Category Archives: Computers

Science Code Manifesto

Posted on December 29, 2012 by sflammia

Recently, one of the students here at U. Sydney and I had the frustrating experience of trying to reproduce a numerical result from a paper, but it just wasn’t working. The code used by the authors was regrettably not made … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Programming, Scientific Publishing | 3 Comments

strike!

Posted on January 17, 2012 by aram

In a move that will undoubtedly bring the US Senate to its knees, the Quantum Pontiff is going dark from 8am to 8pm EST on Jan 18 to protest SOPA, PIPA, the Research Works Act and other proposed acts of … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, General, Open Science, Scientific Publishing, Society | Leave a comment

Could Elsevier shut down arxiv.org?

Posted on January 1, 2012 by aram

They haven’t yet, but they are supporting SOPA, a bill that attempts to roll back Web 2.0 by making it easy to shut down entire sites like wikipedia and craigslist if they contain any user-submitted infringing material. (Here is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, Computers, Economics, Open Science, Politics, Scientific Publishing | 9 Comments

Hippy Software Licenses

Posted on March 7, 2011 by dabacon

One of my favorite software licenses is the Beerware license, here in a version due to Poul-Henning Kamp: /* * ————————————————————– * “THE BEER-WARE LICENSE” (Revision 42): * <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file. As long as you retain * this notice … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Fragment, Funny Ha Ha | 6 Comments

Watson

Posted on February 14, 2011 by dabacon

Exciting times for machine learning and artificial intelligence fans: IBM’s Watson computer versus two of the flesh bound starting tonight, Feb 14, 2011, on the game show Jeopardy. And not just any humans, I guess, but Ken Jennings and Brad … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Off The Deep End, Television | 2 Comments