Spaced-OoooO-Out

Let there be stoning!

I can't really add to much more to Garr's blog entry, other than to point you to the short essay/editorial that appeared in Ground Water back in 1985 (Lehr, J.H. 1985 Let there be stoning! Ground Water 23, 2, 162-165)..... in the first instance it makes you laugh, then you can feel the anger and then the wisdom. In short, whilst nearly 30 years ago, the detail of this paper holds the presentation essentials for any academic - it's a treasure trove of wisdom. Read it and compare yourself against his yardstick - there is no excuse for boring your audience to death.

1926 London

Fabulous COLOUR film of 1926 London from the BFI..... what's startling (for me) about this is how little has changed in a lot of London, yet notice that there is no highrise and the streets are so clean.

London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.

The Long Swath

Great post from the NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day - this is 9000km swatch running from Russia all the way down through Africa offering stunning images along the route. It was captured shortly after the calibration and testing of LDCM completed and it was moved into its operational orbit - note its not due to enter full operational status until late May. Watch the video FULL SCREEN. It is stunning.

And check out further details of "The Long Swath" which includes a fabulous GigaPan at full resolution.

Asda's Not-so-easy Wifi

I was in my local Asda recently and saw the stand below - I don't think "Follow these simple steps....." could be further from the truth! The words "can't be bothered" spring to mind.

Word for the Day: Pareidolia

I came across the word Pareidolia at 500px yesterday which I didn't know, so looked it up on Wikipedia. This is what it had to say:

a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant.... Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.

Perhaps one of the most famous remote sensing examples (below) is the face on Mars..... we've all seen them and the WIkipedia page has some great examples.

CONFIRMED: CBC council officially provide no educational leadership

Well this week saw Central Bedfordshire Council organise an open meeting to "discuss changes to schools and academies in Dunstable and Houghton Regis" (something I've blogged about before) I think they got the feeling it was going to be popular early on and changed venues to a 200-seater hall, but the 400 who turned up, in the long queue snaking around All Saints Academy, perhaps took them by surprise.

The panel consisted of Cllr Mark Versallion (Education Portfolio), Pete Dudley (Assistant Director Children's Services), Rob Parsons (Head of School Organisation, Admissions & Capital Planning), Andrew Selous (MP for SW Beds) and Cllr Richard Stay. Thought it was strange the Director of Children's Services wasn't there - does that highlight the concern?

Anyway, the first four provided brief commentary to the context of school provision (and planning) in Dunstanble and Houghton Regis before moving on to an extended Q&A session. To give you a flavour here is Mark Versallion's talk.....

What's the take away from this?? CBC is in charge of planning for maintained schools but that ALL the proposals currently on the table have come from the schools themselves and that they have no control over Academies that are run by central government. This was again clarified in a response to a question - listen here - and goes on to be a bit more explicit. The council didn't want to make firm decision (no decision is better!) and drew the comparison with Suffolk which he felt was wrong because:

(1) the council shouldn't make decisions
(2) the council still isn't sure whether 2 or 3 tier is better
(3) central government has stopped this with Academies
(4) we can't afford it
(5) Suffolk KS2 results have gone down

And the catch phrase of the night was to let "local solutions emerge" as there wasn't a "one size fits all". There was, of course, plenty of emotion in the evening and Des Tinch provides a nice example of that - the comment "Pontius Pilot couldn't have done it so well" was well timed!

So, to sum up:

-Cllr Mark Versallion believes that CBC shouldn't make decisions about school planning
-he didn't want to lead this when he got elected (presumably because it would affect his chances of re-election)
-it's not his fault anyway because the local schools have proposed it
-it's not his fault because the ConDem central government have this nasty little Academies programme
-it's not his fault that Bedfordshire didn't make its mind up 5 years ago
-and anyway, 3-tier is probably just as good as 2-tier anyway
-and it's all a moot point because even if we wanted to do this properly we can't afford it

It's sad to see this local council having *created* the implosion of education in Dunstable and Houghton Regis. They are elected on the mandate to *lead* but have washed their hands of all and any responsibility (bar statutory) to deliver high educational standards for the *current* and future generations of children in this area. And at this point in time it seems quite easy for them to target schools for making the decisions, central government and a lack of money.

