There’s far too much for a Dot article, but I’m trying to sift some general trends and a few quotes out of the mass of information and am writing the article at the moment.

The level of interest has taken both Luca and me by surprise (in a good way) and the information you gave us is very useful in helping us to plan the next steps.

Initially, I’ll be talking about this at Akademy and it also feeds in to Luca’s BoF. However, we are also setting up another quick session to try and get interested people together and share a few ideas. If you can, please come along to the KDE Science BoF on Wednesday at 1030.

If you can’t make it, don’t worry, we’ll be sharing our initial thoughts and there will be plenty of chance to give feedback and get involved as we try and develop this. All the comments on my last post will be considered and please feel free to add any further thoughts below or contact me via the About page.

Do you use KDE software?

Do you use KDE software for your science?

Gratuitous picture of Einstein

Update: Well, actually, I have plenty of answers now Thanks very much. I don’t need any more responses, but if you’d like to let me know what you think then by all means go ahead (probably won’t make the article though).

There are (I sense) a few scientists in KDE land and some of us (Luca and myself at least) are beginning to ponder how we can achieve world domination for KDE through the sciences.

We have some pretty cool sciencey apps already:

• Kile (LaTeX)
• Cantor (young, but promising)
• KBibTeX (I crave a Platform 4 port)
• LabPlot (Platform 4 port in progress)
• Kalzium
• Kalgebra
• KStars
• Marble
• Rocs
• KmPlot
• Step

We also have external projects such as SciDAVis that are working with KDE projects (LabPlot in that case).

So, if you can spare some time for me, here’s a mini open interview for you:
(Edit: made it an ordered list for easier answering and added questions 9 and 10 from Luca)

1. Who are you and what field to you work in? (Add where and for whom if you’re happy to do so)
2. What KDE software do you use in general?
3. What KDE software do you use specifically for science?
4. Were you aware of all the applications I listed above?
5. If not, are there any you weren’t aware of that could be relevant to you?
6. What is missing among KDE software for you?
7. Would you be interested in a dedicated mailing list/website area for KDE software for scientists?
8. What else would you like to tell me?
9. If you developed scientific software/algorithms, did you ever consider KDE users/platform as a target? If not, why?
10. Did KDE software help you with your research in general? For example, do Kontact or Plasma widgets help keep things orrganised?

I’d like to make you comments up in to some kind of Dot article – they may be edited and it is likely that not everything will be used. You can either drop a comment using the form here or mail me directly at myfirstname.mylastname at gmail.com (if that isn’t obvious then go to the about page and solve a captcha to reveal my email address). If you use the comment form then please use your genuine email address (it is never disclosed) if you’d be willing for me to come back with some follow-up questions.

Also, if you’re making it to Akademy, there are at least a couple of KDE-science things that you can attend: Luca’s BoF at 1500 on Tuesday (see the wiki page) and my lightning talk at 1030 on Sunday.

Ada Lovelace

KDE does relatively well among free software communities when it comes to attracting female contributors, but that shouldn’t hide the fact that compared to the wider world we still do pretty badly. The issues are likely complex and will take a long time to change, but I’m sure we can all think of a few examples of possible causes. None of the ones I can think of actually came from KDE or its contributors, which is a good sign.

So, female or male, what’s stopping you from joining KDE?

I spent the last couple of days attending a “results-based writing” course hosted by my university. The main aim was to learn some things about writing concisely for scientific papers and finding a good structure for my thesis, but the lessons are applicable to all many kinds of writing. Writing a thesis takes a lot of endurance and strong writing ability, as you have to keep the reader interested and informed for thousands upon thousands of words encompassing complex topics and formed scientific opinion. While many online education sources do indeed offer some great tips on compiling a good thesis paper, it is best to take a look into face to face courses as well as you can ask questions of the teacher and other students and involve yourself verbally as it plays out.

The training I attended was provided by Cognitrix and was excellent. These are key points that I took away from the course:

• Know your audience
• Identify the concepts and how they link
• Don’t try and hide uncertainty with vague language
• See the opposite point of view
• Cut the waffle
• If you can’t say a sentence in one go then it is too long

They maight seem obvious, but many scientific papers fail on a lot of them. More detail on each follows below.

