ELD Scholarly Communication Committee

Via ELDnet-l, a website for the above mentioned committee. The Committee also has a Scholarly Communication in Engineering blog which doesn't have much yet but will certainly be worth watching. Welcome!

Friday Follies: Albert Einstein Madlib

OK, so the family is doing Madlibs after supper last night and one of the ones that comes up is titled Albert Einstein. The bold terms are the ones we filled in:

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, the son of Pee Wee Herman and Janet Jackson. In 1902 he had a job as assistant lampshade in the Swiss patent office and attended the University of Zurich. There he began studying atoms, molecules, and poodles. He developed his famous theory of gory relativity, which expanded the phenomena of sub-atomic pogo sticks and minty fresh magnetism. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for jalapeno peppers and was director of theoretical physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm SUV in Berlin. In 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor of Mars, Eistein came to America to take a post at Princeton Institute for tooth picks, where his theories helped American devise the first atomic bar stool. There is no doubt about it: Einstein was one of the most brilliant cooks of our time.

Another funny physics madlib.

Javaschools

Joel Spolsky has a very thought provoking article on his Blog, Joel on Software. It's basically about what the main teaching language of CS programs should be, C or Java:

Therein lies the debate. Years of whinging by lazy CS undergrads like me, combined with complaints from industry about how few CS majors are graduating from American universities, have taken a toll, and in the last decade a large number of otherwise perfectly good schools have gone 100% Java. It's hip, the recruiters who use "grep" to evaluate resumes seem to like it, and, best of all, there's nothing hard enough about Java to really weed out the programmers without the part of the brain that does pointers or recursion, so the drop-out rates are lower, and the computer science departments have more students, and bigger budgets, and all is well.

As you can see, he takes no prisoners. His idea is an interesting one, central to the whole idea of what a CS education (or any education, for that matter) should be about: getting a job or learning how to think. Spolsky definately comes down on the learning how to think side, drop out ratio and enrollment numbers be damned.

As we can all imagine, there's been plenty of buzz about this on the compsciblogosphere and that's a very good thing. Personally, I think CS programs have to find a balance. Yes, hard topics need to be covered and those not cut out for the field need to be gently culled, but students also need to get some marketable skills to get them that all-important first job. Another thing that needs to be pointed out is that there is really no longer one kind of "computer science," but really a whole range of paths including systems, software engineering, databases, communications, applications areas and a whole lot more. It's probably no longer such a good idea to think of CS and CS education as a monolith.

I plan on forwarding the article to the members of my comp sci faculty, hoping they will get something out of the debate. One other essay on Spolky's very interesting site is his definition of a good developer. A detailed description of how some people are just way better at creating software than other people and how is really worth getting those people to work for you.

As for your truly, when I took my CS degree, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Pascal was the main teaching language with C only just starting to gain popularity. Fortran (the first language I learned) still had a lot of adherents rather than its current status as a niche language. I did learn C, but as part of an elective rather than a compulsory part of the program. I also learned COBOL. via Topix CS.

Here & There

A potpourri of bookmarks sitting around my desktop, many only vaguely related to our core mission here:

• Free Science Fiction Calendar for 2006
  
• Another View on ‘The Access Principle’ By Thomas Bacher from InsideHigherEd
  
• Straight Flushed on student gambling
  
• Cool Alien Monster Made Out of LEGOs
  
• 20 best food books of the year
  
• Wil McCarthy's wonderful "Hacking Matter" as a free download
  
• Chess-set made from nuts and bolts
  
• 100 greatest gadgets of the past 50 years
  
• Essay contest: What is humanity's worst invention?
  
• Print your own Monopoly money
  
• Nature's website has a comic strip about synthetic biology
  
• Soviet public-domain maps
  
• Top Science Stories of 2005
  
• Bread Pudding
  
• Ambient Findability Bibliography
  
• FemaleCSGradStudent
  

A holiday break

We all deserve a nice holiday break, a chance to read some books for fun for a change. I hope to do plenty of that (Yay!) and to catch up on the considerable posting backlog for the other blog. See you all in the new year.

Women in computing

A bunch of posts on women in computing, mostly about how the numbers have actually declined recently:

• Women in CS: the dance remix version from Jane.
  
• Open Letter to Dr. Phil from FemaleCSGradStudent (Great blog, btw)
  
• In computer science, a growing gender gap is the original article that prompted many of the links that follow
  
• Gender Gap in Computer Science Growing (via Topix CS)
  
• Cultural factors impact growth of big gender gap in computer science (via Topix CS)
  
• Women Shun Computer Science (via Topix CS)
  
• 'Gorgeous geeks' get some exposure -- yes, a calendar. (via Topix CS)
  
• Attracting females into computer science (via Topix CS)

Dover, PA

Great news. The decision (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) in the Dover case on teaching evolution in the classroom has been released and the judge basically called the supporters of ID a bunch of liars:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy

I haven't read a lot of legal decisions in my time, but this is certainly going to be one of them. Solid coverage at Wikipedia, of course.