All of that is, of course, their right to do so as elected members and if we want want good governance then we should exercise that right in the ballot box. What we don't have time for are those that want to play politics at the expense of the lives of the people in their care.

What should be happening is a local authority reviewing in detail metrics for performance and planning and *leading* the brokering of change within the area. If there is a decision to make on 2 or 3-tier then make it. If you don't have the money to see through that change, be honest and pragmatic. But LEAD.

As a final point, exam results have the potential to implode in the area following the change to schools. Bear in mind that Lower Schools oversee teacher assessments for KS1 - Middle Schools KS2 - Upper Schools KS4. There has been long debate that KS1 grading does not map on to KS2 with the possibility of inflated grades at KS1 (for whatever reason). *If* this is the case, then it leads to poor progress at KS2. With Primary Schools now being responsible for KS1 and KS2 there is a possible implosion of one or both sets of grades as they come to terms with responsibility for both key stages.

Landsat 8: Landsat Data Continuity Mission

This passed me by for some reason last year, but a great summary on the Landsat Data Continuity Mission is available over at Remote Sensing of Environment. Gives a lot of detail on the instruments a is a great pre-cursor read to the impending wide availability of data.

Journal of Maps Editor's Choice

Just wanted to flag to people the Editor's Choice over at the Journal of Maps. These are available to download for free and include many of the previous Best Map Award Winners. So, take a look, there are some great maps.

Antarctic Archive Data

Jonathon Amos provides a nice overview of a team that put together a mosaic of archive data of Antarctica (published in The Cryosphere which is open access) from the 3-week long Nimbus-1 satellite from 1964. Its a great example of the importance of old data and how it adds to our knowledge of the Earth system.

Sony RX100 - a compact DSLR

I've gotten far more in to my digital photography recently - see gallery - and my DSLR (Nikon fanboy!) is my constant companion. However when I'm on the daily grind it's far handier to have a compact to allow me to get that shot when I need to. After much gnawing and gnashing of teeth I plumped for the Sony RX100 - this is one of a new breed of compacts designed for the professional. What makes these types of camera amazing is packing a very large sensor in to a tiny body and making full manual controls available with a great lens. There are several competitors on the market, but the Sony offers a stunningly large 1" sensor and a fast Zeiss f1.8 10.4-37.1 optical zoom. In short, it produces amazingly sharp photos with remarkable light sensitivity. Minor shortcomings include the lack of ability to attached filters and the lack of time lapse and IR remote release.

There are two things I briefly wanted to touch upon here, namely filters and setup. So....

1. Filters: the camera as it arrives cannot take any kind of filters on the front. UV, ND or CPL would all be very useful to add. Thankfully after market comes to the help here - Lensmate make a glue on plastic mount that allows you to add a 52mm (for Nikon) screw-thread. I then use a 77-52mm stepper ring to use my telephoto filters on the camera.

2. Setup: the camera menu is far from simple to use and there are a myriad of settings. On the back of the camera is a control wheel surrounded by 4 menu buttons. My adjustments here include reassigning the functions to allow great control over the shooting. These are:
a. Centre: focus point. Camera is set to single focus point and pressing this allows you to move the focus point to your subject.
b. Up: screen display (default setting)
c.Left: drive mode. Change from single, multi, bracketed or timer modes.
d. Right: manual focus (yes it has a manual focus mode!!)
e. Down: exposure compensation. Adjust under or over exposure of the image

OK, that gives me huge granularity over my day-to-day shooting however I need quick access to other settings as well, so hit the Function (Fn) button to bring up a custom menu that you can edit. For me this is:

ISO (I have auto as the default to increase ISO at low shutter speeds)
Metering Mode (change between centre weight and spot)
Flash Mode: I have it off by default

Finally you can use the Control Wheel around the lens to access specific functions - this is just way too confusing and easy to knock. I turn this OFF and *only* use it for focusing in manual mode.

