Space Telescope Science Institute on The Carpentries

Solution to Data Checking Problem

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I finally had a chance this morning to record my solution to the final exercise I set the learners from the Space Telescope Science Institute. It demonstrates how to build a little program in Python that checks the consistency of some experimental data; along the way, it uses file I/O, functions, assert statements, lists of lists, and on-the-fly unpacking. As always, feedback on the content and format would be greatly appreciated. (And if anyone would like to post their own solution, either as plain code or as a video, please let me know so that I can include it here.)

Wrapping Up the STScI Course

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The online portion of our work with learners at the Space Telescope Science Institute wound up today. 6 of the 14 people who took part in the on-site workshop submitted "graduation exercise" videos, and three more sent apologies (time pressure, technical difficulties, etc.), which I think is a pretty good completion rate. As always, we finished up by asking everyone to give us one good and one bad thing about the class:

The First Bootcamp of 2012

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We just wrapped up the first bootcamp of 2012 at the Space Telescope Science Institute. 14 scientists with a wide variety of computational backgrounds spent two days learning about testing, version control, program structure, the basics of Python, and the psychology of learning and programming. We're following up with 6 weeks of online material, partly because that's what fits everyone's schedules, and partly to see whether a blended approach works better than either strategy on its own.

Interview with STSci's Perry Greenfield

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today's interview is with Dr. Perry Greenfield of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

We run the Hubble Space Telescope, starting with soliciting and gathering proposals from astronomers that want to use it, to scheduling the selected proposals, generating and uploading telescope commands, processing the downloaded data from raw telemetry to calibrated science images and spectra and providing the results in an archive to the astronomical community. The general goal is to maximize the scientific potential of HST. We are also helping develop the systems needed to run the next large space telescope planned, the James Webb Space Telescope. STScI employs approximately 500 people and is located on the Johns Hopkins University Campus in Baltimore, MD.