The Toilet Paper

Summaries of scientific papers without the boring sciencey bits. Ideal for bathroom and other types of breaks.

Ex-girlfriend website meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

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!

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?

A hand with some dice. One die has an “X” on it, which is commonly associated with the “Doubt” action in L.A. Noire

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.

A centurion sets an example by attacking the enemy like a fencer

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.

A group of people tries to get a cat to attack a fly by using mirrors and other objects to redirect light from a laser pointer.

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.

Two border agents examine a little girl’s backpack that has some Arabic text on it.

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.

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.

A virtual meeting with Dunder Mifflin employees. One of the employees is wearing their birthday suit.

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.

Link from the Zelda series points at a pot that he’s about to break.

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.

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 March of Progress”, documenting the evolution from “No homo” to “Homo sapiens”

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?

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?

A weighted companion cube in Windows colours

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.

An old man tries to read his newspaper, but is struggling because of his poor eyesight.

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?

A classical building dedicated to the poop emoji

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.

Response option configuration of online administered Likert scales

What should your Likert scales look like?

Investigating the temporal relationship between proactive burnout prevention and burnout

How feasible is it for an employee to proactively prevent or recover from burnout?

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.

Depiction of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union

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.

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?

The Docker whale in Twitter’s classic fail whale image

Should you upgrade official Docker Hub images in production environments?

Docker makes it easy to upgrade applications in production environments in-place, but not without risk.

A new king stands on top of his dead predecessor

Understanding information needs of agile teams to improve requirements communication

Casual reminder: “Working software over comprehensive documentation” does not mean that you don’t have to document requirements.

Batman’s bat signal is visible in the sky

Inter-team coordination mechanisms in large-scale agile

This week’s article describes how a Norwegian company coordinates its agile teams.

Mark Zuckerberg diverts a trolley into a group of tied people so that it doesn’t hit a stack of bills.

Does ACM’s code of ethics change ethical decision making in software development?

ACM’s code of ethics isn’t very effective, but maybe something else is…