Archive for the ‘Software Carpentry’ Category

Badge of Reproducibility

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Coming back to the badge meme from earlier this week, John Cook's new Reproducible Research blog pointed me at this page on the EPFL site advertising a paper called "What, Why and How of Reproducible Research in Signal Processing". Notice the "Reproducible Research" badge? The "add your evaluation" ...

Quick Quiz to Measure What Scientists Know

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Suppose you have a room full of scientists---hundreds of 'em---and want to find out how they actually use computers in their work. There isn't time to interview them individually, or to record their desktops during a typical working week, so you've decided to ask them to self-asses their understanding ...

Reviving the Software Carpentry Mailing List

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Luke Petrolekas and I are thiiiiis close to having the Software Carpentry notes converted to a wiki. Once they are, I'm going to be working with Tina Yee to update them, do the examples in MATLAB as well as Python, and fix some longstanding bugs.  I'm also going to resurrect ...

Badge of Honor?

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

I met up with Shirley Wu, Michael Nielsen, and a few other ISMB attendees yesterday to talk about what's variously called Science 2.0 or Open Science. It was pretty rushed (and not helped by the bar we wound up in), but it got me thinking about creating an "open ...

Kevin’s Been Busy

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Kevin Brown has been busy --- he's been coordinating, installing, maintaining, fixing, and figuring out how to use a new $20 million supercomputer for cancer research. No word on how much money will be spent training people how to use it effectively, but hey, I'm easy to reach... :-)

What a Proposal Looks Like

Friday, June 13th, 2008

I got word earlier this week that The MathWorks (makers of MATLAB) had approved my request for funding to spruce up the Software Carpentry notes, and find out how scientists are actually using computers. I faxed a signed copy of the paperwork down to them today---with luck, work will start ...

Faking Results

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Via BoingBoing, a story about scientists Photoshopping experimental results. Sometimes it's outright fakery; sometimes they're just "cleaning up" or "correcting". Either way, it raises an interesting question: how often are people doing this with computational results? Without scientists' code, or any other way to reproduce their work, we'll probably never ...

Three Weeks and Change

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Everyone's making good progress: Ming and Bing have posted their second demo --- next step is to do some serious design of the final product. After correcting an earlier post of mine, Xuan has blogged a fuller description of what she and Edward are building. Zeev Lieber posted a brief summary of what ...

Programming and Scientific Education on Slashdot

Friday, May 30th, 2008

Via Adam Goucher, a Slashdot thread about whether programming should be part of science education.  300+ comments and counting, almost all relating personal experiences.

Reminded of the Difference Once Again

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

Via Irving Reid, a great quote from Henrik Kniberg about how to tell when you're done: So when a team member says that a story is Done and moves the story card into the Done column, a customer could run into the room at that moment and say “Great Lets go ...