This semester, I am taking a course for my retirement PhD project titled “Groundwater Modeling through Time Series Analysis.” It is only a one-credit “Special Topics” class, but it looks very interesting and a good way to get my feet wet back in the (remote) classroom. The course is to be taught by my PhD adviser, Troy and one of his compatriots in Brazil. There will be a sum total of three lecture sessions and three working sessions to do projects with a software package called HydroSight. The material looks great, but the program depends on the MatLab runtime so that did not please me. Anything that depends on the MatLab runtime is a disaster and a tragedy, but that is a rant for another day. I am really looking forward to the course. It starts on Tuesday and I have permission from my day job to sit in on the class in the middle of the day.
Month: November 2020
Our friends, Al and Michele, completely out of the blue, bought us a Concept 2 rowing machine. Lorena and I have both been avid rowers. I actually quit rowing after a good long stint back in about 1994 because we had kids and it was hard to get to the gym without neglecting the family. Lorena started rowing in about 2010 and has never stopped. She did an hour, three days per week for several years, but has settled down to 45 minutes now. She runs for an hour an additional two days per week.
I have now excuse now not to get back in the game. At 65, I know I need to start a little slower than I did in the past. My plan is to start at five minutes and add a minute per day until I get up to 45 minutes and make up the difference walking on the treadmill until I hit my goal.
Kudos go out to the people at Concept 2 who made this device. It is just spectacular. I spent three-quarters of a 45 year career in manufacturing, manufacturing quality, and design for manufacturing. The machine is extremely well made. I understand the difficulty of building something that is easy to assemble, ships in a reasonable size/weight box, and holds up after it is put together by fumble-finger schlubs like me. It took about 15 minutes to assemble after we got the thing unboxed and it is solid as a rock. We have been using it for a couple of weeks and could not be happier. Great product.
Last week, I was able to submit the first refereed journal article for my retirement PhD research. Right now we are waiting to see whether it will be accepted and to for the formation of a review committee at the Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS) journal. We think it is a pretty good article about how to create machine learning models with image features from annotated with USGS stage (water level) and discharge (stream flow) sensor measurements to fill gaps in the data when there is equipment or funding failure. We actually got some pretty amazing results. The images were not taken in a way that is normal for scientific or engineering purposes, but from a documentary project (Platte Basin Timelapse project). Here is a graph from an earlier post.
This shows the observed vs. predicted graphs for the data gap filling. The middle (2016) year did not predict so well in the preliminary effort, but we addressed that and made better predictions in the paper.