Week 290 - Interesting links

How science can beat the flawed metric that rules it

The Impact Factor of an academic journal is increasingly being used as a shortcut to assessing the scientific merit of individual papers and thereby individual scientists. Many scientists I know complain that it’s often a very unfair metric, but I think this article is right in saying that the only way to improve matters is to come up with better metrics. — JM

Wuthering Bytes

This looks like a really interesting conference, but unfortunately I’m going to be away when it’s on. I wish I’d read about it sooner. — JM

The impact of GitHub on Open Science

This link is to a tweet containing a photo of a slide presented at PyCon Australia. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a better source. However, it shows a graph of the cumulative author counts over time for NumPy, SciPy & Matplotlib. There’s a clear jump which I assume coincides with the point when the projects moved onto GitHub. — JM

Introducing Stellar

Stripe recently wrote about their perspective on Bitcoin and they talked a lot about the idea of gateways which “should allow people to transparently get into and out of the network, while always thinking in terms of their normal currency”.

Stellar is an open-source project which provides a “decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money in any pair of currencies” which should make it a lot easier to build such gateways. — JM

Eurucamp 2014 Podcast - Day 3

In this podcast, Tom Stuart chats about his Introduction to Monads conference talk and “a lot of other things including the problems with math education”. Via James Coglan. — JM

Eastbourne pier fire - drone footage

This 5 minute video has some incredible footage of the recent fire on Eastbourne pier. I’m amazed that you can get this sort of quality from a drone and camera relatively cheaply. Via Tom S. — CR

Google Cardboard

I thought it was a joke when someone told me about Google Cardboard. Having watched the Google I/O video I realised it was indeed real and decided to have a go at building one. I ordered some components from Amazon, bought some card from Ryman’s and got cutting. It probably took around 3 hours to put everything together but I think it’s turned out quite well. — CR

When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins

Although it’s a bit US-centric, I found this article about the economic benefits of worker cooperatives interesting. Via Chris Lowis. — JM