Spaced Out :: 11 2011

Not a healthy outlook for Landsat 5 27 years after launch. Mind you, its not bad for a 3 year life expectancy!!

For those interested, I am currently a Co-Investigator on a NERC Knowledge Exchange grant titled “The Physical Landscape of Britain and Northern Ireland.” Under the auspices of the British Society for Geomorphology, this will be putting together a fully functional spatial bibliographic database for two locations in the UK and integrating references for all published and unpublished material that relate to the geomorphology. We successfully developed (through some of the hard work of Claudio Piccinini) a demonstrator webmap and this now moves on to a full prototype with our partners Mouchel, Halcrow, National Trust, Environment Agency and Natural England.

It’s a great knowledge exchange project and comes out of a BSG Steering Group which is looking far beyond the prototype envisaged here. There is some visionary thinking going on and big aims for the future utilisation of geomorphological expertise in the UK and maximising its benefit for all. Professor Janet Hooke is leading the project and has experience of similar knowledge exchange work before. Kingston’s expertise in GIS adds strength to the project. Layman’s press release is here.

One Story is a great subscription for your Kindle. Each month you get one new short story and they never use an author twice. The variety, breadth and freshness is revitalising. At at £0.99 its a bargain. Subscribe… today.

“One Story magazine features one great story every month. Because One Story never publishes an author more than once, you’ll discover a great new writer in every issue.”

“Launched in 2002, One Story has quickly become one of the top American venues for short fiction. Of the 115 issues published between 2002 and 2008, almost half were selected as among the year’s best by various anthologies and prizes, including Best American Short Stories, Best American Non-Required Reading, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. As The New York Times noted: “At a time when literary writing seems like a dying art, when little magazines are folding left and right, when publishers bemoan the sinking bottom line, here lies a spot of hope…It is called One Story.”"

Amazon UK offering a “daily deal” each day for a heavily discounted book. See the blog post for further details. It’ll be interesting to see how these deals develop…. equivalent price in the US at the moment. Will have to see if it goes up tomorrow as well or whether its the usual “Brits can pay more”

How cool is this ball camera?? Love the application…. our Leica laser scanner grabs similar imagery and splices them together but this is so elegant and you get a whole sphere of imagery. The alternative would be to fish-eye images but not as easy to do. Great!