Reading
Looking for this in my notes and couldn’t find it: An excellent paper from the Software Sustainability Institute and friends outlining the need and possible structure for sustaining career paths for software developers. “The research software engineer”, Dirk Gorissen. Provides a good response to the software issues highlighted by climategate, etc.
Remote conferencing
(Based on earlier unposted notes). With so much going on, it’s nice to be able to follow highlights from some conferences remotely
From ISIC: Ben Bolker’s slides on statistial machismo
From BOSC: C. Titus Brown’s keynote A history of bioinformatics (in 2039) (see links to slides, storify).
From PyCon: Greg Wilson’s talk (youtube recording) is fantastic, ending with compelling thesis for large-scale collaboration via diff/merge as the foundation of transformational change / open science, and the puzzling case of why this model has not yet been more widely adopted in generating teaching materials. Greg mentions several excellent resources in the talk as well: John Hattie’s slides on effect sizes of different classroom methods, Carnegie Mellon’s summary text on decades of research, “How Learning Works” (pdf), and Mark Guzdial’s blog on CS education.
From ESIP: Daniel Katz’s slides on Working towards Sustainable Software for Science (an NSF and community view)
Misc code-tricks
For a question raised during the Mozilla sprint: had to remember how to write custom hooks for knitr (e.g. for kramdown compatibility):
hook.t <- function(x, options) paste0("\n\n~~~\n", paste0(x, collapse="\n"), "~~~\n\n")
hook.r <- function(x, options) {
paste0("\n\n~~~ ", tolower(options$engine), "\n", paste0(x, collapse="\n"), "\n~~~\n\n")
}
knitr::knit_hooks$set(source=hook.r, output=hook.t, warning=hook.t,
error=hook.t, message=hook.t)