Must We Be Ambushed by the Future?

Why The Future Of Science Must Be In Free Software

This essay is about free software. Nowadays the importance of software is increasing day after day, and more and more people are obliged to use software in their everyday life. This is why talking about software often means talking about people’s habits with all the relative consequences: economic and pseudophilosophical arguments are often mixed up. This essay is an attempt to give an objectiv...

Margaret McCartney: We must be smarter about recruitment and retention.

A hundred million pounds is a lot of money. NHS England has pledged to spend as much as this on recruitment agency fees to bring in GPs from abroad. The aim is for 5000 extra GPs. Overseas recruitment will make up a large portion of this new wave of doctors. In the 1960s, general practice in the NHS was saved by Indian and Pakistani doctors, at a time when a third to a half of UK medical gradua...

Future collapse: how optimistic should we be?

Prof. Kelly FRS is optimistic about the chances of avoiding a collapse, but sadly we find his arguments entirely unpersuasive. For example, have Malthus (or we) really been wrong about food security? Roughly 850 million people are seriously undernourished (lacking sufficient calories) today, and perhaps 2 billion are mal-nourished (lacking one or more essential nutrients) [1]. When Malthus live...

Parallel Programming Must Be Deterministic by Default

In today’s widely used parallel programming models, subtle programming errors can lead to unintended nondeterministic behavior and hard to catch bugs. In contrast, we argue for a parallel programming model that is deterministic by default: deterministic behavior is guaranteed unless the programmer explicitly uses nondeterministic constructs. This goal is particularly challenging for modern obje...

We must--and we can--do better.