Geobulletin alpha

Win The Tyrannosaur Chronicles! 

Following Niroot's previous post, we have at least* 2 copies of Dave Hone's new book, The Tyrannosaur Chronicles, to give away. The book is a superb examination (a chronicle, if you will) of the science surrounding that very sexiest of theropod clades, the tyrannosauroids. Highly accessible and yet detailed and comprehensive with it, The Tyrannosaur Chronicles has plenty to offer for dinosaur enthusiasts of every stripe. It's been met with a flurry of positive reviews, to which we will [...]

Guest blog: “Photogrammetry for Paleoseismic Trenching” by Nadine Reitman (USGS) 

A few weeks ago, Nadine Reitman (USGS) published an interesting paper about the use of Photogrammetry for Paleoseismic Trenching in BSSA. In this guest blog she shares her key findings and explains how to minimise errors without spending too much time measuring control points. Thanks Nadine! Structure-from-motion (SfM) is now routinely used to construct orthophotos and high-resolution, 3D topographic models of geologic field sites. Here, we turn SfM on its side and use it to construct [...]

Exp359. JOIDES.Magnetic susceptibility: simply great !! 

Magnetic susceptibility: the name could seem weird ! The process used now in sedimentology  is smart. 2 points to know: - Magnetic susceptibility measures the answer of a sample in response to an applied magnetic field. A kind of degree of magnetization of the material. read

Imaggeo on Mondays: The world’s narrowest fjord 

Feast your eyes on this Scandinavia scenic shot by Sarah Connors, the EGU Policy Fellow. While visiting Norway, Sarah, took a trip along the world famous fjords and was able to snap the epic beauty of this glacier shaped landscape. To find out more about how she captured the shot and the forces of nature which formed this region, be sure to delve into today’s Imaggeo on Mondays post. The Nærøyfjord is situated in southern Norway between Oslo and the western of Bergen. It’s a narrow branch [...]

Geo Business and Social Media: Blogs, Twitter and Facebook 

This year I visited the Intergeo 2015 not without reason. I was invited at the booth of the German GeoBusiness Commission for an interview. The interplay of geobusiness and social media should be examined more closely. I like to publish my theses here as well<! – More -> Talk about your deeds The German (geo-)economic landscape is rich in smart companies, ideas, concepts and great products. Nevertheless, Germany is “dubbed” as a country of the small and medium-sized [...]

Favosites heldebergiae coral from the Kalkberg formartion of New York 

Corals are not terribly common in the section of the Kalkberg formation that I have collected and most of what I have found are small examples. Such is the case with Favosites heldergeriae as seen in these two examples that are about the size of a US quarter.This first specimen has a small mound starting in the center and is spreading out. A side viewWhen it is flipped over you can see the epitheca which is slightly wrinkled. The most notable feature of the ventral side of this fossil is the [...]

Effective Stress - Part 3 

All those points contacting the grain express the full vector surface forces including shear.  Since the grain is at rest, the forces sum to zero.  When the beaker is filled with water, there is a hydrostatic pressure gradient.  Within the water itself, these forces balance to zero, and there is no flow, but the grain is exposed to a gradient. The pressure is greater on the bottom than on

Download is Dead, Bring Forth the Stream 

The cooperative network of bittorrent has been thoroughly smashed by the slimy lawyers of the home box office.  They have sent depressing letters everywhere, and thus depressed the new economy by 2 points, throwing thousands out work.  Their infamy is now a close second to the Sony rootkit, and we know what happened to that company. So, go sic 'em, my Mad Russians.  Nobody will morn.  Ask

Top events of first day #1: Tectonophysics poster session 

Really good discussion in yesterday’s evening Tectonophysics poster session! Among several points of interest, I met a young PhD student from Montpellier who is doing both fieldwork and numerical modeling in Alaska, dealing with the tectonic configuration of thrust and strike-slip fault interference. This caught my attention immediately because I have been doing both numerical and (mostly) analogue modeling of this type of interference for some time now . Mostly we’ve been looking at the [...]

