RIP Mark Linkous
Very sad news from the pages of Rolling Stone:
Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mark Linkous has committed suicide, his publicist confirms to Rolling Stone. Best known for his acclaimed work with Sparklehorse, who released four albums of imaginative ambient psych-folk, Linkous also produced Daniel Johnston’s 2003 album Fear Yourself and collaborated with Danger Mouse on Dark Night of the Soul.
Sparklehorse defined great swathes of the music I listened to in the last decade; I have memories of consciously thinking that I would write specific essays for my MA to read something like the band sounded. The Rolling Stone write-up is pretty good, and has plenty of links to further reading. I was also pleased to see the story made the BBC.
BBC: "The volunteer mappers who helped Haiti"
The Guardian and New Scientist have already reported on the OpenStreetMap response in Haiti, now the BBC has a very nice magazine piece on the same subject.
For more information, see the Project Haiti wiki page.
gvSIG OADE Beta 2 Released
Ben has announced to the gvSIG mailing list the availabilty of the second beta of our OA Digital version of gvSIG.
More details on our site
From the site:
Advantages of gvSIG OADE 2010
GvSIG OADE 2010 differs from the official gvSIG 1.9 release in the following respects:
* Completely new installer frontend.
* Comes bundled with many extensions.
* Includes Java Runtime Environment version 1.6r17 (Linux and Windows versions only).
* Complete and consistent English (GB, US) GUI translation.
* Heavily reworked and improved menu structure, keyboard shortcuts and layer context menus.
* Additional documentation and sample data.
* Better integration into all supported operating systems.
We hope that you will enjoy what we did with gvSIG!
Changes in gvSIG OADE Beta 2
* Improved labels and formatting in raster layer legends.
* Added some useful raster colour tables for elevation, slope, aspect and more.
* Corrected placement of affinely transformed layers.
* Added DWG CAD format support.
* Fixed a number of bugs that would cause crashes in the raster and remote sensing tools.
* Export of maps with advanced labels to PDF no longer crashes.
* Added missing symbols and label styles.
* Proper file type descriptions in all file selection dialogs.
* Unified native binaries: all versions use GDAL 1.6.3 and PROJ.4 version 4.7.0 now.
* Runs on Windows 7 (but see notes at end of this page!).
* Improved Windows startup performance: no more copying of large binary files on startup, no more write access required to installation folder.
* Updated Java runtime environment (JRE) to latest 1.6u18.
* Some translation fixes.
* Updated North Carolina sample data project to gvSIG 1.9 format.
Buzz me
Yann might be unhappy with Google and their new Buzz service, but I'd like to play with it some more and see how it pans out. Add me if you want to.
I've got a Google profile and, of course, an address: iknowjoseph at gmail dot com
Let's see if I can get more social... ;-)
Google Maps get interesting
Thanks to some new lab settings:
I'm sure that the geofolks will have already been all over this, but I like it. Enough to replace OpenStreetMap though? Probably not.
Open Source in Archaeology: Science at Work!
My last post accused archaeological science practitioners of failing at science, and quite often, archaeological theory too.
Of course, there are people doing proper science and archaeology out there and they are talking about it too. More specifically, we're doing it. My last post was enough to encourage Benjamin to post the slides of a recent paper presented to the Institute of Archaeology:
Ducke 2010: Science Without Software no Longer: Archaeological Data Analysis and the Open Source Paradigm
The slides wonderfully demonstrate the point made by Professor Ince in his Guardian article, with examples from an archaeological perspective. Well worth the read.
We have other presentations available for download on our site:
http://oadigital.net/research/researchpresentations
Good Science Requires Open Source
There's a fantastic article on the Guardian's website about further revelations emerging from the UEA "Climategate" affair. The conclusion? Release the source code of applications you use in scientific endeavours. I said something like this at TAG 2008:
The Guardian 5 February 2010: If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too
Computer code is also at the heart of a scientific issue. One of the key features of science is deniability: if you erect a theory and someone produces evidence that it is wrong, then it falls. This is how science works: by openness, by publishing minute details of an experiment, some mathematical equations or a simulation; by doing this you embrace deniability. This does not seem to have happened in climate research. Many researchers have refused to release their computer programs — even though they are still in existence and not subject to commercial agreements. An example is Professor Mann's initial refusal to give up the code that was used to construct the 1999 "hockey stick" model that demonstrated that human-made global warming is a unique artefact of the last few decades. (He did finally release it in 2005.)
