Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Academic’ Category

The benefits of an academic website

Over the last few months I’ve helped a number of people setup academic websites, and various other people have asked me whether it’s worth a PhD student, Early Career Researcher or other academic creating a website, especially given that it does take a bit of time to do it well. My unequivocal answer is YES! In […]

Encouraging citation of software – introducing CITATION files

Summary: Put a plaintext file named CITATION in the root directory of your code, and put information in it about how to cite your software. Go on, do it now – it’ll only take two minutes! Software is very important in science – but good software takes time and effort that could be used to do […]

van Heuklon Ozone model implementation in Python

As part of my PhD I wanted to use a simple model which would give me an estimation of the atmospheric ozone amount given a location and time of year. A simple model to do this was created by van Heuklon in 1979, and was described in a delightfully simple paper (unfortunately not freely available […]

Review: Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook

Summary: A useful guide to automating ArcGIS using Python, which is fully up-to-date with the latest version of ArcGIS. Definitely provides "quick answers to common problems", but it may take more effort to get a deep understanding of the methods used. Good breadth of coverage – but notably lacks raster examples – and well explained […]

John Snow’s Cholera data in more formats

UPDATE: I’ve created a new site to host my John Snow data, and included various other modern formats (GeoPackage, GeoJSON etc). Please go there to download the data. In honour of the bicentenary of John Snow’s birth – and because I was asked to by someone via email – I have now released my digitisation […]

Resources for Sustainable Software and Reproducible Research in Remote Sensing presentation

I recently did a presentation entitled Sustainable Software and Reproducible Research in Remote Sensing at the Wavelength 2013 conference. The slides are available at SpeakerDeck, and shown below. https://speakerdeck.com/robintw/software-sustainability-and-reproducible-research-in-remote-sensing The rest of this page is a rather rough categorised list of various links and resources that may be useful to you after seeing the presentation (either […]