DaSH meeting and Farewell

Hi DaSHers,

For our meeting this week we have the magnificent Molly Zhongnan Jia broadening your horizons and dragging you kicking and screaming beyond MS PowerPoint.

Molly will give an overview of the presentation tool Prezi and will lead a discussion on alternative approaches to Death by PowerPoint.

ALSO: This is my last week as DaSH co-ordinator. For those that don’t know, I have accepted a job with the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne where I will be helping implement a satellite data based marine water quality system and a sea-surface temperature now casting system for Australian coastal waters. I am eternally grateful to the brilliant Stuart Corney for taking over from me. It’s been a swell ride and I hope that you all get behind Stuart and support DaSH into the future – it will only stay alive for as long as you keep showing up and support it.

Where:

IMAS Aurora Lecture Theatre – it’s the big lecture theatre on the left as you walk into the waterfront building foyer – 20 Castray Esplanade, Battery Point, next to CSIRO.

When:

Friday 27th of June, 9:15am

Meeting on the 20th June

For our meeting this week we have Simon Wotherspoon continuing his series of lectures on Time Series Analysis for fun and profit. This week it is an introduction to ARIMA and it’s uses.

ALSO: We NEED speakers for the next month or so. If you’ve been thinking of doing something with DaSH and have been too shy to say ‘Hi’ now is your chance! ALL WELCOME!

— When & Where —

Friday 20th June at 9:15am

IMAS Aurora Lecture Theatre – it’s the big lecture theatre on the left as you walk into the waterfront building foyer – 20 Castray Esplanade, Battery Point,  next to CSIRO.

Meeting on the 13th June

Hi DaSHers,

For our meeting this week the great Ben Galton-Fenzi will be multi-threading the DaSH community.

Ben will lead a discussion on a series of potential future DaSH sessions around computers and science from topics that range from what are computers and how do they work, cloud computing, data access, data formats and high-performance computing (what it is and how can it be used).

The aim of the session will be a brain storming session about what people would like to know more about and to develop a plan for discussing them at future DaSH sessions.

— When & Where —

Friday 13th June at 9:15am

IMAS Aurora Lecture Theatre – it’s the big lecture theatre on the left as you walk into the waterfront building foyer – 20 Castray Esplanade, Battery Point,  next to CSIRO.

The Python Fish

Have you ever wondered if you could put a progress bar in your terminal to reassure you that your script is still running?

Enter the Python Fish:

>))’>

The Python Fish progress bar could be just what you were looking for! The Fish is a Python module that makes any program look awesome and displays useful data while munching away on your data.

Check it out in action:

—

Install it with easy_install or fork it on github: https://github.com/lericson/fish

 

 

 

Meeting on the 6th June

For our meeting this week we have Simon Wotherspoon giving the first of a series of lectures on Time Series Analysis for fun and profit. As always, it is sure to be entertaining and informative…

ALSO: We NEED speakers for the next month or so. If you’ve been thinking of doing something with DaSH and have been too shy to say ‘Hi’ now is your chance! We have openings on the 20th and 27th of June (and beyond…). Put your hand up, get involved, give back to your community or even pose some hard questions you’d like answered or discussed. ALL WELCOME!

— When & Where —

Friday 6th June at 9:15am

IMAS Aurora Lecture Theatre – it’s the big lecture theatre on the left as you walk into the waterfront building foyer – 20 Castray Esplanade, Battery Point,  next to CSIRO.

Meeting on the 30th May

For our meeting this week we have Andreas Schiller from CSIRO talking about “CSIRO Tools and Applications in Support of Environmental Monitoring.”.

Andreas will provide a high-level overview of some of the tools developed by CSIRO and its partners in support of environmental monitoring. He will address applications and scales from the global to the surf-zone, e.g., defence, search and rescue, and tracking of marine debris. He will talk for about 45min and there will be questions and/or demonstrations afterwards.

— When & Where —

Friday 30th May at 9:15am

IMAS Aurora Lecture Theatre – it’s the big lecture theatre on the left as you walk into the waterfront building foyer – 20 Castray Esplanade, Battery Point,  next to CSIRO.

Python Install Fest – Resources

Here are some the basic resources needed for tomorrows Python Install Fest:

Notes and Installation Instructions

Code Test Cases

These resources were created by Eric Oliver and me (Rob Johnson), they are provided for free but are in no way exhaustive – there are many ways to do this.

 

Python Install Fest

This week we have the inaugural DaSH PUG (Python Users Group) meeting and to kick it all off we are running a Python Install Fest.

This session is for people who have thought about using Python but don’t know where to start. During the Install Fest we will help you to install a scientifically capable version of Python and to run a couple of simple test examples.

All operating systems are welcome.

Where:

IMAS Aurora Lecture Theatre – it’s the big lecture theatre on the left as you walk into the waterfront building foyer – 20 Castray Esplanade, Battery Point, next to CSIRO.

When:

Friday 9th May, 9:15am to 10am.

Happy birthday BASIC!

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the BASIC programming language!

Happy birthday BASIC!

BASIC is the language that many started their adventures in scientific computing with and the current generation of Data Scientists owe it quite a lot of respect. Dartmouth college and the hall where the very first BASIC code was run are holding a series of celebrations to mark this special anniversary, many of which can be viewed online, and have put together a Docco on the history and impact of the language.

Check out the party here:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basic.html

and

Meeting on the 2nd May

For our meeting this week we have the statistically correlatable Stuart Corney talking about being data poor but model rich, and does that really matter?

In the current environment of tighter budgets and decreased opportunity for field time to conduct research Stuart will examine issues surrounding data (information that comes from observations) and model output (information that comes from a computer), and look at the different ways that various disciplines regard model output, data or data products.

Can one scientist’s model output be considered another’s data. Can models be used to replace observations?

We’re hoping for some lively debate and discussion around these topics!

— When & Where —

Friday 2nd May at 9:15am

IMAS Aurora Lecture Theatre – it’s the big lecture theatre on the left as you walk into the waterfront building foyer – 20 Castray Esplanade, Battery Point,  next to CSIRO.