So, if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.
I don't know if anyone has ranted at Professor Darrel Ince, but the reaction I got was fantastic; amongst a general shower of scorn, one person flat out called me a liar and another said that such an issue was too theoretical for a meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group.
Open Source Software is gaining momentum within archaeological practice, but perhaps not as quickly as it could be. The reason why? Probably because of the nature of archaeological practice rather than the ability of the tools. Many of the practitioners of archaeological computing (in the UK at least, probably also elsewhere) are ivory tower academics interested in producing published volumes. "Archaeological computing", for most, is little more than producing pretty pictures for books. It barely matters for most if you can access the original data, or the black box software that turned it into an image, because there is no element of experimentation or reproducibility required; you've simply produced an image for a book. Other over worked areas of archaeological computing, such as least cost path analysis, view sheds and calorific analysis of landscape exploitation have such little merit from an archaeological perspective that they barely warrant trying to justify by any scientific measures. I tried to this second point a few years back during my MA and, although the only linkable mention of it I can find is on Jo's blog, I think it went down a little better than when I tried to point out the obvious at TAG. Whilst phenomenology critics may enjoy my paper for demonstrating holes in the practice, it also points out that people don't just walk along the easiest paths they can find, nor are they necessarily interested by the fact they can see something impressive on the horizon.
There's plenty of MSc Archaeological Computing types around, but few of them actually do anything scientific. There's no scientific rigour within archaeological practice; no reproducibility, little experimentation, no openness. No scientific hypothesis to stand up and knock down. Archaeological theory is sometimes played with by archaeological computing practitioners, certainly nobody could work in a theoretical vacuum, but it's often implicit, if not shunned. Many people want to make maps within an accepted and uncritical theoretical wasteland that has largely failed to see the emergence of post-processual thinking.
Archaeological computing is, more often than not, behind the curve on scientific practice and archaeological thinking. Professor Ince highlights the need for openness and scientific rigour; let's just hope that people start doing more to work that would actually involve a need for this approach.
Great writeups of Web 2.0 in a crisis
A great number of people, myself included, have been doing what we can to help relief work in Haiti. This is now, rather wonderfully, being picked up in the proper press:
NewScientist 27 January 2010: How crowdsourcing is helping in Haiti
The Guardian 4 February 2010: Meet the Wikipedia of the mapping world
See also Mikel Maron's blog entry, this one by Harry Wood and these video's of Haiti mapping by Eric Marsden: Port au Prince, Haiti.
Girona, Somewhere
I'm thinking about going to the OpenStreetMap conference this year, named State of the Map. The question remains though, is it in Spain, Italy or Portugal?
It's good to see that a bunch of mapping enthusiasts are so geographically aware. I'm hoping that the next announcement will see Girona moved to somewhere in southern Britain; that'll save a plane journey into Europe.
BBC Archives release episodes of Chronicle
Plenty of vintage TV archaeology released via the BBC Archives to help plug some new content:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/chronicle/
To coincide with BBC Radio Four's groundbreaking 'A History of the World in 100 objects" the BBC archive collections team have today released 15 episodes of the long-running archaeology programme 'Chronicle' from the archives.
Cold weather auditory Phenomenology?
Sounds like ray guns.
Some great cold weather blog posts:
Dispersion of Sound Waves in Ice Sheets
…Sounds like Star Wars Blasters
Archaeological implications for encounters with singing lakes abound; who's for some fieldwork?
Stopped Watch
My watch stopped yesterday, first time I've ever had that with a digital:
Arduino 7 segment display examples
I was lucky enough to receive an Arduino board from Christmas; yesterday I had a quick play with the example code included, but today I tried to cook something up on my own. I've attached the results to this post.
Both simple examples count on a 7 segment display from 0 to 9. The first displays each digit for a second before moving on, the second uses an analogue input (I've tried with a potentiometer and a photocell) to display the digit for a variable amount of time.
Download:
I'll be ordering an ethernet shield soon.
