Call For Scientific Research Code To Be Released

Pentagram writes "Professor Ince, writing in the Guardian, has issued a call for scientists to make the code they use in the course of their research publicly available. He focuses specifically on the topical controversies in climate science, and concludes with the view that researchers who are able but unwilling to release programs they use should not be regarded as scientists. Quoting: 'There is enough evidence for us to regard a lot of scientific software with worry. For example Professor Les Hatton, an international expert in software testing resident in the Universities of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several million lines of scientific code. He showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies. For example, interface inconsistencies between software modules which pass data from one part of a program to another occurred at the rate of one in every seven interfaces on average in the programming language Fortran, and one in every 37 interfaces in the language C. This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one error — just one — will usually invalidate a computer program. What he also discovered, even more worryingly, is that the accuracy of results declined from six significant figures to one significant figure during the running of programs.'"

Comments

Re:Why release it?

[Foolicious]

Since you brought up the socially inept idea, I might also suggest taking a look at Bic's razor or Gillette's razor.

Re:Seems reasonable

[Troed]

You still don't get it - which means that you might be brilliant in your field of science but you have no business whatsoever talking about source code - which would be one of my fields :)

You're simply not qualified, to use your own words.