The Research Corner with Damien Irving
Plugging into the scientific computing discussion From the time we write our first literature review as a graduate or honours year student, we are taught the importance of plugging into the conversation around our research topic of interest. We subscribe to journal email alerts, set up automated searches on databases like Web of Science, join the departmental journal reading club and attend relevant sessions at conferences. If we want to get a job one day, we also figure out pretty quickly which email lists and job boards to keep an eye on. A discussion that people tend not to be so engaged with, however, is that around computational best practices. Modern weather and climate scientists spend a lot of time writing and debugging code, but discussions around the best tools and tricks for doing this are a little harder to find. As such, here’s my attempt at a consolidated list of the best places to tune into.
Online • Twitter is an absolute gold mine when it comes to quality discussions about computational best practice. Start by following accounts like @swcarpentry, @mozillascience, @victoriastodden, @openscience and of course @DrClimate and you’ll soon identify the other key people to follow. • Nature has recently started a Toolbox section on its website, which features regular articles about scientific software, apps and online tools. See: http://www.nature. com/news/toolbox • The Mozilla Science Lab Forum hosts all sorts of discussions about open science and computational research. See: http://forum.mozillascience.org/ • Weather and climate bloggers tend to focus on their science or topics like climate advocacy (because let’s face it, those topics are much more interesting), but I’d certainly recommend Dr. Climate (naturally) and also Python for the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences. See: https://drclimate.wordpress.com/ and http://pyaos. johnnylin.com/, respectively.
Offline • The two-day workshops hosted by Software Carpentry are the perfect place to get up-to-date with the latest tips and tricks. We’re hosting one alongside the upcoming AMOS conference in Brisbane (see: http:// damienirving.github.io/20150713amos/). If you can’t make it to that event check out the Software Carpentry website for upcoming workshops. If there isn’t one in your region, email them to tee one up for your home department/institution. If you enjoy the experience you can stay involved as a volunteer helper and/or instructor (as a number of AMOS scientists have done) and then you’ll always be a part of the computational conversation. • Don’t tell the AMOS conference organising committee, but I’ve always found the scientific computing /data analysis streams at conferences like PyCon Australia or the Research Bazaar to be much more useful than regular academic conferences. This is because at academic conferences there’s only ever a handful of people working on similar research to my own, while at computing conferences there are many people doing similar programming tasks. • Local data science meetups are really starting to grow in popularity. For instance, the Research Platforms department hosts a weekly “Hacky Hour” at a bar on campus at the University of Melbourne, a bunch of AMOS scientists have got together to form Data Science Hobart in Tasmania (see: https://datasciencehobart.wordpress. com/), and Rob Johnson has just started a Hacky Hour of his own at the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne. If a data science meetup doesn’t exist in your area, why not get a bunch of colleagues together and start one up? If you know of any other great online or offline discussions, please head over to my blog and let me know!
Calendar
2015 June 1–5 7th International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO), Canberra, Australia 9–14 5th International Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change, Chania, Crete, Greece. 15–17 International Symposium on Tropical Ocean and Climate, Qingdao, China Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 28 page 50
17–19 10th Antarctic Meteorological Observing, Modeling, and Forecasting Workshop (AMOMFW), Cambridge, United Kingdom 22 June–2 July 26th General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, Prague, Czech Republic. 25 London: Planning for Climate Change (Conference series), London, UK.