Cool new citizen history project from the folks at Zooniverse
http://www.ancientlives.org/Sunday, July 31, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Explore new large geographic features in Google Earth
July 25, 2011 4:20 PM
by Lat
Explore new large geographic features in Google Earth
Since announcing the "Mountains" layer in April, we've been busy working to bring you additional geographic features in Google Earth. Today we're announcing the availability of mountain ranges, deserts, plains and more under the "Borders and Labels" left Layers panel.
Along with well-known landmarks such as the Appalachian Mountains, the Alps and the Sahara Desert, you'll also find some less-well-known (but just as interesting) features, including the Lut Desert in southeastern Iran (one of the hottest areas on Earth) and the Canadian Shield in central and eastern Canada (a very large area in where glaciers removed much of the topsoil starting around 4.5 billion years ago).
Lut Desert in southeastern Iran
Canadian Shield in central and eastern Canada
To view these and all the other newly-added features, make sure "Borders and Labels" box is checked in the left Layers panel in Google Earth and look for the green labels.
Knowing that a single label may not do justice to expansive areas such as the Rocky Mountains, we've also enabled "mouseover" extents for these geographic features. By simply moving your mouse over the label you can see the full extent of larger formations or regions.
Mouseover extent of the Rocky Mountains
Posted by Pete Giencke, GIS Data Engineer
Google Earth
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Data Appeal: A new way to visualize data in Google Earth
July 27, 2011 10:11 AM
by Google Earth Blog
Data Appeal: A new way to visualize data in Google Earth
As we've seen over the years, Google Earth is an amazing tool for data visualization. We've shown you tools for visualizing census data, CO2 emissions and a variety of other items.
DataAppeal is a new data visualization company that is doing some neat stuff. They allow you to upload XLS files, which are then converted into 3D models and/or animations. The resulting models are quite well-done, as seen here:
Because they're a young company and are still building our their product, it's entirely free to use right now. That will likely change in the future, but hopefully they'll continue to provide a free option.
Their tool is already being used in mainstream publications, such as this article in the Globe and Mail a few months back.
Nadia and her team have put together a solid tool, and it'll be fun to see how it develops in the coming years. If you build any interesting items with this system, leave a comment below and show it off to everyone.
3D Models
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Monday, July 25, 2011
Photographers Capture Mysterious, Beautiful Patterns in Sand | Wired Science | Wired.com
Some great images here that I'll be sure to use in class!
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Sea Dwellers
Going to have to pick up a copy of these books.
July 18, 2011 1:31 PM
by Justin Brown
Sea Dwellers
For those of you interested in learning the beginings of seafloor habitats I suggest to read Bob Barths book on the SEALAB programs.
From the Publisher
From the late 1950′s through the 1960′s the U.S. Navy SEALAB program was guided by Captain George Bond. This program ultimately had a huge impact on the global economy. The SEALAB program provided the commercial diving industry with its most important tool in the exploitation of offshore oil and gas reservoirs: the ability to dive deep and stay there for extended periods of time. In the process, the Navy medical community extracted a wealth of physiological data from their human subjects. While this diving program got less media exposure than NASA's space program and even Cousteau's rival Conshelf program, SEALAB's impact has been very profound by proving the viability of saturation diving.Sea Dwellers: The Humor, Drama and Tragedy of the U.S. Navy SEALAB Programs is a journal of this exciting Navy adventure. Author and Navy diver Bob Barth was the only man to experience all of the SEALAB programs and its predecessor, the Genesis program, from the other end of the hose. These programs provided the scientific basis for the practice of saturation diving as it is known and performed today. Barth and his peers were literally human guinea pigs. He gave blood, sweat, tears, the prime years of his life, and even his heart and soul to these programs in order to experience what most men can only dream of… life on the bottom of the ocean.
Sea Dwellers will not become the definitive account of SEALAB in the annals of history. George F. Bond's own chronicles, as edited by Helen Siiteri, provide a more comprehensive and balanced view of the political, technical, and logistical hurdles that had to be crossed in making Genesis and SEALAB happen. Yet Barth's story must be told, and the fact that he is a colorful story teller in his own right is icing on the cake. That his recollections don't always jibe with Bond's in the finer details of what happened is only reflective of Barth's different vantage point… from the bottom.
