The Third Bit

Jon Pipitone, who was once a student of mine and is now a friend, volunteered with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association as an observer during G20 in Toronto. I know it’s a cliché, but Jon really is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, and one of the gentlest as well. Despite that, he spent almost 22 hours in lockup. He recently posted his account of what happened; knowing him as I do, I believe it to be accurate (if anything, understated). I am angry that the police stood by on Saturday and let people smash windows and burn cars, then turned around and arrested people like Jon. I’m even more angry that there will almost certainly never be a full accounting: we’ll never know where a billion-plus dollars of public money went, how it was that legislation giving police extra powers was passed in secret, and—well, read Cllr Janet Davis’s piece for the rest of the question (if you can get past the formatting glitches).

I’m very proud of Jon for getting out and doing something constructive; I think society would be a lot safer if more people followed his lead.

Uncategorized

Two thought-provoking pieces from Mark Guzdial’s blog (again):

1. The Molecular Workbench: “…is not just a collection of simulations–do not be deceived by first glance. While it presents many existing simulations that are ready to use in classroom, it is, however, also a modeling tool for teachers and students to create their own simulations and share them with collaborators. There are very sophisticated modeling capacities hidden behind its simple user interface that empower you to create new simulations and even explore the unknowns.” Given more resources, I’d love to do something like this for Software Carpentry (and for programming in general).
2. The Future of Tablet Textbooks: “[Apple] thinks…that the first iPad-based textbooks are going to come out as apps… But…Apple would prefer to have textbooks come out as EPUB books… [Because] EPUB books can be distributed through Apple’s iTunesU channel in the iTunes store…Apps are much more tightly controlled, e.g., they have to be checked for memory leaks and proper behavior (expensive!), and they have to be signed and distributed carefully to make sure that what the customer gets is what the publisher delivered (and what Apple vetted).  Apple doesn’t want to have to vet textbooks… I think Apple doesn’t see the problem as I do. When textbooks have the capability of rich textbooks, what makes them different from an App anyway?  Couldn’t they misbehave in the same ways as errant apps?”

Teaching

Making Software (the collection on empirical software engineering that I helped edit) is now available on Safari Rough Cuts — chapters include:

1. A Communal Workshop or Doors that Close?
2. Learning through Application: The Maturing of the Quality Improvement Paradigm in the SEL
3. Conway’s Corollary
4. Architecting: How Much and When
5. How Usable Are Your APIs?
6. Modern Code Review
7. Quality Wars: Open Source vs. Proprietary Software
8. Personality, Intelligence, and Expertise: Impacts on Software Development
9. Mining Your Own Evidence
10. What We Can Learn From Systematic Reviews
11. Understanding Software Engineering through Qualitative Methods
12. What Does 10x Mean? Measuring Variations in Programmer Productivity
13. Code Talkers
14. Why Aren’t More Women in Computer Science?
15. Pair Programming
16. The Art of Collecting Bug Reports
17. Identifying and Managing Dependencies in Global Software Development
18. Why Is It So Hard to Learn to Program?
19. Beyond Lines of Code: Do We Need More Complexity Metrics?
20. The Quest for Convincing Evidence
21. Copy-Paste as a Principled Engineering Tool
22. Two Comparisons of Programming Languages
23. How Effective is Test Driven Development?
24. How Effective Is Modularization?
25. The Evidence for Design Patterns

We hope you enjoy it!

Making Software

Beryl Lieff Benderly: “The Real Science Gap“. The teaser says, “It’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.” And later: “Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.”

Uncategorized

From the announcement:

The University of Toronto Department of Physics hosts Toronto PyCamp 2010. For beginners, this ultra-low-cost Python Boot Camp makes you productive so you can get your work done quickly. PyCamp emphasizes the features which make Python a simpler and more efficient language. Following along with example Python PushUps™ speeds your learning process in a modern high-tech classroom. Become a self-sufficient Python developer in just five days at PyCamp! Conducted on the campus of the University of Toronto, PyCamp comes with your own single OS/single developer copy of Wing Professional Python IDE.

Python, Teaching

Another week, another bunch of posts on t’other site — including a short survey to help us prioritize future lectures, and a plea for help from anyone with graphic design skills who loves isometric game art as much as I do:

• HPC and Programmability
• What Topics are Most Important to You?
• An interview with Michigan State’s Titus Brown (during which no goats were tested)
• A shorter version of the Sets & Tuples episode (for the benefit of those who don’t want the gory details in the longer version posted last week)
• Some web stats
• An interview with Indiana University’s Andrew Lumsdaine
• The last two episodes of the Sets & Dictionaries lecture
• Preliminary survey results (short version: version control, task automation, and data visualization are your top three picks)
• A plea for help with clip art

Software Carpentry

Apologies for falling behind on these updates:

1. An interview with Microsoft’s David Rich
2. The third episode of the regular expressions lecture
3. The fourth episode of ditto
4. A job posting in London, England
5. A three-and-a-half-minute pitch for Software Carpentry
6. A link to a fascinating lecture on genomics by Eric Lander
7. Some musings on small-p patterns
8. A SIAM News article about Software Carpentry
9. The fifth and final episode of the regular expressions lecture
10. The last episode of the lecture on sets & dictionaries (just to mix things up a bit)
11. The violas of programming
12. A pointer to a post by Titus Brown discussing how to combine material from Software Carpentry with other courses — comments would be greatly appreciated
13. A schedule for a one-term run of the course this fall
14. A discussion of the science of learning, and how it impacts the design of the course
15. The first and second episode of the lecture on sets & dictionaries (introducing sets and hash tables respectively)
16. An interview with SciNet’s Daniel Gruner

Software Carpentry

The collection of essays on evidence-based software engineering that Andy Oram and I edited has gone to production. The final title is Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It. Individual chapters will be available as Rough Cuts from O’Reilly next month, and the book itself should be on the shelves not long after.

I’d like to thank all the people who volunteered their time; in no particular order, they and their chapters are:

1. Tim Menzies and Forrest Shull: The Quest for Convincing Evidence
2. Lutz Prechelt and Marian Petre: Credibility, or Why Should I Insist on Being Convinced?
3. Barbara Kitchenham: What We Can Learn From Systematic Reviews
4. Andrew Ko: Understanding Software Engineering through Qualitative Methods
5. Victor R. Basili: Learning through Application: The Maturing of the Quality Improvement Paradigm in the SEL
6. Jo E.Hannay: Personality, Intelligence, and Expertise: Impacts on Software Development
7. Mark Guzdial: Why Is It So Hard to Learn to Program?
8. Israel Herraiz and Ahmed E. Hassan: Beyond Lines of Code: Do We Need More Complexity Metrics?
9. Elaine J. Weyuker and Thomas J. Ostrand: Finding Fault: Developing an Automated System for Predicting Which Files Will Contain Defects
10. Barry Boehm: Architecting: How Much and When
11. Christian Bird: Conway’s Corollary
12. Burak Turhan, Lucas Layman, Madeline Diep, Hakan Erdogmus, and Forrest Shull: How Effective is Test Driven Development?
13. Michele A. Whitecraft and Wendy M. Williams: Why Aren’t More Women in Computer Science?
14. Lutz Prechelt: Two Comparisons of Programming Languages
15. Diomidis Spinellis: Quality Wars: Open Source vs. Proprietary Software
16. Robert DeLine: Code Talkers
17. Laurie Williams: Pair Programming
18. Jason Cohen: Modern Code Review
19. Jorge Aranda: A Communal Workshop or Doors that Close?
20. Steve McConnell: What Does 10x Mean? Measuring Variations in Programmer Productivity
21. Neil Thomas and Gail Murphy: How Effective Is Modularization?
22. Walter Tichy: The Evidence for Design Patterns
23. Tom Ball and Nachi Nagappan: Evidence-Based Failure Prediction
24. Rahul Premraj and Thomas Zimmermann: The Art of Collecting Bug Reports
25. Dewayne Perry: Where Do Most Software Flaws Come From?
26. Andrew Begel and Beth Simon: Novice Professionals: How Newly-Hired Recently-Graduated Software Developers Fare in their First Software Engineering Job
27. Kim Sebastian Herzig and Andreas Zeller: Mining Your Own Evidence
28. Michael Godfrey and Cory Kapser: Copy-Paste as a Principled Engineering Tool
29. Steven Clarke: How Usable Are Your APIs?
30. Marcelo Cataldo: Identifying and Managing Dependencies in Global Software Development

Making Software

A new event series is starting up: Toronto Live Interviews.  The first is on Tuesday, July 20, 6:30pm – 8:00pm, at the Centre for Social Innovation, Room 120 (215 Spadina Ave).

Tickets are free, but please register as space is limited: for information and registration, see http://guestlistapp.com/events/25203.

The guest, Karl Schroeder, is an award-winning science fiction author. He’s a world-builder able to convincingly juxtapose high and low tech. He goes beyond Arthur C Clarke’s idea that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” to understand the worldview, philosophy and economy of people living in these magical possible futures. In his work as a foresight consultant and environmental blogger, he flips these perspectives around to understand how we can make a future we want to live in.

Karl will be interviewed by Jen Dodd. Jen is a physicist, designer of public science events including SciBarCamp and Perimeter Institute’s Quantum to Cosmos Festival, and is now managing director of Subtle Technologies, Toronto’s annual festival of art and science.

Location instructions: on arriving at 215 Spadina, go through the Dark Horse cafe to the lobby, go up the stairs to the left of the elevator, and room 120 is through the glass doors straight ahead.

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