Spaced-OoooO-Out

Inkscape

It's now new, however for those not in the know Inkscape is the grand-daddy of open-source vector graphics software. There is a strong and continuous development cycle and whilst it is still going to be sometime before a full version 1 release is available, it is an impressively featured and powerful piece of software. As ever, its downloadable as cross-platform and available on Windows as a portable version. It has a extension architecture that supports an ever expanding set of functions.

There is no better advert for a product like this than the images it can produce..... take a look at the Inkscape Tutorials Blog and Open Clip Art library (although not all are created with Inkscape on the latter). I've used Inkscape on-and-off for a while (including for DTP jobs where I find it more intuitive and powerful than Scribus, although maybe I need to spend some more time with the latter!) but thought I'd follow one of the tutorials to produce something, so I plumped for the coffee cup with the results below.... OK, it's hardly going to win anything, but the results are impressive for a relatively straightforward tutorial (besides the crappy handle.... just never quite seem to be able to crack bezier curves). Worth a gentle introduction and keeping tabs on the manual me thinks.

Are you out there?? Andy Wilson GIS MSc (09-11)

Andy (or someone still in touch with him!), wondered if you could get in touch. cheers mike

Conference: Objective Geomorphological Representation Models

The IAG/AIG WG on Apllied Geomorphological Mapping (http://www.appgema.net/), together with the Italian Association of Physical Geography and Geomorphology (AIGEO), the University of Salerno, with the support of National Park Cilento and Vallo di Diano, and Geoparks are organizing an International Workshop on "Objective Geomorphological Representation Models: Breaking through a New Geomorphological Mapping Frontier" on 15-19 October 2012, in the Salerno University Campus, Italy. This comes as a natural follow up on the recently published book 'Geomorphological Mapping methods and applications' edited by the AppGeMa IAG WG.

Four renowned Key Note Lectures, oral and poster session will be hold, and a field excursion to discuss the geomorphological mapping of a landslide on the coast of the Tyrrhenian sea (Cilento and Vallo di Diano Geopark).

More information and the registration form are available on the IAG website http://www.geomorph.org/main.html

Deadlines Summary:
Registration August 31, 2012
Abstract submission June 30, 2012
Abstract acceptance July 31, 2012

Looking forward to seeing you in Salerno!

NDVI Differencing

During my remote sensing class in the fall term I cover some introductory level image processing techniques that can be used in quite profound ways. If we have a multi-spectral image with each layer imaging the Earth at different wavelengths, how can we manipulate that? Well, one very common technique is a ratio (divide one wavelength by another), giving you the proportion of variation of one layer relative to another. Where this is powerful is when you have two diagnostic wavelengths unique to your surface of interest (e.g. green and red), with very large differences in reflectance. This allows you identify very subtle variations in your target wavelengths. For vegetation, green and NIR are ideal wavelengths and the Ratio Vegetation Index does this. However its not comparable to other RVI measurements (and can vary to infinity), so its common to normalise (i.e. look at the range rather than absolute values) this calculation, a measurement called the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index. This gives you the amount of "greenness" and is calculated operationally as a product for many satellites. Its powerful for monitoring vegetation and is used extensively for things like crop-management and deforestation.

On their own, many of these techniques offer significant insights about the environment. However in combination, they allow you to perform complex tasks and create greater understanding. Another common process is to subtract two images at different time periods allowing you see the change that has occurred; very effective for temporal analysis. And, of course, when combined with the NDVI you get to see change in vegetation through time.

What kicked this blog entry off was a really good NASA Image of the Day which shows the dramatic effect of drought and decreasing vegetation in Spain. For robustness the NDVI average over a 16-day period this spring is taken and then subtracted from the overall average. Using the data the USDA have been able to estimate the yield and therefore the shortfall in harvest against need and so the approximate requirement for import. For me, it is this simple work that shows the importance of operational remote sensing at an international, national, regional and even individual level. It affects everyone.

