Articles on The Carpentries

Software Carpentry article in CiSE

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The November 2006 issue of Computing in Science and Engineering includes an article I wrote titled "Software Carpentry: Getting Scientists to Write Better Code by making Them More Productive". It's available to subscribers only on the magazine's web site, but they have kindly given me permission to post it here. I think it's out too late to bring November's stats up above October's, but I could be surprised.

Computational Result Retracted

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

From the latest Nature (Vol 443, No 7114, p 1013):

When a new, independent code is used for the calculations on which the conclusions of this Letter were based, the results reported for the evolution of obliquity cannot be reproduced. This code was written in the inertial frame and is more reliable than the one used in the Letter. In most runs, the obliquities can change by only a few degrees and attain large values in only a very few cases. In addition, the obliquity variation shown in the Supplementary Information, although correct, originates from changes to orbital inclination of the planet, and close encounters are not effective in causing large obliquities.

German Version of 'Bottleneck'

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A German version of my article "Where's the Real Bottleneck in Scientific Computing?" has just appeared in Spektrum magazine. Pay-per-view, unfortunately, but the Software Carpentry site has had a flurry of hits from .de domains.

Dec 1: I just received my copy in the mail—I sound so much...sterner...in German ;-)

Gregory V. Wilson ist Professor für Computerwissenschaft an der University of Toronto. Sein Kurs ist erhältlich unter www.swc.scipy.org/.

Design Patterns in Scientific Software

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This paper, via the OpenScience Project, is a couple of years old, but a good step in an interesting direction.

Data Lineage

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The January 2005 issue of ACM Computing Surveys (vol. 37, no. 1, if you prefer) has good review by Rajendra Bose and James Frew titled "Lineage Retrieval for Scientific Data Processing: A Survey". In it, they look at what scientists do to keep track of what data they have, where it came from, and what has been done to it. Some of my students last term were worrying about the same issues in the context of HL7 medical data. It seems like an ideal place for software engineers to apply their skills: I'd be interested in hearing from people who have home-grown or small-scale systems I could use as a starting point for a lecture in Software Carpentry.