The University of Michigan – Dearborn Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery has a new Executive Board. Its composition is as follows.
- President: Nicholas Mullins
- Vice President: Derelle Redmod
- Treasuer: Mike Lane
- Secretary: Joshua Morrison
The new leadership is excited to take the first steps in the rest of ACM’s future. Please do contact the executive board if you have any suggestions, questions, or comments on things that you would like to see in ACM. Our contact information can be found on the Officers page above.
The next ACM general meeting will be Wednesday, May 23rd at 5pm in CIS 121. We’ll be talking about interesting things like Freshment Orientation, ACM T-Shirts, Committees for LAN Parties, Fundraisers, etc. We look forward to seeing you at the next meeting!
“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”
(Martin Golding)
ACM Elections
From the Secretary:
Below is a list of candidates. The President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer will need to get an ACM national student membership once they are elected. Professor Elenbogen said that the officers can put their $5 chapter membership dues towards their national student membership.
Elections will be on Wednesday May 9th. Meeting at 5pm in the CIS conference room. Voting will also be accepted Tuesday and Wednesday (until 6pm on Wednesday).
Chair (President):
Nicholas Mullins
Vice Chair (Vice President):
Derelle Redmond
Joshua Morrison
Justin Hawke
Mike Lane
Treasurer:
Mike Lane
Secretary:
Joshua Morrison
Program Chair:
Joshua Morrison
Education Chair:
Derelle Redmond
There is a popular cliché … which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you put in. Other versions are that computers only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. The cliché is true only in the crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write–words.
RICHARD DAWKINS, The Blind Watchmaker
Hi Eveybody! (@see obnoxious wave),
We at ACM hope that the Winter 2012 semester has brought you great grades and big changes in your academic and personal lives. If it wasn’t, let ACM know how we could have made it better for you and then we jump iiiiinnn it!
Speaking of jumping in, ACM will be holding elections for the upcoming academic year next week. If you are interested in running for a position, please email Nick Mullins (nmullins umd umich edu) with the position that you would like to run for. The positions with their descriptions are listed in the “About” page above, under the officers section. There will eleven positions open plus the position of web administrator.
The elections meeting will be held May 9th, 2012 @ 5pm in CIS rm 121. If you can’t make it out to the meeting, ballots will be accepted by email by the 9th. If you have any questions, you can email Nick or comment here.
We look forward to seeing you on Election Day!!
“ If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. ”
- Edsger Dijkstra
Distinguished Lecture: Sorting in Space
This Friday, an ACM Distinguished Speaker raps on “Space, the final frontier! These are the voyages …” oops wrong space!
Sorting in Space
Distinguished Speaker: Prof. Hanan Samet, University of Maryland
Date: March 30, 2012
Time: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Venue: Auditorium, Institute for Advanced Vehicle Systems
Abstract:
The representation of spatial data is an important issue in computer graphics, computer vision, geographic information systems, and robotics. A wide number of representations is currently in use. Recently, there has been much interest in hierarchical data structures such as quadtrees, octrees, R-trees, etc. The key advantage of these representations is that they provide a way to index into space. In fact, they are little more than multidimensional sorts. They are compact and depending on the nature of the spatial data they save space as well as time and also facilitate operations such as search. In this talk we give a brief overview of hierarchical spatial data structures and related research results. In addition, we demonstrate the SAND Browser (found at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~brabec/
UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.
— Doug Gwyn
The Nintendo 64 Throwback party was a blast! Members went H.A.M. on everything from Conkers Bad Fur Day to Mario Party 2! The VP took on all comers in Mario Tennis while Nicole demonstrated mad skills in Mario Kart/Party. No one went away empty handed … because they all took home the games they brought with them!

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
— Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger in The Elements of Programming Style.
