Summary: Great book – clear explanations, useful example code and a friendly, easy-going writing style. One of my favourite academic books ever! Reference: Marsland, S., 2009, Machine learning: An Algorithmic Perspective, Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, Florida, 390pp Machine Learning can be a difficult topic – as I found out when taking a Masters-level machine […]
Just a quick post this time, as I’m currently enjoying a nice holiday (well, holiday combined with work) in France. I had to post this because I’ve just realised that one of my biggest gripes with ArcGIS has been fixed in version 10! Hooray! I suspect a lot of other people have been frustrated by […]
Since I started my PhD I have forced myself to use LaTeX for all of the documents that I write (yes, absolutely everything), and this has really helped me get to grips with how to do things in LaTeX. Overall I have been very impressed – my documents now look really professional, and LaTeX actually […]
Summary: Great book – both for GIS concepts and for teaching Python libraries. Lives up to the boast on the front cover – you really will learn to create complete mapping applications, learning a lot of useful tools and techniques on the way. Reference: Westra, E., 2010, Python Geospatial Development, Packt Publishing, Birmingham, UK, 508 […]
I spent part of today struggling with an undergraduate student to get our university-provided ArcGIS dongle licenses to work. In the spirit of sharing our hard work with the rest of the world, the solution below may be of use to people. The error that we got which were fixed by this solution are listed […]
I was thinking recently about a post I made a while back about my academic values, and happened to come across the Reproducible Research website. I can’t emphasise how much I agree with the idea of reproducible research – it would remove so many problems that I have been having with my research, and will […]
(Yes the title is meant to remind you of snakes on a plane!) Goodness! At this time of year there really are a lot of people coughing on trains! I travelled from Southampton to Tunbridge Wells today, and my journey was accompanied by a large range of coughs and sneezes, from the high-pitched cough of […]
This is the first in a series of posts on the lessons I’ve learnt from various episodes in my life. First up: my dissertation. In case you’re not familiar with dissertations: they are the large written projects which are often given to students in the final year of their degree. The details of mine are […]
Quite through chance I just happened to stumble upon the USGS New EarthExplorer, and I’m really quite impressed. Remote sensing is a field that is almost entirely based around new technology: satellite sensors, computer processing techniques and so on, but for ages actually acquiring the data has been an exercise in frustration. Much as the […]
So, hot on the heels of my last post, I’m now applying another concept from a computing blog post to science. For many years I’ve been a fan of Joel Spolsky’s blog, and I’ve learnt a lot from it. One of his most interesting posts was called The Law of Leaky Abstractions. As with my […]