Welcome to Greg Wilson's personal blog.
Recent Blog Posts
| Nov 10 | 2013 | Three Old Men Drinking Tea | ||
| Years ago, a friend took me to see an exhibit of Chinese paintings in Edinburgh. I liked one so much that I picked up a print (which I have long since lost). for one called, "Three Old Men Drinking Tea." As near as I can recall, the text said, "The first figure is the Buddha: he is frowning because the tea is bitter. The second, Lao Tzu, is smiling because the tea is warm, while the third represents Confucius, who is ignoring the tea and studying the cup very closely." I think about those three old men a lot when... | ||||
| Oct 23 | 2013 | A Simple Exercise | ||
| Every teacher has a few favorite assignments. Here's one of mine, which I gave to two undergraduate software engineering classes that I taught at the University of Toronto: According to Statistics Canada, about 6% of Canadians are from East Asian or South Asian backgrounds. However, roughly 75% of students in Computer Science are ethnically Asian. Your task is to write two short essays, each roughly 1000 words long. In the first, you are to argue that this proves Caucasians and members of other ethnic groups are intrinsically less interested in or capable of programming than Asians. In the second, you... | ||||
| Oct 8 | 2013 | Assuming the Problem | ||
| Gizmodo ran a piece recently titled What Happens When Cities Fall Apart? about the work of David Kilcullen, an Australian military theorist who believes that many future conflicts will take place in lawless urban areas—what he calls "feral cities". For me, this was the most important, and most saddening, passage in the article: ...if cities—particularly in the world's coastal, developing regions—are such a hotbed for future aggression...then how can we develop a new understanding of the city that would help us to...design away this growing problem? How can both civil infrastructure and urban governance be made more resilient to become... | ||||
| Sep 24 | 2013 | To Tell You the Truth... | ||
| Sep 15 | 2013 | PyCon 2014 Proposal | ||
| I submitted this proposal to PyCon 2014—win or lose, I hope to see you all there. Submitted by: Greg Wilson Category: Education Python Level: Novice Audience: scientists, educators, and community organizers Objectives: Attendees will learn what we know about free-range teaching and learning, why very smart people still mostly can't program, what's wrong with MOOCs, and what the #1 priority for creators of new programming languages ought to be. Duration: I prefer a 45 minute slot Description: This talk will explain how Software Carpentry has grown to run over a hundred training events a year, what we've learned along the way, and... | ||||
| Sep 5 | 2013 | Still | ||
| I am pleased to announce that my YA novelette Still is now available in paperback at Lulu.com and as a Kindle e-book on Amazon.com. The story is an extended version of one that ran in the Summer 2010 edition of OnSpec magazine; it deals with some difficult themes, but it's the piece of writing I'm proudest of, and I hope you enjoy it. For more about the book and my other fiction, please see http://sensibleadventures.com/. | ||||
| Aug 31 | 2013 | How It Should Have Ended | ||
| Aug 25 | 2013 | Why Open Access? | ||
| Mark Guzdial's group at Georgia Tech does world-class work on how to teach programming: over half of the links in the recommended reading for our instructor training course point at Mark's blog, and I've learned much of what I know about education from following up the pointers he has provided. Two and a half weeks ago, he posted a link to a paper that he and others had written summarizing what actually works in introductory programming classes. The paper itself was behind the ACM's paywall, and reaction to that ranged from disappointment to vulgar. Mark responded thoughtfully, arguing that the... | ||||
| Aug 12 | 2013 | Offering a New Order | ||
| Every movement that seeks to change society faces two great tasks. The first is to discredit the old order. The second is to offer a new one. Without the assurance of a new order, the debate becomes a choice between order and chaos, and order wins. — William Saletan, in the New York Times Book Review, Sept 26, 2004 | ||||
| Jul 28 | 2013 | Chillin' | ||
| Jul 28 | 2013 | Rebooting | ||
| After repeated hackage (and half-hearted tech support from Dreamhost, which seems to have lost all interest in its customers), I've rebooted this blog using Jekyll and a custom theme instead of WordPress. I'll be migrating to a new host soon as well; I apologize for any disruption in your feeds. | ||||
| Jun 13 | 2013 | Problems with Pandoc | ||
| People have been asking me to write the Software Carpentry instructor's guide in Markdown instead of HTML, mostly so that it will be easier for other people to review and contribute. I was initially against the idea because standard Markdown lacks so many features that I'd basically be writing HTML with back quotes instead of <code> tags, but it turns out that Pandoc's variation on Markdown provides a lot of what I want—a lot, but not all. After converting the section on databases, I've come up against the following: Pandoc won't number figures and insert those numbers in references. I... | ||||
| Jun 13 | 2013 | Keynoting at SPLASH 2013 | ||
| I will be giving a keynote talk at SPLASH (formerly OOPSLA) in Indianapolis on Wednesday, October 30. Hope to see you there! | ||||
| Jun 9 | 2013 | Heroes | ||
| All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. — Edmund Burke These men chose to do something. If anyone deserves to be called heroes, they do. Edward Snowden Bradley Manning | ||||
| Jun 7 | 2013 | Is There Only Room for One Utopia? | ||
| The title of Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History is misleading. It isn't really a history of human rights; instead, it's an outline of how human rights rose to prominence as a defining political issue in the years after World War II. But it doesn't really do that either: all too often, Moyn alludes to people and events, rather than describing or explaining them, so his argument he's trying to make is sketched rather than drawn. And he definitely is making an argument. In a nutshell, he believes that human rights have become important because other utopias... | ||||
| May 8 | 2013 | If Anything, They Overestimate My Javascript | ||
| From my open source report card: More seriously, there's a whole lotta unhealthy spin goin' on when "open source" means "what you did on GitHub". | ||||
| May 1 | 2013 | Merging is the Real Revolution | ||
| Many people at Mozilla think that Javascript and HTML5 are the future of the web. Respectfully, I think they're both red herrings: I think what makes Mozilla and other successful open source projects work is older, less exciting, and still only kind of works. It's called "merge", and if we really want to help people collaborate on a global scale, we ought to put a lot more effort into making it easy to use. What's merge? It's what you do after a "diff". What's diff? It's something that shows you the differences between two files in a human-readable way. More... | ||||
| Apr 19 | 2013 | Cameron Neylon Speaking in Toronto on May 1, 2013 | ||
| Network Enabled Scholarship — Reconfiguring Research for the Web Dr. Cameron Neylon Director of Open Access Advocacy, Public Library of Science 4:00 p.m., Wednesday, May 1, 2013 Room 205, Bissell Building, University of Toronto, 140 St George St The web, like all network technologies before it from the mobile phone to writing itself, has the potential to enable a qualitative change in our capacity as people, organizations and societies. We are starting to see the first glimmerings of how our research capacity might change with projects like Galaxy Zoo and Polymath but these remain isolated examples. What will it take... | ||||
| Mar 28 | 2013 | That's My Secret, Captain... | ||
| ...I'm always proud: | ||||
| Feb 28 | 2013 | A Software Carpentry Boot Camp for Women in Science and Engineering | ||
| Software Carpentry is pleased to announced a two-day software skills boot camp for women in science and engineering, to be held in Boston this June. We're currently trying to raise the $6000 needed to give 120 grad students (and others) a chance to improve their research computing skills while networking with peers; donations would be very welcome. Why a boot camp specifically aimed at women? Because a large body of research has shown that without initiatives like this, the cycle of low participation today leading to low participation tomorrow will continue unchecked. For example, WiT reports: In the Bayer Facts... | ||||
| ...more | ||||