Dr Mike J Smith
Friday, December 27, 2013 at 21:23:32
Note to self - AF-assist only works when in single servo mode and with single point focus on the centre spot. It don’t work otherwise and you can’t focus in a dark location!!!!
Friday, December 27, 2013 at 21:22:30
For those raised in the 70s and 80s there is a nostalgia for some cracking and quaint old games - forget Elite (although it is cool!). Pacman and Frogger are the name of the game!!!! BBC News carried a nice article on the Internet Archive’s emulation of some classic consoles and the games they run all within a web browser. Easy way to fritter away a few hours :)
Friday, December 27, 2013 at 17:15:06
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 at 15:38:26
See Earthrise as Apollo 8 saw it in 1968 - for the first time. Fabulous Earth Observatory and great NASA video.
Monday, December 9, 2013 at 19:50:16
Cast your votes! Some corkers here…..
Sunday, November 17, 2013 at 20:56:04
Nicely blogged by the OS - and listen directly at the BBC here
Thursday, November 7, 2013 at 16:08:00
Night skies by Mark Gee…. stunning.
Make it wide screen, pump up the volume, get lost in the universe….
Thursday, November 7, 2013 at 16:06:08
Nioce post from Donald Clark on when big data goes wrong. A timely reminder about how messages become distorted, pushed to serve the purposes of their authors…… and up front is a classic map issue which all GIS students should be more than familiar with!
Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 09:53:06
Friday, October 18, 2013 at 13:59:06
Nice pickup by GoGeo on free SPOT VEGETATION data with the impending end of the product. Comparable with AVHRR and worth a punt if you need wide coverage
Wednesday, October 16, 2013 at 13:35:52
Wednesday, October 16, 2013 at 13:19:30
Some cracking ESA images over at DPReview - take a look!
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 at 12:01:38
Nice video over at the BBC on a drone enthusiast and some great aerial videos.
WATCH IT!
Thursday, October 10, 2013 at 16:20:46
Nice link over at the OS blog on a postcode viewer developed in Processing. Worth a glance!
Thursday, October 10, 2013 at 16:15:10
Just wanted to flag the Journal of Maps Most Read Articles - its a good way to see what has been trending and maybe take a peak at some of the articles. Our top article (at over 2000 downloads) is The Spanish population during the twentieth century and beyond which was our “Best Map” of 2012. This is currently a “free view” as it was released under our “Editor’s Choice”.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013 at 22:25:58
This one passed me by in the depths of my inbox…..for the first 50 people interested, my paper Bibliographic webmap: the Physical Landscape of Britain and Northern Ireland has 50 FREE E-PRINTS. Please click on the link and download your copy.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013 at 22:20:56
The Live London Bus Tracker is just too cool to pass up - pick your route and be mesmerised by the buses passes to-and-fro. Want to get on an old Routemaster? Look up route 15 (amongst others) - OK, they’re not all Routemasters but its fantastic to be able to see where the buses actually are!! There are train and tube trackers around, but this for me is a winner!
Wednesday, October 2, 2013 at 12:24:56
Long summer and very busy start to the term…..but back with some posts!
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 at 07:48:18
Love this side-by-side-by-side of the London-to-Brighton line shot by the BBC….. its a great social take on the trip and the article provides some interesting comments on the changes. Well worth a view
Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 08:01:06
If you haven’t clocked it already, I am involved in organising a workshop on the mapping of glacial landforms this September. Titled GMapping, it is concerned with:
“….the “GMapping Workshop” will present and discuss results from glacial gemorphological mapping by different interpreters for statistically representative synthetic drumlins within a real landscape. This can then inform both the differences/similarities in mapping and quantify the impacts upon the calculation of derived metrics. The key outcomes of this workshop will be the initial development of a set of objective criteria for geomorphological mapping.”
This is a highly topical area at the moment as manual, interpretive, mapping of visually complex landscapes is used extensively throughout the geosciences. And whilst it is preferable to have objective, repeatable, automated techniques, these approaches are still some way off sufficient levels of accuracy. So manual mapping remains the tried and tested approach….. yet comparability of results remains unquantified. Part of the problem is that with a real landscape we cannot a priori know what actually exists meaning it is hard to test the efficacy of individual maps.
One solution to this problem I was involved in with a my colleague John Hillier over in Loughborough….. here we used a real landscape but removed drumlins from it and then inserted our own back in to the landscape. We now have a real landscape with known landforms which means we can test how well individuals are able to identify them and, more importantly, variations in this identification and impacts upon the subsequent calculation of landform metrics.
So the workshop fast approaches and we now have a large set of mapped data (and shortly a preliminary report!) from which discussion can follow - perhaps the most important outcomes of this workshop are twofold:
1. gain a better understanding of mapping error and its impact upon landform metrics
2. development of a protocol for manual mapping to maximise accuracy