News from the Underground

In the seemingly random content factory that is the Software Underground community, there has been a heavy sampling this past week around openness. What is open source? What is open data? What are good practices? and, How does this affect me? Here’s a collection of those conversations and more.

The Geothermal Hackathon — happened last week immediately following the World Geothermal Congress Geoscience virtual event. You can read about the things that people built leveraging open data sets and be sure to connect with these creators in the #geothermal channel.

The complicated world of open source — Spilling over from an SPE workshop on Open Software, is perhaps the longest thread in Swung history about what actually constitutes open source software, why it can be so confusing, and what the implications are for scientists and technologists. Matt followed up with a number of suggestions how technical societies can support openness, and also created a poll to measure the degree of confusion around open source. Conclusion: it depends.

A checklist for open scientific software — Yes, open source is complicated, especially for newcomers, so it seems fit for relatively straightforward tools to guide behaviours. Matt shared a so-called best-practice checklist for open scientific software, which quickly underwent a handful of revisions after some supportive feedback. It is meant to be more than just tick marks on a piece of paper but that it can be a vehicle for delivering behavioural change.

Big Borehole Dig – Steph shared a cool project launched by the British Geologic survey welcoming scientists and citizen scientists alike to digitize their vast collection of historic logs into a standard digital format. It’s the ‘ol PDF to actually-digital transformation challenge and this one is a tall order. But just imagine the data science possibilities from 1.4 M boreholes!

Tools and tactics – people are getting help on to tricky technical questions in the #python channel on a variety of topics including: dealing with very large tabular data with Vaex, how to constrain solutions to non-linear problems with scipy.optimize, and fixing missing data values in rasters with rasterio.

Vedo – in the visualization awesomness category, the winner goes to a post that Dieter made in the #viz channel about the Vedo project, whose gallery will incite all the feels of a kid in candy store for those working in 3D. Notably, the first tile in the gallery is a demo geo-model shared by Richard Scott. Check out his scene here before you get on with the rest of your day.

Vedo – a python module for scientific analysis and visualization of 3D objects.

News from the Underground

The reverberations from TRANSFORM 2021 have started to dampen, so we’re back with our weekly round-ups.

Badges of honour — Did you know that you can slap a Software Underground badge on your projects and webpages? These badges aren’t just for showing off either. They can links to other places, for instance to your project’s channel in the Swung Slack, if it has one.

Geothermal Hackathon 2021 — is taking place at the end of next week with much activity to be going on in the #geothermal-hack-2021 channel. Here are some of the proposed projects. Even if you aren’t registered in the hackathon you can still follow the action.

Superstar with LiDAR — Are you dealing with .las files, but not of the wireline kind? Then this discussion will serve you up a platter of resources and advice for working with point-cloud data sets.

Feature combo pipelines — If, like Brendon, you’re doing some machine learning and you find yourself building a boatload of models all with different combinations of inputs and pre-processing steps, you’re life is going to be much easier if you have a way to keep track of these different permutations so you can apply it all again on other data.

Need a license for work — Pythonistas using Anaconda might be shocked to find out that it’s no longer free to use. Sort of. It depends on who you work for and the kind of work you are doing. This thread discusses the issues and reveals a shared frustration in comprehending the terms and conditions. There are also some thoughtful perspectives on supporting the free (or nearly free) software that many organizations become increasingly dependant on.

Tools for seeing — Geoscience very often relies on making graphics and visualization. This post pointing to the Python-only compilation called PyViz.org, shows you the collection of tools that are out there. It looks to be a comprehensive resource, particularly because the number of tools in the tool shed can seem so daunting.

News from the Underground

Here are the highlights from the past week.

Less than one month until Transform 2021 – The Software Underground’s T21 virtual conference is less than a month away, so it’s time to register and schedule your life during 16 – 23 April, 2021. Check out the calendar of events and make sure that you are tuned into the #t21-general channel.

