Swiping in QGIS

Tuesday, 27 September, 2016

I quite often find myself compare two images or a vector layer overlying a raster layer and, for me, a swiping tool is tremendously helpful in doing this. Its now also commonly deployed as a javascript tools in web browsers to compare before/after images as well. ERDAS Imagine has had such a function since the year dot. So it was disappointing to see that it isn’t natively part of QGIS - but heck, it is one of those nice-to-have bells and whistles. But actually, it turns out that the MapSwipeTool does just this - although its classed as an “experimental” plugin so you need to make sure these are loaded into the plugins (just change the plugin settings).

Once installed, select the swipe layer and start the plugin. This will then be revealed/hidden from the underlying layers.

Of VM woes…

Tuesday, 27 September, 2016

Actually not so much VM woes as out-of-date underlying OS. Yes, the new term is hitting so I thought it appropriate to upgrade ArcGIS to the same version used on campus - that meant going from 10.2.1 to 10.4. Simples I thought - just request the student/instructor license, download the EXE and away we go.

Of course in reality things are never quite so simple. I won’t allow ArcGIS near my native OS because it is such a behemoth of an application - so I run it in a VM. Its slower, but locked down and if it dies, well I can just spin it up in the VM again. I use the excellent (and cross-platform) Portable VirtualBox) and, because its portable, I can copy it onto my portable hard drive and take it with (just make sure your drive is exFAT formatted for those large VDI files). Anyway, after the EXE download and install fails telling me to upgrade to Windows 7 (yes, the VM is on 7, I have an 8.1 and the main system on 10) to SP1. One upgrade later and…. upgrade .NET to 4.5+. And then… my virtual disk runs out of space. Its sized to 25Gb, but with ArcGIS, Imagine and Cyclone on there its run out of space. A little head scratching (and Googling later) led me to this page outlining the VirtualBox command to increase the VDI file (why you can’t do this in the GUI I don’t know!):

VBoxManage modifyhd windows7.vdi —resize 30000

Finally, inside Windows, expand the partition to take up all the virtual drive space.

Bingo, ArcGIS finally installs.

Whilst these are quite frustrating hoops to jump through, it does at least make you aware of some of the hurdles that students face.

Peer Review Week

Monday, 26 September, 2016

Well the dust has settled on Peer Review Week, a low profile (!) event celebrating the moderating role of peer review scholarly communication. It’s good to see lots of high profile sponsors although a few notable gaps so I would encourage those organisations to get behind this initiative as it’s essential in all aspects of public life, working with government and communicating to the broader general public.

Sense About Science were active as part of their advocacy role of science in public life and its worth pointing to some of their resources for those that may have missed them last week:

I Don’t Know What to Believe: in their own words This leaflet is for people who follow debates about science and medicine in the news. It explains how scientists present and judge research and how you can ask questions of the scientific information presented to you.
Peer review: the nuts and bolts: a pamphlet target at early career researchers to make sense of the whole academic publishing scene.

And for those ECRs wanting some hands on guidance then go along to the next Peer Review Workshop.

Give a beep…

Monday, 26 September, 2016

Give a beep is a great example of citizen science, geographically volunteered information and the ability of everyday “users” to influence politicians. Cycling is big in London - very big. Wikipedia shows the number of journeys per day doubling between 1999 and 2014 (over 600,000) with the ratio of cars to bikes dropping from 17:1 to 1.7:1 by 2016. Cycling is quicker, cheaper, healthier… and enjoyable. Why drive? Well, one aspect is safety. As Wikipedia again show, recorded accidents have dropped for the first time in 2014 and whilst relatively low the fear of an accident is a big part of this.

Enter Hovding (yes, those of bike airbag fame), ably assisted by the London Cycling Campaign, have teamed up to find out where and when people feel unsafe. Using the low cost, low power, Flic (how many uses can you think of for this little puppy?!), mount it on your bike, pair the low-power Bluetooth button with you phone and then, every time you hit the button it sends an email to the Mayor of London with you location and time. And, by also storing that information online they produced an interactive map of “fear”.

OK, the mapping is nothing to shout home about (seriously Hovding…. can we move away from the yellow meme??) but the simplicity of use and application to a real world issue where cyclists can genuinely feedback in to policy is great.

After the initial trial of 500 users is being rolled out to anyone wanting to use it - just buy a flic and give-a-beep (how long before every taxi has a jump-the-light flic for reporting cyclists!!).

Got an old ISO disc image….