And finally, for those searching desperately for a way to multi-select and delete images in Playback mode, it isn't there!!! You actually need to press the "Menu" button, go to the first "Playback" menu and select "Delete" (counter-intuitive!!).

Fabulous camera - buy one!

And the winner is....

submarine volcano eruption. Coooooool.

First satellite image

Well almost.....i09 shown the first weather satellite image of the Earth. This was taken from TIROS 1, a research satellite launched in 1960 to test the efficacy of remote observation from space. These images look a little mediocre in comparison to today's images, however its worth remembering that they were primarily aimed at imaging the atmosphere, NOT the surface. Prior to this point imaging a whole hemisphere was not possible and just having information on a whole weather system, in one snapshot, was astonishing. Yes there were high altitude aircraft, but they were military. It must have seemed miraculous when these first images were returned to Earth - an eye watering moment to ponder what the next 50 years would hold.

LDCM Calibration

Nice article over at EO IofD as NASA/USGS prepare to ready LDCM for full operation status. As they say in the article....."You don�t just strap a satellite to a rocket, launch it, and voil�, it takes measurements." There's a bucket load more stuff to do. Worth having a read and watch as LDCM is prepared for routine data collection.

The Final

Cast your vote

OS Terrain 50

OS announced this weekend the availability of OS Terrain 50 (T50), a maintained 50m DEM of the UK. This is great news as 50m provides an incredibly useful spatial resolution for a variety of tasks. I have fond memories of working with the older equivalent, Landform Panorama, which provided a good visualisation of terrain given the resolution. The same couldnt be said of Landform Profile which was derived from vector contour data and suffered from all sorts of artefacts. As the Terrain FAQ notes, the data have been produced photogrammetrically using stereo air photos entirely by OS. There is no third party data involved (aka the bastardization of Landform Profile Plus).

Terrain is clearly a new product and almost doesn't feature on the main terrain data page. I'm assuming this is a (very) new product, as its only on the FAQ page that we see mention of Terrain 5 which will be a 5m DEM to compare to NEXTMap amongst quite a few other products in the marketplace.

It's great to see OS bringing this to market, albeit a little late and I will be interested to play with T50 more - in particular if it is derived from the T5 product how was this done and is the "information content" actually potentially higher such that we could resample to better resolutions (e.g. Grohman and Steiner (2008))

Google Translate goes offline

Google Translate is an excellent service and so useful for many translation tasks. It really is the closest thing to the Babel Fish that we have. As with many Google services (although alas not Reader) it is available across mobile platforms and it is really good to see this being offered as an offline service for Android 2.3 and higher. That doesn't leave all those Gingerbread devices orphaned (and it still remains a very active platform), offering an extremely valuable service. Download!

Tablets in learning - not fit for purpose?

I'm actively involved in learning technologies both as my role as a lecturer (e.g. Livesribe pen and also as a school governor. One of the things I have been involved in is trialling the use of mobile phones for delivering learning of times tables and number bonds - nothing new in using an app to learn times tables, but when you roll this out to a class of children there are a variety of key considerations. Not least usability, cost and durability of the hardware platform. So you need to take account of the physical size of the child and the equipment and how they are going to use it, as well as the need (or not) for screen real estate - ergonomics are vital as this determines the ease with which people engage, use and learn. After that look at cost and durability.

Our conclusions? Tablets are ideal for *consuming* media due to the large screen size (both 7" and 10"). They are *poor* for interaction due to their large size, something that becomes worse the smaller the child gets. So, when you want interaction? A tablet is **NOT** the form factor to use - a 4" size device (aka smartphone or iPod). These are easy to handle, cheap (e.g. at O2) and (often) durable.

