Celebration

madagascar-4.0

March 9, 2023 Celebration No comments

The major version of Madagascar, stable version 4.0, has been released. The main change is the switch to SCons-4.0 and the added support for deep learning and other enhancements of the Python interface. The new version also features 20 new reproducible papers and other enhancements.

According to the SourceForge statistics, the previous stable distribution has been downloaded about 12,000 times. The top country (with 36% of all downloads) was USA, followed by China, Germany, Brazil, and India.

The total cumulative number of downloads for the stable version of Madagascar has reached 65 thousand. The current development version continues to be available through Github.

Jim Jennings

October 18, 2021 Celebration No comments

A new inductee in the Madagascar Hall of Fame is Jim Jennings.

You can read Jim’s story here.

Jeff Godwin

October 18, 2021 Celebration No comments

A new inductee in the Madagascar Hall of Fame is Jeff Godwin.

You can read Jeff’s story here.

Yang Liu

September 27, 2021 Celebration No comments

A new inductee in the Madagascar Hall of Fame is Yang Liu.

You can read Yang’s story here.

Vladimir Bashkardin

September 23, 2021 Celebration No comments

A new inductee in the Madagascar Hall of Fame is Vladimir Bashkardin.

You can read Vladimir’s story here.

Hall of Fame

August 31, 2021 Celebration No comments

A new wiki page, Hall of Fame, honors those individuals who made particularly important contributions to Madagascar and the Madagascar community.

The first two honorees are Nick Vlad and Pengliang Yang.

Please submit nominations for other major contributors.

Online Conference

May 5, 2021 Celebration No comments

The first ever worldwide Madagascar conference will take place on June 21-27, 2021. The participation is free of charge.

The conference program will be announced later. Meanwhile, please indicate the level of your interest in participation by filling a form on the website.

Legislating reproducibility

January 23, 2021 Celebration No comments

American Innovation and Competitiveness Act was adopted unanimously by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by president Obama in January 2017.

The law contains a section called Research Reproducibility and Replication, which asked the Director of the National Science Foundation in agreement with the National Research Council to prepare a report on issues related to research reproducibility and “to make recommendations for improving rigor and transparency in scientific research”.

To fulfill this requirement, a consensus report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine was published in 2019. The report is summarized in the special issue of Harvard Data Science Review in December 2020.

Among the recommendations:

All researchers should include a clear, specific, and complete description of how the reported results were reached. Reports should include details appropriate for the type of research, including:

  • a clear description of all methods, instruments, materials, procedures, measurements, and other variables involved in the study;
  • a clear description of the analysis of data and decisions for exclusion of some data or inclusion of other;
  • for results that depend on statistical inference, a description of the analytic decisions and when these decisions were made and whether the study is exploratory or confirmatory;
  • a discussion of the expected constraints on generality, such as which methodological features the authors think could be varied without affecting the result and which must remain constant;
  • reporting of precision or statistical power; and
  • discussion of the uncertainty of the measurements, results, and inferences.

Funding agencies and organizations should consider investing in research and development of open-source, usable tools and infrastructure that support reproducibility for a broad range of studies across different domains in a seamless fashion. Concurrently, investments would be helpful in outreach to inform and train researchers on best practices and how to use these tools.

Journals should consider ways to ensure computational reproducibility for publications that make claims based on computations, to the extent ethically and legally possible.

madagascar-3.0

September 9, 2019 Celebration No comments

The major version of Madagascar, stable version 3.0, has been released. The main change is the added support for Python-3. Both Python-2 and Python-3 are now supported. The new version also features 14 new reproducible papers, as well as other enhancements.

According to the SourceForge statistics, the previous 2.0 stable distribution has been downloaded about 6,000 times. The top country (with 27% of all downloads) was China, followed by the USA, Brazil, Canada, and India.

In September 2019, the total cumulative number of downloads for the stable version of Madagascar has reached 50 thousand. The current development version continues to be available through Github.

Working Workshop 2018

November 28, 2018 Celebration No comments

Working Workshops as opposed to “talking workshops” are meetings where the participants collaborate in small groups to develop new software code or to conduct computational experiments addressing a particular problem.

The 2018 Working Workshop took place in Houston on August 8-11. It was hosted by the University of Houston and organized by Karl Schleicher. The topic of the workshop was Python and Julia programming languages, as well as their interfaces to Madagascar.

The workshop attracted 16 participants (students, academic staff, and industry professionals) from 12 different organizations. Software projects included such topics as machine learning, 3D plotting, parallel processing, wave equation modeling, and well log analysis.