Geobulletin alpha

Visualizing the Heating of the Planet 

An ingenious animated graphic by Ed Hawkins (Climate scientist at the Uni. of Reading in the UK) is going viral online today, and it is well worth sharing. Finding a new way to show raw data in a way that allows you to visualize what is happening, is always worth pursuing. Ed has another graph that shows how 2016 so far compares to last year. Last year was the warmest

The rise of open research data 

This was originally posted at: http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2015/08/26/the-rise-of-open-research-data/ As a junior researcher in the UK, it has given me great pleasure over the last few years to see the dramatic development of open access publishing. Most major research funders in the UK now require public access to published research articles in one form or another, and many other research intensive nations across the globe are following suit. Along with this global increase in public [...]

Dataforensics Rapid CPT Software Receives Major Update 

Norcross, GA – August, 2014 – Dataforensics proud to announce a major update to its Rapid CPT Software. The new version of Rapid CPT (version 4.2) drastically improves performance. Depending on the dataset, the processing time is typically reduced by 80-95%. This is particularly important for customers with large datasets consisting of a hundred or more soundings where processing time previously took 3-4 hours which has been reduced to 10-15 minutes. Additionally, a new Cloud based [...]

Exploring OSM Israel/Palestine 

In this post I’ll show how to explore (or data mine) Open Street Map data and use features off-line that normally can be hard to get. Many use http://download.geofabrik.de to download zipped shapefiles to be used directly in GIS systems, but are surprised when it does not contain as much data as the same area in Open Street Map on-line. You can still use geofabrik.de but download the *.osm.bz2 files instead. They include raw data from OSM that needs to be processed in order to be used in [...]

Neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 2: why serial position matters 

In the previous post in this series I looked at the some of the easily available raw data on neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropods. In this post I’ll explain how serial variation–that is, variation along the vertebral column in one individual–is relevant to the inferences made in the new paper by Woodruff and Fowler (2012).

Govt policy "reprehensible" says Science and Technology committee 

Oh, but they didn't say it in quite that way, instead preferring to portray it as a fault of the "climate science community":"The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the 'standard practice' among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes – something the committee's chair, Phil Willis MP, described as

Empirical Study of Data Sharing by Authors Publishing in PLoS Journals 

Apropos of nothing in particular :-)Conclusions We received only one of ten raw data sets requested. This suggests that journal policies requiring data sharing do not lead to authors making their data sets available to independent investigators.(via Andrew Gelman, in my list of old starred

Where’s the data? 

Much of the discussion in recent days has been motivated by the idea that climate science is somehow unfairly restricting access to raw data upon which scientific conclusions are based. This is a powerful meme and one that has clear resonance far beyond the people who are actually interested in analysing data themselves. However, many