Friday, 23 September, 2016

…. as I have. I was interested in accessing the contents of an old ISO disc image from an age old data CD. There are a number of tools to look inside these, but at times you just want to emulate a CD/DVD drive and run it directly. There are a range of tools to do this but I wondered if there was an easy option… and there is! Under Windows 10 you can now directly “Mount” the ISO image and it will appear as a new CD-ROM on your PC. Just right-click and “Mount.” For older systems Microsoft do a device driver bundled as the Microsoft Virtual CDRom Control Panel (which I first came across here).

Voila! Problem solved.

Tour of Britain: at 240fps!

Sunday, 11 September, 2016

Just back from an afternoon at the Tour of Britain where Steve Cummings took the overall general classification. The route itself was 16 laps of a 3-point star centred on Trafalgar Square going out to Aldwych, down to Downing Street and then up Regent Street almost to Oxford Circus. We positioned ourselves just around from Aldwych on the Strand at St Mary le Strand. The road snakes slightly and almost all the riders come within centimetres (literally!) of the railing. It makes for a quite exhilarating position as the headwind from the peloton hits you, following by the incredible noise.

We moved to a couple of different positions over the course of the 16 laps and Ryan shot some hyperlapse (240fps high frame rate) on his iPhone. High frame rates are great fun with some models pushing 1000fps which is pretty amazing. Anyway, see the video below and watch the start carefully to see how fast they are really going!

Don’t just fly a drone… BE THE DRONE!

Friday, 9 September, 2016

We’ve long been able to view remote video footage from a remote camera - when I was developing the kite aerial photography workflow I currently use, I experimented with a small spy camera that transmitted video footage back to an analogue LCD TV. It worked quite well and the intention was to use it to determine camera attitude and so allow use to remotely rotate the camera. Except for one BIG problem - when you are imaging the natural environment from relatively close range (60m), one piece of grass looks EXACTLY like another!!! In the end it was a pointless exercise.

Anyway, things move on and the next obvious way to integrate video was via AR (augmented reality) through a video overly in glasses. And true to form, DJI have announced another tie up, this time with Epson and their Moverio BT-300. See the announcement and some commentary on it over at DPReview. For consumer drones these make more sense as you tend to be viewing obliquely from (very) close range so positioning is important. Of course the glasses cost as much as the drone (!) but expect these products to become more prevalent.

OS from the air

Monday, 5 September, 2016

A nice piece over at the BBC on informal photos taken by Ordnance Survey’s aerial unit whilst surveying. And the accompanying video. Grand stuff!

Historic London Underground

Monday, 5 September, 2016

I was at the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden recently and saw a nice animation of the historical development of the network. With all the underground mania in mapping, I liked this because it’s one you see much less often and provides a nice historical perspective on the growth (and decline) on parts of the network. I couldn’t find the animation that TfL used, but did come across the site of graphic designer Doug Rose who has produced a similar animation. So click here to view the map itself which (unfortunately!) uses Flash video. Quite fascinating.

Studio of Objects at RGS

Saturday, 3 September, 2016

The Studio of Objects (see all my previous posts on the project), which recorded the interior space of Paolozzi’s studio at the Scottish National Gallery, was available for viewing and interaction at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference last week in London.

I took part in a panel discussion on the arts and sciences (see my personal page for slides and mp3) and then for the rest of the day the latest beta version was available in the main hall. In fact, the installation was so popular that it made a return visit on Friday where delegates had a second bite at the interactive cherry!

Reading Landscape :: art production by Fine Art and Geography Students, Kingston University

Saturday, 3 September, 2016

And following on from our “Reading Landscape” project I blogged about last week, here is the video out we presented for the first time at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference last week.

Be sure to check out Patrick Rickles blog post outlining the session and with a picture of all the presenters (including our fab students). And, to quote Patrick:

The next talk was from Mike Smith, Flora Parrott and their students from Kingston University on interdisciplinary ways of perceiving space. Flora, with a background in Fine Arts and Mike, coming from Remote Sensing, brought their students together to phenomenologically explore the Rotherhithe Tunnel - once dubbed the 8th wonder of the world, which was the first of it’s kind to allow people to cross under the Thames. Students used Go Pro cameras, castings of the tunnel and 3D imaging techniques to collect experiential information of the tunnel to create a narrative from the students. One of their outputs was an incredible video sharing the students’ experiences titled “Reading Landscape”.



Check out the slides below (and on my personal page).

With many thanks to all who participated and in particular the dedication of the students who participated. It’s been an amazing cross-fertilization of creative ideas. Enjoy!





