<story><title>A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors in More Than a Hundred Published Studies</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjwda/a-code-glitch-may-have-caused-errors-in-more-than-100-published-studies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>catalogia</author><text>Something I don&amp;#x27;t get is why universities don&amp;#x27;t to a better job of having professional statisticians and programmers on staff for the explicit purpose of providing support to researchers.&lt;p&gt;I guess grad students are cheaper and &amp;quot;good enough.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>ken</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve implemented algorithms I dug out of original research papers, which often included sample code.  (That&amp;#x27;s why I first learned to read Fortran!)  I&amp;#x27;ve almost never gotten results that match the authors&amp;#x27; exactly.  Sometimes the bugs are obvious, and sometimes they&amp;#x27;re subtle.  I&amp;#x27;d estimate that 100% of sample implementations in published research papers have bugs.  Researchers, even in computer science, are usually not skilled programmers.  The product for them is the paper, not a program.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the same category of problem as &amp;quot;enterprise software&amp;quot;.  Whenever the &lt;i&gt;customer&lt;/i&gt; is not the &lt;i&gt;user&lt;/i&gt;, the user gets screwed.  With research, the customer is the journal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PeterStuer</author><text>From experience:&lt;p&gt;- Research is an iterative creative process. The creation of the code is an organic process of discovery and  not a separate stage from writing it&amp;#x27;s specification.&lt;p&gt;- The jobs are too small to split up. This is the same in industry. Try to split up a small task (1 person, 2 weeks) over a small team of specialists (Analyst, programmer, DB specialist, dev-ops, tester and now you need a project manager, ...) and suddenly it becomes way, way larger than it should be.&lt;p&gt;- Most production programmers realy dislike working in research environments. The objectives and nature of research code is very different from what turns-on and drives professional programmers, so you wouldn&amp;#x27;t have &amp;#x27;the best professional programmers&amp;#x27; working there anyway.&lt;p&gt;Being able to code well enough to do your own experiments is part of the researcher&amp;#x27;s skill-set. Grad students should become &amp;#x27;good enough&amp;#x27; at it. &amp;gt;&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s not kidd ourselves. Independent academic research is a constant struggle for funds. Nobody is going to pay for a magnitude increase in the costs. If you are looking to up the quality, best look into how to get academic research out of the ridiculous quantified output metrics conundrum.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors in More Than a Hundred Published Studies</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjwda/a-code-glitch-may-have-caused-errors-in-more-than-100-published-studies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>catalogia</author><text>Something I don&amp;#x27;t get is why universities don&amp;#x27;t to a better job of having professional statisticians and programmers on staff for the explicit purpose of providing support to researchers.&lt;p&gt;I guess grad students are cheaper and &amp;quot;good enough.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>ken</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve implemented algorithms I dug out of original research papers, which often included sample code.  (That&amp;#x27;s why I first learned to read Fortran!)  I&amp;#x27;ve almost never gotten results that match the authors&amp;#x27; exactly.  Sometimes the bugs are obvious, and sometimes they&amp;#x27;re subtle.  I&amp;#x27;d estimate that 100% of sample implementations in published research papers have bugs.  Researchers, even in computer science, are usually not skilled programmers.  The product for them is the paper, not a program.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the same category of problem as &amp;quot;enterprise software&amp;quot;.  Whenever the &lt;i&gt;customer&lt;/i&gt; is not the &lt;i&gt;user&lt;/i&gt;, the user gets screwed.  With research, the customer is the journal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>btrettel</author><text>The University of Texas at Austin has statisticians faculty, staff, and students can consult with for free: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;stat.utexas.edu&amp;#x2F;consulting&amp;#x2F;free-consulting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;stat.utexas.edu&amp;#x2F;consulting&amp;#x2F;free-consulting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve used the service before and can recommend it.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t know anything comparable for programming at UT, though I can say that UT&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;computational&lt;/i&gt; science (different from &lt;i&gt;computer&lt;/i&gt; science) program has some good classes on software engineering practice aimed at practicing research scientists and engineers.</text></comment>