Tutorial 29: how to choose a title for your paper 

Over on his (excellent) Better Posters blog, Zen Faulks has been critiquing a poster on affective feedback. The full title of the poster is “Studying the effects of affective feedback in embodied tutors”. Among other points, Zen makes this one: As a browser, I often want a take home message. This isn’t helped by the weak title,

HeidiSQL vs. pgAdmin III – a small speed-test 

HeidiSQL, a free database-client, now supports PostgreSQL/PostGIS in the newest nightly builds. Using HeidiSQL with MySQL was always a pleasure and I often had the feeling that the pgAdmin III client of PostgreSQL is slow and not very user-friendly in some points. Because of this I had to test the difference of performance of these two clients. I don’t want to talk about features and handling because this is on the one hand a matter of taste and on the other hand the support of PostgreSQL [...]

Five Points About The Fossil History of Echinoderms! Happy National Fossil Day! 

Happy National Fossil Day! Every few years I'm in a position to share some more love about echinoderms and fossils. I've done this on previous National Fossil Days and tried to shed some light on the often arcane world of fossil echinoderms... Here's one on paleocology & fossil parasites.. A nice gallery of fossil crinoids..   and this classic piece on giant floating/pelagic

ESRI’s MOOC Going Spatial: Week 3 

Area, counts and data. This week became more tricky than ever. You faced the concepts of density and chorophlet maps. You were confronted with the MAUP problem and with some massive calculations done online. The MOOC infrastructure ATM approximately 500 out of 1200 students take actively part in the course. This is a shame as after the schedule was available the need for the course was obvious to many folks and now they need to wait. The course is going well and the tutorials in ArcGIS online [...]

Creating models in QGIS 

You’ve probably heard of model builder in ESRI ArcGIS (even used it?), but did you know the same functionality is available in QGIS? Image showing the “Processing Toolbox” in the background right and the “Processing modeler” in the front. In my example I’ll be building what should be a very simple tool that extracts points at a maximum distance from some lines, but it has a complication due to a bug in QGIS. However there’s a fix explained on the QGIS [...]

Paste 2014 Day 2: Oil Sands Tailings–It is all about scale! 

The first official day of conference sessions at the Paste 2014 conference here in Vancouver.  Sean Wells, Director of Research for Suncor presented the opening keynote address. I cannot possibly here recount all he said.  All I can do is note a few points that he made that stuck with me.  In due course, his

Turning Points 

“Arisa had come to Tokyo to perform a sort of ritual. A necessary ritual, though perhaps no ritual is unnecessary, it must be done because that is what a ritual is.” — from “Breakfast” by Toshiki Okada “We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way

historic shipping routes: a webmap 

We all know: Black is beautiful. So is this map from Andrew Zolnai. But besides the stunning Stamen toner background map he also shows the significant amount of 260.000 points on one map: historic logbook entries of ships. nations vs. time You can select nations and times and identify each point of this nice map and […]The post historic shipping routes: a webmap appeared first on

create point density raster in QGIS 

In some applications you want to calculate the density of points. It sounds very easy and in fact it is using QGIS. Let me show you how. Especially, let me show you how to do this with the heatmap plugin in QGIS. Prerequisities You will need the common installation of QGIS 2.0.1 Dufour and an

Why peer-review may be worth persisting with, despite everything 

Regular readers will remember Jennifer Raff’s guest post on the PeerJ blog, How To Become Good At Peer-Review; and my response to it, Three points of disagreement. Today I read a very different take on this piece by Chorasimilarity, who is a frequent commenter here at SV-POW!: Two pieces of all too obvious propaganda. Chorasimilarity starts by taking

How to become good at peer-review: three points of disagreement 

Jennifer Raff wrote a useful guest post on the PeerJ Blog: How To Become Good At Peer-Review. Most of its advice is excellent, and I’d heartily recommend it to anyone starting out on reviewing. But there are three points where I disagree with it. Here are the three things Jennifer said, and my counter-points. 1. Communicating