Why Excel is Evil

Why Excel is Evil is not a campaign against a commercial product. Instead, it is an analysis of the requirement for having a solid scientific product.  Thanks to Colin Caprani for this valuable contribution.

The Zero Notebook for GEOframe components

There is the necessity to properly document the code we developed.  The state-of-art is that many Jupyter Notebooks were written to document may of the actions requested for running them. These Notebooks are made available when to sample projects are downloaded through their osf (which stands for Open Science Framework)  repository. This is probably a temporary solution which will be unified once forever in Github. However, these notebooks, see for instance the case of the Winter School  ofter are missing of an overall description which conveys all the information regarding the Component, part of which, for some component, was written in a custom LaTeX format and made available through the GEOframe blog. To make some order, I am proposing here to put the basic information in a Notebook, whose template you can find by clicking on the Figure below.

The notebook is a work-in-progress and who wants to give suggestions is welcomed. There are other two scopes for this Notebook Zero,  one is that the materials it contains can serve for a chapter in a Thesis where the component is described for its informatics and its content, with minimal modifications;  the other,  that it could be used for a possible submission of the component code to JOSS.  The latter goal would require some improvement in our GEOframe component Github site though in order to have tagged version of the software, a clean way to submit issues (a issue tracker), a set of unit test for the continuous integration of the components. We made a lot of progresses in recent years, but we are not yet there, really operational. A companion issue is where we do upload the .sim files and the data corresponding to tagged version of the components. So far they were assembled together in someone computer, compiled, eventually uploaded to Zenodo (or OSF) and made public. Streamlining the whole process in Github would be probably convenient. Going even more general, there is an installing problem of the OMS/GEOframe stuff. So far we replicated the jars (i.e. the Java executable) several times, each time we needed a a new project. It is time, I guess, to have the executable in a unique place, at Computer or User level, while the directories with data etc (so fare recognised as the OMS projects), freely replicable for different simulations, but without having to get along any time with copies of the executables.

Fair use: It is easy to make custom versions of our software components and embed it into some "proprietary platform" or "commercial" product.  We do not prohibit this use. However, it should be reminded that GPL 3.0 of the component would require a redistribution of modifications of our codes. 

Besides, even its use would require a note, somewhat visible that makes clear the product is powered by GEOframe. So we expect that fair use of our software in some enterprise would be acknowledged by: "Powered by GEOframe and OMS3".

Math3ma

Since quite a while, I read, enjoyed and indexed in AboutHydrology the Math3ma  ("Mathema") blog by Tai-Danae Bradley. I enjoyed for the choice of the topics that I found stimulating and connected to my own research on hydrological networks and the way the material was presented. She graduated recently and produced one of the best ever non-technical introduction to scientific work I have seen.
I guess that any Ph.D. student should be motivated to produce similar products because the habits to expose their own research in widely understood concepts helps them to focalize what is important in their research and it is simply good for science in any case.

By clicking on the figure, you will be redirected to the you Tube video. The original blog-post is instead here.  The dissertation can be found on arXiv. The topic is generically a reflection on how to connect subsystems and which mathematics ca be useful to this scope. But certainly watching the ten minutes video gives a much better information.

To inquiring students

Since a few years, I am receiving emails from students inquiring for the possibility of doing Ph.D studies with me. The letter is usually of this type :

"Dear Dr. Riccardo Rigon,

Hope my email finds you well.My name is Donald Duck and I would like to hereby ask about the possibility of working under your supervision as a PhD student. I have received my MSc degree in * and **.

Sometimes, the candidate also says something like:

"I possess 5 years of work experience as a researcher, instructor and Environmental Consultant and have a related research background which led me to present 18 conference papers, 2 published papers and 3 submitted papers which are detailed in my CV.”

They continues,

"I was reading about your recent works on the website and due to the alignment of my research interests with your expertise in Environmental Engineering and the academic position of your university, I believe the valuable experience that I would have under your supervision will provide me with the ground to achieve my academic goals.
I am deeply interested to begin a PhD program at your university  [...]"

CV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck

RI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhBf4ClJwoY

Best regards,

Donald Duck

Receiving many of this letters, I have prepared an answer below, which I hope is useful to clarify some points and my feelings. 

I do research in Hydrology and you can be enrolled to our doctoral school by participating to a call, usually in the first months of every year. The Applicants are examined by a committee that tries to  choose the bests. We are always looking for outstanding students and dedicated people (not only me but also my colleagues).

For producing an endorsement for a candidate I do not personally know,  and forwarding it to the selecting committee,  I require the student to study the material of the last Winter School on GEOframe (on catchments studies)  or of the Summer School (on soil-plants-atmosphere interactions, process-based modelling), or apply to one of the Schools. I can wave their school fees if  they specify they wants to try to be enroll as a doctoral student. 

