[CivicAccess-discuss] "Ecologists Warn of Overreliance on Unvetted Computer Source Code by Researchers"

[Glen Newton]

Likely true for many other scientific disciplines.

 Original article: Troubling Trends in Scientific Software Use
 Science 17 May 2013: 883
 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6134/814

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-ecologists-overreliance-unvetted-source-code.html

"(Phys.org) —A team of scientists, led by ecologist Lucas Joppa of
Microsoft Research, has published a commentary piece in the journal
Science, highlighting what they say is a growing problem in research
efforts. They suggest that an overreliance on source code that has not
been properly vetted is increasingly leading to incorrect research
effort results.

The problem, Joppa et al, say, is that increasingly, researchers are
relying on existing software to perform their research, despite the
fact that no one has peer reviewed the software itself. It's a
problem, they say, that is particularly troubling when big
applications are used because small coding errors can be compounded. A
rounding error in a spreadsheet generally won't cause much problem,
they note, but when a rounding error is repeated over and over again,
perhaps millions of times, it can lead to completely inaccurate
results."

-Glen