Computation is becoming essential across all sciences, for data acquisition and analysis, automation, and hypothesis testing via modeling and simulation. As a consequence, software development is becoming a critical scientific activity. Training of scientists in programming, software development, and computational thinking (Wilson, 2006), choice of tools, community-building and interoperability...

We describe our experience teaching programming and numerical methods to engineering students using Visual Python to exploit three dimensional real time visualisation. We describe the structure and content of this teaching module and evaluate the module after its delivery. We find that the students enjoy being able to visualise physical processes (even if these have effectively only 1 or 2 spat...

We demonstrate that the Python programming language is not signal-safe, due to Python’s support for raising exceptions from signal handlers. We examine the approaches that various languages have used when dealing with the combination of asynchrony and exception handling, and propose a modification of the Python language that restores signal safety.

We present a simple web search engine for indexing and searching html documents using python programming language. Because python is well known for its simple syntax and strong support for main operating systems, we hope it will be beneficial for learning information retrieval techniques, especially web search engine technology.

L-systems were conceived as a mathematical framework for modeling growth of plants. In this paper, we present L-Py, a simulation software that mixes L-systems construction with the Python high-level modeling language. In addition to this software module, an integrated visual development environment has been developed that facilitates the creation of plant models. In particular, easy to use opti...

Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of the Navier Stokes equations is an invaluable research tool in fluid dynamics. Still, there are few publicly available research codes and, due to the heavy number crunching implied, available codes are usually written in low-level languages such as C/C++ or Fortran. In this paper we describe a pure scientific Python pseudo-spectral DNS code that nearly match...

Environmental DNA (eDNA) methods are used to detect DNA that is shed into the aquatic environment by cryptic or low density species. Applied in eDNA studies, occupancy models can be used to estimate occurrence and detection probabilities and thereby account for imperfect detection. However, occupancy terminology has been applied inconsistently in eDNA studies, and many have calculated occurrenc...

A new Python API, integrated within the NLTK suite, offers access to the FrameNet 1.7 lexical database. The lexicon (structured in terms of frames) as well as annotated sentences can be processed programatically, or browsed with human-readable displays via the interactive Python prompt.