The Third Bit

Lots of fun (especially if “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter” is your idea of fun).

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13th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival

Call for Submissions

Deadline January 9, 2010

Festival Dates: June 3 — 6, 2010

This year’s Subtle Technologies Festival will explore sustainability
through a critical multidisciplinary lens. We invite investigations of
the role that decentralization, diversity and societal power dynamics
play in our attempts at maintaining a sustainable future. We look forward
to exploring multiple meanings of sustainability. We will be discussing
the science and technology behind sustainable practices and design, the
science behind the events and circumstances that have driven us to seek
sustainable solutions, and the role the artist plays in deepening our
understanding of these topics.

For 12 years, Subtle Technologies has been an extremely
multi-disciplinary festival: a place where artists, scientists, and other
innovators inspire, inform and generate new concepts and tools. We
encourage submissions from any discipline relevant to sustainability.

Specifically, this year we are looking for proposals for:

• presentations for the symposium
• works for the exhibitions
• video and film submissions for screenings
• workshops and partners for collaborations

Some example areas of exploration in sustainability include:

• political and historical perspectives
• design and architectural practices
• global warming science
• climate change refugees
• agriculture, water and other resource management
• cultural preservation
• material science
• alternative energy systems
• corporate responsibility
• co-operatives and microfinance
• biodiversity conservation
• preservation of indigenous knowledge
• the culture of consumption

Please make a submission on our website by January 9, 2010.

Questions or comments: Jen Dodd (+1 (519) 572 2275, jen@subtletechnologies.com)

Announcements

45 students from 14 universities, 8 projects — it’s been quite a term for the cross-country capstone projects. There were some bumps in the road, but overall, we think it went well. If you’d like to see what the students accomplished, check out their screencasts; if you’d like to join us next term, please get in touch; and if you’d like to talk about scaling the program up, please stay tuned — I’m hoping to organize a BoF at SIGCSE’10 in Milwaukee. (And p.s.: you can see screencasts of projects in my Government 2.0 course as well.)

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Compare this and this, then read this, this, and this.

Later: In response to a couple of email messages: if you’re a computer scientist, and want to do something to help, join the ACM or IEEE, run for office, and get them to start lobbying governments and companies for change.

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A few weeks ago, I asked for pointers to something that would translate 400-odd partial paper citations (usually just author names and paper titles) into full bibliography entries.  So far, none of the proposed solutions have worked out:

1. Bibsonomy’s search only found 2 of the 10 papers I tried it on manually.
2. JabRef did no better.
3. CrossRef found none.
4. The “possibly working Python script” for querying Google Scholar, and my home-grown attempts to do likewise, produced nothing but “your agent isn’t allowed access” messages. (Yes, I’ve included all the same headers that Firefox sends when I do searches manually—doesn’t make a difference. Google, they smart.)
5. I didn’t get cb2bib to run on Mac OS X. Admittedly, I only tried for ten minutes, but this isn’t a critical path project for me.

*sigh*

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Toronto-based science fiction writer Peter Watts was beaten and arrested by US border guards, and is now facing a long court fight.  Please help if you can.

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I’d like to start playing the sax again. I’d also like to get to the gym a couple of times a week, and write some more children’s books, and tear up the paving stones in our front yard so that we can put in a garden, but you probably don’t care much about that. If you’re reading this blog, though, I hope you will care enough about what I hope to do after I’m done at the University of Toronto to help me make it happen. Funding would be nice, as would pointers to potential sources of funding, but what I need most at this point is a reality check—your thoughts and comments would be very welcome.

So: I’m involved in a lot of things right now, but the three that matter most to me are (in order):

1. Software Carpentry, a crash course in software development for scientists and engineers;
2. Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects, which gives students from universities in Canada and the US a chance to work in distributed teams on term-long software engineering projects; and
3. a collection of essays on evidence-based software engineering that will be published by O’Reilly in 2010.

The second and third are unlikely to turn into full-time jobs, and I’m not even sure I want them to. At this point in my life, what I really want is to make a difference to the world my daughter will inherit, and I think my best shot of doing that is to help scientists do more research with less effort. As I’ve argued many times, teaching them basic software development skills will have more impact than any amount of petascale this or parallel that. The problem is finding someone to fund me for 12 months while I upgrade the existing course so that it can be used for self-paced study over the web. I have a plan; all I need (for some value of “all”) is half a dozen donors willing to kick in $20-25K each to cover salary, travel, video production, and what-not.

I’ve given up on getting government funding through conventional channels (I’m 0 for 5 on applications), and unfortunately, most companies doing the computational side of computational science are only interested in backing showcase “big iron” stuff (because hey, it makes sense to ask scientists to parallelize code before they even know how to modularize or test it). With 139 days on the clock as I write this, I’m open to (practical) suggestions…

Software Carpentry

(via Toronto’s Mayor David Miller)

Question: does it still count as science fiction if it’s actually happening? We’re engineering the planet, and we’re doing it by accident—how Larry Niven is that?

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I posted a link to OpenHatch a few days ago; Asheesh Laroia has now put up a post of his own pointing out that over 100 open source projects now tag entry-level bugs to help students get involved. He’d like your help connecting to others so that OpenHatch can aggregate them.

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