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Holocene Book Review: Emanuela Casti, Reflexive Cartography: A New Perspective in Mapping

Friday, 2 September, 2016

Mike J. Smith (2016)
The Holocene


Elsevier’s Modern Cartography Series, edited by Professor DR Fraser Taylor, is a long-running occasional series that currently comprises seven volumes, the first published in 1991. With a hia-tus since 2006, Elsevier has injected some new vigour with a title planned for 2017 and this volume, Reflexive Cartography, pub-lished in 2015.

EarthEnv-DEM90

Tuesday, 30 August, 2016

It’s been a little while since my last global DEM news update but (somewhat belatedly) I came across Earth-Env DEM90 which merges SRTM (shuttle radar) and GDEM (ASTER photogrammetric) global DEMs. And more specifically the CGIAR-CSI SRTM DEM which is gap filled and hydrologically correct.

Neither DEM is actually completely global missing, to greater or lesser extents, the polar regions. GDEM has greater coverage (owing to the overpass of the satellite) but is generally considered to be less accurate than SRTM. So its inevitable that a merged product should arrive which covers ~91% of the globe and mitigates much of the noise and void problems of the individual products. Full methodology can be read here.

The Success of Failure

Wednesday, 24 August, 2016

I’ve blogged before about the success of failure and how critical it is to improving in whatever domain you are working in. In my review of Matthew Syed’s Bounce I noted the central importance of purposeful practice. That is, practicing at the “edge” which inevitably leads to failure. Without failure you don’t know where (and how) to improve. Failure is vital to success.

Donald Clark provides a nice succinct list to the 5 levels of failure. Read it - it’s good. So, in abbreviated form:

1. Failure is normal in life, it happens, recognise it for what it is.

2. Break it down (or the science of marginal gains). Break your task down in to small steps or elements, strip it back, analyse it and improve. For those in the teaching game, Lesson Study looks at these building blocks in the classroom.

3. Practice, then practice some more! Do it, fail, feedback, improve, stretch your abilities.

4. Catastrophic Failure: practice those tasks that lead to major failure… so that they are unlikely to happen when it’s the real deal!

5. Reboot: learn, try, fail, go back to the beginning of the level and try again. Its a gaming strategy and incredibly frustrating, additive and the way to accelerated learning!!

So, go ahead, fail and go do it again.

Anyone have any good (big or small) failure stories?

word word count

Wednesday, 17 August, 2016

Yup, that’s right… how do you do a word count in Word? Well, the simple answer is Alt-T, W and particularly for the ribbon-challenged like me who prefer the keyboard. But what happens if you are working to a specific word count, have ancillary information in the file but only want the content word count? Well, that’s a little more tricky and requires some lateral thinking (or some DuckDuckGoing).

And the (or one) solution is to put your ancillary information in a different style, change the font attributes to include “hidden” for that style, but then in the Word options make sure “print hidden text is selected”. That way you can see it and print it - crucially though Word excludes hidden text from word counts.

Read in full here

Google Earth Updates

Friday, 12 August, 2016

A little late in getting this out, but Google announced late-June updates to imagery in Google Earth. This is significant for a several reasons (and their post is worth reading):

1. Landsat 8: the base imagery they Google fall back to if no high res aerial imagery is available is now Landsat 8. Previously it was Landsat 7. Google need moderately up-to-date imagery but the Landsat 7 partial failure meant a slower process for acquiring global imagery. With enough global data in the back pocket, they can now switch to the newer sensor.

2. Google Earth Engine: Google’s cloud based image processing service is used to process the imagery. This leverages huge online image archives and processing power to allow very fast MASSIVE processing. So, in this case, for every pixel across the whole planet, using every available Landsat 8 image, select the one with the lowest cloud cover. Very neat way to create a global cloud free image. Or to put it in their marketing speak:

Like our previous mosaic, we mined data from nearly a petabyte of Landsat imagery-that’s more than 700 trillion individual pixels-to choose the best cloud-free pixels. To put that in perspective, 700 trillion pixels is 7,000 times more pixels than the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, or 70 times more pixels than the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe.

3. The Verge: just to show how mainstream this is, even The Verge picked up on it. Remote sensing is joe bloggs interesting now!

