Another exciting update for this new year: my first academic journal paper has been published! It’s called Py6S: A Python interface to the 6S Radiative Transfer Model, and is published in Computers and Geosciences. If you’re reading this from a university with a subscription to Computers and Geosciences then you can read it at ScienceDirect – […]
The New Year is a time of new beginnings – and so it is rather appropriate to launch the complete redesign of my Free GIS Data list today. As you can see from the screenshot above, it looks far nicer than before – but it is also far easier to navigate. The dropdown […]
So, I’ve been pondering an interesting scientific dilemma recently: how do you validate a validation technique? That is, if you’re using a certain procedure to validate some data (that is, check how correct/accurate it is), how can you validate the validation procedure itself? This has come up in my work recently in relation to validating […]
A while back I released a GIS dataset containing Snow’s Cholera analysis data in modern GIS formats, and georeferenced to the British National Grid (see my previous post). Unfortunately, there was an error in some of the attributes of the Cholera Deaths shapefile which caused issues when using the data. This error has now been […]
I’ve just signed the Science Code Manifesto because I firmly believe in what it says. Ok well, that probably doesn’t tell you much – generally I tend to believe in things that I sign – but I’d like to tell you why I signed it, and why I think it’s really important. A lot of […]
As you might know from some of my previous posts, I’m a big fan of making my scientific work reproducible. My main reasons for being so keen on this are: Reproducibility is key to science – if it can’t be reproduced then it can not be verified (that is, the experiment can’t be tried again to […]
Recently I was shocked to find that there didn’t seem to be a simple tool which would convert BibTeX files to COINS metadata span tags – so I wrote one! That sentence probably made no sense to you – so lets go through it in a bit more depth. I use LaTeX to write all […]
While processing some data at work today I had an issue where I had a raster dataset in ArcGIS, where all cells with invalid data had been set to 9999. Of course, this caused a lot of issues for the statistics on the dataset – basically they were all nonsense – so I needed to […]
In my field I often need to plot polar contour plots, and generally plotting tools don’t make this easy. In fact, I think I could rate every single graphing/plotting package in the world by the ease of producing a polar contour plot – and most would fail entirely! Still, I have managed to find a […]
In 1854 there was a massive cholera outbreak in Soho, London – in three days over 120 people died from the disease. Famously, John Snow plotted the locations of the deaths on a map and found they clustered around a pump in Broad Street – he suggested that the pump be taken out of service […]