The Third Bit

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 of some key terms on a scale of:

1. No idea what it is.
2. Use it/have used it infrequently.
3. Use it regularly.
4. Couldn’t get through the day without it.

My list is below; what have I forgotten, and (more importantly) how would you criticize this assessment method?

1. A command-line shell
2. Shell scripts
3. Version control system (e.g., CVS, Subversion)
4. Bug tracker
5. Build system (e.g., Make, Ant)
6. Debugger (e.g., GDB)
7. Integrated Development Environment (e.g., Eclipse, Visual Studio)
8. Numerical Computing Environment (e.g., MATLAB, Mathematica)
9. Inverse analyzer (e.g., Inane)
10. Spreadsheet (e.g., Excel)
11. Relational database (e.g., SQLite, MySQL, Oracle)
12. Layout-based document formatting (e.g., LaTeX, HTML)
13. WYSIWYG document formatting (e.g., Word, PowerPoint, OpenOffice)

Now, you have the same room full of scientists, and you want to find out how much they know about software development. There still isn’t time to interview them or have them solve some programming problems, so again you’re falling back on self-assessment. This time, the scale is:

1. No idea what it means.
2. Have heard the term but couldn’t explain it.
3. Could explain it correctly to a junior colleague.
4. Expert-level understanding.

and the terms themselves are:

Once again, my questions are (a) what have I forgotten, and (b) how “fair” is this as an assessment method?

Software Carpentry

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 the project’s two mailing lists (one for occasional announcements, the other for people interested in developing new material and/or teaching the course).  If you’d like to be on either or both, please let me know.

Software Carpentry

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!

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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…

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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 scenes.
• How much of your code is comments?  Meaningful identifiers?  Spacing?  Better yet, which open source project are you most like?
• Jon Udell is watching you, Senator Sununu.
• And finally, who owns science?

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

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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, frustrating, and expensive mistakes. Yet we put so little effort into understanding them, or learning how to work with people.

You can learn how to deal with people, and you can even learn to enjoy it. This tutorial gathers together some of the best speakers on “people topics” and teaches you—the programmer, the sysadmin, the DBA, the geek—how better to deal with people.

…

People planning to attend this session also want to see:

• Programming Vim

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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 latter, you can do so by following the Preferences link and requesting membership. (There are about half a dozen messages per day.)

Along with the usual bug fixes, we are working on some new features:

1. Updating the administration panel to simplify workflow. Qiyu Zhu and Liz Blankenship have been making good progress, and this will definitely be in the end-of-August release.
2. Integration with IRC. Kosta Zabashta presented this at DemoCamp a few days ago; we have some issues to work out with administering channels, but again, this will be in the end-of-August release.
3. Status charts. Kosta has been working with Jeremy Handcock to integrate a few simple charts to show projects’ status. We’ll know by the end of July whether this will make it into the next release.
4. A configurable ticketing system. This is the most ambitious of our current projects; Nick Jamil posted a video showing what it can do, and once Jeff Balogh finishes his Dojo-based drag-and-drop form editor, we’ll put another one up. This needs a lot of testing before we put it in a release, but Luke Petrolekas has already started, and if we don’t make the end-of-August release, we ought to have it in your hands by Christmas.

As always, if you need help getting DrProject installed, please mail help@drproject.org—we’d be happy to help you out.

DrProject

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 science” badge that scientists could apply to their work. Right now, people are using a variety of terms in inconsistent ways; it sometimes takes a very close reading to figure out exactly what the mean. I’d really like to see the PSB workshop (or some other meeting like it) put a peg in the ground and say, “If you do the following things, you can put this ‘open science’ badge on your lab’s web site, and put, ‘This research is certified open.’ in your papers.” The W3C’s familiar badges and the Open Source Initiative‘s certification of software licenses have done a lot to clarify discussion, and have given people standards to aspire to. Nine years after the “Open Source/Open Science” workshop at Brookhaven National Laboratory, maybe it’s time to borrow those ideas and put them into practice.

Software Carpentry

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:

Family