Sister act

The new look for AARP Health, a sister site to one we launched earlier this year, is on the air. With a sweet mobile microsite as a kicker!

Blazer

Laura Sydell profiles Sarah Allen, founder of Blazing Cloud and co-founder of the RailsBridge workshops, "born out of a desire to improve the gender ratio in the San Francisco Rails community, and ... expanded to try to improve the diversity in open source and in tech companies, too."

BA-what?

Some of the most interesting questions that I try to answer on Stack Overflow are "dusty deck" problems.

"I inherited this program to maintain/emulate/port and I don't understand it. Heck, I'm not even sure what language it's written in!"

Usually, the questioner's first guess is COBOL. (It's old and incomprehensible, so it must be COBOL, amirite?) Such was the surmise of user1381537, who offered this source file. Other posters and I quickly disabused him of the notion that it was written in COBOL; Gilbert Le Blanc figures that it's Caché MultiValue Basic.

I amused myself by pointing out some of the less obvious aspects of the program, and by flipping through the documentation to understand some of the peculiarities of this BASIC dialect. In a 1970s-vintage program, just finding the main processing loop can be a challenge. GOSUBs are a feature that is, Fox be thanked, no longer maintstream. I like the compactness of the bracket syntax for performing substring operations. And I envy user1381537's innocence that he/she has never encountered a zero-suppression format string that looks like "ZZ,ZZ9".

A stopped clock is correct twice a day

Reminds me of the time I was asked in an interview how to optimize the path of an aircraft that had to make a bombing run: Ineffective Sorts. Though the idea of using Stack Overflow as input to a genetic algorithm is intriguing.

Where are the women?

Leaders and commentary, book reviews, and news features in Nature's special package of stories dedicated to the conundrum of women in science.

Science remains institutionally sexist. Despite some progress, women scientists are still paid less, promoted less frequently, win fewer grants and are more likely to leave research than similarly qualified men. This special issue of Nature takes a hard look at the gender gap — from bench to boardroom — and at what is being done to close it.