If the applicant agrees,  I and the group of GEOframers will dedicate some of their time helping  in the installations of  our software and eventually perform some case study. This application can be in the field of catchments hydrology (on the example of Dr. Abera papers cited below) or applications using the tools more explicitly developed to work on the Critical Zone (Richards equations coupled to the energy budget and evapotranspiration) on which I can give material and direction.
After the completion of the above task, I will be able to weigh their skills, to know how they can work in  my group and to consider them as interesting candidates for a Ph.D. with us (this does not mean they is not an interesting and skilled candidate for other groups or colleagues).
The enrollment though is not guaranteed, since the selection is  a public competition and many apply. However, my endorsement can help. Besides, it can be used also elsewhere, since it will be provided with a certification of having completed the GEOframe studies, and the candidate certainly did not waste their time having learned something useful for their hydrological career.  

I cover various topics in hydrology, and, all of them are explained in my blog AboutHydrology. Therefore, the astute candidate has to consider to browse what I do. Besides advancing theoretical parts of Hydrology, usually a Ph.D. student in my group is intended to produce working and tested codes (i.e. doing programming). All the code developed will be regularly uploaded to Github (or similar platform), inside the GEOframe community space, and will be Open Source according to the GPL v3 license. I am not usually interested in  doing research with SWAT, HEC_HMS or other hydrological models, different from those I develop. 

Further information of the policies of the research group can be found:

• To my students
• Working with us
• The scaring version of “working with us"
• About doing a Ph.D.
• Why Open Source ?
• Going beyond the present state of Art Of Hydrological Modeling (since 2011 but still valid)
• Authorship policies in the group
• Software documentation and autorship policy (the latter included at the bottom of the notebook)

P.S. 0 - For getting a Ph.D. opportunity or a postdoc position, one valuable way  is to subscribe to the AboutHydrology google group where you can find appropriate announcements

P.S.  I- About coding - The candidate will take care of implementing, besides the code, the appropriate procedures for continuous integration of the evolving source code, and s/he will be also asked to maintain a regular rate of commits to the common open platform. Despite these conditions, and being free and open source, the code will be intellectual property by the coder.
This will be guaranteed also by the components-based infrastructure offered by OMS3, which allows to better define the contributions of anyone.The implementation part will be followed, accompanied by testing activities, either for mathematical consistency, than for physical consistency with experiments and field measurements.The Ph.D. student is intended to produce, besides working and tested codes, also at least three papers in major journals (VQR Class A), of which, at least one as first Author. Duration of the doctoral studies is three years.

P.S. II - I am also considering with favor:
Applicants who wants to apply to build the new GEOtop snow model but with attention to forest-snow interactions.
Who wants to work on the infrastructure of the OMS3, GEOframe systems.
Who wants to exploit the capabilities of the GEOframe system to pursue the modelling of the river Adige (and/or other rivers in the world), including human infrastructures.

References

Abera, Wuletawu, Giuseppe Formetta, Marco Borga, and Riccardo Rigon. 2017. “Estimating the Water Budget Components and Their Variability in a Pre-Alpine Basin with JGrass-NewAGE.” Advances in Water Resources 104 (June): 37–54.

Abera, Wuletawu, Giuseppe Formetta, Luca Brocca, and Riccardo Rigon. 2017. “Modeling the Water Budget of the Upper Blue Nile Basin Using the JGrass-NewAge Model System and Satellite Data.” Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 21 (6): 3145–65.

Tubini, Niccolò, and Riccardo Rigon. 2021. “Implementing the Water, HEat and Transport Model in GEOframe WHETGEO-1D v.1.0: Algorithms, Informatics, Design Patterns, Open Science Features, and 1D Deployment.” https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2021-163.

Making a good poster

Everybody fight for having an oral presentation at conferences. However, a poster is often not a bad idea. A poster is like a resume. His scope is not to tell everything about your work, but to attract potentially interested people from who you can have nice conversations, learn something, start a collaboration. To get the general idea of an award winning poster, give a close look to the poster below, that is part of a dedicated page on Nature.

A less traditional layout is the one of the poster to which I dedicated the first post of this year. Finally informative guidelines by:

• Nature journal
• Cornell Center for Material Research
• Liverpool University
• Colin Purrington's templates
• McDermott poster story

Obviously, it is assumed that you have something to tell (but this is another topic). 

TranspirAction

This post contains the presentation given by Michele Bottazzi. His presentation look forward to dig into the forecasting of transpiration from plants (and evaporation from soils) through concentrated parameters modelling. His findings will have a counterpart in our JGrass-NewAGE system.

The figure illustrate his willing to find a new, modern, way to scale up leaf theories to canopy and landscape. The starting point is one recent work by Schymanski and Or but it will go, hopefully, far beyond it. Click on the Figure to access his presentation.

An ML based meta modelling infrastructure for environmental models

This is the presentation Francesco gave for his admission to the third year of Ph.D. studies. He summarizes his work done so far and foresees his work during the next year.

Francesco's work is a keystone of the work in our group, since he sustains most of informatics and pur commitment to OMS3. Besides of this two are his major achievements: the building of the Ne3 infrastructure (an infrastructure inside an infrastructure!)  which allows an enormous flexibility to our modelling, and the new road opened towards modeling discharges through machine learning techniques. But there are other connections he opens that are visible through his talk. Please clisk on the figure to access the presentation.