So why all the hubris over tablets? Good question and something Donald Clark covers, particularly on their total unsuitability for active learning, as well as how they can actually inhibit learning. Tablets are madness for serious active and creative learners - I'll say it again, they are for consumption not creation.

Yet again and again we see the tablet bandwagon being fuelled by nonsense such as Newscorp. What's more worrying is when so called charities start spouting this nonsense. As one headteacher recently said to me "they are not genuinely interested in school improvement or 1-2-1 pupil learning or they would be more analytical, more diverse and more innovative." In fact the drive for tablets in to schools seems to be driven by manufacturers hoping for a windfall in the same way the consumer market has moved, what it's not thinking about is actually what learners *need*. The scale of cost and replacement for these devices (e.g. Newscorp) is mind-boggling, particularly with the manufacturer tie in.

Manufacturers....please please design for the needs of the market. Look at what your customers need and make the best possible product you can for that.

Teachers....don't be taken in by the marketing spin (look at the number of defunct whiteboards!), but look at the genuine learning that takes place and credible successes where this has occurred. The image that immediately springs to mind was the BBC reporting on tablets rolled out to an entire school and showing them in a science lesson. Tablets, lab, children, teacher....and nothing else! Where was the science lesson? Was it watching it on the tablet?! This isn't active learning. BEWARE

Round 4 - need I say more??

VOTE!

EPoD Redux

Just can't get enough of a good thing!! I was trawling through some old photos and came across one of a small translational slide in Glen Ogle, Scotland. I asked Alan Dykes if he'd be willing to pen a few words which he kindly did and....

voila Glen Ogle Landslide.

New dawn for "geoservices"

For want of a better name (new cartography, neogeography, geoservices or maybe geomatics!!), Science has a nice article on the emergent importance of geo in the global economy and the subsequent requirement for suitably qualified employees, noting a ~35% predicted growth in workers in the US by 2020. That's pretty big! Worth also reading the linked Oxera report for Google on Geoservices.

Bright future ahead people!

LDCM First Images

Yes the LDCM first images are here - take a peek over at NASA

Saturn engines recovered

A pair of giant Saturn 5 rocket engines, used to launch the original US lunar missions from the 1960s have been recovered by a team sponsored by Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos. A real part of space history!

Clear explanation of changes to education in Central Bedfordshire......

Watch...listen....learn....

Did you understand that?? No, neither did I. As a follow-up to my blog on educational leadership in Central Bedfordshire, I wondered where we had got to in informing stakeholders of the (not) clear direction and structured approach to change that we have in Central Bedfordshire.... there is of course the classic flow chart which highlights the lunacy of the current situation (helpfully removed by CBC; perhaps not the best example of corporate communication).

So how does the corporate video stack up - besides the obvious lack of script and over-use of "err" and "umm" - there is virtually no content in the presentation at all, other than repeated reference to the changes in school structure that have been personally allowed by Mark Versallion.

I'm a big believer in clear communication - you have a message, make the communication simple so that it is effective and let the viewer go away knowing what that is. I'm baffled to know quite what this is aiming to achieve and my take home message is

Central Bedfordshire's policy on education is to sit back and watch

Earth Madness Round 3

This slipped under my radar, but round 3 of Earth Madness closes on Friday, so get your vote in before the deadline

QGIS Primer

OpenShift have a good post of using QGIS for loading spatial data and then does some spatial processing using Python and GDAL for import. Its a good primer and forms part of a series on open source spatial - part 1 looked at spatial data

Goodbye Google.......

Google's announcement that they are killing off Google Reader seems to have been met with dismay, including a petition to the federal government in the US (and the ubiqutous Hitler meme below)! However a far more reflective piece was written by Ruper Goodwins at The Guardian - the "do-ers" on the internet use Reader and its a huge mistake to kill it. It was the one Google location I found myself frequenting and it integrated really well with Chrome browser and the native Android apps.

