When is a book finished? When the authors cross off every item on the to-do list? Uh uh—there’s always errata, especially in this age of beta releases and preprint e-copies. What about when the first printed and bound copies arrive in a box smelling faintly of ink and travel? Same answer—in an era of print-on-demand, publishers can get a revision out almost immediately (I’m actually surprised the revised 13-digit standard for ISBNs doesn’t include version numbers.
All that aside, there is something special about crossing off the last to-do. We’re inches away from doing that for our intro to computer science using Python; Daniel, Steve, and the rest of the PragProg crew still have to create an index, tidy up the typesetting, and all that, but after all this work, it’s nice to have some kind of end in sight.
Update: Paul Gries just closed the last to-do. Yay!
Teaching
Last week was the first of a new term. The table below shows where my hours went; it comes to 41 hours, which is under-counting somewhere, but the proportions are accurate.
| Departmental: |
Industrial Relations committee |
2 |
|
helping students find jobs |
1 |
|
helping students get into grad school |
0.5 |
|
setting up e-learning meeting |
0.5 |
| CSC49X/2125: |
class |
2 |
|
organization |
2 |
|
client meetings |
2.5 |
| Basie |
organization |
2.5 |
|
meetings with students |
2.5 |
|
online meeting |
1 |
| CSC301: |
prep |
0.5 |
|
meeting TAs |
1 |
|
lecturing |
3 |
|
admin (setting up teams, etc.) |
2 |
|
prerequisite waivers |
0.5 |
| CS-1 in Python book |
coordination |
0.5 |
|
writing |
4.5 |
| Research |
reading papers |
1.5 |
|
meeting with grad students |
3 |
|
reviewing thesis chapters |
1.5 |
| Miscellaneous |
reading blogs |
2.5 |
|
trying to find missing books |
0.5 |
|
coffee breaks |
1.5 |
|
geek lunch |
1 |
|
updating project roster |
1 |
Teaching
Nice piece by Michael Nielsen (part of his upcoming book) titled “Three Myths About Scientific Peer Review“. As we fret about the future of scholarship, it’s worth remembering that we’ve always had to…
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Nice thread on Artima about things that can go wrong with agile development. I’m going to pass this on to my students…
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Over at Skoolr, Jon Pipitone is blogging about his master’s thesis project, the aim of which is to create an interface that would allow non-specialists to browse and query climate change data. Huge numbers of simulations have been done, and most of the results are reachable electronically (not easily, but it can be done). The problem is figuring out a way to make them accessible, so that TV journalists and Grade 10 science students can answer questions like, “What will the winters be like in Kapuskasing twenty years from now if developing countries put five hundred million more cars on the road?” If you’re interested in reading summaries of work that’s been done on human-friendly database query techniques, or if you have ideas you’d like to pass on, it’s worth a surf.
Research, Teaching
Via Science in the Open’s summary of the workshop on open science at PSB’09, a link to a paper explaining why scientists will want to identify themselves with unique serial numbers.
Research, Software Carpentry
Neat idea from Microsoft Research called NetPrints: “Basically, if a user has a working network configuration for an application or has determined how to rectify a problem, we would like this knowledge to be made available automatically to another user who is experiencing the same problem. NetPrints accomplishes this by applying decision tree based learning on working and non-working configuration snapshots and by using network traffic based problem signatures to index into configuration changes made by users to fix problems.”
Research
If you missed the Workshop on Advanced Software Development Tools and Techniques held last July (I did—didn’t even know it existed ’til December), there’s a summary page with some interesting links. (See also this post about a stack analysis debugging tool developed at Livermore that collapses similar process states together to reduce the cognitive load on people programming massively parallel machines.)
Research
There’s a pub night coming up! The theme of the evening is blogging. As usual, it’s casual, but we’ve got a guest speaker, a report from the ScienceOnline09 conference, some science bloggers, and hopefully a hard copy of the new edition of Open Laboratory to browse through. The pub serves decent food, so come early and have dinner (and meet fellow Toronto Nature Networkers) before the talks start.
Have you ever thought that you’d like to start a blog, but wondered how to combine blogging with your work?
Toronto tech blogger (and “Accordion Guy”) Joey DeVilla will give a talk about how he successfully incorporated blogging in his life and work.
We’ll also look at the newest edition of Open Laboratory , a book collecting the best posts from science weblogs in the past year, and get a report from the ScienceOnline09 conference (held January 16-18 in North Carolina) to see some of the ways blogs are used in science.
Date: Monday January 26th 2009
Location: Fionn MacCool’s (181 University at Adelaide)
Time: 6 PM onwards (talks start at 7)
Contact: Eva Amsen eva@easternblot.net
Announcements
I’ve updated the map showing the birthplaces of people who’ve been involved in projects with me at U of T with data for (most of) this term’s students. I picked up Bangladesh, Latvia, Peru (which adds South America to my collection of continents) and Poland. I can hardly wait to find out if any of the students who haven’t sent me data yet was born in Australia or Antarctica 
.
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