Gaia Resources - Blog

Toys for WALIS

2009-11-02

Cutting Edge? No, it’s all smooth and lovely, the new Pelican iPhone case.

We could be the first people in Australia to have the new Pelican iPhone/iPod Touch case (i1015). It’s life-time guaranteed, water resistant, and crush proof as per usual with Pelican cases, but this one also has an integrated headphone jack through the wall of the case, and a nifty little headphone winder inside to keep everything neat and tidy. Piers tells me that his HTC phone fits too (see below).

We also received our new pens (picture) made from 100% recycled paper (with minimal plastic). Beats adding to the over 10 million plastic pens chucked into Australian landfill annually.

Our prize draw this year at the WALIS Forum is a new Solio “hybrid” charger, just like the one Piers has been using. So come grab a pen, check out the new Pelican case, and enter our busines card give-a-way for a Solio charger at our stand. See you there!

Tom

email Tom directly here

Tom

Wordle Number 2

2009-10-23

It's been a while since I last looked at our feed with a Wordle, (see here), so here it is again:

I'm not really surprised how dominating Twitter is, seeing how much it dominates our communcations now. However, what is particularly disappointing is that "beer" is now completely missing.

Email me directly here or find me on Twitter.

Piers

Tweets galore

2009-10-22

If you're not already watching the Twitter feed from FOSS4G, have a look at http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23foss4g2009.

Both Andrew (http://twitter.com/andrew_dennison) and AJ (http://twitter.com/ajones17221) are also posting regular tweets about the sessions that they are in.

It's hard not to feel some of the excitement and interest from the conference through Twitter (further cementing my own view that it's a great tool for keeping people in the loop about conferences).

Contact me directly through email or Twitter.

Piers

Quicklinks

2009-10-16

FOSS4G starts on Tuesday next week in Sydney (AJ and I will be going!)
Finland has made 1Mb broadband access a legal right. This will increase to 100Mb by 2015
GeoServer 1.7.7 was released this week. Mostly focussed on bug fixes leading into the 2.0 release which will feature a totally redesigned administration interface (Get the latest version 2.0 release candidate here)
Walkscore goes open source. Walkscore measures the ‘walkability’ of an address based on how easy it is to access local facilities on foot
The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced a new Wi-Fi Direct specification. Wi-Fi Direct will allow for peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections without a wireless network. The Wi-Fi Alliance is a global not for profit industry association made up of most of the big players in the wireless industry.

Email me directly here or find me on Twitter

Andrew

Come and see us at WALIS 2009

2009-10-13

We will be having a stand at the WALIS Forum again this year.

At the stand we will be showcasing the work we have been doing with ClimateWatch as well as our own Earth2.0 application and the latest open source GIS solutions.

Andrew will be presenting a paper on some of the work we have been doing with Rio Tinto Iron Ore over the past five years. This talk is titled Rio Tinto: Managing environmental data on a large scale and is scheduled for Wednesday November 11 at 2:15pm.

If you are at the conference come and see us at the stand and say hi!

Email me directly here or find me on Twitter

GaiaResources is now also tweeting

Andrew

Quicklinks

2009-10-09

Interesting and somewhat critical article on the issues associated with data interoperability.
Google are moving from using Tele Atlas street centreline data in Google Maps to their own data. Only applies to the US at the moment, but I would expect that to change over time.
uDig have released uDig 3D. It is still only in alpha release but looks interesting.
DigitalGlobe launched the new WorldView-2 satellite on October 8th

Email me directly here or find me on Twitter

Andrew

Quicklinks

2009-10-05

Google has released an update for Google Earth 5.1
Two weeks to go till the FOSS4G conference in Sydney. See you there!
WALIS has won the right to host the 2011 Digital Earth (ISDE) Conference in Perth

Email me directly here or find me on Twitter

Andrew

Presentation skills

2009-09-24

Much like Piers' interest in citizen science, I have come to realise that I am fascintated by how people learn. We all know that "everyday is a school day", and some "teachers" are better than others. If we can present an idea well, then surely it makes it easier for people to understand and learn it. Last week, Andrew, Anthony and I went on a refresher course for our presentation skills. I thoroughly enjoyed the course, and I think we all got different things out of it.

