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The readings for CSC 125 usually include a summer-reading book common to all the FYS sections. This fall, that book was The Only Woman in the Room, by Marie Benedict.

During the course of the term, the class reads shorter works dealing with the societal issues—some quite old—that have taken on substantial new dimensions with the rise of computing. For instance, for the last couple of centuries, countries have used control of the copying process to compensate creative work. Computers' ability to make error-free copies of information in huge volumes at nearly zero cost has upended this approach, leading to all kinds of legal and technical stopgaps. Two of the articles recommended to the class on this topic were Richard Stallman's "The GNU Manifesto" and Robert Boynton's "The Tyranny of Copyright".

Other societal issues are discussed as well, although the exact list of issues changes somewhat from year to year. One article that has been assigned in the past is been Nolan Bushnell's article "Relationships between fun and the computer business", which sets out to discuss gamification and (possibly inadvertently) raises some fascinating questions about animal (and, by extension, human) identity. Another article used in the past is "When discrimination is baked into algorithms", by Lauren Kirchner, which considers the effects of computer programs that are based on (sometimes unconscious) discriminatory assumptions.