Hi, On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 10:19 AM, Minh Nguyen <nguyenmi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On the above site, I notice the following dot point: > > "credit: young people, publication record" > > I'm not sure why this point would be under the list of things that > disturb anyone about the direction in which Sage is going. Perhaps I > don't understand the list heading correctly. Is it possible that > someone please explain that point? > This is a complaint about contributing to mathematical software in general, and it's not specific to Sage. The point of it was this: at least in North America, it is difficult for an academic who contributes to mathematical software to receive academic credit for it; that is, if someone is applying for academic jobs, or going up for tenure, or applying for promotion, there is basically no way for the person's contributions to math software to be taken into account. This is quite critical for graduate students or postdocs applying for jobs, or for tenure-track people trying to make sure they'll get tenure. It is a tricky point, not sufficiently understood, and over which mathematicians tend to disagree. It is also hard to classify: if I write functions for computing with surfaces in 3-dimensions in Sage, this could be considered research (if I have to come up with some clever algorithm for doing it) or service to the community (others can use these functions in their research or for teaching). What if I just take code that's already there but I clean it up and document it better and extend it and make it more usable? It is very easy for someone to say: "That's not really doing mathematics." (this is an actual quote) The emphasis in judging someone's record in academia is on research output (in terms of quality and quantity of their publications) and/or their teaching credentials. Writing software falls in an ill-defined gray area, no matter how useful this is for the community at large. I don't see this changing drastically in the near future, but hopefully we can help build up more awareness and appreciation of it. A few ways of doing this were discussed at SD14: emphasising the referee process for inclusion of code into Sage, having a journal associated with Sage, finding out what mechanisms are in place in countries that try to deal with this problem (I think France was given as an example). A meta-comment: I basically just wrote down snippets of what people were saying in that discussion. I will try to go through it and expand a little bit. Also for the technical parts (which are amenable to "send me a patch") I will create enhancement trac tickets so they don't get lost. Best, Alex -- Alex Ghitza -- Lecturer in Mathematics -- The University of Melbourne -- Australia -- http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~aghitza/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
