Shidan Gouran & friends have a new venture called Magic Hardware, an online store for all things to do with home automation. (Want to give your fridge a Twitter account?) See his blog post for more information.
Well-written article from Maciej Cegłowski about financial and climatic meltdowns, and the inability of mass-media democracies to think sensibly about long-term issues. It prompted an interesting exchange today:
Me: Any plan to deal with global climate change that’s based on a fundamental change in human nature is going to fail.
Him: You would have said that about slavery in 1800.
The list of mentor organizations for Google Summer of Code 2009 was announced today; see Leslie’s post for an explanation of what comes next.
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According to a CRA press release (NYT coverage here), “The number of majors and pre-majors in American computer science programs was up 6.2 percent from 2007″, and “Total Ph.D. production grew to 1,877 for the period July 2007 to June 2008, a 5.7 percent increase over the previous period.”
My grad students and I met Victoria Stodden for the first time yesterday, and had a great time talking about reproducible research, science 2.0, and most particularly the kind of legal/copyright frameworks needed to move science forward. She has two papers up that anyone interested in the subject should read: a short one that appeared in Computing in Science and Engineering titled The Legal Framework for Reproducible Research in the Sciences: Licensing and Copyright, anda longer one due out soon called Enabling Reproducible Research: Open Licensing For Scientific Innovation. If you have thoughts on the subject, I’m sure she’d enjoy hearing from you.
More precisely, Jason Montojo (ex-Eclipse developer, now grad student) is thinking about studying how novices learn the architecture of large applications for his master’s thesis. I’m sure he’d welcome your thoughts…
The Department of Computer Science is holding its Research in Action showcase on March 24, 2009. Presentations are listed below, with full descriptions here. Look forward to seeing lots of you there!
Via Red Hat’s Greg DeKoenigsberg:
There are more professors than ever hoping to teach the open source development process to their students—but working in the open source world can be a daunting proposition. Professors themselves have only a limited amount of time to learn about open source, and are often unsure about how, exactly, to get started.
POSSE is designed for these professors. Sponsored by Red Hat, the POSSE program is a weeklong bootcamp that will immerse professors in open source projects. Participants will spend a week of intensive participation in selected open source projects, led by professors with experience in teaching open source development, in partnership with community members who have deep experience and insight. By the end of the session, participants should have a much better understanding of the workings of open source projects, and a strong network of contacts to lean on as they begin to bring students into the open source world.
Dates: July 19th-24th, 2009. For more information, including how to apply, visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Professors_Open_Source_Summer_Experience.
As I’ve mentioned previously, we’re moving DrProject over to Django. Work started in September, and the second release is coming up soon. The schedule highlights some of the differences between doing development with full-time developers, and doing it with students who are working 1/5 or 1/4 time:
I’m pretty pleased with the state of the reworked code; looking forward to reactions from the rest of the world.
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