Free Republic

Global climate models are software behemoths, often containing more than a million lines of code. Inevitably, such complex models will contain mistakes, or "bugs." But because model outputs are widely used to inform climate policy, it's important that they generate trustworthy results. Ulrike Proske and Lieke Melsen set out to understand how climate modelers think about, identify, and address bugs. They interviewed 11 scientists and scientific programmers from the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie who work on the ICON climate model for their study published in Earth's Future. When new code is developed for ICON, it's screened and tested to catch bugs...

As in Iraq, the Afghan army is having a hard time finding qualified people for technical jobs. People who have the qualifications are in short supply in Afghanistan, and most of those that do exist can either make better money in a civilian job, or have left the country. Moreover, Afghanistan has the lowest literacy rate in Eurasia (about 40 percent), and even some of those who are literate, are barely there. The skilled labor shortage that existed in Iraq, is much worse in Afghanistan. As a result of this, NATO and American trainers have to recruit and educate a...