Searching for a way to publish scientific data I found two interesting platforms: figshare and ZENODO. I've made a quick comparison between the two platforms. For me the clear winner is ZENODO.

Every other day or so I watch a TED talk and today I saw a talk by Simon Anholt titled Which country does the most good for the world?.

Policy advisor Simon Anholt thought of a new scale describing how much good a country does outside its borders, and it's called The Good Country Index. In his talk he discusses why countries tend to compete instead of cooperate, why this should change and how this could be changed. He investigated how people perceive other countries and he found out that the countries we like are the good countries. Good countries, what do I mean with that you might wonder. Well, if you want to have an answer on that I suggest watching the talk!

Some time ago I encountered mdwiki, a Wiki which is processed entirely client-side. In short:

1. Download mdwiki.html, put it in the root of your site, and rename it to index.html
2. Add index.md which you use as your index page. Write content in your favorite formatting syntax, Markdown :-)
3. Optionally add a navigation.md for a navigation bar.
4. Add any other Markdown file.

It doesn't have many features but in my opinion it doesn't have to. It's great for quickly publishing ideas or content without bothering too much yet with layout and looks. Now, that doesn't mean it's not possible to make nice looking sites as can be seen in the examples. Also, features can be added using gimmicks. Examples of added functionality are the parsing of equations, embedding Google Maps and YouTube video's.

Last year I saw this TED talk by Erik Brynjolfsson on how we should handle the digital revolution. In 2011 he wrote Race Against the Machine together with Andrew McAfee and last week I finally got to reading it (okay I admit, I completely forgot it was on my to read list). It's a good book and I strongly recommend it. The digital revolution is happening, things are changing and a lot of people can't keep up with it. Next up, The Second Machine Age, another book by Brynjolfsson and McAfee.

Last week the conference Forum Acusticum 2014 took place in the city of Krakow, Poland. From Monday till Friday there were presentations as well as meetings of technical committees. The presentations covered a wide range of topics like structural acoustics, human response and auralisation.

A special session was organised on Urban Sound Planning as well, in which many of my project members presented their current work. I'm glad a lot of people attended the session.

I gave a presentation with the title Modelling sound propagation in the presence of turbulence for the auralisation of aircraft noise in a session on Environmental Acoustics. This session was Friday morning early, which was a bit unfortunate, considering there was a nice party with the Young Acousticians Network the evening before. I was surprised there were still so many people that morning!

On Thursday I joined a discussion on benchmarking for computational acoustics. When implementing a model you would like to be able to validate this. This can sometimes be difficult due to lack of available information or benchmarks. Therefore, the idea is now to put online some kind of repository where people can put their benchmarks. Considering this is a topic of interest in other fields of science I am really curious how they deal with this.

The city of Krakow surprised me a lot. It's quite a green city and there seems to be a good and relaxed mood. There's plenty of pubs and restaurants, especially around the main square which is huge.

Anyway, that's my summary on FA2014!

Last month I was back in Gothenburg for a week and it was nice! I've been living in Gothenburg for close to two years and being back there brought up some good memories. The reason I was there again was that we had a course for SONORUS on leadership.

In the course we treated topics like communication, knowledge, coaching, group dynamics and decision making. There was one very interesting exercise on group dynamics. In 20 minutes the entire group had to agree on a list of statements related to meetings. We also built a tower using dry spaghetti, a meter of tape and a marshmallow, or at least we tried!

Besides the course we spent time on some practical matters in the project, like discussing how we would cooperate, e.g. with regards to sharing data. Another topic that was discussed is the upcoming International Noise Awareness Day, but more about that later!

Numpy offers dense arrays and both Numpy and Scipy offer sparse matrices. However, they don't offer any sparse array solution. On the web I found some implementations of sparse arrays but they were generally quite limited:

• ndsparse operators only support scalars
• sparray operators only support other sparse arrays

What I would like to do is replace in some of my calculations certain dense arrays with sparse arrays. Numpy compatibility is therefore important. A first version can be found here.

What works?

• The basic operators work with scalars, sparse arrays and dense arrays.
• Basic slicing is partially supported. newaxis, None, slice and Ellipsis aren't really supported yet.
• Converting from dense to sparse and vice versa

What's left to do?

• Finish basic slicing
• In-place operators
• Advanced slicing
• Enforcing dtype
• Cythonize

Because I was curious I Cythonized it quickly. While it is much much faster than the plain Python implementation it still is about a factor 1000 slower than dense arrays when operatoring with a dense array. Unfortunately this is too slow for my use case, so for now I reverted to using dense arrays but with a reduced model size. Nevertheless I am sure there is a significant performance increase possible.

Recently I set up a new Planet aimed at acousticians called Planet Acoustics. A Planet is basically a feed reader; it downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed. The purpose of this Planet is to collect blogs and news by and for acousticians.

Planets are very popular in the open-source software development world. Planets like Planet KDE, Planet Debian, Planet Python and Planet SciPy syndicate posts from many people all over the world who write posts related to respectively KDE, the Debian project, Python programming language and the Python module SciPy.

The posts on such a Planet give a good overview of which efforts are currently taking place. Contrary to news posts, press releases or journal articles they are informal. People write about their current work, problems they face, events they attend and often share nice tips and tricks or even detailed tutorials.

I hope that Planet Acoustics will become a Planet with many nice posts regarding acoustics and the life of acousticians. If you would like to have your posts syndicated, then please send an e-mail to admin@planetacoustics.org with your name and a link to your Atom or RSS feed. Hopefully, in time, Planet Acoustics will become just as successfull as those Planets I referred to :-)