Geoscience Data Journal

Paolo also pinged me a link to the Geoscience Data Journal, published by Wiley under open access. Data publication is close to my heart (and Journal of Maps) and something I have blogged about before here, here and here. With so much digital data we are in a generation that may end up losing lots of it. This is not something that has gone unnoticed by libraries, governments or research councils, as well as societies. As a result there are various subject-based or more broad brush clearing houses for maintained data and outputs from limited-life projects. At the tail end of "limited-life" you have funded and unfunded research. Wiley clearly think GDJ is worth a punt in that it is targeting the whole geoscience community with the USP that as an author you garner a peer-reviewed publication and that your data becomes citable and widely available. This is something we have supported at JoM and published about our citation strategies more recently. In short we enable citation of authors, secondary authors, map authors and data authors.

Data citation in other disciplines (e.g. physics)is more common due to the nature of reproducible research and the need to re-test initial findings. So this is nothing but a good move and with the journal open to submissions it will be interesting to see what the first few issues look like. Papers are intended to be short (1200-6000 words) and have the dataset deposited with an "approved" repository ("one that can mint a DOI, is commonly used by the scientific community it supports and has a formal data management policy"). It's this latter point that is the killer.... there are only 2 UK based repositories. These things do need to grow organically, but given the Ed board has an international membership one would have hoped for slightly wider coverage to encourage submission. Anyway, you have to start somewhere (and JoM is a nice example of that) and they have the support of a publisher, repositories and a top-class Ed board. Watch that space....

The king is dead (again).....

.....long live the king. And a few more days counting until the Sentinels launch.

Imaggeo geosci image library

A nice catch from Paolo (thanks!) at EGU last month was the launch of Imaggeo which is an open access geoscience image library. All the images are interesting and range from stunning through to poor quality (but none-the-less interesting). Some historical some modern and, increasingly, something for everyone. If you are giving that lecture and suddenly realise you need that image of a pingo (actually, for the time being you'll have to go to Wikipedia because they don't have that image). However the library is new (everything licensed under Creative Commons which is nice to see) and growing.... it'd be nice if they put the total number of the front page, but if you go to the Sections page you'll get an idea of how many (about 1300 at the moment).

The king is dead......

.....long live the king. 262 days and counting to the launch of LDCM.

Battery charging best practice

A good pick-up from the Guardian on battery charging with this summary salutory advice:

What does all this mean in practical terms? Unless you have specific instructions from the manufacturer to the contrary, you probably can leave a device plugged in if it is truly off. Otherwise, you probably should not leave it plugged in for much more than an hour after the �fully charged� indicator comes on. This gives you the greatest chance of giving your battery the longest life possible. This may not matter for a device that you are going to replace every year or two anyway � such as a cell phone � but for devices that you intend to keep for several years, such as a laptop or tablet, you may want to be more conservative in your recharging practices.

Repeat to remember.....

....it's a well worn mantra. Repeat something over-and-over to remember it (or, shout longer and louder and people will believe you!). In fact its one of of the "Brain Rules" and spaced repetition is a well known phenomena. Donald Clark covered Kandel recently which provides a nice biological context for long-term memorisation (something experimentally shown by Ebbinghaus over a century ago).

Yet as Donald notes, spaced repetition is largely ignored in training and education, although it is more endemic in primary schools where numeracy and literacy are core skills that are practised over and over. I would argue that this draws on historical norms, that repeated practise has always been done. There isn't really an appreciation of spaced repetition which could be used more powerfully. Anyway, a nice quote from Donald on Kandel:

Learning, for Kandel, is the ability to acquire new ideas from experience and retain them as memories (a simple fact often overlooked).