Update: Via EvolutionBlog, a very good summary of the decision by Jason Rosenhouse.

Your resume says you're some kind of intermediate species

A very funny Dilbert cartoon.

Google Librarian Newsletter

The first Google librarian newsletter is out, with a feature article on How does Google collect and rank results? with some nice info on their crawling and relevance ranking techniques.

The Access Principle

A nice interview (with discussion in the comments) with John Willinsky, author of The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship.

A taste:

Q: Many publishers argue that journals and materials for which one must pay are somehow by definition of higher quality than various open models. How do you respond?

A: The empirical evidence argues otherwise: For example, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology, a relatively new open access journal that operates on author fees, has the highest “impact factor” (number of times articles are cited) by a considerable margin among biology journals indexed by the ISI Web of Science. But that is only part of the quality story. The majority of journals now allow their authors to “self archive” their published articles in open access institutional repositories (usually located in the author’s university library). But note that in all cases, someone pays, though it is not necessarily the reader, and these alternatives are greatly increasing access to this knowledge.

In defence of Wikipedia

The Wikipedia/Britannica comparison in Nature has been much in the blogospheric news lately (here for example), and Will Richardson points to a very nice summary of the main issues by Danah Boyd. I'll quote the paragraph before Richardson quotes:

I am worried about how academics are treating Wikipedia and i think that it comes from a point of naivety. Wikipedia should never be the sole source for information. It will never have the depth of original sources. It will also always contain bias because society is inherently biased, although its efforts towards neutrality are commendable. These are just realizations we must acknowledge and support. But what it does have is a huge repository of information that is the most accessible for most people. Most of the information is more accurate than found in a typical encyclopedia and yet, we value encyclopedias as a initial point of information gathering. It is also more updated, more inclusive and more in-depth. Plus, it's searchable and in the hands of everyone with digital access (a much larger population than those with encyclopedias in their homes). It also exists in hundreds of languages and is available to populations who can't even imagine what a library looks like. Yes, it is open. This means that people can contribute what they do know and that others who know something about that area will try to improve it. Over time, articles with a lot of attention begin to be inclusive and approximating neutral. The more people who contribute, the stronger and more valuable the resource. Boycotting Wikipedia doesn't make it go away, but it doesn't make it any better either.

I must admit I'm on the Wikipedia side for this one. No reference source is perfect, the all have some bias, some inaccuracies. It seems to me if all the world's experts actually contributed to Wikipedia instead of complaining that it isn't any good...

The Patent Librarian

Via Eldnet-l, Michael White of Queens University has started up a blog, The Patent Librarian, for academic librarians who use patent information:

I'm still tweaking the format, but the content is aimed at academic librarians who work with patent information. My hope is to create a forum for exchanging ideas and information related to patent data and documentation, search tools and techniques, free and commercial databases, patent statistics, training tips, USPTO information dissemination policy, and other related topics.

Yet another scitech librarian blog by a Canadian...must be something in the water.

New blog: the Blog Section of the IT Division of SLA

Via Christina, The Blogging Section of the IT Division has a new blog. It's run by Catherine Lavallée-Welch, chair of the Section.

Goodbye and Good Luck to Computing Chris

Chris Leonard of Elsevier has just posted this on his Computing Chris blog:

OK - the news is out! I am leaving Elsevier as of today to pursue opportunities elsewhere. I have had fun and met some amazing people, but I feel the time is right to move back to England and have a fresh start in another field entirely.

To everyone who reads the blog, who I have met at conferences and visited at your institutes - thanks for making the last few years so enjoyable.

Best wishes for the future,
Chris

PS: I will remain contactable on cjleonard at mac dot com. Also, I will try to keep up with the blogging here.

Although Chris was only part of the scitech biblioblogosphere for short time, I always appreciated the insights he gave into the journal publishing world.

On the off-chance Elsevier removes his blog, it's worth reprinting here his post on 14 Steps to the Perfect CS Journal:

1. FREE ACCESS - at least at the point of use. Subscribers access the journal for 1 year, then all articles are available to everyone who wants them?
   
2. DIGITAL PRESERVATION - the profileration of electronic journals is all well and good, but they need to be available in 100 years time. This could be done by independent 3rd parties.
   
3. UPDATEABLE ARTICLES - following the example of versions on arXiv, authors should be able to update their articles whenever new date or results are available. Old versions remain available as well.
   
4. BETTER PEER REVIEW - open, on-going peer review. Anyone can comment on an article and suggest improvements or point out inaccuracies. Maybe also worth adopting something like F1000 or this reviewer rating system.
   
5. SOME PROFIT - a commercial company needs to make a profit to survive. What would be an acceptable level of profit to make (after tax)? Any excess could go to reducing the costs of the journal subscriptions.
   
