Latest in Comments on Science and Academia
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Inner-source software development (upcoming talk)
I’ll be giving a talk on our inner source research at Concordia and McGill (both located in Montreal) third week of January. HMU for details if you are interested. Abstract: Inner-source software development is the use of open source practices for firm-internal software development. In inner source, developers collaborate across organizational silo boundaries for higher…
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Fixing scientific language using chat AIs
I wanted to know whether a chat AI like ChatGPT would help my students and me improve scientific writing (not every Ph.D. student is born with superior language skills). So I asked.
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An illustration of how chat AIs might disrupt teaching
With the recent general availability of chat AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, teachers have to ask themselves how to deal with student homework potentially created using these tools. In the following ten minute video I provide a short illustration from my own teaching how students might use such chat AIs in creating homework, and I discuss…
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A common single-person research design that does not work (well)
I’ve had some success in grant proposals with research designs for human-centered software engineering that follow the following (common) pattern. It is a three-step of I won a couple of one-person (Ph.D. student, i.e. three years of work) grants with this, but execution has been harder than expected. The skilled observer (e.g. experienced principal investigator)…
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Have you seen this review?
We recently submitted a structured literature review to a well-ranked journal, and got a review back complaining about how badly our controlled experiment had been carried out. We inquired with the editor about this, but got no answer back. The review (by reviewer 2, no less) is so generic, I suspect it has been used…
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Dear ministry, are you serious?
Translated from the (German) instructions on the final step of submitting a project plan for funding: Please specify exactly how many and which publications you will publish over the next three years. Yeah, right.