So now we have a differentiation between learning (as in the acquisition of new knowledge/skills) and education (preparation for life). It is perhaps arguable as to whether learning is simply knowledge acquisition.... knowledge is cheap (aka wikipedia), but the skills to use knowledge aren't and that's where successful people and business make a mark. However I would strongly argue that a "scaffold" of core/essential knowledge is vital to hang further learning off. A well-worn example is the memorisation of times-tables to make further mathematical understanding easier. So, spaced repetition is a powerful technique in learning that is largely unused and essential to build in to a curriculum.

FOSS - 2012, alt update

A nice list of FOSS software, with a particular focus upon geoscience and academia. Everyone will find something new and useful both in the main list and also the comments (good pickup from GoGeo).

Some of the new picks for me included Shotwell (wish there was still a Windows port) and SQL Manager (a Firefox extension). The latter is particularly useful where you want to store structured data in a database that you can use SQL queries on. And the following two catches are quite interesting: tutorial on creating maps in R and Natural Earth data.

What is education for?

A seemingly innocuous question that is thornier to answer than you might think..... indeed, what *is* education for? Thinking historically, there is an element of child protection related to the implementation of mass education for all. Try to reduce child labour. If you take a more behavourist view of history, then it was also a means by which the labour force could be trained for the industrial employment market. However, in a 21st Century education system, what are we actually trying to achieve? Before you can think about school organisational systems and curricula, you need to know what it is you are trying to achieve. And thinking about the massive changes in schools at the moment, Academies, Free Schools etc etc, what are these intended to do (and, in true Ken Robinson style, don't say "raise standards". Everyone automatically wants to do that, but what standards?!).

I mentioned this to a group of 21-25 year olds recently and got a sea of blank faces..... to "teach" was the mantra. Donald Clark, in his 50-blog marathon, has written about John White who has spent a considerable amount of his career on (and off) the topic. He uses "autonomy" as the central underpinning reason and, to quote Donald,:

"Autonomy, not reason or any other end, is chosen, as it defines, in terms of the self, what one must learn to be a fully functional adult in a complex world. In this sense it avoids the narrow strictures of an inflexible, over-academic curriculum, but it widens education out to deal with the individual as a rounded functioning being. The learner needs to avoid being the slave to desire but also being a slave to a given authority.

His alternative is an education that promotes rational, freedom of choice. The curriculum therefore needs to foster moral, intellectual, financial and practical autonomy to allow people to lead happy, healthy, lives, form relationships, cook, find jobs and think for themselves. The system is stuck in a mode that allows the people who benefit most, the middle-class, to defend its outmoded values, as it has served them well."

If you haven't done so already, take a look at Shift Happens (and the different YouTube versions). This gives a nice media based idea to the challenges facing children as they move to transition to the modern employment market. It's drastically different from the one I inherited. And in this sense White's philosophical argument is strong. A pure academic focus (organisation/curricula) is outdated, outmoded and ill-equips children for the future. We need to move to something that really meets the needs of state and child for the future. If you were to simplify this down, you would like to produce economically useful people (to the state), who are happy and can operate successfully in a modern culture. That incorporates all the entities identified above. If we start from this basis, how would we organise our schools?

Envisat still in trouble.....

The Envisat mission still remains suspended with the satellite still unresponsive to communications. Great image of the satellite from Pleiades which shows there has been no substantive damage. The search goes on....

Envisat in trouble

Not to be outdone by NASA, the European Space Agency now has it's own satellite in trouble, Envisat. Like Landsat, Envisat has done sterling service (10 years in fact) in monitoring the Earth. It's the biggest EO satellite ever launched and has a sophisticated range of sensors on board. Anyway, another "watch this space"....

Office 2003 End-of-Life

Aggghhhhhhhhhhh..... Microsoft announced end-of-life for Office 2003 this week. Come on guys, I've only just upgraded from Office 97

;)

North Korea's Satellite Ambitions....

....ended up in the Yellow Sea. Hopefully the rocket launch in North Korea hasn't escaped people's attention over the last week, not least because of the diplomatic tensions it has caused and the potential for using this launch as a test for the development of ballistic missiles. Anyway, the "reason" for the launch was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-Sung and to place an EO satellite in to orbit. Jonathan Amos has a nice piece highlighting the difficulties in rocket launch and satellite development.

Landsat MSS back online!

And here we have it.... Landsat MSS is officially back online and collecting data (see earlier blog). According to the news item this is the first time in over a decade MSS has been collecting data and we have a raw image of, well, somewhere, to prove it. What that space.

Wellcome Trust goes OA - academic publishing and the future

An interesting story over at the BBC about the Wellcome Trust publishing it's own open access journal, eLife. It's good to see this debate becoming ever more public, a topic I've covered before, and again. Unfortunately it's quite a complex topic and the BBC article is quite narrowly focused which doesn't really do justice to covering it fully. Something that does need to be done.

In short you could probably summarise it as:

1. WHY: researchers need to publish as part of their annual appraisal, the better the journal, the better your standing as an academic ..... O, and because you want to inform your colleagues and wider academic community of your research and findings. Let's not forget that the government is the primary driver in metric driven accountability through the Research Excellence Framework, a game which universities are more than happy to play.

2. HOW: a journal is established in a topic area with the sole purpose of publishing relevant material. Authors send an article in which is then peer-reviewed and, if accepted, typeset and published (in print, electronically or both). That is the service they provide.

3. FUNDING: we have a mish-mash of funding models for publishing research, but they boil down to reader pays, author pays or free. The dominance of model will depend upon the subject area.
(a) Reader pays (subscription) is perhaps the most common (it would be interesting to see statistics on the mix of journal funding models though) - authors can submit as many papers as they want which are then peer-reviewed. Anything actually published has to be purchased by the reader, much like a book and this is where universities come back in, buying subscriptions to journals.
(b) In the author pays model, the author has to pay a fee (typically in the region of $2,000+) for an article to be peer-reviewed. It is not guaranteed publication and can be rejected at this stage. The journal makes its published material freely available with no subscription.
(c) Free - actually this dosen't exist, so let's dispel that myth. Publishing a journal costs money - the editorial office, peer-review management, managing editors, marketing, copy editing, typesetting, printing and web dissemination. Someone, somewhere, has to pay. You can of course have it cross-subsidised so that neither author nor reader.

So where does that leave the Wellcome Trust? Well here's a few salient points:

1. Copyright - the publisher holds copyright in the typeset physical representation, the journal in the as-accepted physical representation. Not the work itself.
2. Paywall - (publicly funded) research work is hidden behind a "purchase to read" paywall. This is partly true - yes, you do have to purchase an individual article, but the copyright rests in the typeset version. The author can still disseminate the "knowledge" widely (which they do through posters and presentations at conferences).
3. The accusation of excessive profit, monopoly and a cage on knowledge is acceptable, at least in part. Some journals are excessively expensive and published with the sole purpose of profit. This isn't a route we want to go down and Wellcome Trust are attempting to change this element, which is good.
4. Journals cost money to publish! Someone, somewhere, has to pay for this service to be performed and the product delivered.

What is the best model? Well there isn't one, as it will be subject and market specific. As such there won't be a sticky plaster, one-size-fits-all, answer. For well funded subjects such as physics, engineering or medicine, open access where the author pays is neat and simple. It can also make a profound difference where literally life-saving work can be disseminated widely.

However if you move out of this area to less well-funded subjects (which receive little or no government funding) and things become more difficult. With no government subsidy on publication, and the unit cost (the published page) still the same, how do you fund a journal? The obvious answer is subscriptions (i.e. reader pays). Yes, I do object to excessive costs by publishers, but that is a slightly different debate and an area where publishers can be directly questioned. The worry from areas such as geography and history, is that a government move to OA will, literally, kill-off journals and profoundly impact the health of the subjects they serve. This is a serious debate beyond public access to knowledge which needs to be acknowledged, flagged and taken up.