Know your audience

What jargon can you include? What explanation is necessary? On the Dot I insert hyperlinks to applications, jargon or concepts that I think might not be widely known, but mostly base that on what I understand.

Identify the concepts and how they link

We took a science paper, wrote its concepts out on paper and drew arrows to link them. Those with the most outgoing links are probably good starting points; those with mostly incoming links conclusions. Some items were not linked at all (these were mostly irrelevant and could be removed). Others had few links coming in and needed more background.

Don’t try and hide uncertainty with vague language

I know I’ve tried this in the past when I haven’t quite understood something. Not on the Dot, because there are far too many knowledgeable people reading and I’d get found out If you can’t explain something well then you probably don’t understand it properly yourself.

Try and imagine the opposite point of view

Particularly useful for science. Scrutinize statements like “it is obvious” to see whether they are true. Do you need to provide justification?

Cut the waffle

Some of us (I am guilty) can be a bit verbose. Being brutal with every word, we cut a sentence from 50 to 19 words with no loss of information.

If you can’t say a sentence in one go then it is too long

If you can’t remember at the end of a sentence how it started then the information is hard to take in. A good test is whether you can say the sentence aloud without pausing for breath.

Summary

Applying some of the above, I just cut the length of this post by 21%. I’m going to be trying to apply these lessons not just in my dayjob but also in my work with KDE. So you should read a bit less from me

Design KDE swag

KDE has a new spreadshirt store with a couple of nice t-shirts by Sebas and some badges including some work by Ingo.

Under construction by Ingo

One of my suggestions - help needed

So, what’s in it for you? Well, you get to say you contributed to KDE and might get to see your creation wandering around Akademy, plus there is talk of giving the designers a free copy of the t-shirt, or whatever, containing their design.

Here’s some additional info courtesy of Justin on the kde-promo mailing list:

1. We do have some existing logos and things you may want to use or at least be aware of which are stored on the Community wiki. Logos are in the KDE clipart link at the top.
2. Spreadshirt allows for both “vector” and “pixel” designs but due to the nature of of the t-shirt medium it is highly advisable to design in a program that produces the vector graphics so we can scale them as needed without distorting your images. Though I think in some cases if we only have “pixel” versions we might be able to work with it if the resolution is high enough.
3. Since this is printed media you should design everything in CMYK colorschemes rather than RGB.
4. More details about the Spreadshirt “design” uploading process can be found on the Spreadshirt site
5. “Be Creative”…”Be Inspired”….”Be Free”

Provide your science photos for LabPlot

Something I started working on a number of months ago and have recently come back to is working on a website redesign for LabPlot.

The current draft is at lp.asinen.org (there’s still a lot to do, integration of the logo in the header definitely needs a lot of work). One of the things I want to have is a rotating image in the sidebar. I have a few already – one is displayed and the rotator is implemented but I’ve lost the copyright info for the others so only displaying one at present. It would be great to get photos from actual KDE people in Science – I’m after things that are fairly simple, optionally quite abstract from any branch of science. You should be prepared to license the image under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (or something more liberal). You can send images to me at stua…@gmail.com (click on the dots to solve the CAPTCHA) or just put a link to an online image in the comments. Please specify the license and make it clear that you’re the copyright holder in your comment or email.

You may have heard about the cracking of the email system at a leading UK University and subsequent posting of excerpts on various climate science conspiracy theory websites as “proof” of a conspiracy among climate researchers to keep the alleged truth about climate (which is of course it’s all fine actually, there is no man-made climate change) a secret. I haven’t been that interested in it really, but finally got around to having a look.

I won’t go over everything in detail here, as there is already a nice concise rebuttal, but there are a few comments I can make as someone working in climate related science at an unrelated institute (my own comments, not in any way endorsed by my employers). For the record, I’m concerned with finding out about past (natural) climate events, not predicting the future.

