You start with nothing, a blank editor window and some LaTeX boilerplate, some half-baked ideas, a few axes to grind and a tremendous apprehension at how much your life is going to suck between now and the deadline.
Great post by Matt Welsh on writing scientific papers.
She’s very good at everything, very smart,” Haas said of her daughter. “She loves chemistry, loves math. I tell her, ‘Don’t go into science.’ I’ve made that very clear to her.”
Where the jobs aren’t. Brutal.
Scientific World Journal retracted two papers because of the use of excessive references to other papers in order to inflate citation metrics.
In the North American tradition of journalism, it is considered inappropriate for journalists to have actual opinions about the news stories they are covering. But humans have opinions, and everybody knows that, so suppressing this is a ridiculous fiction. What’s pernicious about this tradition is that journalistic writing is more compelling when authors write in their own voice, instead of the detached view from nowhere shtick that Jay Rosen (rightly!) complains about. It’s even worse in analysis-type pieces, because the journalist is supposed to express their opinion in the piece, but aren’t allowed to do so explicitly, so what happens instead is they find sources they agree with, and then publish quotes from those sources.
This piece by Dave Weigel from a few days ago is an example of the kind of journalistic writing that becomes possible if a journalist writes in their own voice. Great stuff, and the Washington Post is much poorer for having let him go.
When you’re programming, and the program you’re working on behaves in some way you don’t expect, then by definition there’s some assumption you’ve made about the system that’s incorrect.
Today I was working on adding some fields to a Django admin interface, and I got an unexpected error message when I tried to create a new object in the admin interface and save it. The code was very similar to other code I had previously written that already worked, so I tried to figure out what was wrong by identifying the difference.
The important difference I couldn’t see was that the name of a variable was the source of the problem. In this particular case, the field name (image) was colliding with the field name in a grandparent class, which caused the error to occur. I hadn’t considered that the name of the variable was a meaningful difference that could cause a problem, until I did a search on Stack Overflow and found someone who encountered a similar problem.
This is one of the hardest parts of programming: being able to systematically test your assumptions until you discover which of your current beliefs are false.
From Macia et al. (doi: 10.1145/2162049.2162069)
The phenomenon of architectural degradation was introduced by Hochstein and Lindvall [16] as aiming at referring to the continuous decline of the architectural modularity.
Thank you, Google Scholar Alerts.
I’m hoping to blog more about this later, but I loved Gelman and Loken’s column in Chance magazine (what a great name!) about statistics professors not eating their own dogfood. I’m a big fan of Andrew Gelman’s blog.
Empirical Software Engineering Stack Exchange Proposal
Just proposed this.
Since I now work within walking distance of the house, our family downsized from two cars to one, with the expectation that we could use zipcar for those times when we both need a car.
Today was the first time I used the service, and I was pretty impressed with how well the workflow was thought out. A number of my questions about the service were quickly answered. (“How do you get in the car? There’s a scanner on the windshield that senses your Zipcard. Where do they put the keys so they don’t get lost? Keys are attached to a zipline mounted near the ignition. What about gas? There’s a debit gas card that lives in a special sleeve in the driver’s visor. How do they prevent gas card fraud? When you use the card, the pump requires you to input for your mileage and your zipcard number.”)
The first time I left the car, I locked it using the normal power door lock. When I tried to get back in by scanning my card, it locked the doors again instead of unlocking them. I swiped again, and I was in.
Why did scanning my card the first time lock the doors again? I don’t know for sure how the scanner mechanism is implemented, but I can take a guess. The scanner can send a “lock” or an “unlock” signal to the car, just like a regular key fob. However, it has no way to query the car for the state of the lock, so it has to keep the state of the lock’s internally. The first time I swiped my card, the scanner was in the “doors are locked” state, so it sent the unlock signal and switched to the “doors are unlocked” state. When I got out of the car and locked it with the power lock, the Zipcar scanner was still in the “doors are unlocked” state. When I came back and swiped, it thought the doors were unlocked and so it sent the “lock” signal and switched to the “doors are locked” state.
This problem could be avoided if the car could receive a “toggle lock” signal in addition to “lock” and “unlock”. In that case, the scanner wouldn’t need to keep state internally, and could always send out the “toggle lock” signal.
Alas, there is no “toggle lock” signal.
Surfing Complexity 