Latest in Comments on Science and Academia
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Chief programmer teams alive and well in academia
According to Wikipedia, “a chief programmer team is a programming team organized in a star around a “chief” role, granted to the software engineer who understands the system’s intentions the best. Other team members get supporting roles.” Amusingly, this set-up is alive and well in academia, and for good reason. At least my research group…
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What’s better: Submit to ICSE or TSE? (Conference or journal?)
When planning a publication strategy for a dissertation, invariably the question comes up where to submit your papers. Ph.D. students naturally are biased towards conferences, because if a paper gets accepted to a conference they get to travel to a (usually) nice place. I nip this bias in the bud right away: For a journal…
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What is it about the WTFPL that students always choose it as the example?
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Evaluation of theories vs. validation of hypotheses
Research should be presented with appropriate choice of words to the world. So it bugs me if researchers, maybe unknowingly, overreach and call the evaluation of a theory a validation thereof. I don’t think you can ever fully validate a theory, you can only validate individual hypotheses. The following figure shows how I think key…
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MECE translated: Überlappungsfrei und erschöpfend
When teaching about modeling the world, I often talk about how concepts should be MECE, that is, mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive. I didn’t invent this acronym, I took it from Barbara Minto’s writings about structured reasoning. I finally figured out the appropriate German translation, and, oh wonder, it is shorter than the English version.…
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Is exploratory data analysis bad?
Last weekend, I ventured into unchartered territory (for me) and attended the Berliner Methodentreffen, a research conference mostly frequented by social scientists. I participated in a workshop on mixed methods, where the presenter discussed different models of mixing methods with each other (“Methodenpluralität” in German). She omitted one model that I thought is often used:…