OPEN ACCESS EPRINT: Exploring Explanations of Subglacial Bedform Sizes Using Statistical Models

Thursday, 28 July, 2016

John K.Hillier, Ioannis A Kougioumtzoglou, Chris R.Stokes, Michael J. Smith, Chris D. Clark, Matteo Spagnolo (in press)
PLOS ONE


Sediments beneath modern ice sheets exert a key control on their flow, but are largely inaccessible except through geophysics or boreholes. In contrast, palaeo-ice sheet beds are accessible, and typically characterised by numerous bedforms. However, the interaction between bedforms and ice flow is poorly constrained and it is not clear how bedform sizes might reflect ice flow conditions. To better understand this link we present a first exploration of a variety of statistical models to explain the size distribution of some common subglacial bedforms (i.e., drumlins, ribbed moraine, MSGL). By considering a range of models, constructed to reflect key aspects of the physical processes, it is possible to infer that the size distributions are most effectively explained when the dynamics of ice-water-sediment interaction associated with bedform growth is fundamentally random. A ‘stochastic instability’ (SI) model, which integrates random bedform growth and shrinking through time with exponential growth, is preferred and is consistent with other observations of palaeo-bedforms and geophysical surveys of active ice sheets. Furthermore, we give a proof-of-concept demonstration that our statistical approach can bridge the gap between geomorphological observations and physical models, directly linking measurable size-frequency parameters to properties of ice sheet flow (e.g., ice velocity). Moreover, statistically developing existing models as proposed allows quantitative predictions to be made about sizes, making the models testable; a first illustration of this is given for a hypothesised repeat geophysical survey of bedforms under active ice. Thus, we further demonstrate the potential of size-frequency distributions of subglacial bedforms to assist the elucidation of subglacial processes and better constrain ice sheet models.

Lucy Powell: Labour’s Vision for Education

Friday, 22 July, 2016

An interesting article in Governing Matters (a monthly for UK school governors) this month where they interviewed Lucy Powell, Labour’s shadow education secretary (see her profile at theyworkforyou), to outline current party thinking (and her personal take). In general I would note the tone as progressive but as is typical of opposition parties, it is generally critical (although the rhetoric isn’t strongly this way), with no strong steer on how any measures would be funded - the latter is particularly telling as it relies on successful school leavers contributing more in taxes in the future. Which is just wishful thinking when you are setting budgets!

What caught my attention though was the following question:

What is your vision for the education system in England?

“Like most people’s, it’s one where every child can reach their full potential regardless of background or postcode. And not just their academic potential, they would also develop a rounded character. At the moment, this is all too often the preserve of those you can pay. We’ve got to make sure that today’s education system is equipping our young people for tomorrow’s economy and tomorrow’s society and challenges. There is a lot more we can do to bring together the worlds of work and education.”

This is all very disappointing stuff:

1. “reach their full potential” is almost by definition what education should be, but what does “full potential” actually mean. Be specific - if this is going to become policy, curricula and performance measures then what exactly is that?

2. Not biased by factors beyond a child’s control - I get that, although the previous Lib-Con government had explicitly funded this through the pupil premium.

3. We then return to “potential” - more specifically, “academic” and “a rounded character”. Academic is fair enough - we’ve had 150 years of this and we might argue about what should be in it, but we measure it every year. But what the heck is “rounded character”? Please please please define it for me, tell me how its “taught” and what the metric is for it?!

4. Slightly firmer ground - “equipping our young people”. I say firmer, in that this starts the process of understanding what education is for but - well - says no more about it. What do we need to be equipped to do, what do we need to learn and become proficient in in order to achieve that and how will that be undertaken?

5. It then finishes with “bringing together the worlds of work and education”. At what age, in what way, for what purpose? Is this a sop to apprenticeships or something deeper? Or is this a cynical ploy for a government to develop tax revenue in the future?

Overall I’m left thoroughly underwhelmed if this is the best a pre-scripted shadow education secretary can do. I blogged a while back about “What is education for?” and the topics raised are good starting points for any discussion about the future of education - and particularly the ideas of autonomy outlined by John White. This reminded me of a recent conversation with my 16 year old daughter who bemoaned the fact that she didn’t know how to make an egg mayonnaise sandwich or understand how credit cards work (and commented: “Why don’t they teach this at school?”). These are vital life skills for autonomy. Which brings us back to “reach their full potential regardless of background or postcode” - what is important for children to attain and so what do we want our schools to do? I may not agree with a vision as promoted by Labour or Conservative, but if we start from something explicit we at least have something to work from.

How big is your image? O, 53 billion pixels!

Thursday, 21 July, 2016

DPReview have a review of Bentley’s rather impressive 53 billion pixel of one of their cars on the Golden Gate Bridge. It might not be obvious at first glance but it is there!! Made up of over 700 photos taken at varying focal lengths (between 300 and 1500mm… bet that puppy cost a few pennies!) using a motorised panoramic tripod head it is one monster of an image that require a fare bit of TLC is post production - most notably the bridge can move ~8m in either direction in high winds! Head on over to Bentley to take a peek.

Mapping Boris

Friday, 15 July, 2016

Indy100 have a great static (below) and interactive map of the countries Boris Johnson has insulted - without a doubt this can only be added to. Just look at the vast opportunity in South America for starters!