Sci/Tech
Linux Has Landed On Mars
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 19th of February 2021 03:56:25 PM Filed under


NASA has landed a new rover called Perseverance on Mars. It has it's own miniature helicopter named Ingenuity that can take off, navigate, and land on Mars without human intervention. Ingenuity runs a custom Linux-based operating system, Linux has now reached Mars.
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Accurate Conclusions from Bogus Data: Methodological Issues in “Collaboration in the open-source arena: The WebKit case”
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 30th of November 2020 12:07:32 AM Filed under
Nearly five years ago, when I was in grad school, I stumbled across the paper Collaboration in the open-source arena: The WebKit case when trying to figure out what I would do for a course project in network theory (i.e. graph theory, not computer networking; I’ll use the words “graph” and “network” interchangeably). The paper evaluates collaboration networks, which are graphs where collaborators are represented by nodes and relationships between collaborators are represented by edges. Our professor had used collaboration networks as examples during lecture, so it seemed at least mildly relevant to our class, and I wound up writing a critique on this paper for the class project. In this paper, the authors construct collaboration networks for WebKit by examining the project’s changelog files to define relationships between developers. They perform “community detection” to visually group developers who work closely together into separate clusters in the graphs. Then, the authors use those graphs to arrive at various conclusions about WebKit (e.g. “[e]ven if Samsung and Apple are involved in expensive patent wars in the courts and stopped collaborating on hardware components, their contributions remained strong and central within the WebKit open source project,” regarding the period from 2008 to 2013).
At the time, I contacted the authors to let them know about some serious problems I found with their work. Then I left the paper sitting in a short-term to-do pile on my desk, where it has been sitting since Obama was president, waiting for me to finally write this blog post. Unfortunately, nearly five years later, the authors’ email addresses no longer work, which is not very surprising after so long — since I’m no longer a student, the email I originally used to contact them doesn’t work anymore either — so I was unable to contact them again to let them know that I was finally going to publish this blog post. Anyway, suffice to say that the conclusions of the paper were all correct; however, the networks used to arrive at those conclusions suffered from three different mistakes, each of which was, on its own, serious enough to invalidate the entire work.
So if the analysis of the networks was bogus, how did the authors arrive at correct conclusions anyway? The answer is confirmation bias. The study was performed by visually looking at networks and then coming to non-rigorous conclusions about the networks, and by researching the WebKit community to learn what is going on with the major companies involved in the project. The authors arrived at correct conclusions because they did a good job at the later, then saw what they wanted to see in the graphs.
I don’t want to be too harsh on the authors of this paper, though, because they decided to publish their raw data and methodology on the internet. They even published the python scripts they used to convert WebKit changelogs into collaboration graphs. Had they not done so, there is no way I would have noticed the third (and most important) mistake that I’ll discuss below, and I wouldn’t have been able to confirm my suspicions about the second mistake. You would not be reading this right now, and likely nobody would ever have realized the problems with the paper. The authors of most scientific papers are not nearly so transparent: many researchers today consider their source code and raw data to be either proprietary secrets to be guarded, or simply not important enough to merit publication. The authors of this paper deserve to be commended, not penalized, for their openness. Mistakes are normal in research papers, and open data is by far the best way for us to be able to detect mistakes when they happen.
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LabPlot 2.8.1 released
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 15th of November 2020 08:43:49 PM Filed under


