Archive for July, 2008

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 ...

Belated Barbecue Photos

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

We had our mid-summer student barbecue a couple of Fridays ago, and a good time was had by all. The photos are courtesy of Qiyu Zhu: In transit This must be the place. Whozat? Or we could use recursion! Mmm... Dancing, dancing!

Summer 2008 Logo

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Our summer students have chosen a logo for their t-shirts.  Yes, that is a hippo wearing a toque (knit cap, if you're American), a scarf, and an inflatable swim toy. You wouldn't believe how much discussion it took to get this far...

Link Soup

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Oh dear --- I have fallen behind again. MyTTC.ca is up (Jorge's comments are more coherent than mine). Should this be the starting point for student projects in my fall CSC301 Software Engineering course? The science maps at Eigenfactor are pretty cool --- this post talks about what's going on behind the ...

Mail Traffic Over Time

Monday, July 21st, 2008

Twenty lines of Python, an Excel chart, and here we are:

It Wasn’t *Meant* To Be Funny, But…

Monday, July 21st, 2008

From the OSCON'08 schedule: People for Geeks People, whether other geeks or “normal” people, we’re bad at them. They’re such an important part of our lives and jobs and the point of all the technology we love so much. Misunderstandings between people can be the root cause of so many vast, deep, ...

DrProject Status Update

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

http://www.drproject.org hosts two projects: All, which is for people interested in announcements and general news, and DrProject itself, which is for developers (and those wishing to file tickets against our code). This message is going out to the list belonging to the former; if you'd like to join the ...

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 ...

Just Another Saturday

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Maddie on her way to the show: Theo on stage (in his dreams): Maddie gives it a try: The backstage party: Sadie's reaction to it all: