How to do well in a PhD viva
After a brief chat this week with a student about an upcoming viva I thought I would list some of the useful pieces of advice from my own viva (thanks to Ian Evans for a pleasant experience!) and some recent students:
be honest
its a 2-way conversation. Talk about your work
its better without your supervisor. It also means that if theyve made a bad project decision you can happily blame them!
its quite nice at the beginning of discussing each chapter to actually point out any mistakes you've spotted
make sure you references are totally spot on
Im sure there are others so feel free to add to them.
posted on: Fri, 05 Sep | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Sony London Underground
These images did the rounds a few weeks back, but I really like them. As part of Sony's advertising campaign for the Walkman they have produce various underground maps in the style of a set of headphones. In Sony fashion, they are understated but really rather pleasing on the eye. Worth a look.
posted on: Fri, 05 Sep | path: /fun | permanent link to this entry
Maps that Matter
Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins had a really good PPT running in the foyer of the RGS-IBG last week (related to the "Maps as Method" session) called "Maps that Matter."...
posted on: Wed, 03 Sep | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
Google Chrome
If you've been living on another planet for the last 24 hours then you might just have missed Google's typically understated announcement that they are releasing a new web browser called Chrome, designed to meet the deficiences in Firefox, IE and Opera....
posted on: Tue, 02 Sep | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Google Maps and Academic Mashups
During the "Maps as Method" sessions at the RGS-IBG last week, there were a surprising number of people talking about using Google Maps and Google Earth in mashups....
posted on: Tue, 02 Sep | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
OS Trumped
Just returned from a pleasant day at the RGS-IBG annual conference. An event well worth attending as its mellow and covers a range of subjects. However it is largely colonised by human geographers, a strange breed. Thats not for want of the RGS trying to get physical geographers involved... Time will tell.
Anyway the OS are one the of the primary (platinum?!) sponsors of the RGS (along with Land Rover and Rolex from memory). So the map of the venue, and how to get to it, prominantly displayed on the back cover of the abstracts naturally used
Open Street Map data. Nice one!
posted on: Fri, 29 Aug | path: /meetings | permanent link to this entry
C5 Aviator
I have a habit of destroying watches and, over the years, have always ended up coming back to my old trusty Casio Flight Planner....
posted on: Thu, 28 Aug | path: /fun | permanent link to this entry
Getting things done...
I've been an advocate of the Getting Things Done (GTD) for a number of years now. In a management era that seems to be defined by self-organization manuals, this one stands out from the crowd by its relatively simple explanation of why things don't get done and how to go about rectifying the situation....
posted on: Mon, 25 Aug | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Maximising the benfits of publication
As Editor of the Journal of Maps, I've recently been chatting to the British Geological Survey about the potential for publishing some maps....
posted on: Fri, 22 Aug | path: /publications | permanent link to this entry
TagCrowd
Came acrossTagCrowd today which is an interesting service that analyses a piece of text and provides a visual cue as to the types of words and their frequency....
posted on: Thu, 07 Aug | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
NGA Coastline Data
I came across the NGA Prototype Global Shoreline Data, otherwise known as NGA PGS, after a link from the EVS Islands Project. This seems to be one of the best (freely available!) world datasets around at the moment. Its derived from LANDSAT 7 (GeoCover) multi-spectral imagery and uses the Short-Wave Infra-Red (SWIR) bands to define the land water interface to about 50m. Gaps are in the dataset due to cloud, snow and ice (~10%). Well worth a look!
posted on: Fri, 01 Aug | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
Modelling urban changes: Mastermap is the solution you can't use
I have been involved in a project looking at detecting urban change from radar imagery and, specifically, the building and demolition of buildings....
posted on: Tue, 29 Jul | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
ArcView 3.x is alive and kicking
GIS Lounge have a nice article entitled Why ArcView 3.x is Still in Use. And the funny thing is that it describes (by inference) all the problems with AV3 and then goes on to say why it can still be better than ArcMap. Not really a glowing recommendation for ESRI. And yes, incredibly poor performance, high overheads of implementation, draconian licensing and the arse-about-face way of doing things. Yup, it is usually quicker to do things in ArcView 3.x (create a new shapefile, delete vertices etc etc).
posted on: Wed, 23 Jul | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
ArcGIS Terrains
ESRI have been busy bees in the 3D geospatial world and one of the "new" features in ArcGIS 9.2 (OK, I know 9....
posted on: Tue, 22 Jul | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
SoftGIS?
OK, its actually SoftGrid and ArcGIS. Bought by Microsoft recently, softgrid provides a virtualisation environment where you can "push" an application across a network to a client sitting on a PC....
posted on: Fri, 18 Jul | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
Mobile broadband speeds
For those that have taken advantage of the tumbling subscription rates for mobile broadband through the likes of 3, T-Mobile etc (as cheap as £5 per month), the different data rates might prove a little confusing....
posted on: Thu, 17 Jul | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Firefox 3 and addons
I've finally taken the plunge and upgraded to Firefox 3, although through the portableapps.com route....
posted on: Tue, 15 Jul | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Engaging students
OK, so there are potentially cognitive thresholds which inhibit the progression of (willing!) students in their learning....
posted on: Thu, 10 Jul | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
A better way...
The Free Our Data Campaign report on the Show Us a Better Way "competition" from the e Power of Information Taskforce. In short, getting people to come up with good ideas for the use of public data. What's nice that they have a brief list of data available and have posted new datasets. Makes for interesting reading even if you don't post any ideas!
posted on: Tue, 08 Jul | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
NERC FSF
I spent a day this week at the NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility receiving some training in the use of a GER1500 that is being used to study loess profiles....
posted on: Sun, 06 Jul | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Geomorphological definitions
I came across a recent USGS publication today, Annotated Definitions of Selected Geomorphic Terms and Related Terms of Hydrology, Sedimentology, Soil Science and Ecology. This is a geomorphologically focussed "dictionary", although there is a bias towards fluvial environments. Possibly not as useful as the Penguin Dictionary of Physical Geography but none-the-less well worth a look at and with a more inter-disciplinary focus.
posted on: Thu, 03 Jul | path: /glaciology | permanent link to this entry
Cognitive Thresholds
I was at the Middlesex University Teaching and Learning Conference today where one of the keynote presentations was given by Sandy Gilkes from the University of Nottingham....
posted on: Tue, 01 Jul | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Reviewers: an editors nightmare (or "Your can't live with em...")
I'm just completing a moderately busy spring season at the Journal of Maps which has left me feeling a little battle worn....
posted on: Tue, 17 Jun | path: /publications | permanent link to this entry
Underlying geospatial algorithms
I was completing a project this week that used, in-part, a tensioned spline to interpolate across an area with no data points....
posted on: Sat, 14 Jun | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
IR-pen again...
After my last post on using the Wiimote as part of an interactive whiteboard, and the follow-up on building an IR pen, I have now found that it is not quite so easy to get ahold of as I thought....
posted on: Wed, 11 Jun | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Bibliographies and referencing
Referencing is a bit of a black art in universities and something we try to drum in from the first year....
posted on: Sun, 08 Jun | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Extracting images from MS Office documents
For quite a while image handling in MS Office has bugged me. Its never been particularly great for two reasons:
1....
posted on: Mon, 02 Jun | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
WinGRASS is finally here
It's had a quiet announcement (over a month ago actually) but WinGRASS is finally here. Since its inception in 1983, GRASS has never run natively on Windows and this, in part, has limited its application by a wider audience. To be fair, it can run very well on most modern Linux distributions, but its not quite the same. And it can run on Windows under Cygwin, just not natively. Note that, as per Linux releases, odd point increments (v6.3 in this instance) are considered beta versions in preparation for full "even" releases (the upcoming 6.4 and eventually 7.0). So download and have a play as the capabilities are remarkable.
posted on: Fri, 30 May | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
Foxit PDF Read 2.3
A new version of Foxit PDF Reader has been released and whilst on the face of it it only appears to be an incremental update, the big news is that it now offers full audio/video support for PDFs....
posted on: Fri, 16 May | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
LED IR Pen
As a follow up to the recent blog on the Wiimote interactive whiteboard, you will need an IR LED pen for the Wiimote to track. You can obviously dust off your soldering iron and build your own pen, or follow this painless and easy tutorial!!
posted on: Wed, 14 May | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Wii-moting
I came across Johnny Chung Lee's Wii remote projects this week. And, well... they blew me away!! Have a look at the 3 YouTube videos and you will see how understanding what hardware is in the Wii remote, with a little lateral thinking, can develop some astounding results. The fact that no games designers had actually thought of head tracking is amazing because the demo is cool beyond belief. If we don't see any games on the shelves that use these ideas in the next 6 months then I'll east my hat! And, from the teaching perspective, having a portable, low-cost, interactive whiteboard is brilliant. I'm building my LED pen as we speak!!
posted on: Tue, 13 May | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Worst presentation moments?
I thought lecturers in HE had some pretty funny teaching moments (I remember one lecturer writing on an overhead projector and then stopping, going white. He had just realised there was no acetate on the projector and he was using a permanent marker!), but anything we can do, Microsoft can do better. Have a look at this page for some really very funny moments in the life of an IT consultant.
posted on: Thu, 08 May | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Open Access Journal Publication: implementation, copyright and dissemination, using the Journal of Maps as a case study
Smith, M.J.
Digital Mapping Techniques, Columbia, South Carolina
Open access (OA) journals are rapidly becoming an important channel for publishing academic articles and, although they represent a small proportion of the total number of journals published annually, it is significant that organisations such as British Medical Journals (BMJ) operate in this manner. This article explores the broad implementation of OA journals, issues pertaining to copyright and the distribution of (geospatial) research data.
posted on: Wed, 16 Apr | path: /publications/proceedings | permanent link to this entry
Glacial striae observations for Ireland compiled from historic records
Smith, M.J., Knight, J. and Field, K.
Digital Mapping Techniques, Columbia, South Carolina
Glacial landform mapping is one of the primarily inputs for the reconstruction of past glacial environments and processes, potentially inferring maximum ice sheet extent, primary ice flow configurations, and ice sheet dynamics....
posted on: Wed, 16 Apr | path: /publications/proceedings | permanent link to this entry
High spatial resolution data acquisition for the geosciences: kite aerial photography
Smith, M.J., Chandler, J. and Rose, J.
Earth Surface Processes and Landforms
This paper highlights the requirement for very high resolution (<0....
posted on: Wed, 16 Apr | path: /publications/journals | permanent link to this entry
Enter Plan B
I came across Donald Clark's Plan B blog blog recently and have been both impressed, and quite amused by mahy of his musings....
posted on: Wed, 16 Apr | path: /fun | permanent link to this entry
Geotat for a geot*at (or maybe that should be a geowanker!)
Following on from the last blog on the Geo8 trade show and, in particular, following on from the last AGI Tat Awards, I would like to announce the formal re-inauguration of the official, unofficial, Geo8 Tat Awards, or simply GeoTat (for those American readers the title might be lost on you....
posted on: Fri, 11 Apr | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
Geo8: the new GIS trade show?
Since the demise of the AGI Trade Show in 2006, I've felt that there has been somewhat of a void in the GIS industry....
posted on: Thu, 10 Apr | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
1st year field trip to Swansea
I've just got back from our first year geography field trip to the Gower Peninsula. Designated the first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1949, development is limited and so it is relatively unspoilt and quite wild....
posted on: Sat, 05 Apr | path: /meetings | permanent link to this entry
"My point buffers are't round." "No problem sir, that is an ArcMap design feature."
One of my MSc students was recently completing a piece of coursework that required finding a solution to a spatial task, part of which involved the creation of buffers....
posted on: Wed, 02 Apr | path: /GIS | permanent link to this entry
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