Barth recounts dozens of comical episodes in Sea Dweller, including: contending for the right of way with a destroyer in his 35 foot LCPL; attempting to drown one of the NASA astronauts; providing for the construction of the SEALAB habitat with a little midnight requisitioning; explaining to the Shore Patrol why a sailor needs to be out walking goats; having the whole Armed Forces Sea and Air Rescue Teams out looking for him as he is parked at an island enjoying drinks at a nearby club; and instigating many other shenanigans that aggravated his Captain and, if not for the greater good achieved by the project, might have put him in real hot water.
NASA Astronaut and Navy Diver Scott Carpenter was a member of the SEALAB team. Of the author, Carpenter has the following to say: Bob Barth is a man of few words and, in a few words, he is the undisputed dean of the saturated diver. He was in the business before anyone ever knew it was a business, including Bob himself. Name any event or feat in the world of saturation diving and Bob Barth has been there and done that. His long underwater career has left him with an endless list of respectful shipmates for whom the mere mention of the name Barth brings fond smiles. He doesn't talk about it very much though, and unless you ask him to tell you a story, you'll have no idea of his background or his accomplishments. It has taken a quarter of a century to get him to write this book because, he says, he can't write. The book itself proves him wrong.
Sea Dwellers is a 184-page book which contains 115 photographs, many of which have never been seen before, covering all of the SEALAB and Genesis programs.
July 2011 Saturation
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Submarines, Rocks and a Beautiful Lake - NYTimes.com
http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/submarines-rocks-and-a-beautiful-lake/
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Friday, July 22, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Backseat driving – the science backroom team operations
Great post by Jen Biddle!
July 20, 2011 2:49 PM
by admin
Backseat driving – the science backroom team operations
Jenn Biddle - Science backroom
I'm so excited to be officially joining the PLRP team this year as part of the science team. I got excited about astrobiology in graduate school and after my PhD, was a NASA Astrobiology Institute postdoctoral fellow. When I became a professor, I kept looking for ways to stay involved in NASA and astrobiology science. I collaborate with the NASA Astrobiology Institute at Penn State University and now am part of the PLRP team!
I typically do deep sea research, so the PLRP approach of using manned submarines is not too unusual to me. What is unusual is that we're taking an analog mission approach to the science and exploration – complete with a mobile mission command center. I've been really impressed with the amount of infrastructure that the team has had to create in order to do their work, including setting up wifi in remote places and running video feeds across miles. Typically my research done on a ship has communications already on it – we just hop on and do science. Coming to a remote (and beautiful!) site in British Columbia certainly presents challenges.
Today I got my full immersion into PLRP science and headed up the science backroom team for the third dive in Kelly Lake. One disadvantage of a single manned sub is that only one person is seeing and observing things in real time. Maybe they can take a video, but the rest of us might wait hours to see it. That means decisions are slowed and science might be impeded. So this year the team designed a way to have a sub tethered to a cable, sending video feeds to the surface – and then the coms team has been able to shoot video back to the mobile mission command center. What this means is that many of us scientists can sit in comfort and see and hear what the pilot of the sub is observing. That way we can confer on what we are seeing immediately, add extra sets of eyes to a busy pilot and give advice or opinions on what is happening. Really what we did was sit back and go "Cool!" when a lovely microbialite would pop up on the screen.
We additionally got a true mission-feel when we started doing delayed communications. If an astronaut is off of the Earth, it takes a while to talk to them! So even though our sub pilot was only a few kilometers away, we gave ourselves a delay to see how things would go. Not surprisingly, it did seem easier – doesn't your job go better when your "boss" stops interrupting you? But we'll see how well it works when we actually want samples. Maybe 10 brains are better than one – maybe not! It's part of this week's experiments. My final experiments won't be done for a while. We are collecting samples from Pavilion and Kelly Lakes to continue to describe the microbial communities that are in the microbialites. My group is specifically interested in the phototrophic (light-harvesting) communities, who we expect are driving the distinct shapes we see in these structures. Our work is in progress, so now updates yet – but watch for later updates as we start to unravel the mysteries of these beautiful and mysterious microbialites!
Written By: Jennifer Biddle
Inside the MMCC
Inside the MMCC
Bill keeping - comunications, MMCC
Darlene Lim (PI) - Inside the MMCC - there are million ideas going on inside her head right now
Field Reports Microbialites Science Reports Underwater Exploration Communications CSA Deepworker flight plan MARSLIFE Mission Support MMCC NASA pavilion lake PLRP Science Metrics
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
NOAA approves catch limit increases and other measures to provide greater flexibility to the sustainable Atlantic sea scallop fishery
Yay the scallop amendments have been passed now it means our RSA effort can begin!