Far side of the moon - photos taken by kids

Great news story over at Earth Observatory - wonderful way of engaging kids in science.

Gatewing bought by Trimble

Hot on the heels of Geo12, Trimble announced yesterday that it had acquired Gatewing (an industry comment here).

An interesting move that really ups-the-ante and brings small drones in to the arena of major mapping. Clearly Trimble not only wants a piece of this pie, but to actively develop it in to markets where it already provides terrestrial solutions that this can add to. And I bet Gatewing founders are sitting on a nice big healthy pile of cash which is nice for 4 years work (well, and some, because they were working on it before then). A good success story and also showing how much potential low altitude aerial photography (LAAP) and photogrammetry are showing at the moment.

KAPping in Delft

I've just spent a couple of days delivering an introduction to KAP for MSc students at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft. More specifically it was a series of lectures, fieldwork and practical around this topic area, but starting more generally introducing aerial photography, providing some definitions, history and a broad-brush starter. This led in to photointerpretation and stereoscopy, a topic seemingly missing from most geography related undergrad and postgrad programmes. It's almost anti-tech, yet is one of those skill areas I frequently find myself revisiting. Lectures on day one finished with an introduction to low altitude platforms and some of the recent applications before we focused on KAP and then introduced the kit itself. After lunch we headed out to Zandmotor, the beach area that my colleague Paron Paron is currently using KAP to trial monitoring.

Yet again I have managed to visit the Netherlands when there is virtually no wind! There was slightly more than last time so we managed to fly the kite, but I only had my smaller Sutton Flowform so no chance in flying the camera. Next time I will bring the lightweight rig and compact camera. The morning of day 2 saw a brief introduction to photogrammetry and then a practical using both a standard vertical air photo set and a KAP photo set performing aero-triangulation in LPS.

All in all a very good two days and Delft is a very pretty location.

Open UK rail timetables

This is what open data is really all about... although overnight success might make the server a bit... laggy!

Txt polls.....

It's good to bring a little more interactivity in to talks and presentations, particularly where you want to generate some feedback, produce discussion points or gauge audience consensus. In an analogue world we might use a questionnaire, perhaps at the beginning of a class, and then feedback the results at the end. If it was distance learning or over a longer period of time we might consider a Delphi Probe. In a digital world we can take advantage of instant feedback to generate interactivity in class: these are generically called personal response systems (PRS) which use either IR or radio "clickers" to register a response to a question on screen. However you need to set the kit up or have them permanently installed, all of which is a faff or too expensive. As a result I've never much bothered with them. However the alternative is.... sitting in your pocket! Yes, the mobile phone offers by far the simplest and easiest solution, through txting. This isn't new and txting is being used in an increasingly varied number of interesting applications, however it is reaching a certain level of critical mass.

I use the PollEverywhere service which is simple, efficient and effective. I can set up free form or multiple choice questions and, the killer output, a live graph on the screen that updates in realtime (either through their website or integrated in to your PPT presentation). The majority of people are happy to participate either because txts are free or they want to participate. PollEverywhere is free up to a 30 participant event then you have to pay. Good for lectures though and you can export results if you want to. Well worth experimenting with.

The Guardian: Data Visualisation 101

The Guardian have been forging ahead with the whole "data journalism" area (and I guess I should mention their book!!) and have been doing a remarkable job in ferreting out interesting datasets, finding links/stories (and lets face it, The Telegraph's MP expenses story doesn't really get any bigger, and it was all data), developing online visualisations and making the data available. It's a fascinating area and one the deserves to be developed much more extensively.

Two recent columns are worth highlighting: firstly the Open Data Weekend which features a couple of useful presentations and then a slightly longer, more focused, write-up of the online services they use for visualisation. Well worth a read.

Podcasts for learning

Donald Clark wrote a good blog entry on the usefulness of audio, listening and podcasts for learning. Not least the ability to rapidly re-review, take notes and at faster playback. This all makes sense to me and I like catching up on audio shows, as well as TED videos, when on the move.

