What a Proposal Looks Like

I got word earlier this week that The MathWorks (makers of MATLAB) had approved my request for funding to spruce up the Software Carpentry notes, and find out how scientists are actually using computers. I faxed a signed copy of the paperwork down to them today—with luck, work will start in a couple of weeks, and I’m very excited to have a chance to work with the NRC’s Janice Singer on the survey.  And since students (graduate and undergraduate alike) occasionally ask about how academic funding works, the text of the proposal is below the cut. It isn’t quite the same as programming, but in the end it might be more useful…

Faking Results

Via BoingBoing, a story about scientists Photoshopping experimental results. Sometimes it’s outright fakery; sometimes they’re just “cleaning up” or “correcting”. Either way, it raises an interesting question: how often are people doing this with computational results? Without scientists’ code, or any other way to reproduce their work, we’ll probably never know.

Three Weeks and Change

Everyone’s making good progress:

• Ming and Bing have posted their second demo — next step is to do some serious design of the final product.
• After correcting an earlier post of mine, Xuan has blogged a fuller description of what she and Edward are building.
• Zeev Lieber posted a brief summary of what Dmitri and William did last term. Dmitri’s still wrestling with GWT exceptions.
• Jeff Balogh shortens his build.
• Matthew Basset sent his first data.
• Joseph Yeung is converting an EXE to an MMC.
• Victoria Mui completes a subtask.
• Daniel Servos likes Moodle plugins.
• Qiyu Zhu can edit roles.
• Nick Jamil provides more details.
• Qi Yang bursts into song.

Oh, and it looks like I’m going to get a grant from The MathWorks to upgrade the Software Carpentry course and find out what scientists are actually doing with computers — more on that once I know whether Sadie and I have bought a house or not.