TED: Academic research is publicly funded - why isn’t it publicly available?

Thursday, 29 March, 2018

An interesting talk from TEDxMileHighWomen. Worth a watch to get a short 10-min summary of some of the issues involved with publishing academic research - the comments are worth a look too.

As Erica Stone implies, she hasn’t got much experience in academic publishing and it unfortunately shows. There are some points well made, but there is and underlying naivety about the role of publishing, the cost, the requirements of universities and the amount of time academics have. As I noted in my editorial this year:

Academic publishing is a knowledge distribution and academic assessment system, partially funded by universities and research institutes.

To publish you have cross-subsidise, or go down an author or reader pays route - ironically (and perhaps to the chagrin of the OA camp), OA is currently costing the system more than a subscription model on an annual basis and probably on a pageview basis too. But, let’s keep the debate going!

Open Access UK Unit Postcodes

Thursday, 29 March, 2018

The Ordnance Survey released their Code-Point Open product a few years ago that has the OSGB centroids of the unit postcodes. It’s very useful but is only points - if you want the postcodes areas as polygons then you need to license Code-Point with Polygons (snappily titled!). A number of people have derived unit postcode areas using Voronoi polygons including more recently Mike Spencer with some intro at his Scottish Snow site. It’s worth noting that Voronoi diagrams equally partition space between points and nothing more - they are not equivalent to unit postcodes (which can be arbitrary) but are a reasonable first guess. One dataset worth having for your arsenal of spatial data!

Waldo Tobler

Tuesday, 6 March, 2018

I was sad to see that Waldo Tobler passed away last month - a lifetime geoscientist he contributed huge amounts to computational cartography but will be best remember for the First Law of Geography. Some more details at GeoLounge and in the original paper.

However I love the CSISS Classic which was a tongue-in-cheek experiment with Peter Gould on geocoding. Read it because its wonderfully powerful way of showing students about geocoding. Hopefully we’ll see an anthology of his work in the not too distant future.

QGIS 3 features

Monday, 5 March, 2018

QGIS 3 is well and truly out now - download your copy here. And the good folks over at GIS Geography have put together a list of QGIS features that are in the new version. Some of the highlights include 3D (1), coordinate reference bounds (5), geopackage (7), background processing (8), new print composer (13), refined graphical modeler (25), but they are all worth taking a look at as it might just be a solution to the problem you have!