During my career I have been on many presentation skills courses, and of course attended many presentations. There are a handful of presenations that I can remember. I want my presentations to be the memorable ones. During our course I paid close attention to how people learn, and how they remember. Without taking business from Cameron at Front and Centre Training Solutions here is a short list of what I learnt.

Three.
- Tell people more than about 3 things, and they won't remember them
Plan.
- Don't write the presentation then ask yourself if it fits the objective afterwards!
How do you remember things?
- Exactly. Recalling things, that is one way
- Repeating
- Making things relevant to your audience

We learnt many other things and agreed between us that we will help each other not to forget them. It is a great benefit to have several colleagues that were on the same course as we can learn from each other, and critique each others work.

Hopefully Andrew is not feeling pressured as he is presenting a paper at WALIS in November. We won't heckle too much!

If you'd like to find out more about our course, drop me a line 9227 7309, or email me.

Tom

Citizen Science

2009-09-22

I’ve been interested in citizen science my whole life, as you might have guessed from some of my older database projects and my fascination with birding. So, I’m really excited about the launch of Climatewatch, and a new project that we kicked off last week in Canberra, focusing on the role of citizen science and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).

Nigel George from Redskink and myself went to Canberra for a two-day workshop to start the ALA project last week. This first stage focuses on reviewing the needs of several large citizen science projects happening around Australia, and then looking at what sort of open source tool stack would help these projects to achieve their goals. If we find some commonality in the citizen science projects out there, then we’ll be looking at building the tool stack over the next 18 months or so. We’ll shortly have a web presence up for this project, and I’ll blog and tweet the details of this.

The initial steps in this work are already underway, with Nigel talking to some projects on the east coast, while I am looking at the West coast projects. Our backgrounds are also complementary, with Nigel working more in the water and physio-chemical areas, while I’ve been focused on biology most of my career. Both of us are quite excited about the project and the possibilities of working together on a range of other projects, so stay tuned…

In our other main citizen science project, Climatewatch kicked off on Monday morning, with the Acting Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, launching the web site in Melbourne. The event went well, I’m told, and you can read more about it here.

Climatewatch is a pretty large citizen science project (and we will be including it in our ALA project), which aims to capture information about “indicator” species, and how their behaviours are changing in the face of climate change. It’s the other end of climate change from the work we’ve been recently doing for the South Coast NRM Inc group, where (along with other consultants) we have been looking at mapping and analyzing regional climate change impacts and effects.

Two people at Gaia Resources have put lot of hard work into the Climatewatch project, firstly Tim Carpenter (who left Gaia Resources earlier this year) and then by Anthony Jones, who’s taken Tim’s role here. Both of the guys put a lot of hard work into Climatewatch, and without it the launch wouldn’t be as successful. So credit must go to Tim and AJ for their hard work here.

I would like to finish this post up by encouraging anyone interested in citizen science, or climate change, to register and participate in Climatewatch (you can register here). You don’t have to be a naturalist, a biologist or have any special qualifications. If you can recognize an Australian Magpie, or a Common Brown Butterfly, or a White Cedar tree, then you can participate – and if you can’t recognize them yet, the Climatewatch web site will certainly provide you with the material so that you can!

If you have any questions about these projects, then contact me via email or Twitter.

Piers

Quicklinks

2009-09-21

GeoEye-1 has celebrated its first birthday
Two cool new uses for augmented reality. The first round of iPhone apps have been released, there has also been some research into combining augmented reality with Google Earth. I’m expecting the iPhone stuff to be big!
Google Maps is now offering live traffic information for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. No word on when/if Perth will be added
QGIS 1.3 was released today. I picked up three key improvements:
- There are a number of new editing features
- Lots of work done on the OpenStreetMap plugin
- New Terrain Analysis plugin
ESRI have released an updated version of the Geodatabase Toolset for ArcCatalog (GDBT)

Email me directly here or find me on Twitter

Andrew