SWUNG Hackathon Inside Transform – T21 kicks off with the Hackathon 16 – 18 April, but momentum from those projects will likely carry on, gathering eyeballs and contributors throughout the rest of the conference as well. In the #t21-hackathon channel, Filippo shared some instructions for proposing and discussing any would-be hackathon projects on this GitHub Discussion page.

git for you – One month in advance of his tutorial on git and GitHub at T21, Thursday 22 April, Steve has set up a Q & A in slido. Talk about a tutorial that is truly in service of others! It also means that you can might still get your questions answered if you, say, get pulled too deeply into a hackathon project.

Perils of improper sanitation – Are you aware of the perils of not sanitizing your inputs? This thread in #python has some nice links to explain what this is and when you should care.

Mapping partnerships – There are those that make maps, and there are those who want to make maps of those that make maps. This post is looking about how to structure a database to create a network of co-authorship of geoscience publications.

Probabilistically going to read it – I’ve got loads of love for those who put in the extra effort to make their work open access. Take for instance, this new publication that Júlio announced yesterday: Probabilistic Knowledge-based Characterization of Conceptual Geologic Models.

News from the Underground

Here’s a selection of newsworthy things over the past week.

Nice to see you. Can you help me? — New to the Slack? Here’s a friendly post that if you do in fact introduce yourself like Elvis did stating some of your interests and ambitions, the first connections may come from other people reaching out to you with their technical questions. How cool is that?

Real-time coding collaboration — Ever wondered if there are platforms where you and your chums could collaborate in real-time on your code? Check out the handful of options that came up in this post.

Rendezvous for the hackathon — The next Rendezvous is on Wednesday (not the usual Friday), 7 April at 4 pm UTC. This one is a bit different because it will be a group chat about the projects happening at the upcoming TRANSFORM hackathon. So if you have something in mind, this is your chance to pitch it. Better yet, start a discussion in Slack right now!

Kudos and logos and merch — Doing a shoutout to Software Underground in some graphical format such as a presentation, video, or poster? Make sure your acknowledgements look crisp with the official logos. And while representing, colour coordinate your video calls with a coffee mug, T-shirt, or stickers from the shop.

Shear advisory — A bit of rock physics in the #machinelearning channel as Mads asked for help predicting a shear sonic log. This is a classic seismic geophysics workflow because shear sonic is seldom acquired but allows rock physicists to get into elastic properties.

TRANSFORM 2021 is coming

Mark your calendar: 16 to 23 April. The virtual conference for the digital subsurface is returning, a little earlier this year, so that it can incorporate the Annual General Meeting of the Software Underground on Wednesday 21 April. It will be a rather momentous occasion, because it is the first AGM since we incorporated the society last spring. Please come and help us celebrate — and determine the future of this organization!

If you just want to get to the sign-up, click the button. If you want to learn more, read on!

As last year, the conference will focus on expanding the horizons of our members. This means helping people acquire new skills, meet new people, and find out about new problems in applied subsurface science and engineering. Here’s how the schedule looks from a very high level:

An outline schedule for TRANSFORM 2021. We will publish the timing of these blocks in the near future. For now, it’s just a guide and is subject to change.

You may not have encountered some of these components before, especially not in a virtual world, so here’s a bit more detail:

• Hackathon — Teams of up to about 8 collaborate on all sorts of projects, from Python libraries to open data to reproducing papers. Check out the report part one and part two from last year.

• Tutorials — Get started on a new tool or skill! These 2-hour sessions will be 100% hands-on and can be consumed live or at your own pace. Check out the TRANSFORM 20 lessons.

• Unconference — This is the bit of the conference where we tackle the big questions. We’ll announce these components as we get closer to the event.

• Birds of a Feather (BOF) — Software Underground aims to be a platform to elevate other communities and projects. BOFs are where people with big ideas in common flock together.

• Annual General Meeting (AGM) — The Underground incorporated in April. Our first AGM will see our first elections and voting on our constitution. You’re invited, please sign up here.

• Lightning talks — Five minutes is not long, but it’s long enough to get a crowd stoked about your latest project or keenest insight! Watch the lightning bolts from Day 1 and Day 2 last year.

TRANSFORM 2020 brought over 700 digital subsurface professionals together to talk and learn about their craft. The virtual format means anyone can join us, wherever they are. And our Pay What You Like fee means that cost is never an issue. If you are planning to join us, sign up now and we’ll make sure you’re kept up to date.

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