Replications play an important role in verifying empirical results. In this paper, we discuss our experiences performing a literal replication of a human subjects experiment that examined the relationship between a simple test for consistent use of mental models, and success in an introductory programming course. We encountered many difficulties in achieving comparability with the original experiment, due to a series of apparently minor differences in context. Based on this experience, we discuss the relative merits of replication, and suggest that, for some human subjects studies, literal replication may not be the the most effective strategy for validating the results of previous studies.

DrProject is a web-based software project management portal that integrates revision control, issue tracking, mailing lists, a wiki, and other features. Unlike other such systems, DrProject is specifically tailored to the needs of undergraduate teaching and team programming assignments. We describe the pedagogical motivations for DrProject and our experiences with it to date.

Professional software developers use version control systems to coordinate their work, and to provide an unwindable history of their project's evolution. In contrast, students in most programming courses use a homegrown electronic submission program to submit their work, and email to coordinate with partners when doing team projects. In May 2003, we began using CVS, a popular open source version control system, as an assignment submission system. Students receive starter code by checking out the assignment, use the version control system to manage their work, and submit their assignment by committing it to CVS. Teaching assistants grade assignments by checking out each student's repository, and committing the marks. Our experience to date shows that this is both a simpler and a more flexible way to manage student assignments, and also an excellent way to teach them how to use a fundamental software development tool.

Between 1987 and 1994, more than 100 students in a broad range of disciplines worked as summer scholars at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. Many of these students have since taken their parallel computing skills into graduate work and industry, and over a quarter of EPCC's technical staff are alumni of the Programme. This report describes the evolution and present operation of the Summer Scholarship Programme, and its costs and benefits.>

The remarkable processing capabilities of the nervous system must derive from the large numbers of neurons participating (roughly 1010), since the time-scales involved are of the order of a millisecond, rather than the nanoseconds of modern computers. The neural network models which attempt to capture this behaviour are inherently parallel. We review the implementation of a range of neural network models on SIMD and MIMD computers. On the ICL Distributed Array Processor (DAP), a 4096-processor SIMD machine, we have studied training algorithms in the context of the Hopfield net, with specific applications including the storage of words and continuous text in content-addressable memory. The Hopfield and Tank analogue neural net has been used for image restoration with the Geman and Geman algorithm. We compare the performance of this scheme on the DAP and on a Meiko Computing Surface, a reconfigurable MIMD array of transputers. We describe also the strategies which we have used to implement the Durbin and Willshaw elastic net model on the Computing Surface.