A few things have been pulled out of the emails. One is the contempt that some of the scientists express for some of the better known climate conspiracy theorists. Really, this is not surprising. Have you ever had anyone publicly trash the quality of your work and accuse you of lying for personal gain without backing it up with any facts whatsoever? Would you perhaps say some unflattering things about them in private correspondence? A lot of the allegations that have been made are libelous, but have not been pursued because (a) scientists generally aren’t that much in to lawyers and (b) it would only give publicity to the malicious idiots making the comments in the first place.

The other thing is the alleged “tricks” referenced in some of the emails. The main one refers to the famous “hockey stick” plot of rising temperatures, in which an email referred to using a “trick” to prevent the divergence of data for recent years. Real Climate make some general comments about the use of “trick” which does, generally in science mean some clever way of dealing with an issue. I know I’ve said about some of my data, in an email, that “the trick is to average it over 1mm, then you can see the trend” (without the trick you have a mass of noise). The trick relating to the hockey stick graph is to use instrument data – you know, the stuff you actually measure to give you temperature readings. That graph makes use of instrument data, where we have it and scientifically inferred temperatures for older times for which we don’t have instrument data. The problem with the plot is that the inferred temperatures for recent years diverge from the instrument record, so obviously the method used there for inferring old temperatures is not perfect (this is widely acknowledged). You’ll note that the plot has big error bars on the old data.

Well, I could go on – but what’s the point? The climate issue seems to attract huge numbers of people who have great certainty that the body of scientific evidence is wrong or, actually, fabricated without reading any of it or producing their own research. But then, as the Daily Mail so eloquently put it (while simultaneously comparing scientists with the Nazis) we do have this unfortunate habit of “relying solely on empirical facts” – of course we should instead rely on enlightened conjecture. Damn those facts.

The thing with climate science is that it is hugely uncertain. It is unfortunate that politicians need to have things put to them in definite and certain terms – climate scientists as a whole have had to come to some slightly premature agreements about the danger that faces us, just to make people listen before it is (probably) too late. We know that gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere have a warming effect (it’s fairly basic physics and is to do with the radiation the earth emits which is particularly well absorbed and re-emitted by these gases) and we can even quantify that.

The uncertainties come in what happens next.

More greenhouse gas leads to warming which leads to ice melt which makes the planet’s surface darker which means that more of the sun’s energy is absorbed rather than being reflected which leads to more warming. However, more warming leads (in some places) to more plant growth which reduces carbon dioxide, although the plants themselves may absorb more of the sun’s heat. In other areas it leads to increased desertification which reflects more of the sun’s energy and cools us. It may lead to more clouds, which also reflect the sun’s energy. But then high temperatures cause more forest fires that release carbon dioxide. But the soot from burning also blocks heat from the sun. There are plenty more effects and counter effects like those. Then there are the oceans which have a huge role in regulating temperature everywhere, but which we understand ridiculously badly…

What we have at the moment is a hugely complex system we call earth that we don’t really understand at all but which, for a tiny part of its history, has been quite hospitable to us as a species. We’re changing it in ways that it hasn’t been changed for a long time. There have of course been past major climatic events as the conspiracy theorists love to point out – probably driven by natural events such as volcanic activity – but another inconvenient truth the conspiracy theorists tend not to mention is that these past warming events have generally been associated with mass species extinctions. We’re not sure how well the earth will be able to counteract the stuff we’ve been doing. Current best estimates suggest that we are quite capable of causing our own destruction in quite a big way, although you’ll see if you actually read the IPCC reports that they put a large margin of error on those estimates – even to the extent that we might all be more or less ok. It all depends on whether you think a 1 in 3 chance of not killing a few million people (perhaps more) counts as good odds. Even if you do, getting odds that far in our favour still require us to take some pretty serious action.

Skepticism is great – in the sense of requiring evidence before believing anything it is the very foundation of science. However, blind faith in far fetched conspiracy theories and a complete rejection of rational argument… well, it does get a little irritating.

Ok, rant over. Next post will be back to KDE, I promise