Science
Mostly just summaries of scientific papers for people without an academic background.
The Toilet Paper
A gentle introduction to ensemble learning
What is ensemble learning? Well, it’s kind of machine learning’s version of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.
The Toilet Paper
You really shouldn’t spend so much time working
Money might buy you a bit of happiness, but working for larger amounts of money will not necessarily make you happier.
The Toilet Paper
How to use the System Usability Scale (SUS) in 2021
An updated guide on how to measure the usability of a product with the System Usability Scale (SUS).
The Toilet Paper
For decision making, speaking is silver – but so is silence
Some people talk too much in meetings, others too little. Good leaders can foster high-quality conversations by creating safe environments.
The Toilet Paper
Ghost writing providers for essays and assignments are cheap and plentiful
Ghost writers aren’t particularly scary, but there are still very good reasons to fear them if you are an educator. Happy Halloween!
The Toilet Paper
How (not) to use the variance inflation factor
The variance inflation factor (VIF) is often used to find and remove multi-collinearity in a regression model. Does that make sense?
The Toilet Paper
Casting doubt on the ability of tools to measure technical debt
Numbers produced by technical debt tools tell a tale, but it’s largely fictional.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
A good centurion is worth their weight in a model
An agent-based model suggests that centurions in the Roman army had a pretty large impact on the outcome of battles.
The Toilet Paper
How many hands make light work in computer science student projects
Group assignments are common in computer science programmes, but it’s not clear how well they work from an educational perspective.
The Toilet Paper
What do regular expression bugs look like?
This study gives us a better understanding of the practical problems faced by developers when using regular expressions.
The Toilet Paper
Why and how do developers tweet about GitHub projects?
The open source community is very active on Twitter, so what happens on GitHub doesn’t stay on GitHub.
The Toilet Paper
You should be able to turn off your camera in virtual meetings
Online meetings are more tiring than face-to-face meetings, and it may be because video chats are more cognitively demanding.
The Toilet Paper
What happened to the Semantic Web?
2021 is not the year of the Linux desktop, nor is it the year of the Semantic Web. But as a field of research it is still alive and kicking.
The Toilet Paper
Do Java developers write better Python? Studying off-language code quality on GitHub
What happens when you let Java and C++ developers write Python code?
The Toilet Paper
Does code structure affect comprehension? On using and naming intermediate variables
The answer is not “yes” or “no”, but somewhere in between. Who would’ve guessed?
The Toilet Paper
What it would take to use mutation testing in industry – A study at Facebook
Mutation testing is useful, but not many developers use it. What steps can we take to increase adoption?
The Toilet Paper
Towards inclusive software engineering through A/B testing: A case-study at Windows
Data collected from users helps you make better product and design decisions – but only if you gather and interpret it correctly.
The Toilet Paper
Towards an improved methodology for automated readability prediction
Some texts are easier to read than others. There are many different formulas that supposedly quantify “readability”, but how useful are they?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Water, toilets and public health in the Roman era
I’ve been feeling like shit for a while now, so this seems like a good moment to feature an article about literal shit.
The Toilet Paper
Response option configuration of online administered Likert scales
What should your Likert scales look like?
The Toilet Paper
Investigating the temporal relationship between proactive burnout prevention and burnout
How feasible is it for an employee to proactively prevent or recover from burnout?
The Toilet Paper
A case analysis of enabling continuous software deployment through knowledge management
A paper with a vague title, but also clear lessons about adoption of DevOps practices in a medium-sized software company.
The Toilet Paper
Résumé-driven development: A definition and empirical characterization
Using the latest tech is a bit like smoking in the ’80s: it makes you look cool, but it might not be the smartest thing to do.
The Toilet Paper
A replicable comparison study of NER software: StanfordNLP, NLTK, OpenNLP, SpaCy, GATE
Named entity recognition (NER) can be used to detect entities like people and locations in text. Which OSS library gives you the best results?