A quick reader’s guide: Version Control by Example, by Eric Sink

Version control is tricky business, especially if you’re trying to support between your different options out there. *Version Control by Example* is a fast introduction to the concept of version control, as well as some of the more popular tools. While Sink included plenty of code in the book, there are also plenty of diagrams that will help you get the mechanics of version control down cold.

*Version Control by Example* is an introductory-level book, however: it’s enough to get you started, but once you start getting into choosing an actual version control tool for your work and developing your own workflow, you’re going to need additional reading material — preferably system-specific. There may be a little bias in favor of Veracity within the book (SourceGear, which was founded by Sink, developed Veracity), but it’s still a good resource to get started with.

Development: Cripple the prototype
A prototype is based on a lot of best-case assumptions, put together in a pretty way to help a company get started. But it’s worth looking for more problems, even to the point where you may cripple your prototype. By introducing some of the flaws that you know you’ll have to deal with in the real world, you’ll be able to move through the prototyping process better, with a more useful end result.

Funding: Engineering team for sale
A failed startup’s engineering team is offering themselves up as a unit for acquisition. Nineteen people are on the team, including a director of operations, and they’re promoting themselves as a valuable acquisition because they’re already used to working in a unit. It’s an interesting approach to dealing with the failure of a startup, for sure.

Operations: GitStreams
If you use GitHub, you may have faced the same problem as Justin Abrahms: the focus on telling you what updates have been made to important repositories only tells you what’s happened recently — not what’s actually useful. Rather than sticking with the existing activity feeds, Abrahms created GitStreams to offer a clearer way to get the information he needs.

Marketing: Behind the scenes: 5 steps to a brand overhaul
Changing the name and brand of a website is tough, particularly if you’ve invested enough resources in it to build up a following in the first place. Sometimes, though, you just have to do it. Andy Hayes found himself in that position recently and has written up his experiences on his personal blog.

Beyond Tech: Startup visa could create at least 1.6 million U.S. jobs in next 10 years
The Kauffman Foundation issued a report the week that startup visas could bring an impressive number of new companies to the U.S, in addition to having the potential to create more than million jobs.

Our most popular link this week: How many programming languages do you really need to know?

And congratulations to Treasurer’s Briefcase on launching this week.

Back from the Edge

Could our global ecosystem be careening towards a cliff? That’s what some scientists think. Erle Ellis, an associate professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC, and a group of scientists from Australia and the United Kingdom are trying to talk their colleagues back from the edge in a new paper published this week in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

There is growing agreement among scientists that we now live in an epoch called the Anthropocene – an age where humanity has transformed the world’s ecosystems, atmosphere and even its rocks. The question is whether humans are causing changes in Earth’s ecosystems that might soon trigger a global tipping point. Is the Anthropocene biosphere accelerating towards a point of no return?

While the idea of global tipping points is controversial, ecological tipping points at the local level are well studied. For example, “if you add nutrients to a lake it will continue on as before until you surpass a certain level of nutrients.  Then the lake’s ecosystem will suddenly shift to a new state — it will have reached its tipping point,” says Ellis. “The lake will go from having very clear water to very turbid water, the kinds of fish will change and the chemistry and the ecology of the lake will change almost completely. It is then very hard to get that lake back into its previous state.”

A planetary tipping point in Earth’s ecosystems could occur, say Ellis and his colleagues, if ecosystems across the planet responded to uniform human pressures in similar ways, or if there were strong connections across continents and ecosystems that enabled the rapid transmission of ecological impacts across the planet. 

Fortunately, Ellis and his colleagues are convinced that a planetary tipping point in ecology isn’t likely to occur on Earth. To begin with, organisms and ecosystems on different continents aren’t strongly connected. Animals, plants and microbes are greatly limited in their interactions by distance and barriers such as oceans and mountain ranges. Accordingly, responses to human pressures depend largely on local conditions.  Even global climate change is unlikely to produce a coherent global shift in ecology because local ecosystems respond so differently to changes in climate.

“Essentially, local changes aren’t acting to push each other over the edge, as is the case with tipping points,” Ellis says. “They are simply adding up to cause long-term global changes in ecology.”

While we still need to think about global impacts, Ellis’ research puts the emphasis back on managing ecosystems at the local and regional level. That assertion has significant policy implications and could help us avoid misguided conservation efforts. “The disadvantage of thinking in terms of global tipping points,”says Ellis,“is that if you think you are far from the brink, no need to act, and if you think you’ve passed the tipping point you might as well give up.”

(3/1/13)

Reinventing the Classroom:
creating a new course and a space to teach it

Professor Harry Lewis

Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science
Harvard University

12:00-2:00 ITE 456, UMBC

slides (ppt); talk (video); discussion (video)

TALK AND LUNCH: 12:00-1:00. Lunch courtesy of Dr. Warren DeVries, Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology. RSVP on my.umbc.edu by Monday, February 25 to reserve a spot. Email requests from outside UMBC to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

DISCUSSION: 1:00-2:00. The community is invited to stay after the talk for an open discussion and conversation with Professor Lewis and your UMBC colleagues about designing new classroom spaces for active learning and the flipped classroom approach.

For decades my lectures kept getting better, my enrollments kept going up, and the number of warm bodies in the lecture hall kept going down. So I decided to try something entirely different, a "flipped classroom." Students watched lectures over the Internet at night in their rooms, and spent class time solving problems under supervision in small groups. The subject matter was discrete mathematics, which is well suited to this pedagogical style, but the class was so successful that it is being adapted for use in other Harvard courses. I will report on some of the conceptual and practical problems I encountered, including the creation of a new teaching space, which had to be cheap to construct and adaptable in use since the experiment might have failed.

Harry Lewis is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, where he has taught since 1974. He is uncertain whether he should be proud of his role in launching the careers of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of Harvard shortly after taking his course. From 1995-2003 Lewis served as Dean of Harvard College. In this capacity he oversaw the undergraduate experience, including residential life, career services, public service, academic and personal advising, athletic policy, and intercultural and race relations. He is a long time member of the College’s Admissions Committee.

For more information, see his article Reinventing the Classroom in the Fall 2013 issue of Harvard Magazine.