Data Processing.

Data Processing.

Posted Jul 26, 2007 14:20 UTC (Thu) by grantingram (subscriber, #18390)
In reply to: they are writing Linux code, but not releasing it. by njs
Parent article: Where have the universities gone?

we're only now reaching the point where results in *any* area of science are habitually released alongside with raw data

I'm a big fan of releasing data as well as papers. I have a wonderful thesis from 1986 full of tables of numbers in my office which means that even twenty odd years later it's still extremely useful. It's a real shame that we have a culture of secrecy in many areas.

...critical pieces of code are not even written down anywhere, just some series of commands were run in a terminal (or by clicking in a GUI!), and then the number shown on the screen pasted into an article.

Well I hope that this is not true in "many cases" though I have a suspicion that you might be right. Not being able to reproduce your own data is poor to say the least!

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