And a smartphone makes a lot of sense here in that you can subscribe to RSS feeds and download audio whilst on the move. You can even play back audio whist it is still downloading. On Android there are quite a few choices with BrightHub providing a good review although its a little out-of-date. Google Listen stands out for its search capabilities and integration with Google Reader. However it would appear adding the feature for increasing the play speed (a real time saver!) is more difficult for whatever technical reason. So much so that there is now a third party sound library that has this function called Presto. Several apps have added support for this feature and the Presto page lists some of these. I have been trying the current Beta (and free) ReadItOut Audiobook Player which adds the Presto library. If you just want something very lightweight and simple then you can't go wrong with either Podcast Player or Tiny Player.

Photos that make you say "OMG!"

A great selection of historic photos that just shout "O MY GOD". Fantastic!

Links roundup

A few links to follow up:

1. Pointclouds.org.uk: I don't normally plug other institutions, but this site outlines a link-up between Faro and UCL and, basically, scanning a few locations to try to get on the BIM bandwagon. Its fun to play with the pointclouds though and see the direction people area headed.
2. Britain from Above: summary page of the English Heritage project to scan ~100K aerial photos dating from 1919. Due to go live this year and should be a wonderful historic resource. Watch this space.
3. Astun Loader: Astun have released Loader which takes the underlying OGR and allows easy conversion of GML/KML to other formats. Specifically designed to focus upon loading Ordnance Survey GML in to other formats/databases. useful.
4. TanDEM-X: TanDEM-X has now imaged the entire planet with good, medium and poor data. Mission well on track and results looking, well, exciting!

GEO-12 roundup

I attend the GEO12 trade show yesterday..... it's hardly the most salubrious location (Holiday Inn in Elstree) but the space is reasonable and, well, its free and yes, you do get a free lunch!! More than that, it is doing a good job of combining the GIS and survey world.

Building Information Management (BIM) was the focus for the first session.... not the most exciting topic, but I can see this has the potential to transform building management from design, through build, delivery and maintenance. Key area to watch and there is plenty of money in the sector to make it work (and make it save money).

For me, the "fun" topics close to my interests were in the remote sensing. UAVs were a big focus at the show with both SeneseFly and Gatewing in attendance. Presentations were good from both although pizazz goes to SenseFly.... they went from packed to ready-to-launch with engine running **in the conference room** in 30 seconds!!! (I've blogged before on Gatewing). Some of the key aspects were:

total weight and payload. SenseFly total weight is under 500g to simplify licensing, Gatewing is 2kg with research looking at larger payloads
accuracy is an issue with both UAVs flying compact cameras. The Gatewing is 10MP but both resolution and camera quality limit accuracy. The ability to fly a DSLR would significantly improve imagery
the key point is software. Both offer orthphoto and DEM processing, but didn't really explain how they did it (one assumes SfM type processing, possibly involving open-source libraries). We are getting close to the stage where these are mature products - yes, payload and cost are issues, but expect these to drop dramatically over the coming years
licensing - really key issue. These come under CAA regulations and require licensing as unmanned aerial vehicles flown under line-of-sight. Apparantly this is 500m horizontally and 400ft vertically (not sure why Gatewing switched from metric to imperial!). They have an extended license allowing them to operate at upto 750m

Its horses for courses when it comes to aerial systems: my biggest complaint with UAVs is payload, licensing and cost. These demos do nothing to alleviate these problems particularly, but things are headed in the right direction.

The final company was Spheron who specialise in full 306 degree imaging using a high dynamic range camera. In short, an SLR will take images with a small dynamic range (read radiometric resolution), this is 8-bit or about 5-10 f-stops. The human eye can see 18-20 f-stops. The Spheron is 32-bit at upto 28 f-stops. This allows you to image things across all contrast levels that are simply not possible with traditional cameras. Applications?? Two main areas:

Computer rendering: place the camera at a location in a real photo and image the scene. Use the light information to accurate render a computer model in the scene. The results are stunning
Asset Management: image different locations allowing you to get full 360 degree HDR imagery of assets.