Now though it's time to say goodbye to Google. Yup, I'll happily use the android smartphone and tablet, when search gets tricky I'll come back to you, but you've largely become superfluous to requirements, the Wal-Mart of IT that just hits the middle ground.

There are alternatives to Reader with several services (Feedly, Digg) expected to bring a reader to market by July - and its certainly useful to have the integrated Android/iOS apps, but I spend most of my time digesting RSS feeds in the browser. So.... there appear to be no RSS reader extensions for Chrome so that got me looking back at portable Firefox - and Bamboo Feed Reader. There are a few rough edges but by-and-large Im happy with it. And the rest of Firefox? I'm actually amazed at how fast the user experience is - certainly faster than Chrome.

So there we have it, no contest - Chrome is now ditched, I have a feed reader and I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Au revoir, it was nice whilst the party lasted - I'm happy with your morphing in to Wal-Mart, I just don't need your one size fits all approach.

Proprietary data silos

.....and the moral of the story is.....

.....don't lock your data away in proprietary silos. The quotation at the end is fabulous: " A person seeking public records should expect to pay the price for copying the records, but not the price for a public entity�s mistake in purchasing inefficient software."

Burren in TimeLapse

A simply stunning set of time lapse photos taken with a Canon M5D Mk2/3 using a DIY rig to move the camera with a rising/falling rail. Make it full screen watch and be inspired.

Deleting multiple blank cells in Excel

I was doing some straight forward data management in Excel today and had gone through a long list of items and deleted a number of them..... you're then left with a list of items with blanks in it! This is a familiar problem and many people end manually going through the list to remove them.

There are two simple solutions in this situation, both based around the idea that you want to create a selection of the data items you DO and DON'T want.

Select Blank Cells
(thanks to WikiHow for prompting this one)

1. Create a selection of the area that contains the empty rows you want to delete
2. Press Ctrl+G (GoTo)
3. Choose Advanced (or Special depending on version) and then select "Blanks" (this will select all the blanks in the column selected)
4. Right click on one of the selected cells and select "Delete" 5. Choose "Delete entire row"

Sort Cells
1. Select the entire range of cells for your data (not just a single column)
2. Goto Data -> Sort and sort the column using any sort criteria (e.g. A to Z) 3. Blank rows will be moved to the bottom of the sorted range

Get Voting: round 2!

.....Round 2 at Earth Madness 2013

UAVs and the law

UAVs are starting to the hit the big time with everything geospatial and are driving a hardware, data and software revolution along the way (more in later posts, but think open-source designs, open source software, massive datasets). However their use in most western countries is tightly regulated - and rightly so. If someone is deploying a flying vehicle weighing several kilos that can fly at 30+ kmh then you'd like to think that it's safely done. And that is perhaps where KAP has some advantages... it is tethered, relatively safe and in many locales unregulated.

And this is where many nations are starting to ponder the UAV conundrum.....New Hampshire is looking at extreme restriction which all but negates any use of UAVs. I wonder how many other countries/states will follow suit?

Get Voting!

.....at Earth Madness 2013 (and read some of the linked stories to each image; they are good)

iSERV.....

.....no, not another Apple product (although I'm sure the lawyers letter is waiting), but actually ISERV is a joint NASA/USAID product developed by SERVIR. Its an engineering proof-of-concept combining a commercial camera, telescopy and point system mounted on the Earth-side of the International Space Station (and linked to the ISS orientation and position). And, quoting from their website:

"Acting on commands from the ground, it can photograph specific areas of the Earth's surface as the space station passes over them. Pathfinder is primarily an engineering exercise to help scientists gain valuable information about how a more capable future instrument might operate. But hopes are for a future system, and perhaps even ISERV Pathfinder itself, to provide imagery and data to help officials in developing nations monitor impacts of disasters such as floods, landslides, and forest fires. Its images could also help decision-makers address other environmental issues."

