Robin's Blog

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Orthogonal Distance Regression in Python

Linear regression is often used to estimate the relationship between two variables – basically by drawing the ‘line of best fit’ on a graph. The mathematical method that is used for this is known as Least Squares, and aims to minimise the sum of the squared error for each point. The key question here is how do […]

Previously Unpublicised Code: RTWIDL

When looking through my profile on Github recently, I realised that I had over fifty repositories – and a number of these weren’t really used much by me anymore, but probably contained useful code that no-one really knows about! So, I’m going to write a series of posts giving brief descriptions of the code and […]

Blue Marble: From Apollo 17 to DSCOVR, an EPIC journey

NASA image ID AS17-148-22727 is famous. Although you may not recognise the number, you will almost certainly recognise the image: This was taken by NASA Apollo astronauts on the 7th December 1972, while the Apollo 17 mission was on its way to the moon. It has become one of the most famous photographs ever taken, and has […]

Two great IPython extensions

I bought a new laptop recently, and just realised that I hadn’t installed two great IPython extensions that I always try to install whenever I set up a new IPython environment – so I thought I’d blog about them to let the world (well, my half-a-dozen readers) know. They’re both written by MinRK – one […]

How to: get nice vector graphics in your exported PDF ipython notebooks

(This is really Part 2 of IPython tips, tricks & notes – Part 1, but I thought I’d give it a more self-explanatory title) IPython (sorry, Jupyter!) notebooks are really great for interactively exploring data, and then turning your analyses into something which can easily be sent to a non-technical colleague (by adding some Markdown and […]

Introducing recipy: effortless provenance tracking with Python

By time this blog post is published, I will have finished my presentation about recipy at EuroSciPy (see the abstract for my talk), and so I thought it would be a good time to introduce recipy to the wider world. I’ve been looking for something like recipy for ages – and I suggested the idea […]

How I became Dr Robin Wilson: Part 2

At the end of the previous post in this series, I was six months into my PhD and worrying that I really needed to come up with an overarching topic/framework/story/something into which all of the various bits of research that I was doing would fit. This part is the story of how I managed to […]

Interactive cloud frequency web map, with Google Earth Engine

Summary: I’ve developed an interactive cloud frequency map, available here. It may be particularly useful for satellite imaging researchers working out where they can acquire imagery easily. One of the major issues with optical satellite imaging is that you can’t see through clouds: so normally when its cloudy, you can’t get anything useful from your images. […]

How I became Dr Robin Wilson: Part 1

As many of you probably know, I’ve been working towards a PhD at the University of Southampton. This post is the brief story of my PhD, my graduation and my future plans. So, back in the dim and distant days of 2010, I started a PhD with the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS) at […]

How to: load the Google Maps Places library through Google API Loader

Google have recently introduced a new way of loading their javascript APIs: their Google API Loader. To use it, all you do is add a script tag in your HTML: <script src=”https://www.google.com/jsapi”></script> You can then load whatever Google APIs you want using code like this: google.load(‘visualization’, ‘1.0’); google.load(‘jquery’, ‘1’); google.load(‘maps’, ‘3’); google.setOnLoadCallback(function() { console.log(‘Callback’) }); […]