The camera can operate in stereo (vertical offset), but currently is limited to manual, single, point measurements. An automated process is under investigation.

Pedagogic History

Donald Clark has started a blog marathon looking at a history of pedagogic practise. Its a self-selected list and will inevitably not include those you think it could or should..... but if you want to get a flavour and feel for the scope and extent then it makes fascinating reading. And in good academic style, there are plenty of references to follow up on.

A must read.

Testing 3D landform quantiﬁcation methods with synthetic drumlins in a real digital elevation model

Hillier, J.K. and Smith, M.J. (2012)
Geomorphology

Metrics such as height and volume quantifying the 3D morphology of landforms are important observations that re?ect and constrain Earth surface processes. Errors in such measurements are, however, poorly under-stood. A novel approach, using statistically valid �synthetic� landscapes to quantify the errors is presented. The utility of the approach is illustrated using a case study of 184 drumlins observed in Scotland as quanti?ed from a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) by the �cookie cutter� extraction method. To create the synthetic DEMs, observed drumlins were removed from the measured DEM and replaced by elongate 3D Gaussian ones of equivalent dimensions positioned randomly with respect to the �noise� (e.g. trees) and regional trends (e.g. hills) that cause the errors. Then, errors in the cookie cutter extraction method were investigated by using it to quantify these �synthetic� drumlins, whose location and size is known. Thus, the approach deter-mines which key metrics are recovered accurately. For example, mean height of 6.8 m is recovered poorly at 12.5�0.6 (2s) m, but mean volume is recovered correctly. Additionally, quantification methods can be compared: A variant on the cookie cutter using an un-tensioned spline induced about twice (�1.79) as much error. Finally, a previously reportedly statistically significant (p=0.007) difference in mean volume between sub-populations of different ages, which may reflect formational processes, is demonstrated to be only 30�50% likely to exist in reality. Critically, the synthetic DEMs are demonstrated to realistically model parameter recovery, primarily because they are still almost entirely the original landscape. Results are insen-sitive to the exact method used to create the synthetic DEMs, and the approach could be readily adapted to assess a variety of landforms (e.g. craters, dunes and volcanoes).

Leaves in Near infra-red

During my course on Remote Sensing last year I was trying to drive home to the students that EM radiation is comprised of different wavelengths and that Earth surface features reflect radiation very differently at different wavelengths. Vegetation is a nice example to use because of the dramatic change of reflectance from red to near infra-red (NIR). And you can show this even better by imaging vegetation they are familiar with.

Using my Nikon D70 which is particularly sensitive to NIR I photographed a dead leaf and live leaf in red, green and NIR (below). The postcard (click on it to get a hi-res version) shows each "band" as a greyscale image and you can clearly see the low reflectance in red and green and high reflectance (white) in NIR. The dead leaf still reflects more in NIR, but the difference is far less pronounced; indeed reflectance is nearly equal across all three bands which is why the leaf appears brown in the false-colour composite (bottom right) whilst the live leaf is red.

Freemind location

I blogged on Freemind, the open source mind mapping software, a few days ago, but wanted to add on to that post. The development team are reaching a v1.0 release candidate (currently in Beta) and have incorporated the ability to add location to nodes on your mind map. Tools -> Map (or Ctrl-Alt-M) brings up the Map window which loads OSM data of Europe. Type in the "Search Location" bar the place you want to add and hit enter. The location pointer is centred at this location. You can now:

zoom in to look at this in more detail.
move the point - or rather, single-click anywhere in the new window to place the pointer somewhere else
click Actions -> Place Selected Nodes to add the location to you node
double-click to place a new node in your mind map at that location

All very useful and interesting functions and good to see OSM integrating and enabling such a feature. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Tax move?

