JamieJQuinn Research Software Engineer

Analysing the prevalence of continuous integration in JOSS

JOSS is the Journal of Open Source Software and can be considered a collection of some excellent scientific codebases. Whether they’re exemplars of good coding practices is up for debate but I wanted to know roughly how many published papers (and associated codebases) were using specifically continuous integration of some form. Luckily I have so... Read more

Four pillars of a reproducible PhD

As the academic community continues to embrace open science and reproducible research, it is increasingly important for an academic to understand the tools which can make research easier, more accessible and more sustainable. It can be challenging to absorb so many different good practices while still getting research done. However, I would argu... Read more

How to Render Latex in Inkscape

Rendering latex equations or text in the graphics package Inkscape is not an intuitive task, so I’ve decided to create an extremely short tutorial on doing exactly that using Inkscape’s in-built latex extesion. It’s not difficult but the menus are quite cluttered and there’s a quirk to rendering to equations that’s helpful to know. I’ve always ... Read more

Finally, a strong, Abel woman

Just this month the Abel prize, commonly considered to be the Nobel prize of mathematics, was awarded to the first female prizewinner, Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck. Now a professor emeritus at the University of Texas, and a visiting associate at the Institute for Advanced Study, Uhlenbeck’s work has had a profound impact on many areas of mathematics... Read more

UGRacing Ahead

Just a short while ago I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with the University of Glasgow Racing team, found either in their cosy, computer filled office in the James Watt South, or nestled in their garage, deep in the bowels of the Rankine. Chatting with Oliver, team principal, Kester, head engineer, and Callum, a team member, they intr... Read more

Not so elementary, Dr Watson

Why do clever people say dumb things? How is it that incredibly well-known, well-respected minds that have forged today’s world through scientific rigor and raw intellectual power, can end up thinking that because you’re black, you’re less intelligent? Surely a renowned geneticist, a Nobel laureate at that, wouldn’t say something totally unsubs... Read more

Illegal? No, not in China

The recent news from China of a genetically altered pair of twins is frightening. He Jiankui, from the Southern University of Science and Technology of China, genetically altered the DNA of multiple embryos using the gene-editing technique CRISPR in order to disable the CCR5 gene, thought to be responsible for vulnerability to HIV. Disable the ... Read more

The falsehood of the PhD pedestal

The British government, in introducing the new doctoral loans offered to graduates aiming for a PhD, have sent out a message – “PhDs are valuable”. This stinks of the same misguided and ill-considered ambition of Tony Blair, who, almost 20 years ago set out his grand ambition to have at least half of the entire young population of Britain entere... Read more

Herd immunity and why it matters

We’ve all encountered someone in our lives that’s been royally freaked out by vaccinations. Be it a friend who just can’t stand needles or a hardcore anti-vaxxer, a certain fear of vaccinations exists in our society and the deadly consequences of this fear have been growing. We’re all in our own ways susceptible to the scare-tactics rolled out b... Read more

Running Fluid Simulations in WebGL I - Simple Convection

Years ago I worked my way through Lorena Barba’s 12 steps to Navier-Stokes in Python, but recently I’ve been getting more and more into GPU programming and figured that it would be an interesting exercise to redo the steps in WebGL. Really when I say GPU programming I mean using general purpose tech like CUDA, but CUDA and WebGL are similar enou... Read more