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How do you specify the need for reproducible software installations in an incentive system? Also, what kind of scientist was this? I'm a physicist. I'm deeply

How do you specify the need for reproducible software installations in an incentive system? Also, what kind of scientist was this? I'm a physicist. I'm deeply concerned about the reproducibility of my results. I periodically try to rebuild my software systems on a clean computer to make sure it's both possible and well documented.

dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
>I'm a physicist. I'm deeply concerned about the reproducibility of my results. By way of comparison, biology and related 'sciences' ( psychology, medicine, nutrition, microbiology etc.) will appear to be nearly a scam...
dekhn 3y ago
A biophysicist- a person who built 3d structural models. Most scientists from tyhe era I'm describing use computers as tools and see periodically moving from system to system as an interruption/distraction from them doing science.
- analog31 3y ago
  Were they paying for their own computer? This is a problem I've seen in academic science. Grants and departments don't want to pay for computers, so there's a tacit expectation that you'll buy one yourself. My spouse had to do this. In turn there's no consistent IT management of these computers. My wife's attitude is typical: If they want to touch my computer, they can buy one that they own.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    The group lead ("principal investigator") raised funding (from NIH and NSF) through grants to pay for computers. That's how it's normally done. Making grad students and postdocs buy their own server (not laptop) is not an act of honor. It's also a huge security issue (as you say, no consistent IT management). In this case the scientist was a postdoc so they partly used the group lead's funding and partly had their own funding. That money was for science, not buying computers. It paid for NMR machine (a $10M device), solvents, reagents, going to conferences, grad students, color figures in papers... but my professor was fairly well-funded so we had a full-time "professional" sysadmin (not a grad student) and everybody had a $15K SGI Indy on their desk (which was abysmally slow, because it was the lowest of the low end capable of running OpenGL).

dennis_jeeves1 3y ago

>I'm a physicist. I'm deeply concerned about the reproducibility of my results. By way of comparison, biology and related 'sciences' ( psychology, medicine, nutrition, microbiology etc.) will appear to be nearly a scam...

dekhn 3y ago

A biophysicist- a person who built 3d structural models. Most scientists from tyhe era I'm describing use computers as tools and see periodically moving from system to system as an interruption/distraction from them doing science.

analog31 3y ago
Were they paying for their own computer? This is a problem I've seen in academic science. Grants and departments don't want to pay for computers, so there's a tacit expectation that you'll buy one yourself. My spouse had to do this. In turn there's no consistent IT management of these computers. My wife's attitude is typical: If they want to touch my computer, they can buy one that they own.
- dekhn 3y ago
  The group lead ("principal investigator") raised funding (from NIH and NSF) through grants to pay for computers. That's how it's normally done. Making grad students and postdocs buy their own server (not laptop) is not an act of honor. It's also a huge security issue (as you say, no consistent IT management). In this case the scientist was a postdoc so they partly used the group lead's funding and partly had their own funding. That money was for science, not buying computers. It paid for NMR machine (a $10M device), solvents, reagents, going to conferences, grad students, color figures in papers... but my professor was fairly well-funded so we had a full-time "professional" sysadmin (not a grad student) and everybody had a $15K SGI Indy on their desk (which was abysmally slow, because it was the lowest of the low end capable of running OpenGL).