Seed’s tech guy did a reset and restart of the server, and it appears that now I’m able to turn off registration without completely disabling comments. So everyone who’s been having trouble commenting, please give it a try again, and let me know if you have any trouble.
Just a quick status notice: a bunch of commenters have been having problems with the system demanding authetication to be able to comment. I’m trying to fix it with the help of the SB tech folks. My first attempt made things worse, and made it impossible for anyone to comment. I’m trying to re-enable comments now, but since I’m not sure what disabled them, I’m not sure of what will work. Commenting ability using typekey authentication will be re-enabled ASAP; and commenting without authentication will be re-enabled as soon as the SB techs can figure out what’s causing the authentication requirement.
I’m going to jump into the framing wars again. As I mentioned last time,
I think that most folks who are “opposed” to framing really don’t understand what they’re talking about – and I’ll once again explain why. But on the other hand,
I think that our most prominent framing advocates here at SB are absolutely
terrible at it – and by their ineptitude, are largely responsible for
the opposition to the whole thing.
As you’ve probably noticed, things have been rather slow around here lately. I’ve got more posts in the works on group theory and abstract algebra – but they take a lot of time to research and write, so they’ll be coming out slowly – one a week or so.
In the meantime, I’m looking for other topics to write about, and I’d like to know what you, my faithful readers, are interested in hearing about.
Some things I’ve considered:
Or any other mathematical subject that you’re interested in learning about. Suggest away in the comments.
And keep those bad-math links coming!
At Science, Education, and Society, the Urban Scientist
posts a meme to name five women scientists from each of a list of fields. Sadly, my fields are left off the list. So I’ll respond in my own way
by adding computer science. This is a very idiosyncratic list – it’s women
who are particularly important to my own experience as a student and later
practitioner of computer science.
It’s worth noting that I’ve got a very atypical experience as a computer
scientist, in that many of the most influential people in my
career have been women. That’s very unusual, given the incredibly skewed
ratio of men to women in computer science. But as an undergraduate student,
a graduate student, and a professional researcher, the majority of people who had a great influence on my education and career have been women.
This list leaves off some women who’ve played major roles in my life and career. Like, for instance, my wife, who is a brilliant computational linguist (smarter and a better researcher than I am); my PhD advisor, Lori Pollock, who is an amazing researcher and
the best advisor a student could ask for; my academic grandmother,
Mary Lou Soffa; and one of my favorite current researchers in
software engineering, Gail Murphy.
Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet
Stemwedel, our resident ethicist, has been writing about academic
dishonesty and how professional researchers should respond to it.
I’ve been on the receiving end of dishonesty on three occasions –
ranging from a trivial case (arguably not dishonest at all) to the profound.
I’ll describe my three experiences, along with how I did respond to them, and how I could have responded to them. Unfortunately, my experience isn’t very
encouraging, and most of my advice comes down to: always, always keep a paper trail: it can’t hurt, but don’t count on it being useful.
I don’t want to be too discouraging here. I don’t think that there
are many dishonest researchers out there. The overwhelming majority of professional
researchers are scrupulously honest people who give credit where it’s due, and who would never do anything to
take credit for anyone else’s work, who would never steal an idea, and who would
never do anything even remotely questionable when it comes to
intellectual honesty. The problem is, it doesn’t take much to poison
the well – one person out of a hundred is easily enough to create a
huge problem. And the nature of power and politics in research makes it
possible for that dishonest one to get themselves into a position where
people are scared to come forward about it.
I was just perusing my stats on sitemeter – and to my amazement, I discovered that Good Math/Bad Math had its 2 millionth view this weekend. 2 million pageviews! I never dreamt that this little blog would ever see a number like that. Astonishing! Over 1.3 million visits to the blog so far!
Thank you all!
ScienceBlogs recently branched out and opened up a German-language edition of ScienceBlogs in cooperation with a German media firm. Over at the in-house
blog Page 3.14, our blogging goddess, Ginny, is asking for help with what languages readers think SB should assimilate next. Do us a favor, and drop over to Page 3.14, and fill out the poll. Thanks!
Bright and early tomorrow morning, I’m leaving on vacation. I’ll be spending the week in
Yellowstone National Park. I’m not sure what the network situation is there, but I’m not expecting much. Unfortunately, this year I didn’t have time to prepare some reruns of old posts before I left.
If I manage to find a data connection, I’ll try to schedule some interesting reruns. But don’t hold your breath. See you in september!
This weekend, Seed Media, our benevolent and beloved corporate overlords, sponsored a Scibling gathering: ScienceBloggers from all over the country (and outside) all gathered in New York, ate, drank, and partied.
It made for quite an interesting weekend. I didn’t end up being able to hang around nearly as much
as I would have liked (I missed the drunken Karaoke! As someone who never gets drunk, watching
my drunken sciblings singing badly would have been a kick!) Alas, as the father of two small kids,
I’m subject to the schedule of family/babysitters, so I couldn’t hang aronud. (Plus, to make matters worse, my wife became sick friday night, and I started feeling sick saturday afternoon. I’m writing this from bed.)
But I did manage to meet quite a lot of folks, even in my limited time there. It’s quite an odd experience in its way; between our blogs, and our back-channel forums, we’ve become a tight-knit community, and the people there were my friends, even though I’d never seen them before. It
was a whole lot of fun. My impressions are below the fold. They’re just off the top of my head; I’ll probably edit this
later as I remember more.
By the way, that ScienceBlogs mug that Seed is offering to give away in the subscription ads? They gave us each one as a gift, and theyre great. It’s a very nice, heavy glass mug that looks like a cross between a mug and a beaker.