What I'm up to

• SIGCSE I'm doing my utmost to get a publication into this years SIGCSE, its a reasonable conference, and I am hoping to get my paper in. The paper looks like it'll be a discussion of the evaluation study of my automated assessment tool that was performed this year. Although with the deadline this Friday, that's subject to change at any time

• ESSIR I am currently attending a European Summer School on Information Retrieval. Information Retrieval(IR) is simply acquired information from unstructured data. i.e. Google is an information retrieval system. Before you all jump in and say "My website IS structured", I don't mean structured in terms of XHTML document trees, I mean structured as in the way a database is structured. Here is the difference...

  Criteria	IR	Database Systems
  Data	Unstructured	Structured into Entries
  Fields	None	Semantic Fields (e.g. student_id,age,course,score)
  Queries	Free ( e.g. q="Katie Holmes")	SQL "SELECT actress FROM film WHERE..."
  Matching	Imprecise, sorted by relevance	Exact, Full Recall, 100% Precise

  Fun Fact #1: Google performs 500 million searches per day for users, and each search queries itself against up to 9 billion pages.
  Fun Fact #2: 29% of the web is categorised duplicate material
  Fun Fact #3: 84% of web design blogs are duplicate material
  Okay, well I made up/'anecdotally observed' number 3 there, but the other two came straight from Googles Director of Research this morning in her lecture on Information Retrieval.

  The workshop itself is going very well, excellent lectures delivered by top quality people. The early mornings are killing me thus far, but it'll make Saturday much more fun

• AJAX AJAX (aka JavaScript RPC) is good fun to learn, and you can quickly write some cool little programs in it. I've been learning it lately, with the help of a good book called DHTML Utopia, and have to say it is good fun. It is however a total nightmare to debug. Expect to cry and whisper evil thoughts as you script hangs.

What's on Saturday

Saturday, I am off on holidays to LaHinch (Co. Clare, Ireland). I am going for 7 nights with 6 friends to stay in a 5 bedroom house with 4 night clubs nearby, 3 golf courses, 2 decent restaurants, and not 1 bit of CS:Education to annoy me. I genuinely can't wait.

So that's what I am doing at this moment in time, more updates will arrive once the holiday is over I am sure. Upcoming(aka half-written) articles at the moment are "AJAX for the ultimate beginner", "Students: The only bottom line that counts", "CS1: What do you expect" and hopefully "Assessment: A specific style of information retrieval". It is alleged that our beloved Philip Brennan will post to his blog soon, but don't hold your breath.

Links

I put the links at the end, because it means you might actually get past the first sentence between open 11 more tabs. Also, I think by the time you've gotten to this part of the post, you realise that you actually aren't bothered reading any of the links

• Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education 2006 Conference
• European Summer School on Information Retrieval
• DHTML Utopia The Javascript book I am reading. Very nice introduction.
• LaHinch.org One of the worst websites this side of the millennium
• Has Anyone Seen Phil Last heard from him over a month ago.

All the best!