Tag: science
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Open source science
Slashdot notes an article from the Guardian: “If you’re going to do good science, release the computer code too“. The author is, Darrel Ince, is a Professor of Computing at The Open University. You might recognise something of the mayhem that is the climate change debate in the title. Both the public release of scientific…
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Peer review
I’ve stumbled across yet another “ClimateGate” article (by way of James Delingpole), this one going right for the jugular of science: peer review. The author is journalist Patrick Courrielche, who I hadn’t come across until now. Courrielche argues that peer review is kaput and is being replaced by what he calls “peer-to-peer review”, an idea…
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The colloquium
An “official communication” from early June demanded that all Engineering and Computing postgraduate students take part in the Curtin Engineering & Computing Research Colloquium. Those who didn’t might be placed on “conditional status”, the message warned. A slightly rebellious instinct led me to think of ways to obey the letter but not the spirit of…
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Meta-engineering
I’m beginning to think I should have approached this maths modelling stuff from an engineering point of view: with a requirements document, version control and unit testing. Constructing a reasonably complicated mathematical model seems to have enough in common with software development that such things could be quite useful. I’m calling this “meta-engineering”, because I’d…
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What am I doing?
Over the past few weeks I’ve had numerous questions of the form: “how’s your work going?” I find I can only ever answer this with banalities like “good” or “meh”. It’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing. At any given point in time, I have a list of minor challenges written up on…
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Science fail
Apparently one of the world’s foremost experts on global warming – as far as the denialist camp is concerned – is Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. The sum total of his qualifications appear to be his propensity to comment on the subject. A google search turned up the Heartland Institute’s take on Monckton. Observe the ad…
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Artificial intelligence
A thought occurs, spurred on by my use of Bayesian networks. They’re used in AI (so I’m led to believe), though I’m using them to model the comprehension process in humans. However, I do also work in a building filled with other people applying AI techniques. My question is this: how long until Sarah Connor…
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Theoretical frameworks, part 3
The [intlink id=”225″ type=”post”]first[/intlink] and [intlink id=”324″ type=”post”]second[/intlink] instalments of this saga discussed the thinking and writing processes. However, I also need to fess up to reality and do some measuring. A theoretical framework is not a theory. The point of a theoretical framework is to frame theories – to provide all the concepts and…
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Theoretical frameworks
One of the chapters of my much-delayed thesis describes (or rather will describe) a theoretical framework, which is academic-speak for “a way of understanding stuff” in a given field. In my case, stuff = software inspections, and my way of understanding them is a mixture of abstractions of abstractions of abstractions and some slightly crazy…
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Ponderings of sanity
There are many things to be said about debating in online forums. One, that you learn early on, is that it doesn’t take much effort to find the fruitcakes. It really doesn’t. The people who firmly believe that the World Trade Centre was brought down by explosives, as evidenced by the “indisputable fact” that it…