Jamie and I had the pleasure of going out for dim sum with Greg Wilson the other day. You might remember Greg from such classics as Science 2.0 and Stack Overflow Dev Days Toronto. He was talking to us about his Software Carpentry course that he’s been running out of the University of Toronto and University of Alberta.
Software Carpentry is a two week course for science graduate students who need to do software development, but may not have had CS training. It covers things like scripting, version control, and unit testing. And I know that based on my experience in graduate school, this kind of course would have saved me a lot of time and pain.
Back in the dark ages (1990s) when I was in grad school, we coded in Fortran, didn’t write unit tests, and our version control was something like "Get my latest source out of this directory: /home/jim/calibrations/beware_of_the_jaguar_new_calibration_1997_06_09/". Needless to say, I learned the lessons taught in Greg’s course the hard way.
The course is great and desperately needed; however there is push-back from some in the academic community as to its necessity. The argument is something along the lines of "grad students are cheap, why should we pay more to train them outside of their field?" and "they can learn all the coding they need from books and more senior students."
Well, there’s a great counter-example to that in the news recently: ClimateGate!
The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has one of the most-cited climate change databases in the world. This database has been the basis for some of the UN’s predictions that climate change is real, and is driven by mankind (Anthropogenic Global Warming). Recently, either an external hacker or an internal whistleblower released to the internet a series of emails and source code that implies some non-transparent dealings by the scientists with respect to their data. Whether it’s merely academic infighting or actual fraud is up for debate.
Regardless of your feelings about anthropogenic global warming and the politics of academia, one thing is clear from the released source code: everyone working on that code base needs to attend Greg’s Software Carpentry course. One has to feel bad for Ian "Harry" Harris, who’s HARRY_README.TXT shows that the CRU source code has just about every mistake possible. And because of those mistakes, we can’t answer some very real questions about the conclusions coming out of the CRU.
The point here is not that "ClimateGate" has killed AGW. My point is simply that bad software development practices have contributed not to settling the AGW question, but have further muddied the waters. If the folks at CRU had been open about their practices, we could have an honest debate about AGW and what do to about it. Because, in part, of their bad development practices, we can’t have that discussion, and the anti-AGW folks now say there’s no point to talking about it at all — global warming is dead.
I wouldn’t go that far, but once you lose Rex Murphy, you’re in trouble.
So, to all the academic supervisors and grant approvers out there: get grad students trained up on software development (and statistics, but that’s another post). Every major bit of physical science from now on will involve programming. Training students to do software development is the same as teaching them calculus. It’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity.
I find it hard to fathom that it’s already been one year since I joined Scimatic. It’s been a great year full of exciting developments, and I think that we are well-poised to do some more great stuff in the future.
In the past year, we’ve done a major project for one of our European clients, and we are most of the way through a really fun project for another client — a project that we think they’ll be announcing soon.
In that time, we’ve used a bunch of great tech: WPF,Infragistics,NSIS,NHibernate and ActiveRecord. I’ve learned a tonne by doing these projects, but more importantly by working with Jamie and the group at Scimatic.
The future also looks pretty good — we’ve done a lot of the thinking and design for our new internal project. Lots of whiteboarding and discussions, both internal and with visiting scientists. I’m really excited about the upcoming year.
So to Jamie and the team here: thanks for having me aboard. I couldn’t have dreamed it would be this good. As I mentioned in my first post here on Scimatic, I highly recommend getting out there and networking and going after the job that you think is perfect for you. I found that job for me; I’m sure it’s out there for you
So it’s our fourth day here in West Vancouver for our Christmas break. We come back to BC every other year, and I get really excited for it. I love Christmas with the whole Graham family, and this will be the first year that Iain will go into ski scamps.
Except it won’t.
We are having the strangest weather I have ever seen. We delayed flying out of Toronto until Saturday December 20th so that we could avoid “Snowmageddon” on December 19th. And then there was supposed to be another storm in Toronto on Sunday, except that it went above freezing, and Toronto is having Vancouver-esque weather.
And we are in the middle of the heaviest snow I have ever seen in Vancouver. There’s about 50cm on my parents’ back deck, and it’s showing no signs of stopping. These photos are from the first round two days ago, and it’s just getting worse. We can’t get up 18th Avenue because West Vancouver only has 10 snow plows and has used up its snow budget for the next 10 years.
But, but, but in the worst irony of all — Whistler has the least amount of snow it’s had in a long long time. Like 70cm. And it’s not getting any of this blizzard that we are stuck in. So I won’t even get to ski in this.
Part of me is thinking I will drive to Whistler, get my skis, and then go to Cypress And take Iain with me. The good news is that we are going to get a lot of use from our new Aquarium membership.
My passport expired in November, and I feel that I have to have a valid passport. Just in case I get The Call and have to leave the country in the dead of night. The last time I went through the process, it was a giant pain in the ass, as I had to get a new birth certificate from Quebec and then get the whole thing expedited so that I won’t miss my flight.
I have to say that this time, the process was nearly painless.
Second, I went to the Passport office at 74 Victoria St in Toronto at 9 AM on Tuesday December 9th. There was no line. I was in and out in under 15 minutes. Totally unbelievable. The staff were pleasant and quite helpful.
Third, the estimated date for delivery was December 23rd, which was pretty great turn around time. But I got it today. Just over a week.
I guess the backlash over the huge wait times when the US changed its passport rules last year really affected some change. Specifically the Passport Canada Act.
Even though he was convicted, I actually like former Illinois Governor George H. Ryan. He was two for three for me; he promised to fix the Hillside Strangler, and did; and then he put the death penalty on hold. So he sold fake licenses through the Secretary of State’s office. This is Illinois, after all.
Thank God the last honest man United States Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was assigned to Illinois. He described the corruption as "the most staggering crime spree in office I have ever seen." And he was responsible for the indictment of George Ryan, and a little thing called the Plame Affair.
For raw entertainment, I really miss living in Chicago.
Gladwell is out promoting his new book, "Outliers: The Story of Success." It’s received some bad reviews from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, and from uber-tech guy Joel Spolsky (although it wasn’t clear to me if Joel read the book, or only the review). The main complaint is that Gladwell extrapolates from anecdotes to broad themes without any studies or empirical research.
However, in person, Gladwell seemed to have total recall of not only the anecdotes of his book, the catchphrases, but also studies that back them up. He credited all the scientists who did the original research when talking about anecdotes that illustrated those studies.
He was "in conversation" with Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman’s, who turns out is an old friend. That was convenient, because I don’t think the questions were all that great, and fortunately Gladwell just went off a bit and talked about what was interesting him at the time. Martin was mentioned lately on StartupNorth in a blog link for "phoning in" a report about VC in Ontario.
Gladwell’s talk had lots of interesting ideas, and I think that I will write more about them in a later post. Jay Goldman was also at the talk, and took detailed notes on his Macbook.
