The Third Bit

http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/top_ten.jsp is also available as an RSS feed, so you can see what the rest of the profession is reading…

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Or, in plain English, “Stack Overflow Launches“.  It’s a “find what you need” site for programmers with a credible pedigree — interested to see if it works.

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Starts today at Seneca College — looks like a lot of fun.  If only I was still a programmer… *sigh*

Announcements

Sold our house today — pictures to follow.  Yay!

Family

I’m at the “Science in the 21st Century” conference at the Perimeter Institute today. There are 32 people in the room right now: 23 are male and 9 are female, but only one is non-Caucasian, which pretty much matches the numbers in the picture from the conference dinner last night. That’s about the same M/F ratio I see in science grad courses at U of T, but definitely not the ethnic distribution—wonder why? It can’t just be a “seniority effect” — this is a pretty young crowd. We see the same thing at DemoCamp: non-Caucasians are often a majority n sci/tech classes and companies in the Greater Toronto Area, but definitely a minority on Tuesday nights. Thoughts? Michael Nielsen says that SciBarCamp was 50/50…

Beth Noveck:  “Designing Digital Institutions: Science in Government 2.0″.  Talked about crowdsourcing patent review; wonder if U of T would run a grad course for sci/eng students to teach them how to do this (and as a side effect, get them to do some useful patent reviewing)?  Might be a good central theme for a tech reading/writing course.

Eric Weinstein: “Sheldon Glashow Owes Me a Dollar”. His main point seemed to be that radical thinkers need to find wealthy benefactors (Medicis or Gates) in order to have the freedom to pursue really wild ideas. What I took away from it was how fundamentally the influx of physicists into banking is reshaping the language used by the latter.

You can follow the others in real-time on FriendFeed, or better yet, watch videos of the talks on the Perimeter Institute’s site.

Equity, Software Carpentry

The students in my CSC491 capstone course picked their projects today—here are the students (S) and mentors (M) for the term:

• Porting the Online Marking tool (OLM) to Ruby On Rails: Mike Conley (S), Geofrey Flores (S), Prof. Karen Reid (M)
• Benchmarking the Usability of Scientific Workflow Tools: Fan Dong (S), Prof. Ryan Lilien (M), Prof. Stephen Strother (M)
• Thunderbird Enhancements: Justin Foong (S), Vladimir Markin (S), Teren Teh (S), David Ascher (M)
• Feature Diagram Plugin for Eclipse: Lenny Han (S), Can Zhang (S), Nicole Allard (M)
• GPU Programming: AJ Guillon (S), Prof. Giovanni Grasselli (M)
• InfoTrace Routing Policy and Reachability Tracker: Leigh Honeywell (S), Prof. Ron Deibert (M), Nart Villeneuve (M)
• Visual SQL Query Builder in Flash: Mohammad Jalali (S), Darren Jung (S), Prof. Diane Horton (M)
• High-Throughput Crystallography: Edward Kang (S), Beomheyn Kim (S), Prof. Igor Jurisica (M)
• Accurate CDMA Indoor Localization: Denis Pankratov (S), Jennifer Ruttan (S), Prof. Eyal de Lara (M)
• Moviepedia Business Plan: Miles Thibault (S), Jay Goldman (M), John MacRitchie (M)
• IRC Threading and Summarization: Kosta Zabashta (S), Prof. Gerald Penn (M)

All the students are undergrads; I’ll be running the grad version of this course next term. Stay tuned for development!

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It’s September, so here we go again… Samira, Jeremy, Carolyn, and I welcomed Aran Donohue, Alicia Grubb, Zachary Kincaid, Jason Montojo, and Rory Tulk to the team today. It’ll be March or April before they’ve got research topics, but I’ll add links to their blogs when I get them. David Bolter of the ATRC and I are also starting a project with Alecia Fowler of Environment Canada, who wants to look at making web-based maps accessible to people with visual and physical disabilities.

And I’m teaching two courses: CSC301 (Introduction to Software Engineering) and CSC491 (Computer Science Capstone). Students in the former will be building an image diff/merge tool for use with version control systems as their course projects; students in the latter will get to choose a project from a list of about 15 put up by U of T profs, local non-profits, and colleagues in various startups and open source groups. I’m pitching to them on Wednesday at noon, and I’m still accepting proposals until 9:00 pm tonight.

Teaching

We’re running a survey this fall of how scientists use computers, and while SurveyMonkey does most of what we want, it doesn’t do everything.  We would welcome pointers to other online survey engines that:

1. Are very reliable.
2. Provide a wide variety of tools (including “Rank the following in order of importance” with an option to mark some “not applicable”).
3. Don’t fill 80% of the screen with banner ads.

Anyone have experiences to share?

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A pub night and panel with Timo Hannay, Cameron Neylon, and Michael Nielsen, hosted by Nature Network Toronto

What does the future hold for the way we do science? Are online repositories such as GenBank and the physics preprint ArXiv, or social tools such as Nature Network, about to change science profoundly? To find out, join Nature Network Toronto for an interactive panel discussion over drinks at the pub.

Date: Sunday September 7 at 7:30pm

Place: Fionn MacCool’s (181 University Avenue, near corner with Adelaide)

About the panelists:

Timo Hannay is Publishing Director of Nature.com at the Nature Publishing Group, publishers of Nature and over seventy other scientific journals, plus numerous online resources for scientists. He is responsible for new online initiatives in social software, databases and audio-visual content. Timo trained as a neurophysiologist at the University of Oxford and worked as a journalist and a management consultant before becoming a publisher.

Cameron Neylon is a biophysicist working in molecular biology, biophysics, and high throughput methods. He has a joint appointment as a Lecturer in Combinatorial Chemistry at the University of Southampton and as a Senior Scientist in Biomolecular Sciences at the ISIS Pulsed Neutron and Muon Facility. He is developing an electronic notebook for biochemistry labs which has lead to his involvement in the Open Research movement and to his group moving to an Open Notebook.

Michael Nielsen is a writer living just outside Toronto, Canada. He is currently working on a book about The Future of Science. One of the pioneers of quantum computation, he coauthored the standard text on quantum computation that is the most highly cited physics publication of the last 25 years. He is the author of more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to Nature and Scientific American.

For more information visit Nature Network Toronto (http://network.nature.com/group/toronto), or contact Eva Amsen (eva.amsen@gmail.com) or Jen Dodd (jen@jendodd.com, 519 572 2275).

Software Carpentry

For the past few days, Blake Winton has been reviewing every single commit made by a team of students who building a medium-sized Django application. We’d really like to find someone (not necessarily in the Toronto area, but that would make it easier for me to buy her/him lunch) who’d be willing to do the same for a RubyOnRails project that Prof. Karen Reid is running. As well as generally making the world a better place, it would also be a great way to meet (and recruit) some of our most talented students.  If you’re interested, please drop me a line.

Meanwhile, we’re teaching our daughter a new verse to an old song:

The zombies on the bus go, “Brains… brains… brains…”

Parenthood turns out to be fun in all sorts of unanticipated ways

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