Nice graphic over at The Guardian displaying historic tax rates across the world.... so, where do you want to move??

Reforming teaching and learning

Garr Reynolds has combined together a nice selection of contemporary videos on how teaching and learning could happen, the malaise in some areas of education and some of the suggestions for solutions. Ken Robinson's cartoon talk is perhaps the most academic and well founded, but the others all add very interesting aspects, even if you dont agree with them! Well worth checking out and, it goes without saying, that it is universities that come in for the most severe treatment in terms of large lecture theatres and sterile content. However judge for yourself.

Happiness and Productivity

A great talk from Shawn Achor on TED.com detailing how happiness leads to productivity, rather than the western view of productivity leading to happiness (aka work hard, earn more, be happy). Its a little bit of a sales pitch but the summary of what this all means appears at 11.25.

There is quite a bit of science that goes behind this work..... interestingly Paul Ekman (Emotions Revealed) notes that you feel an emotion by creating the facial expression for it. So as made as it might seem (in our inhibited western society), Laughter Yoga (enforced laughter!) does have relevance in creating feelings of well being which develops in to a positive feedback mechanism. Thats not to say its the only way of doing this, and Shawn Achor has a list of other suggestions. Also worth noting that its a very funny talk!!

Freemind: great mind mapping software

I'm a big fan of mind mapping and whilst Tony Buzan is a bit over-the-top on the sales pitch (for a far more eloquent and scientifically founded piece on memory training read "Moonwalking with Einstein"), mind mapping is a great way of rapidly getting ideas down on paper and storing information in a condensed, and easily accessible, form. Its not linear which makes it quick to integrate.

There are some good commercial mind-mapping programs, but by far the best open-source product is Freemind. Its a Java app, cross-platform and very slick. OK, its not quite as Windows-centric as other applications, but its good and does everything you want, at least initially. Give it a try because it won't disappoint you.

Geotagging - always a good idea?

Nice pick-up from The Guardian..... geotagging photos and uploading is a popular pastime for some, however it can have unintended consequences as the US Army points out.

Warren cited a real-world example from 2007. When a new fleet of helicopters arrived with an aviation unit at a base in Iraq, some Soldiers took pictures on the flightline, he said. From the photos that were uploaded to the Internet, the enemy was able to determine the exact location of the helicopters inside the compound and conduct a mortar attack, destroying four of the AH-64 Apaches.

Ouch! There must have been a big sigh when that happened. Might as well have stood there waving a flag saying shoot me.

Landsat 5 still refuses to die!!

Interesting news article over at USGS about their continued efforts to revive Landsat 5 (or more specifically the Thematic Mapper instrument). All hope is not (yet!) lost, but what's more interesting is that if improvement in the transmission equipment (the reason for the failure) is not solved, there is a certain amount of life left in the kit which will be prioritized. At that point..... they will try to turn on the Multi-Spectral Scanner!! Yes, seriously. Landsat 5 was the last Landsat to have both TM and MSS (as a back-up) and this has been off, well, for a long-time. It would be very interesting to know the last MSS scene imaged. A while back me-thinks. And if they do get it, then (as they note), they need to re-instate all the old MSS workflows. Probably long forgotten and not designed to work within current IT systems. There is something "boys-own" about the whole affair which makes it all rather endearing.... that said, there is a serious side to all this. LDCM is not due for launch until January 2013 which currently gives a relatively large whole in Landsat data collection (albeit with the limited capacity of Landsat 7).

Google adds postcode extents

Nice pick-up by The Guardian..... Google Maps now defines postcode extent when you query the postcode itself: for example. I'm assuming this is CodePoint, as per my previous blog.

Las Vegas: a Landsat Timeline

This shows the real power of the Landsat archive....watch a desert transform in to a city over 40 years. The ability for remote sensing to offer such a relatively simple, but powerful, output is remarkable. It also offers a visual critique of modern society...