6. INTERACTIVE ARTICLES - apart from readers being able to leave comments on an article, it would be nice to see some real functionality in CS articles. Maybe raw data for manipulation within Mathematica or Maple?
   
7. RAW DATA - all articles to have raw data available on the web in an open, interchangeable format.
   
8. INSTANT PUBLISHING - if we adopt a model whereby people can comment on articles when they are published, peer-review becomes an constant, ongoing process. Authors may choose to make sure the paper is refereed before submission. When the editor evaluates a submission, he or she is simply making sure it makes sense and is in the right journal - a 10 minute process, eliminating the need for lengthy review processes.
   
9. OPTIONAL PRINT - electronic journals with an optional print version available for a small fee.
   
10. RSS FEEDS - all journals to have RSS feeds for Table of Contents.
    
11. SOCIAL SOFTWARE - allow users to tag articles to create a folksonomy (good for discovering articles from other journals you wouldn’t normal consult). Adopt things like ‘interestingness’ but for journal articles.
    
12. SEARCH ENGINES - abstract or full-text indexed in all search engines.
    
13. ADVISORY BOARD - alongside an editorial board, an advisory board of scientists and librarians to suggest and comment on new directions for publishing the journal.
    
14. CUSTOMER SERVICE - available via email, but also Skype, instant messaging etc. A regular weblog from this source would also help keep interested parties updated on what is happening behind the scences.

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

Thanks to John Rennie at Scientific American for making the above article that he wrote freely available to the world at the following link. A while back I emailed the SciAm digital library asking if they could make the article available for free on their website. I remembered the artcile very clearly from when I'd read it in July 2002 and remembered it as a very useful summary of the main points for defending evolution. In any case, I shortly got back a very nice response from Rennie, the Editor-in-Chief, saying that they would make the article available and that they were in the process of creating a pro-evolution web presence on their site. It's been a while since I last checked to see if the article was up, but I did today and it's there now. There's also a link to the sidebar material from the original article on other resources for defending evolution.

Thanks to SciAm and John Rennie for performing this valuable service.

Here's the link that the SciAm website wants me to use:

Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism
by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up

TA's as the Key to Science Teaching

A thought-provoking article by Scott Jaschik over at InsideHigherEd. It seems that if you spend a little time teaching TAs how to teach and supporting their efforts while they're teaching, you get happier students, who then want to remain in your program.

Engineering makes you sexier...

Or maybe not. As much as I like Dilbert, as funny as I think it is, as much as it refects what my previous life as a software developer was like, I also have to think that it might be one of the worst things that ever happened to the profession, at least in terms of forging a positive public image. If kids are staying away from engineering (and science) careers, maybe it's because there are so few positive images of scitech careers in the media. Think about it -- what tv show out there portrays science and scientists in a positive light? You can name them on the fingers of one hand. Compare the media image of scitech careers with doctors, lawyers, police, mediums, ghost hunters and all the rest. Thank god for the odd forensic expert on the police shows (I consider CSI & its clones more cop shows than scientist shows). I think this lack of positive image in the media also plays an important role in discouraging girls from pursuing scitech careers, again comparing the progress women have made in fields like law & medicine where there are lots of positive media role models. End of rant.

Geeks R Us

A couple of less-than-serious posts from Locusmag:

• Results of a "Top 20 Geek Novels" poll -- I'll admit to reading 14 of the 20 and all the top 9. Microserfs, the no. 10, is a book I know I'm going to read someday. The only one that I'm just not interested in and may never get around to is The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Lord of the Rings seems to be a significant ommission as does anything by Bruce Sterling.
  
• And for the geekettes out there, a call for papers from She’s Such a Geek: An Anthology by and for Women Obsessed with Computers, Science, Comic Books, Gaming, Spaceships, and Revolution.

By the way, I hope to get back to my regular posting frequency in the next couple of weeks. In particular, I'm working on a "My Job in 10 Years -- Further Comment" essay about my love-hate relationship with Google which I'm going to try and finish this week. November may just be one of those months.

Game developer demographics

The Internation Game Developers' Association has just released a Demographics Report on their industry.

The typical gamer is:

• Male (88.5%)
  
• White (83.3%)
  
• Heterosexual (92%)
  
• 31 years old
  
• 5.4 years in the industry

With lots more information on level of education and other demographic information. Apparently, the industry is worried that a workforce lacking in diversity won't be able to create games that will have broader appeal. The IGDA has a page full of various reports on issues such as quality of life in the industry, legal issues, censorship and a bunch of SIGs. via SciFi Weekly, believe it or not.

Women & Engineering

Prism, The ASEE's magazine, is usually a good read. Interesting discussions about the challenges of engineering Education. The latest is highlighted in ASEE's Engineering & blog here. In particular, the cover story on the challenges of attracking women into engineering is very good. It covers some of the obstacles women face, why engineering is not attractive to women and what one female engineer is doing to change things. Bravo to Prism for this great set of articles. The links from the Engineering & page are to full text for all the articles.