Think of it as the imaging system of an Earth monitoring satellite, but bolted on the ISS providing a very cheap method for obtaining relatively high resolution imagery (upto 2.8m). I couldn't see specfications for the actual engineering, but I'm assuming its something like a Nikon D4 or D800 that will shoot in RGB. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how testing and acquisition develops.

OS Past and Present

Nice pair of contrasting videos about OS - the first a modern promo video from the OS itself which is very glossy but actually tells you very little about the organisation and the second from Pathe news in the 1950s which is cringingly dated, such as "It used to take two men a whole year to do the map making mathematics that these adding machines and electronic computers can do in an afternoon with a girl to help!" However it does show you the full map making process in 3 minutes - quite a feat!

Swansea Trip: 1:40 shows the use f plane tabling!

Earth Madness 2013

From NASAs Earth Observatory:

"Thirty-two will vie for the title, but only one can be the winner. They are the best Earth images of the year, the top 32 from 2012. But which ones will be good enough to survive head-to-head competition? From March 4 through April 5, Earth Observatory readers can vote for their favorite images of the year, whittling the total from 32 to 16 to 8 to 4 to 2 in a tournament of remote sensing science. The competition will be stiff in the four brackets � Earth at Night, Events, Data, and True-Color � so it is up to you to separate the winners from the losers. Come back each week to vote in the next round and help us choose a winner.

Voting starts Monday, March 4, so print a copy of the bracket, fill it out, and get that workplace pool going. Come back every Monday to vote and watch the results."

Go to the bracket....

DON'T WAIT....DO IT!

Software agnosticism

Nice post from James Fee on software agnosticism..... and yes, we all too regularly build an ArcGIS script to find it no longer works in a new version or hasn't been updated by a third party. And yes, the answer is don't use them!!! However as I am also doing (some work with Niels Anders), move to Python and do you geospatial processing there, then call from within ArcGIS. You even have Portable Python so no excuse for being tied to a workstation.

Tristan da Cunha

Great astronaut photo of Tristan da Cunha. Nearest neighbour? St Helena, 2,730 km away! More at Wikipedia.

Uninstalling apps from your Android ROM

Sick and tired of the crap and bloatware that invades the version of Android on your phone but can't remove they because they are built in to the ROM? this may be the ROM that shipped with your phone or one that you installed, but with budget phones shipping with budget amounts of memory every MB counts.

So I got to the point with my San FranII where I needed to free up space and didn't use bloatware like YouTube, Mail (replaced with k9mail) and even Google Maps (MapDroyd). How to get rid of them? Well, first and foremost your phone needs to be rooted.... then it's a case of finding an app that will do what it says on the tin. After a few false starts I stumbled across Root App Delete which just works.

Root App Delete allows you to identify all user and system installed apps...these can be disabled which moves them to the recycle bin. They are still there but inactive.....this is slightly counterintuitive, but actually very helpful because once gone...they really are and you don't want to go removing something central to the OS (like the launcher!). If you are dead sure you want to get rid of it, uninstall from the recycle bin and "ta da", it's gone freeing up valuable space in memory.

Get some Oomf(o) in your presentations.....

Have you ever been watching a TED talk and wondered how they got that cool dynamic chart? Did someone slave for hours over a long Flash animation? Well, I can't vouch for other speakers, but Oomfo, which is in a Google-esque long-term beta, provides such an option. It's an add-in for Powerpoint that allows you to dump data in to the presentation and produce animated/dynamic charts, depending on the data type. This could be as simple as a rather stylish histogram with bars that grow, interactive pie charts that you can get dynamic labels/rotate/resize, fully interactive 3D plots or an infinite x-axis which is fully scrollable. The effects are excellent and, as ever, its not about the design replacing the content, but augmenting it and adding elements the surprise and delight, whilst reinforcing your message.

Try it!

Landsat EO IotD

Continuing coverage.....