This post is the third in a series devoted to version control. In Part 1, I talked about version control features that are already integrated into everyday tools, such as Dropbox or Google Docs. In Part 2, I gave an introduction to Subversion, which is a ‘traditional’ command-line version control system. In this post, I [...]
Rethinking the scientific method | The New Yorker (subscription required, unfortunately) Extremely disturbing article about well-intentioned scientists’ experiments and conclusions gone awry. Most upsetting is the lack of reproducibility in many important studies and the likelihood that those works don’t get published. The disturbing implication of his study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific [...]
Volatile and Decentralized: Why I’m leaving Harvard Tenured Harvard Computer Science professor describes why he chose to leave academia for a gig at Google. (via Evegenya Scholnick) I get to hack all day, working on problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more interesting than I can work on at any university…At Google, I [...]
How to Fail in Grant Writing | Do Your Job Better—The Chronicle of Higher Ed A list of proven techniques for writing bad proposals. (via Mordecai Mac Low). Some of my favorites: Focus your grant entirely on your own study species and/or area of focus. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake, right? Dealing with problems of general [...]
Based on this article and some discussion with an insider, it’s worth contiuing our earlier discussion about the JWST mis-budgeting. Exclusive: NASA’s Plan to Save Astrophysics From Space Telescope’s Budget Overruns | Wired.com “They’re not going to ravage the astrophysics budget,” said Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and chair of [...]
The professional development workshops at last year’s AAS were a great success: turn out was excellent and the participants left very happy with what they had learned. Based on last year’s success, we again organized workshops for this year in Seattle. Surprisingly, however, there’s still plenty of space available and we could really use your [...]
Macworld has published an interesting series of stories on the future of the Mac. Anand Lal Shimpi (of Anandtech fame) writes about the Mac of the future: the CPU. One aspect I found interesting was Apple’s desire for powerful Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), which they are using not just for games and 3D graphics, but for more [...]
Introduction A couple of weeks ago, I outlined how version control, which I defined as the management of changes to documents, code, or information is both something you should care about, and something that you may already have been using or can easily use with Time Machine, Dropbox, Pages.app, etc. One of the areas where [...]
F.lux for Mac 5.0 Review | Macworld via Mike Cushing …looking at a computer display late at night—particularly when that display is calibrated to be bright and clear during the daytime—can be both visually irritating and a contributor to sleep problems. Once the sun starts to go down, [F.lux] gradually—over the course of an hour—dims [...]
I know this is old news by blogging standards, but what are people’s thoughts about the hubbub over the JWST independent review report? NASA Space Telescope Center of $1.5 Billion Fiasco | Science Insider NASA would not be able to launch the telescope before September 2015—a year behind schedule. In order to make that deadline, [...]