A-Level Students Forget Knowledge

Wednesday, 25 June, 2014

New students have forgotten bulk of A-level knowledge” reports The Times Higher Ed… well no real surprise there given what we already know about the forgetting curve. In fact its a bland study that has been repeated over and over - Eric Mazur’s work has shown that memorisation of facts is dangerous when you need to understand concepts

Intro to spatial visualisation in R

Wednesday, 25 June, 2014

Nice catch over at GoGeo

Best email of the day…..

Thursday, 12 June, 2014

Best email of the year actually… after some (slightly) slow customer service from Fast Lane couriers, they sorted my problem (well done!) and end by saying:

We hope we have resolved this matter to your satisfaction, and we look forward to welcoming you back in the future.

If I can be of any further assistance please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Heroic regards!

Dan McGeoghan
Fast Lane Support


Top one Dan - heroic email!!

Skybox Sold

Wednesday, 11 June, 2014

As Ive noted before, micro satellites are a hot topic. So perhaps its no surprise that Google have snapped up Skybox. Lots going on in the spatial data arena at the moment….

Using OSM Data in QGIS

Monday, 9 June, 2014

A nice practical guide to using OSM data in QGIS from download, to conversion, to styling

How to present your data

Saturday, 7 June, 2014

Two brilliantly simple animated slide decks at Dark Horse Analytics - the first on presenting tabular data and the second on presenting graphical data.

I regularly simplify my graphics and tables - many templates overstyle their design so simplifying is good. It also makes your design stand out from the rest because its different. These are REALLY well worth a look.

The things streetview photographs….

Tuesday, 3 June, 2014

Gotta admit, its classy…..

BBC hexacopter pizazz

Monday, 2 June, 2014

Some great videography from the BBC

Android Mindmapping

Monday, 2 June, 2014

I’m a big fan of mind mapping for blatting out ideas (using on a piece of paper!) and then structuring them in to an editable document. Freemind is my favoured desktop application and I then found (and bought) the rather excellent Thinking Space for Android. That was subsequently bought by Mindjet to complement their commercial MindManager product. They have released several incremental updates but the core product remains largely the same, albeit with interaction with their online cloud storage which requires you to subscribe. MindJet supports the same file format as Freemind and, rather helpfully, once you’ve logged in for the first time you can change the storage location to local files (Settings->Other->Device) and then logout and continue using Mindjet (at least with the older v3.7 I am using). It works remarkably well on a small screen and allows you to carry, view and edit your mindmaps. Worth the download.

Brancaster Staithe Gigapan

Monday, 2 June, 2014

A vista of the coastline at Brancaster Staithe looking north across Scolt Head Island….. the students we took on fieldwork won’t recognise this view as there is no rain…..