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110720_scallops.html
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Live video from the E/V Nautilus | Inner Space Center
http://isc.gso.uri.edu/stream1
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
QTC SwathView workshop at VAST Lab UD
Jon Preston and Ben Biffard are here today running a workshop on QTC SwathView. Starting out with a theoretical background including nice coverage of ARA.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
What Would Don Draper Do? - The Oatmeal
WWDDD...
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/wwddd
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Edward Tufte’s “Slopegraphs”
Really interesting discussion of graph visualization.
http://charliepark.org/slopegraphs/
http://charliepark.org/slopegraphs/
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
AUV Scallop cruise highlight photos
http://gallery.me.com/arttrembanis#100324
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Simpler Control of Random Number Generation in MATLAB
July 7, 2011 1:48 PM
by Loren
Simpler Control of Random Number Generation in MATLAB
Simpler Control of Random Number Generation in MATLAB
Once again we're going to hear from guest blogger Peter Perkins, who is a statistical software developer here at The MathWorks.
MATLAB has had random numbers since the beginning. But not surprisingly, as the state of that art advanced, the original tools in MATLAB were not really suitable to incorporate new ideas like parallel random number generation. So R2008b saw the addition of the RandStream class, which was designed to support those new ideas, including new generator algorithms, multiple random number streams, substreams, and parallel generation.
RandStream also fixed an old problem that most people didn't even know existed, where MATLAB code that reseeded or read/wrote the state of MATLAB's random number generator using the pre-R2008b "control" syntaxes, such as
rand('seed',0); % may not do what you think!
didn't always have the effect you might have expected.
So the introduction of RandStream was a good thing, providing powerful new ways of using random numbers. The problem was, with power came a price: using RandStream resulted in more verbose and harder-to-understand MATLAB code, required at least some knowledge of MATLAB objects, and just plain felt different than the old ways of doing things.
stream = RandStream('mt19937ar','Seed',5489); % MATLAB's start-up settings RandStream.setGlobalStream(stream);
Lots of people, justifiably, gave us feedback more or less saying, "Hey! I just want to generate random numbers! It shouldn't be like learning brain surgery!" We listened, and in R2011a, added a new function, rng, that allows you to simply, quickly, and intuitively control how MATLAB generates random numbers. rng is actually built on top of RandStream, so in that sense it isn't anything new. But it provides a simpler interface for the most common operations.
For example, to reinitialize MATLAB's random number generator to its default settings, you use this command
rng defaultand to reinitialize it with the seed 54321, you use this
rng(54321);
You can also reseed it "unpredictably" using
rng shuffleDefinitely a simpler syntax, and yet there's still some potentially tricky ideas going on there, ideas that can trip you up. A couple of years ago, I wrote two posts describing the basic ideas behind random number generator seeds and states, and showed how to "control" the generator in MATLAB, and more importantly, discussed when and when not to. All of that is still relevant and important to understand. But those posts explain it terms of RandStream.
This time around, I'll just point to the MATLAB User Guide section that covers much of the same ground, but this time in terms of the rng function. It is a quick read, and I really recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how to use random numbers in MATLAB. The short summary is that quite often, you don't need to do anything special at all beyond just calling rand, randi, or randn to create random arrays. But if you need simple repeatability or independence, rng gets you that easily.
rng is also a more direct replacement than RandStream for the old, pre-R2008b ways of reseeding or reading/writing the generator state. If you have code that uses those old commands, you've probably noticed that the Code Analyzer in the MATLAB editor flags them. In R2011a, the warning directs you to a section of the doc that shows how to replace the old with the new.
RandStream is still the tool to use for more complicated situations involving multiple parallel random streams, so rng doesn't entirely replace it. But for most people, most of the time, rng is a much simpler choice.
Get the MATLAB code (requires JavaScript)
Published with MATLAB® 7.12
Best Practice New Feature Random
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Considerations for the safe operation of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs)
Thanks to Kurt for sending me this link to a document on AUV operations.
http://www.imca-int.com/documents/divisions/survey/docs/IMCAS011.pdf
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Cartographier un iceberg: une première | Olivier Robichaud | Sherbrooke
http://www.cyberpresse.ca/la-tribune/sherbrooke/201107/11/01-4416832-cartographier-un-iceberg-une-premiere.php?utm_categorieinterne=trafficdrivers&utm_contenuinterne=cyberpresse_B13b_estrie_381_section_POS1
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Cartas BSB
Link to free raster charts for Brazil
https://www.mar.mil.br/dhn/chm/cartas/download/cartasbsb/cartas_eletronicas_Internet.htm
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
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