Renaissance Dan
The Slow road to Enlightenment
Hi everyone, I’m Dan Sandiford, a PhD aspirant in geoscience at the University of Melbourne. My work involves the modelling of convective flows in the solid earth; the surface part of which we call Plate Tectonics.
Using the Underworld code, we are able to explore millions of years of Earth history, through the breakup and collision of continents, the birth of new oceans and the formation of plate boundaries; in short, where we came from, how we got here, and what physical processes underlie it all.
Though I now use a computers in all aspects of my research (from a Raspberry Pi to Raijin), the fact is I had hardly touched one until after I’d finished my undergraduate degree. Using GUI-based software, I often find myself looking for a function that I thought came off a drop down on a toolbar that no longer seems to exist. Just as had I reconciled with the fact that my technological proficiency would hover around the level of your average Pennsylvanian Anabaptist (#Plainpeople), I began tooling around with programming languages like Python to help doing basic data analysis and visualisation.
To my surprise, I found that programming languages were a much better fit to the way my mind learns. So, while I still often forget the name of a particular function in Python, I find 99 % of the time all I need to remember is what I did last time, not precisely how I did it. This is partly a testament to the Stackoverflow forum, but also to the kind of universality that you get in a programming language. A great example of this is a python data structure called the Numpy Array. Whether I’m looking at output from a computer simulation, analysing a timeseries, or inspecting an image file or raster, I’m dealing with the same fundamental object:
fabio = misc.imread('/Users/Fabio/100_greatest_portraits/fabio.jpeg')
Over the last few years, and despite all efforts to resist, my interest in data science, computer programming and the open source movement has grown. A typical morning in my research consists of a cup of black coffee and a quick dive into github to look for code updates that may have materialised overnight. In this way I’m constantly expanding the toolbox, and learning about the approach others are taking. There is a very strong global movement afoot to make research more open, more collaborative and more enjoyable; Research Platform services, here at the University of Melbourne, are supporting and investing in these ideals.
I’m taking over from the inimitable Dr. Climate as the Research Community Coordinator for the physical sciences. Through Research Bazaar, I’ll be teaching basic skills in Python as well as developing new courseware for spatial geospatial analysis. My background is in geoscience, but I’m happy to talk about tinkering with data in any field: from urban planning, to law, to economics. You can find out more about our trainings here: http://melbourne.resbaz.edu.au/.
See you in the Bazaar.
Dan
