I’ve been meaning to blog about this one for a couple of weeks: the 2009 edition of the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference will be held March 12-13 at the Toronto Hilton. This is not just about computing and IT: there’s nanomaterials, bioengineering, and lots more. Schedule still isn’t up, though, so I can’t provide more details. Students who have gone in the past have enjoyed it a lot; I look forward to hearing what this year’s think.
Announcements
I blogged last August about the first and second Provenance Challenge, in which the creators of systems for tracking scientific data and workflows were given sample problems, then asked to have their tools answer a variety of questions. (Results from the first were reported in Concurrency and Computation, but ironically, those articles are not openly available; the third challenge will kick off soon.) Chasing down one of those references again, I came across the Open Notebook Science Challenge, which “…calls upon people with access to materials and equipment to measure the solubility of compounds (aldehydes, amines and carboxylic acids are a priority) in organic solvents and report their findings using Open Notebook Science“. This isn’t quite the same thing as automatically tracking data provenance; instead, it is “…the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded”. There are lots of interesting research questions for computer scientists here, ranging from privacy and security issues to notification, peripheral awareness, ontological engineering, and more — for example, see Cameron Neylon’s latest post synthesizing discussion about using OpenID to identify scientific researchers and their contributions.
Software Carpentry
Back in December, I blogged the books I was planning to read in January and February. Here are the quick summaries:
- Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages: too much “gosh wow” for me (and also too much shaky science).
- The Online Learning Idea Book: to paraphrase, what was new wasn’t interesting, what was interesting wasn’t new.
- Patterns for Fault-Tolerant Software: nice set of patterns; pity there weren’t examples to bring them to life for those of us who don’t have the author’s first-hand experience of real-time problems and their solutions.
- Practical API Design: still working on it—started with some philosophy (never a good sign), but by Chapter 3 gets into meatier stuff.
- e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: on pg 42, the authors say, “Shavelson and Towne eloquently [my emphasis] summarize the argument for evidence-based practice in education: ‘One cannot expect reform efforts in education to have significant effects without research-based knowledge to guide them.’” By comparison with the rest of the book, that is eloquent: there might be good ideas lurking in its turgid Brezhnevian prose, but I gave up before finding them.
- Workflows for e-Science: like most collections, hit and miss—there are a few thought-provoking articles, but most spend their time repeating things readers will already know, or describing successes without any reflection on failures.
I also read:
Thankfully, there are lots of interesting books coming out in the next few months. I’ll be lucky if I get to read any three of them, of course, but I can always dream:
(Ironically, I now have to be much more careful which technical books I gamble on: since I’m no longer DDJ‘s book review editor, and don’t have any research money to spend on books, I have to buy them myself. How barbaric… 
Books
We wrapped up the first half of term in my third-year software engineering class with a talk from Seth Hardy, a local computer security expert. As always, I’m very grateful to everyone in the local tech community who’s willing to give up some of their time to help bootstrap the next generation. So thanks, Seth — much appreciated.
Teaching
Done something cool for a Google Summer of Code project? Now you can show the world: they’ve set up a YouTube channel for demo screencasts and the like.
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Mozilla Labs just announced Bespin, “…an open extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.” It might actually be true — check out their screencast.
Extensible Programming
In response to comments on my post about MTEST that said, “People should use open source tools instead,” I can only reply, “If some people can’t afford cheap, what makes you think that everyone can afford free?” I’m a big fan of Python, NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, and everything else, but they have their costs too — costs that scientists with deadlines often can’t afford to pay. If someone wants to give me a grant to go and measure how productive different kinds of scientists are using different combinations of open and closed source software, you know how to reach me…
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One of my students posted a suggestion for a book title that made me think of this XKCD cartoon:
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http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/ — I doubt I’ll make it (I’m going to ICSE’09 in Vancouver this year, which is all the travel I can afford), but it would have been great to finally meet up with a bunch of people I’ve swapped mail with over the years. Maybe next year…
Announcements
According to the Great Beyond, several prominent British scientists have called for a revolt against new rules that require them to “include a two-page summary of the potential economic and social impacts of their research in funding proposals to the nation’s research councils”. The scientists say that, “In research worthy of the name, we are not aware of anyone who would be competent at foretelling specific future benefits and therefore in complying with the request in any meaningful manner,” to which a representative of one of the grants councils replies, “The impact statement is not designed to ask peer reviewers or applicants to predict future benefits. It is intended to allow the applicant to highlight potential pathways to impact, especially through collaboration with partners, and to help the research councils support them in these activities.”
Regular readers will know how I feel about academic paperwork and bureaucracy, but in this case, I’m on the side of the research councils. Yes, a dollar spent on blue-sky research might one day yield a cure for cancer, but that same dollar spent on primary education for disadvantaged children might one day yield the next Darwin or Einstein. Being paid by the public to chase your ideas wherever they may lead is a privilege, not a right; having to write two pages to explain how those ideas might one day benefit the public seems only fair. (And I have to admit I’m curious how many of the scientists who object to being required to do so simultaneously bemoan the lack of public understanding of science.)
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