A Mashey Gem

http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2010/10/mashey-gem.html

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/on-replication/langswitch_lang/in/

People are making an error common to those comparing science to commercial software engineering.

Research: *insight* is the primary product.
Commercial software development: the *software* is the product.

Of course, sometimes a piece of research software becomes so useful that it gets turned into a commercial product, and then the rules change.

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It is fairly likely that any “advanced version control system” people use has an early ancestor or at least inspiration in PWB/UNIX Source Code Control System (1974-), which was developed by Marc Rochkind (next office) and Alan Glasser (my office-mate) with a lot of kibitzing from me and a few others.

Likewise, much of modern software engineering’s practice of using high-level scripting languages for software process automation has a 1975 root in PWB/UNIX.

It was worth a lot of money in Bell labs to pay good computer scientists to build tools like this, because we had to:

- build mission-critical systems
- support multiple versions in the field at multiple sites
- regenerate specific configurations, sometimes with site-specific patches
- run huge sets of automated tests, often with elaborate test harnesses, database loads, etc.

This is more akin to doing missile-control or avionics software, although those are somewhat worse, given that “system crash” means “crash”. However, having the US telephone system “down”, in whole or in part, was not viewed with favor either.

We (in our case, a tools department of about 30 people within a software organization of about 1000) were supporting software product engineers, not researchers. The resulting *software* was the product, and errors could of course damage databases in ways that weren’t immediately obvious, but could cause $Ms worth of direct costs.

It is easier these days, because many useful tools are widely available, whereas we had to invent many of them as we went along.

By late 1970s, most Bell Labs software product developers used such tools.

But, Bell Labs researchers? Certainly no the physicists/ chemists, etc, an usually not computing research (home of Ritchie & Thompson). That’s because people knew the difference between R & D and had decent perspective on where money should be spent and where not.

The original UNIX research guys did a terrific job making their code available [but "use at your own risk"], but they’d never add the overhead of running a large software engineering development shop. If they got a bunch of extra budget, they would *not* have spent it on people to do a lot of configuration management, they would have hired a few more PhDs to do research, and they’d have been right.

The original UNIX guys had their own priorities, and would respond far less politely than Gavin does to outsiders crashing in telling them how to do things, and their track record was good enough to let them do that, just as GISS’s is. They did listen to moderate numbers of people who convinced them that we understood what they were doing, and could actually contribute to progress.

Had some Executive Director in another division proposed to them that he send a horde of new hires over to check through every line of code in UNIX and ask them questions … that ED would have faced some hard questions from the BTL President shortly thereafter for having lost his mind.

As I’ve said before, if people want GISS to do more, help get them more budget … but I suspect they’d make the same decisions our researchers did, and spend the money the same way, and they’d likely be right. Having rummaged a bit on GISS’s website, and looked at some code, I’d say they do pretty well for an R group.

Finally, for all of those who think random “auditing” is doing useful science, one really, really should read Chris Mooney’s “The Republican War on Science”, especially Chapter 8 ‘Wine, Jazz, and “Data Quality”‘, i.e., Jim Tozzi, the Data Quality Act, and “paralysis-by-analysis.”

When you don’t like what science says, this shows how you can slow scientists down by demanding utter perfection. Likewise, you *could* insist there never be another release of UNIX, Linux, MacOS, or Windows until *every* bug is fixed, and the code thoroughly reviewed by hordes of people with one programming course.

Note the distinction between normal scientific processes (with builtin skepticism), and the deliberate efforts to waste scientists’ time as much as possible if one fears the likely results. Cigarette companies were early leaders at this, but others learned to do it as well.

Breakthrough Narrative and Time Machines, and Carbon Eating Trees

http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/stop-the-presses-climate-journos-think-the-emissions-reduction-issue-looks-an-awful-lot-like-a-narrative-problem-no-word-yet-on-just-how-nail-shaped-people-wielding-hammers-see-it/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ThingsBreak+(The+Way+Things+Break)

Wow. Not to put too fine a point on it: """
Did I mention that this New Narrative meme is being pushed by the same people who are arguing against any sort of meaningful emissions pricing? They wouldn’t have a vested interested in framing emissions legislation as a dead, would they?
...
It’s nice that you have a meme. It’s nice that some journalists bit. When you feel like getting around to actually hooking some grassroots support, give us a reason to support your Narrative besides an appeal to novelty.
"""

This Breakthrough meme is exactly like a call for more time-machine funding. The only reason they are pushing for stratospheric saline geysers and carbon-eating mega-trees is that they would seem more plausible to the uninformed than a time-machine. Their plausibility is the foremost attraction, their actual viability is a far distant concern -- and that is morally noxious.

Education: "Waiting for Superman", Union Busting, and Obscuring the role of Parental Responsiblity

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/1/waiting_for_superman_critics_say_much

I agree that the teachers' union get hit with cheap shots in the school debate. I agree that the teachers' union is full of professionals dedicated to providing excellent education in the "really existing" world, and the construction of alternative scenarios (maybe fanciful) for education that blink the teachers' union out of existence has less to do with delivering quality education in the real world and have more to do with crude union busting.

But it silly to pretend that there is no conflict whatsoever between the education needs of the students and the political convenience of the teachers' union. Those are two distinct entities, and they have different political needs. For example: the mechanism that prevents capricious termination of union employees is in conflict with the discretion a school principal would wish to assert to fire a lacking teacher to replace with a potentially better suited teacher. For example: the mechanism that prevents threat of pay reduction being used to punish a union employee is in conflict with the discretion a school principal would want be able to better compensate superior teachers working from a constrained budget for teacher compensation.

The key point as I see it: the *existence* of teaching as a professional discipline is obscuring the primary role of *the responsibility of parents* for America's education of children. The parents are all too happy to shed responsibility, and push the responsibility to teaching professionals. If parents appropriately shouldered the responsibility for the quality of education of children, the primary role of teaching professionals would diminish, plainly.

Taking responsibility does not necessarily mean home schooling. It DOES mean attending PTA meetings and supervising children's homework every school night and being aware of trends of grades and children's enthusiasm or frustration in coursework -- parents taking every and all opportunity to take a full role in their children's education, paid for in *time*. If that time is then not available for television and amusement or if that time is then not available for working to support a certain level of consumerism, so be it.

In America, teaching professionals take the primary role, for praise and for blame, fair and unfair, because of the sloughing off of responsibility by America's parents.

race on the brain

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/10/racism.html

I would much rather deal with racists than people who have "race on the brain".
I am not interested in searching the world for people free of racism, because it is hard to imagine people who *really* don't allow race to inform *any* judgement whatsoever.  I have met some children and adults who I would guess come very close, but so very very few to make the effort not worthwhile.
So I would much rather deal with racists, because, honestly, I must judge myself a racist.
I *do* have a problem with people who have "race on the brain" -- when the topic of race comes up they are reduced to blithering idiocy and vile reactionary tribalism.  White males haven't cornered the market on this particular form of idiocy -- it is embarrassing when Latino candidates win office on nothing more than their publicized ethnicity (such as the insubstantial Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, aka Tony Villar).
Political correctness makes physical and verbal violence against traditionally disadvantaged groups less likely, and that is good, but it cannot do much to lesson "race on the brain" on both sides of the racial divide.  Only the self-imposed discipline of critical thinking can do that, and people get too much pleasure from their vile reactionary tribalism to self constrain their thought.