This paper describes Blaise, a software/hardware system designed to support writing programs. Students write papers using the Blaise editor, a simple text editor and submit them electronically to a backend database. Instructors download student papers from the database onto a tablet PC and then use pen-like markup to grade the papers. These papers are then returned electronically to the student...

Traditional database management systems are best equipped to run onetime queries over finite stored data sets. However, many modern applications such as network monitoring, financial analysis, manufacturing, and sensor networks require long-running, or continuous, queries over continuous unbounded streams of data. In the STREAM project at Stanford, we are investigating data management and query...

Computing with streams is a topic of increasing interest in modern computer science. Several proposals have suggested the use of programming languages and rewriting systems in order to formally describe programs computing over stream data. However, no stream calculus (in the sense of λ-calculus) has been exhibited for such studies yet. The challenge of providing a calculus for streams is to mak...

Learning to program is hard and one major obstacle for students is getting to grips with the programming process itself: What do I do now, what are the next steps, and what end result do I want to achieve? Further complications arise as many, even simple, designs require quite a lot of code to be written that are just “stepping stones” on the path to a solution. Thus, instead of “writing the co...

Big data is a ubiquitous feature of large modern enterprises. Many organizations generate huge amounts of on-line streaming data – examples include network monitoring, Twitter feeds, financial data, and industrial application monitoring. Making effective use of these data streams can be challenging. While Data Stream Management Systems can provide support for realtime alerting and data reductio...

The rise of open-source software over the past decade makes library reuse doubly compelling. For many kinds of programs there are existing solutions for various problems, and those solutions are available at zero monetary cost. The set of open-source offerings starts with UNIX kernels, base C libraries, command-line utilities, and continues over Web servers and Web browsers to Java utilities su...

Critical intellectuals were traditionally those who utilized their skills of speaking and writing to denounce injustices and abuses of power, and to fight for truth, justice, progress, and other positive values. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre (1974: 285), "the duty of the intellectual is to denounce injustice wherever it occurs." The modern critical intellectual's field of action was what Hab...

The clinical case report is a popular genre in medical writing. While authors and editors have debated the justification for the clinical case report, few have attempted to examine the long history of this genre in medical literature. By reviewing selected literature and presenting and discussing excerpts of clinical case reports from Egyptian antiquity to the 20th century, we illustrate the pr...