Blog – Page 8 – Simon Waldman

Jul

2018

Publication, of a sort… a corrigendum.

Everybody in academia receives email spam, much of it from China, inviting us to conferences that, if they exist, we probably don’t want to go to. One ignores it, and hits “delete”. Late last year I was about to do that when I realised that on this occasion, it was a genuine email from a Chinese PhD student who was using some code that I had published, and asking for help with it. Great!

I couldn’t immediately understand why the code wasn’t working for this student, so I asked him to send his files to me… and I found a bug in my code. With a growing sense of dread, I realised that this bug would have affected results that were already published. I notified my co-authors on the paper and in haste, on evenings and weekends (because this was not my full-time job at the time), I corrected the code, reran a hydrodyanamic model, redid the analysis… and found to my relief that the overall conclusions of the paper were not affected and so there would be no need for a retraction. It did, however, feel as though the record should be corrected, so I got in touch with the editor, and… long story short, a “corrigendum” to the original paper appeared online today. For those without a subscription to Ocean & Coastal Management, I’m also hosting it here for now.

I was already an advocate for good software development practices in science, in order to reduce the liklihood of exactly this sort of thing, and now my feeling on this matter is strengthened…

If you have been using my code for inserting tidal turbines into Delft3D you should make sure that you are using the current version, which had this error fixed in December 2017.

Jul

2018

Corrections accepted!

When I had my viva I reflected that although it was an important milestone, it didn’t feel very climactic because it was simply a gate passed beyond which there was more work to do.

A few weeks ago I finally got word back from my internal examiner that my thesis corrections had been accepted. This felt far more joyful and climatic, because this was an agreement that from an academic perspective, I had passed and would receive a PhD; the only remaining hurdles were bureaucratic ones.

A week later I printed four copies of the thesis and organised an overnight trip to Edinburgh to get them bound and handed in. I got a receipt, and I clutched on to it like the special document that it was. This was what I was waiting for – the point at which I could fully relax. Well, before worrying about the next job 😉

Two pictures. On the left, a cardboard box with "Simon's Thesis" scrawled on the top in marker. On the right, four hard bound theses - black books with gold lettering.

Before and after. Photos: Author.

May

2018

Relocation, relocation, relocation

Photograph of an art installation consisting of two very high piles of brightly coloured luggage.

Photo: Susanne Nilsson, Flickr user infomastern. Licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.

I’m about half way through a one year contract, so of course much of my headspace is occupied with wondering what comes next. (I’d rather it was occupied with great research, or any number of other things. This is one of many problems with the early-career norm of short-term contracts, but that’s another topic.)

As I look around at job adverts, naturally they are all over the world, and also varying in length. Recently I found myself looking at a short one in the US and thinking “I’m not sure I want to relocate intercontinentally for just a year”. My initial thinking was that I’d consider it more seriously for two or three years, but a one-year contract wasn’t worth the upheaval.

Then my officemate pointed out that I had jumped at the opportunity to live in Japan for two months, which is much shorter. I replied that I hadn’t actually “moved” there, it was simply a visit. But where does one draw the line? In my head, two or more years is definitely moving to a place, while two months is definitely a visit. Could a year be considered from either angle?

Possibly it’s less about duration than other things. In Japan I lived out of a suitcase, but I don’t think it really comes down to how many belongings one takes with. Perhaps it has more to do with whether one is getting paid in the other country, dealing with bank accounts, setting up local healthcare provision, househunting, etc.

Food for thought, and in the meantime I’m not ruling anything out.

Apr

2018

EIMR, and future wave resource

This week I am at a conference on Environmental Interactions of Marine Renewables (EIMR), in Orkney. It’s the kind of event that covers quite a broad area, and most of it isn’t in line with my “interests” in a narrow sense – but the breadth makes it really helpful for talking to a wide range of people, and hearing about a wide range of research.

The majority of the research here is about the effects that renewable energy extraction will have on the environment, which is certainly an important topic. A few, including my own poster, look at “environmental interactions” in the other direction, in my case asking “how will the wave power arriving at the west coast of Orkney change, as the planet warms in the future?”

It’s only a short, preliminary look at the problem, and it has a high level of uncertainty attached. However, it looks as though the change between now and 2100 will be small. That’s good news for wave energy developers.

[wc_fa icon=”file-pdf-o” margin_left=”” margin_right=””][/wc_fa] View poster

Feb

2018

Viva!!!

Yesterday was my viva, or thesis defence for those used to that terminology. For those not familiar, in the UK system this means an oral exam of unknown length, in private, with the candidate and two examiners – one from my university, one from elsewhere. It’s nerve-wracking in the lead-up, and one hears plenty of horror stories as well as the (far more common) good tales.

Mine was fine 🙂 I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed it, as some people describe, but it went for three and a bit hours with only a few difficult moments. My examiners were rigorous yet kind, in that when they identified areas of theory that I was clearly a little hazy about they noted that and backed off, rather than continuing to push. They asked for reasonable changes, which will improve the thesis, and one can’t really ask for better than that!

Cartoon of a spider in a viva, using many arms to write in different places and respod to multiple questions at the same time. Caption: "having extra arms helps in a viva, but not as much as an extra brain would".

Comic by errantscience.com, licensed CC-BY-NC.

So the upshot is that I’ve passed, subject to corrections. This is a huge milestone, in that – so long as I do the corrections to the examiner’s satisfaction – I will be awarded the degree. It’s certainly the end of a lot of tension; an evening of relief.

Yet, in some ways it doesn’t feel climatic, and when people ask “how did it go?” it’s a little hard to answer – because the vast majority of candidates who get to this stage pass with corrections (their supervisors would advise them against submitting the thesis if they wouldn’t), and it was very likely that I would as well, and I did! There’s no real surprise, or even a lot of uncertainty, involved – the real question was how significant the corrections would be (mine are not trivial, but are managable). So I’m certainly relieved, and relaxed, compared to this time yesterday, but at the same time it doesn’t feel like I’ve finished, because I haven’t. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that I’ve passed a gate and moved on to the next stage, and there’s still work to be done (and bureaucratic hoops to jump through) before I can be finished and move on.

Publication, of a sort… a corrigendum.

Corrections accepted!

Relocation, relocation, relocation

EIMR, and future wave resource

Viva!!!

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