Spaced Out :: 11 2008

The reports just keep on rolling. This time we have the UK Location Strategy published by DCLG (and the GI Panel). It covers much old ground and gives a rather uninspiring action plan on p17. All Points Blog also discuss this and, somewhat fairly, note that “they do highlight how complex it can be to actually get them done!” However this has to be taken within the context of the 1987 Chorley report and the 1997 followup. Now that was only 21 years ago and, well, pretty much all the same points were covered back that.

The Pre-Budget Report published yesterday was obviously designed to get us to “spend, spend, spend”, but the small print contained much of interest to the debate on trading funds and publicly collected data (not just by the OS). Many feathers seem to have been ruffled in Whitehall, probably not least those of the Home Secretary; “crime maps” is probably rapidly becoming a rude phrase! Anyway, both Ed Parsons and Charles Arthur (FoD) have succinctly outlined the key parts of the document and some of the things they hint at.

Time will tell where this is all heading….

The news over the last few days has been awash with items on the leaking of details of BNP members in the UK. And of course it didn’t take long for a Google mashup to be put together, although, even with the caveats that this mapped post-codes, not individual addresses it was largely misunderstood (Charles Arthur posted about this yesterday) and subsequently replaced with a “hot spot” map which is all very pretty by, well, largely meaningless. There was a nicely considered piece over at thinkwhere saying, in as many words, that on its own, the map doesn’t say too much about BNP membership as we are more interested in understanding the societal implications. This means correlating this list with measures of deprivation, population density, voting results etc etc. This can begin to identify clusters of membership and possibly why they are there (and that’s before you get in to issues of membership by occupation).

For those not familiar with the CORONA Mission, it was the original US spy satellite programme that operated from 1958-1972 (and was declassified in 1995). Of many “firsts” in satellite remote sensing, it was notably the first mission to provide photos taken from space through the launch of the camera in to a pre-selected orbit and, after image capture, the return to Earth of a capsule containing the film for retrieval by aircraft or boat. Whilst the first successful image was not acquired until 1960, it went on to capture over 800,000 images at a range of spatial resolutions.

US spy satellites are designated with a KH (for KeyHole) acronym, with CORONA ranging from KH1 to KH4. Spatial resolutions are good ranging from 7.5 m, with many at 2.75 m and some at 1.8 m. Stereo imagery was also collected for some missions. Not only does this remain “competitive” with contemporary commercial systems, but it also provides an excellent historical archive (although note that its panchromatic photography, not multi-spectral imagery). Given that Landsat-1 didn’t launch until 1972, this provides a valuable archive for a variety of applications. All the imagery are available for purchase from the USGS at $30 per frame.

And of course it wouldn’t be appropriate to conclude this blog without a brief comment on the continuing US spy satellite program. Again, Wikipedia has a nice summary of current known programmes. The successors to CORONA were initially film and then, with KH11, digital. Resolutions were commonly 15 cm (using what would appear to be a Hubble space telescope pointing at the Earth), with the expectation that the current KH13 is probably sub 5 cm.References

Wikipedia
Project CORONA - Keith Clarke, UC Santa BarbaraUSGS

Yup, that’s right its World Toilet Day! Whilst us Brits have always had a tongue-in-cheek snigger about toilet humour, typified by Adam Hart’s wonderful Thunder, Flush and Thomas Crapper and, appropriately on WTD, a piece (or piss?!) by BBC News item (from TearFund) titled Britons’ toilet pastimes revealed, there is a slightly more serious side that WaterAid/TearFund are trying to get across. Namely that 2.5B people worldwide don’t have proper sanitation. And of course:

“One gram of faeces can contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts and 100 parasite eggs.”

At the very least have a go at playing TurdlyWinks. Go on, you know it makes sense!!