Chris Lenz has been a major contributor to Trac, and spent a month working on DrProject for us earlier this year. His post in the wake of Guido’s endorsement of Django is a thoughtful look at the framework’s strengths and weaknesses.
I’ve updated my roster of project students (appears below the divide): 116 students, of whom 28 have done two projects. I still need to update my map, though, and I don’t have birthplaces for the following people:
Details would be welcome…
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A survey of 32 European countries, the US, and Japan, reveals that the only people less willing to believe in evolution than Americans are those living in Turkey:
I’m surprised no one has cast this as a national security issue. America isn’t the world’s only superpower because its soldiers are braver than everyone else’s, or its politicians smarter, but because of its economic and technological supremacy. The former depends on the latter, which in turn depends on having a large pool of scientifically literate innovators. Lysenkoism and its cousins crippled the Soviet Union during the Cold War; will historians half a century from now point to the “equal rights for superstition” movement as one of the reasons America was surpassed by India and China?
BarCamp Earth is a simultaneous compendium of Barcamps around the world to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the first-ever BarCamp taking place August 25-27. Local editions will be held in Toronto, Waterloo, and Sudbury (and I still sometimes feel a pang that Vancouver isn’t local). There are only 70 spaces in TO, so sign up early.
The second edition of Google‘s Summer of Code is winding down, so I figured it’d be a good time to post my (unsolicited 
) thoughts on what they should do next time around. Here are my starting points:
The solution is to give students course credit for their work on open source projects, but of course, it’s not that simple. First, there has to be a quality filter: someone, somehow, has to filter out those students who would be a net drain, or open source projects will (sensibly) choose not to play. Second, someone has to evaluate the students; at most universities, this can only be done by people who have some official standing.
I think both issues can be resolved by bringing the ACM, the IEEE, and other professional bodies into the loop. Everybody wins:
That leaves the problem of assessment. Sadly, most computer science professors don’t know enough about modern software to be able to judge whether someone’s end-of-term patch is worth an A or an F. However, many open source projects have at least one committer with an advanced degree of some kind or another. With a bit of prodding from [name of professional body goes here], I could see at least a few universities giving these people adjunct appointments (which are usually unpaid).
Looking at this year’s sponsor organizations, I could see 12-15 groups being willing to give this a trial run. The open source organizations win by getting (a little) more work done, and (more importantly) by growing the pool of potential committers. The universities win because their programs look more relevant (an important issue in an era of declining enrolment), and because this sort of cross-campus evaluation gives them a good way to assess the strengths and weaknesses of those programs.
Would it work? I have no idea, but it’d be fun to try. The biggest hurdle to overcome is probably Google‘s well-deserved belief that Summer of Code isn’t broken, and therefore doesn’t need to be fixed. There’s also the complementary problem of getting the attention of the ACM and other bodies, which are not famous for their sense of adventure. Getting universities and open source projects on board would also require some work, but probably not much. As for students, I think they’d have to be beaten off in droves .
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Guido just pronounced: Django is the web framework
Eric Jones: Enthought Tool Suite
Chris Mueller: Synthetic Programming with Python
Prabhu Ramachandran: 3D Visualization
Andrew Straw: Realtime Computing with Python
Lightning Talks
William Stein: Software for Algebra and Geometry Experimentation
Alex Clemesha: Mathematica-like Plotting for SAGE
Diane Trout: BioHub
Greg Wilson: Software Carpentry
Guido van Rossum’s Keynote
Travis Oliphant on the State of NumPy
Fernando Perez: Python for Modern Scientific Algorithm Development
Michael Aivazis: “Building a Distributed Component Framework”
Ambient Vector has started a series of tech talks. Their first guest was Nick Koudas, from U of T. May seem like a small thing, but there haven’t been as many ties between the university and local software companies (other than giants like IBM) as there ought to be — I’m pleased to see that changing.
We were listening to Bruce Cockburn on the way up to the cottage last Friday. “Lovers in a Dangerous Time”, “Rumors of Glory”, “Wondering Where the Lions Are”, and so many others are gorgeous, but the line that stuck in my head was, “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”
Amnesty International has been fighting that particular kind of entropy for a long time now. A few weeks ago, they launched a new campaign to fight repression on the Internet. Having spent an hour on the phone trying to find out what I’m actually allowed to take on a plane these days (see Kung Fu Monkey for an accurate summary of how I feel about the current wave of “security theater”), I’d like to ask you to check out AI’s site.
I’m flying down to CalTech this evening to give a talk on Software Carpentry at SciPy’06. There’s been a fair bit of traffic on the web site in the last couple of weeks, and I’m looking forward to hearing how else we can help scientists and engineers become more productive programmers.
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