A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In More Than 100 Published Studies (vice.com) 20
Scientists have uncovered a glitch in a piece of code that could have yielded incorrect results in over 100 published studies that cited the original paper. From a report: The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, last week in the journal Organic Letters. "This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned," the new paper reads. "Authors who used these scripts should certainly double-check their results and any relevant conclusions using the modified scripts in the [supplementary information]." Yuheng Luo, a graduate student at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, discovered the glitch this summer when he was verifying the results of research conducted by chemistry professor Philip Williams on cyanobacteria. The aim of the project was to "try to find compounds that are effective against cancer," Williams said.
A Glitch Editor May Have Caused Thousands of Dupes (Score:5, Insightful)
This ran the other day
the other day
the other day
c'mon msmash.. get back to posting your thoroughly left-biased screeds, we really do miss those. Pretty please, may I have another?
And another?
And another?
Fuck off msmash (Score:4, Insightful)
This is barely off the first page and you're running it again. Do some damn editing.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a Chuck Yeager submission in firehose, it has good links, etc... and it's still just sitting there while heshe posts more tripe.
Just goes to show what passes for "news for nerds" here.
Re: (Score:3)
Chuck Yeager? Who cares - he's old, white, and male. And not promising to pay off my college loans, so who cares...
Re: (Score:2)
Ageist, racist and sexist in one post. How progressive of you.
Slashdot's Department of Redundancy Department... (Score:3)
C'mon guys, at least pretend you're trying.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Won't even phase those it should hit the hardes (Score:4, Interesting)
but it needs to shoved hard up the ass of the I Fucking Love Science types who think of science as a high cult of reason and not the dirty, error-prone, highly fallible human field of endeavor that it is.
The choice is not binary.
I "fucking love science", and as a scientist i am fully aware that it can be error prone and highly fallible.
I do NOT need anything shoved up my ass , but thank you.
Hiring Glitch Causes Hundreds of Dupes (Score:2)
Whoever hired these ass clowns like msmash is a gigantic fuckup. There are intelligent people with a decent work ethic out there without jobs. Maybe hire someone who cares and is competent next time?
lolz the correction (Score:2)
hilarious , because that added .sort() is better than assuming how the operating system will sort files, that is ASS-U-ME
def read_gaussian_outputfiles():
list_of_files = []
for file in glob.glob('*.out'):
list_of_files.append(file)
list_of_files.sort()
return list_of_files
Re: (Score:2)
Is assuming a glob sort order better or worse than assuming a gender?
Do I even want to know why the fix isn't to do something like return glob.glob('*.out').sort()?
Re: (Score:3)
.sort does in in-place sort of the list but won't return sorted list
sorted(glob....) might have been used though
Hey, Retarded Editors -- do your fucking job!!! (Score:2)
You have ONE job: To be an editor.
Do you guys even READ the fucking site???
You guys look like total and complete idiots with all the dupes.
Re: (Score:2)
You just said they only had one job, then you want to add in reading the site? That's TWO jobs.Three, if you throw in actually understanding what they read.
Re: (Score:2)
LOL!
=== Slashdot editor job ===
* Post duplicate links
=== Actual editor job ===
* Read the site
* Read the submitted link
* Skip if a duplicate, else post it
Cargo cult science (Score:2)
So, a large part of the community used the same code without checking or understanding what it does, then the fix is "published" behind a paywalled journal. The sane approach would be to dismiss all results based on the "script" until this is published to be really peer-reviewable.
In our age "code" is what "mathematics" was until the digital age, so it should be published alongside any scientific publication. And "published" obviously means free-as-in-beer, so it can actually be reviewed.
developer was unaware of sort locale settings (Score:1)