We’re happy to announce the availability of the first minor patch release of the big release we made two months ago. This release contains minor improvements and bug fixes only.
In the plot we now allow to change the background color for axis labels. This is useful if you place the axis labels above the axis line and don’t want to see an underlying line in the bounding box of the label. The default setting is that the background remain transparent.
For the cursor, the tool used to measure positions and distances in the plots, we now allow you to copy the values in the result window to the clipboard.
When pasting new values into LabPlot’s spreadsheet, the auto-detection of the datatime format has been improved. We now better recognize the different formats produced in external programs and being pasted into LabPlot.
Many smaller improvements were included in the dialog for the creation of the live-data sources related to the handling of errors coming from remote servers like MQTT brokers, etc. Besides the more stable behavior, the user now also gets clearer notifications about what went wrong. Furthermore, when reading live data it is possible to generate the timestamp column in LabPlot for the data being read also for TCP and UDP network sources. This was only possible for MQTT sources in the past.
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JASP: A Less Complicated Free Open-source SPSS Alternative for Advanced Statistics
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 11th of November 2020 04:10:57 PM Filed under

I had a run with many open-source statistics software and packages, but JASP was truly unique among them.
JASP is a free open-source complete statistical package supported by University of Amsterdam. It's a multi-platform program that runs on Windows, Linux and macOS.
It's designed for users who want to do some statistical work without having to deal with programming or dive deep in learning complex statistical programs. It's a recommended option for students and researchers.
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Senaite: An Open-source Enterprise-grade Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS)
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 5th of November 2020 07:16:01 AM Filed under

Senaite is a free open-source self-hosted laboratory information management system (LIMS) that built for enterprise. It offers several features which are cost and resources effective with a rich set of add-ons and a strong supportive community of developers behind it.
In this article we demonstrate Senaite's features and how it helps enterprise through an efficient management for labs, lab equipments and reduce the turnaround time.
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NASA ROSES-20 Amendment 64: Release of Final text of E.8 Supplemental Open Source Software Awards
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 27th of October 2020 09:06:33 PM Filed under


Supplemental open source software awards are used to encourage the conversion of legacy software into modern code to be released under a generally accepted, open source license (e.g., Apache-2, BSD-2-clause, GPL). The supplement would add a software component to their previously selected "parent" research and analysis award.
ROSES-2020 Amendment 64 Releases Final text for E.8 Supplemental Open Source Software Awards. Notices of Intent are not requested. Proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis with a final due date of April 14, 2021.
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Chemtool: Open-source Chemical Structure drawing program
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 27th of October 2020 08:02:33 PM Filed under

Chemtool is a lightweight application for drawing chemical structures like organic molecules. It's originally written by Thomas Volk from Germany. Later on, more developers came to aid for development and code maintenance.
[...]
The program is created for Linux X systems, it does not work on Windows or macOS.
License
Chemtool is released under GNU General Public License.
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Stellarium 0.20.3 Released with Tons of Changes [Ubuntu PPA]
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 29th of September 2020 03:30:15 AM Filed under


Free-software planetarium Stellarium 0.20.3 was released a day ago with numerous changes. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04 via PPA.
Stellarium 0.20.3 fixed nutation and, with it, season beginning times, included many changes in AstroCalc tool, Oculars and Satellites plugins, and updated DSO catalog.
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LabPlot 2.8 Released
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 16th of September 2020 04:29:14 PM Filed under


In 2.8 we made it easier to access many online resources that provide data sets for educational purposes. These data sets cover a variety of different areas, such as physics, statistics, medicine, etc., and are usually organized in collections.
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“It Just Works”: An Interview with Dexai Robotics
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 11th of September 2020 08:16:14 AM Filed under


The simulators wind up using a lot of computational power, which is one of the reasons why we use System76. Portability is another. I really like the fact that I can run the full software stack on a laptop that I can always have with me. Previously, we had desktops sitting around in a lab environment, and people were often having to sign into them and borrow them. We needed a solution for new hires to have a computer they can rely on at all times.
A co-worker mentioned that she bought a machine from you guys back in 2019. After she recommended it, I did a little bit of digging online for the best Linux laptops available, and you all were named a fair amount in those searches—so I ordered one. I was pleasantly surprised with how it just worked right out of the box. I wasn’t fiddling with drivers, I wasn’t dealing with bootloader problems and figuring out how to get a working desktop environment up; I just opened it up and installed a bunch of software and I was ready to go.
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