mir amicitas - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Title is misleading (Score 1) 223

by mir amicitas on Friday October 23, 2015 @03:57PM (#50789863) Attached to: The Bizarre Reactor Scientists Hope Will Save Fusion Research

Wendelstein 7-X is "new" in the sense that it not a classical stellarator (such as those built by Spitzer) but rather an optimized design. What this essentially means is the shape of the magnetic coils was carefully chosen using a set of theoretical calculations to minimize energy loss (improve confinement) and improve stability. This will be the first large scale stellarator with an optimized design. Several smaller optimized devices have been constructed, however these have been short pulse university scale machines and could not be used to fully explore this confinement concept. Up until the computation tools to create a optimized design became available, it was generally considered that the energy loss in a stellarator would always be much greater than in a tokamak, and that therefore tokamaks were a better path towards fusion energy. Using modern optimization techniques however it is possible to design a stellarator with equivalent expected energy loss as a tokamak design but with much better stability and no need for current drive (which is very energy intensive).

Comment Python along with C/C++ or FORTRAN (Score 1) 465

by mir amicitas on Friday October 18, 2013 @01:00AM (#45161271) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Language To Learn For Scientific Computing?

I do scientific programming for a living (Fusion Scientist) and have extensively used a lot of different languages in my research including:
Python
IDL
MATLAB
FORTRAN
C/C++
Ruby

When working on my own project my favorite setup is to use Python along with Scipy/Numpy. When I need extra speed I use Cython, and also use Cython to interface with libraries that are written in C or C++. For interaction with my codes I use ipython (assuming I need command line interaction) or QT (assuming I need GUI interaction). For libraries written in FORTRAN I use f2py. For plotting I use matplotlib.

This setup works very well for me. It is fast and powerful, almost completely platform independent, and has excellent mathematical and scientific library support. It is extremely easy to integrate C/C++ or FORTRAN code into a Python project which can be extremely useful. It is also very straight forward to do basic multithreading and parallelization. Interactive debugging is very easy and can really help both in the development and in finding problems with scientific calculations. Plotting support is fantastic and easy.

I would say that the next best option is MATLAB. This has good support, an excellent mathematical and scientific library and good plotting tools. I don't particularly like the language for large and complicated projects, and it does require a license, which can make it difficult or impossible to share codes between institutions.

Working directly in C/C++ or FORTRAN is fine for certain kinds of large projects, but is inconvenient for working on lots of small projects or numerous related calculations. Doing something simple like creating a plot requires a significant amount of programming, and debugging can be very time consuming.

I would stay away from IDL; while a nice language in many respects, it is quite out of date at this time and is no longer well supported in terms of staying current. Ruby does not have sufficient support in terms of math/science/plotting libraries at this point to work well for scientific programming.

At the end though it does really matter what kinds of projects you will be working with and what your final goals are. It also matters who else you will be working with to make sure that code can be easily shared.

What Does It Actually Cost To Publish a Scientific Paper? 166

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Thursday March 28, 2013 @03:07PM from the one-trillion-dollars dept.

ananyo writes "Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders. Quoting from the piece: '"The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think," agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.' There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that 'Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible.'"

The Man Who Sold Shares of Himself 215

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Thursday March 28, 2013 @12:36PM from the social-experiments-gone-awry dept.

RougeFemme writes "This is a fascinating story about a man who sold shares in himself, primarily to fund his start-up ideas. He ran into the same issues that companies run into when taking on corporate funding — except that in his case, the decisions made by his shareholders bled over into his personal life. This incuded his relationship with his now ex-girlfriend, who became a shareholder activist over the issue of whether or not he should have a vasectomy. The experiment continues." The perils of selling yourself to your friends.

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