Merry Christmas from OA Digital and OpenArchaeology.net
There are two new releases from OA Digital and OpenArchaeology.net that will hopefully interest those from the world of GIS and surveying. Just in time for Christmas, these show that we put our money where our mouths are when it comes to Open Source and Open Data.
gvSIG OADE 2010 Beta
Released today is the beta version of OA Digital's gvSIG 2010 version. Read all about it here:
http://www.oadigital.net/software/gvsigoade/gvsigoade2010beta
Despite having the word beta in the title, this is a mature and stable piece of software, although the final version (likely to be released in January) will bring some further polish and improvements. The software is based upon the official gvSIG 1.9 release, but features some heavy tweaking throughout. Checkout the release page for full details and links to the Windows and Linux binaries.
Survey and GIS Manuals
Our Open Data comes in the form of Anna Hodgkinson's Survey and GIS Manuals released through our OpenArchaeology.net site. From the project description:
It is meant to supply an easy-to-understand but comprehensive guide to survey and open source GIS, from setting up survey equipment to downloading and processing survey data. The manual is intended for speeding-up, or annihilating the training procedure and providing a guide to survey to field staff in case no professional surveyor is on site. An inexperienced member of field staff should, by following this manual step-by-step, be able to set up a Total Station or a GPS, conduct survey and download and process the survey data, given a certain amount of time.
Today's release sees the addition of GPS manuals and an updating to the TST documentation. An approach of "release early, release often" is being taken, so please make sure to regularly check back for updates an to provide any feedback you may have.
The documents themselves are available through our unglamorous downloads server; I might beautify this at some point in the future.
Download! Be merry!
39% of UK pubs named on OpenStreetMap
It's Monday evening, not the time to be thinking about the pub, so I'll just post up some quick and dirty statistics. The conclusion we draw from these? People are recording UK pubs at an encouraging rate although if you see a pub in the wild, chances are it's not on OSM.
Thanks to everyone that sent me messages in the week to tell me that they'd been adding pubs to the database.
The following pulls out and counts all pubs recorded in the UK with names, as extracted from the database by CloudMade (09/12/09):
joseph@joseph-work:~$ grep -ci '<name>Pub:' united_kingdom_Eating_Drinking.gpx
20882
joseph@joseph-work:~$
Or about 39% of the UK total. This minor variation counts all pubs, named or not, that are recorded:
joseph@joseph-work:~$ grep -ci '<name>Pub' united_kingdom_Eating_Drinking.gpx
21744
joseph@joseph-work:~$
Or about 40% of the UK total; all the way from 12 Bar to Zuri:
joseph@joseph-work:~$ grep -i '<name>Pub' united_kingdom_Eating_Drinking.gpx | sort | head
<name>Pub:12 bar</name>
<name>Pub:13th Note Cafe</name>
<name>Pub:1802</name>
<name>Pub:1901 Bar & Bistro</name>
<name>Pub:26 Smithfield</name>
<name>Pub:2nd West</name>
<name>Pub:3's</name>
<name>Pub:3one7</name>
<name>Pub:3 Tuns</name>
<name>Pub:4 Aces</name><
joseph@joseph-work:~$ grep -i '<name>Pub' united_kingdom_Eating_Drinking.gpx | sort | tail
<name>Pub:ZeroDegrees</name>
<name>Pub:zest</name>
<name>Pub:Zetland Arms</name>
<name>Pub:Zetland Arms</name>
<name>Pub:Zetland Hotel</name>
<name>Pub:Zeus</name>
<name>Pub:Zigfrid</name>
<name>Pub:Ziggy's Nightclub</name>
<name>Pub:Zoo</name>
<name>Pub:Zuri</name>
joseph@joseph-work:~$
The number of pubs with the word "closed" (incorrectly) present in their name still stands at 33:
joseph@joseph-work:~$ grep -i '<name>Pub' united_kingdom_Eating_Drinking.gpx | grep -ci 'closed'
33
joseph@joseph-work:~$
See my first post for the source of supporting numbers.
Contrary to comments on my last blog post, I haven't been getting these numbers wrong by a factor of three. Rather amusingly, if you run the command suggested by my kind commentator, you end up with exactly the same numbers I posted, suggesting that not only was I correct, but the individual accusing me of doing it wrong hadn't actually tried out their suggestion themselves. I think the problem came because my blog was eating the results as I'd copied and pasted them as HTML. Have resolved that above now.