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One of the initial visions for computational reproducibility dates back to the early 90s, where Claerbout and Karrenbach imagined researchers able to reproduce their results “a year or more later with a single button.” In other words, they hoped it would be possible to run a single command to transform any study’s raw data into figures, tables, and finally a complete research article. We never…
In the 21st century, the Agile and DevOps movements revolutionized software development, reducing waste, improving quality, enhancing innovation, and ultimately increasing the speed at which software products were brought into the world. At the same time, the pace of scientific innovation appears to have slowed [1], with many findings failing to replicate (validated in an end-to-end sense by…
Research projects often involve producing some sort of LaTeX document, e.g., a conference paper, slide deck, journal article, proposal, or multiple of each. Collaborating on one of these can be painful, though there are web- or cloud-based tools to help, the most popular of which is probably Overleaf . Overleaf is pretty neat, but the free version is quite limited in terms of versioning,…
My former PhD advisor emailed me recently regarding a grad student interested in using some experimental data we had collected a decade ago to validate some simulations. The repo from the experiment was still up on GitHub , so I assumed that would be easy, but I was wrong. I had left instructions in the README for getting started and regenerating the figures: So I gave it a try. These days I have…
Does using Microsoft Office always mean going to the dark side? Everyone knows that when you want to get serious about reproducibility you need to stop using Microsoft Word and Excel and become a computer hacker, right? There is some truth to that, that working with simpler, open source, less interactive tools is typically better for producing permanent artifacts and enabling others to reproduce…
Have you ever been here before? You’ve done a bunch of work to get a simulation to run, created some figures, and submitted a paper to a journal. A month or two later you get the reviews back and you’re asked by the dreaded Reviewer 2 to make some minor modifications to a figure. There’s one small problem, however: You don’t remember how that figure was created, or you’ve upgraded your laptop and…
In the spring of 2019, after roughly 11 years and 80,000 miles of operation, I decided to sell the Diesel Explorer. It was hardly being driven since moving to Boston from Michigan, and I figured it would be better to find a new home where it could be put to good use. The eBay listing caught the attention of some Cummins diesel enthusiasts out west, and shortly thereafter, the Explorer’s new owner…
To date, most higher level physical knowledge has been derived from simpler first principles. However, these techniques have still not given a fully predictive understanding of turbulent flow. We have the exact deterministic governing equations (Navier–Stokes), but can’t solve them for most useful cases. As such, it could be of interest to find a different quantity, other than momentum, for which…
Note: This work was performed Fall 2008. Fitting the B3.3 in the Explorer was tough. Even with a body lift, the turbo was way too high. To move it down, the intake and exhaust had to be modified. Cutting down and welding the intake was easy enough, but the exhaust was a bit trickier. It wasn’t possible to simply flip the OEM exhaust manifold over, so a custom exhaust header was in order. Intake…
OpenFOAM recently released version 3.0.0 of their open-source CFD toolbox. With an incremented major version number some non-backwards-compatible changes are expected. This post describes the ones I’ve run into thus far, and how I’ve addressed them ( example ). constant/turbulenceProperties now contains all turbulence modeling parameters, rather than separating these into RASProperties and/or…