Previous: Chapter 7. VEB Kombinat Robotron
Chapter 8. Details of attribution
In which kagetsuko ensures that credit will be given where credit is due
kagetsuko had organised a video chat to celebrate the success of the adventure, and to discuss the next steps.
Three faces appeared on my screen.
silverstacks was an enby in her late forties or maybe early fifties, who looked a Hawaiian native to me, maybe with some East-Asian ancestry as well, but that was of course a guess. Their hair was short, shot with grey but still quite dark. With a perpetual semi-frown and large glasses with squarish, translucent white frames they looked distinctly intellectual.
klimagalka was in her late twenties or early thirties, with a strong-boned face, deep-set dark eyes, shoulder length dark reddish-brown hair and a hint of a mischievous smile. Because of her Russian name and her avatar, I’d had a mental picture of her as blond and blue-eyed, but she wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of those Siberian ethno-pop bands. Later I learned that her family came from Kyrgyzstan.
kagetsuko reminded me instantly of a character in an old East German/Polish scifi movie, Dr Sumiko Ogimura in “Der schweigende Stern”. That same inquisitive look and stern eyebrows. Her hair was much shorter and shaved at the sides, making her look at the same older and more boyish than the actress in that movie, Yōko Tani.
As a white man of advanced years I felt somewhat out of place in their company. I wished I was less male, less pale and with better cheekbones.
But we had all brought our favourite drinks and nibbles, and the usual awkwardness amongst geeks proved an effective icebreaker. After a toast, kagetsuko got straight to the point. (I mused how peculiar this was for a Japanese person who had lived in the UK.)
“I can never thank you enough for what you have done for me. This paper will cause a storm when I publish it! I have no doubt that it will be the most important work in my career, and it will lead to huge improvements in simulation of extreme weather events. Therefore I want to make sure that I don’t mess it up, and I would really like your advice on a few points. First of all, this is not just my work. To be fair, my contribution is quite minor. I want to make sure that everyone who contributed gets credit, even if they are no longer alive. We also need agreements to open source the code, and we need to work out acknowledgements. Especially the three of you should get an acknowledgement because without you I could never have done this.”
I explained that I’d rather not be acknowledged in the paper, but that I suggested she acknowledge my friend from Glasgow instead, or maybe even considered co-authorship for him as it was his compiler that had created the modernised code.
kagetsuko was dismayed: “But then you won’t get any credit at all!”
silverstacks suggested it was OK for them to be acknowledged, as long as it was done anonymously. I agreed with that and proposed that maybe there could be a general acknowledgement of everyone who helped track down the code.
kagetsuko continued “There is no rush. ECMWF will need to make very sure about these results, so it will take time. I will need to get support and compute time, and we’ll have to create a super-detailed set of stress tests for that code. Just doing that will probably take a few months.
I would also like to involve both University of Hawaii/NOAA and the Siberian SuperComputer Center in the validation of the model. This paper is going to cause a storm so it has to be absolutely watertight. We’ll have to be super thorough. If the code is independently verified by groups of experts in the US, Russia and Europe, it will make the paper much more robust. I also think it is the right thing to do because it’s fundamentally the work of Lightman, Chinchuluun and Dymnikov. But for that I need your help. I will need contacts at NOAA and SB RAS that can help organise this and also decide on who should get credit and in what way. I’ll also have to discuss this at home because technically I’m an employee of Kyoto University so they will want credit too. Only when all that is sorted can I start thinking about writing the paper.”
klimagalka was more than happy to arrange the contacts at SB RAS: “This is super exciting. Maybe I can even find one of the old guys who were involved at the time and who remembers Nathan and Alexey, like Viacheslav Gusiakov, or maybe even Valentin Dymnikov himself.”
“That would be amazing!”, kagetsuko replied, “I will definitely push for Dymnikov to get authorship. But if we could just ask him, that’d be fantastic.”
silverstacks said they knew who to approach at NOAA. And they went further: “I think I should get in touch with Nathan’s grandniece. This work concerns Nathan and Alexey very closely, so I think she should have a say in this.” Of course we all agreed on this.
A month later, there was a long message from silverstacks. She had gone to the surf shop and met with Nathan’s grandniece Alice. It turned out that Nathan was still alive and well, living in a nice serviced apartment in Makiki. They went to visit him together.
@silverstacks:
@kagetsuko While we were on our way, Alice told me that your aunt had come to the shop to ask about Nathan, and had gone to visit him. And when we met with Nathan, one of the first things he told Alice was, “Guess what? Mieko came to see me last week. You know, her husband Shigeru was one of our first customers? They ran a bike shop and we went there for our bikes. Shigeru had this really cool trailer for surfboards, but they didn’t sell them. Thought there would be no demand for them. In those days everyone was still driving everywhere. But the moment we saw it, Lexey and I both wanted one, and Shigeru arranged it. We turned a lot of heads when we cycled to the beach with our boards in tow.” His eyes shone with the memory.
We sat under the pergola on the terrace, with a magnificent view towards the ocean. I asked him what happened when Alexey visited. This is the story he told me.
Next: Chapter 9. Standing Wave