planetwater

• Solar panels to come back to the White House? http://twiturl.de/lajnu #

International Association of Mathematical Geosciences Stanford University Stanford, California, USA http://iamg09.stanford.edu

1. Trinkwasserkolloquium Von der Ressource bis zum Lebensmittel http://www.iswa.uni-stuttgart.de/aktuelles/Trinkwasser-Kolloquium-Flyer%20WGW%202009_neu.pdf

Conference announcement (last call):

Location: Milos Island, Greece. George Eliopoulos Milos Conference Centre

Conference Dates: June 17-19, 2009.

Conference Web Site: http://milos.conferences.gr/statgis2009/

Contact: statgis2009@heliotopos.net

Keynote Speakers:

We are pleased to announce the following keynote speakers for this event:

• Noel Cressie, Ohio State University: Spatio-Temporal Random Effects Filtering

• Hans Wackernagel, Ecole des Mines de Paris: Data assimilation for epidemiological surveillance

• Stefano Nativi, CNR-IMAA, University of Florence: Multidisciplinary interoperability architectures, some GEOSS and GMES experiences

Conference Overview:

StatGIS is addressed to researchers in academia and research institutes, as well as practitioners and industry professionals who want to learn about recent developments in spatial statistics and their applications, and to share their experiences in these areas. Application fields of interest for this conference will include, but not be limited, to: spatial environmental modelling, early warning monitoring systems for the environment, geostatistics in natural hazards prediction, optimum spatial design, space-time analysis and renewable energy resources, remote sensing applications in land reclamation after mining exploitation, spatial metrics for biodiversity assessment and monitoring, etc.

The conference will provide an opportunity for researchers and industry to meet and exchange the latest in spatial statistics and geoinformatics with an emphasis on the main steps involved in environmental monitoring and surveillance. We will start with the collection of data from environmental sensors and monitoring networks and further discuss their use by the web services and systems involved in the processing of the information. The automated analysis of the data and the detection of anomalies and changes will also be covered before finally addressing the visualization and communication of the generated information for efficient decision making.

The international character of the conference will be an opportunity to focus on GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) and GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) related issues, in particular on the need for cost-effective sustainable services. StatGIS 2009 will therefore focus on generic solutions, re-usable software solutions, in particular Open Source technology, and interoperability of systems. Cross-border issues that affect the homogeneity of geographic information (INSPIRE) and of global environmental monitoring networks as well as the interoperability of the systems will also be covered.

Those used to the tradition of StatGIS being an important meeting to learn about the latest developments in geostatistics and spatial statistics will not be disappointed by the challenges that will be discussed in Milos. Statistical issues that will be covered range from the analysis of data provided by heterogeneous networks, the automatic detection of anomalies for early warning, to the real-time interpolation of data collected by mobile devices or the fast processing of environmental data for reducing computing times. The monitoring of environmental risks using spatial statistics and geoinformatics covers a large number of applications. These cover issues as different as environmental radioactivity, global change, biodiversity, pests, floods, droughts, fires or earthquakes but also health risks associated with the spreading of viruses or any health threats.

Key papers will be published in a special issue of Computers & Geosciences.

Conference Topics

Topic A. Monitoring networks and Sensor Webs Topic B. Service Oriented Architectures for Environmental Monitoring Topic C. Statistics and spatial metrics for Environmental Monitoring Topic D. Open Source tools for Environmental Web Services Topic E. Applications and Case Studies Topic F. Visualisation and Decision-Making Topic G. Socio-economical benefits of Service Oriented Architectures for Environmental Monitoring

Workshop: “Lessons learned from INTAMAP, an interoperable framework for real-time automatic mapping of critical environmental variables”

Important dates and deadlines

• Friday 13 February 2009 – Abstract submission.
• Friday 27 February 2009 – Notification of abstract acceptance
• Friday 2 April 2009 – Submission of full papers
• Friday 24 April 2009 – End of reviewing
• Friday 8 May 2009 – Submission of camera ready copies of corrected papers
• 17-19 June 2009: Conference in Milos, Greece

Conference Fees:

Early registration until April 25th Students: 150 Euros Regular: 300 Euros

Late registration Students: 200 Euros Regular: 350 Euros

Organizing Committee

Cornford, Dan (Aston University, UK) Dubois, Gregoire (JRC, European Commission) Hristopulos, Dionisis (Technical University of Crete, Greece) Pebesma, Edzer (University of Münster, Germany) Pilz, Juergen (University of Klagenfurt, Austria)

Scientific Committee

Allard, Denis (INRA, France) Atkinson, Peter (University of Southampton, UK) Bogaert, Patrick (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Brenning, Alexander (University of Waterloo, Canada) Brus, Dick (Wageningen University and Research Centre, The Netherlands) Christakos, George (San Diego State University, USA) Cornford, Dan (Aston University, UK) Diggle, Peter (Lancaster University and Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, UK and US) Dubois, Gregoire (JRC, European Commission) Fortin, Marie-Josée (University of Toronto, Canada) Ghosh, Sujit K. (North Carolina State University, USA) Goodchild, Michael F. (University of California Santa Barbara, USA) Goovaerts Pierre (BioMedware, USA) Griffith, Daniel A. (University of Texas at Dallas, USA) Havlik, Denis (Austrian Research Centres GmbH – ARC, Austria) Heuvelink, Gerard (Wageningen University, The Netherlands) Hristopulos, Dionisis (Technical University of Crete, Greece) Kyriakidis, Phaedon (University of California Santa Barbara, USA) Lark, Murray (Rothamsted Research, UK) Myers, Wayne (The Pennsylvania State University, USA) Nativi, Stefano (CNR-IMAA, University of Firenze, Italy) Neteler, Markus (Fondazione Mach – Centre for Alpine Ecology, Italy) Papritz, Andreas (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) Patil, Ganapati P. (The Pennsylvania State University, USA) Pebesma, Edzer (University of Münster, Germany) Pilz, Jürgen (University of Klagenfurt, Austria) Saura, Santiago (Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain) Schaepman, Michael (Wageningen University, The Netherlands) Schouppe, Michel (DG INFSO, European Commission) Stein, Alfred (ITC, The Netherlands) Stöhlker, Ulrich (BFS, Germany) Switzer, Paul (Stanford University, USA) van den Boogaart, Gerald (TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany) Wackernagel, Hans (Ecole des Mines de Paris, France)

A daily problem for researchers, is a solid answer to the question where and how do I get decent information from? Traditionally, a decent answer used to be libraries which is where knowledge used to be kept in form of books and journals. I’m hesitating to use past tense, because just a week ago, I paid 15 Euros to get access to the public library in Stuttgart. However, the online world is growing insanely fast, and for research, I almost exclusively rely on access to e-journals via our university’s webpage. When dealing with online resources, the same problem persists: How do I get decent information, which reduces in the online world to how do I find what I am looking for. Sure, google and especially its “scholar” variant are not a bad choice. Second choice for me tend to be “compendex” or “georef“. However, I just found something very interesting:

A guy called “edsu“, who I follow on twitter (twitter is a story for another post), pointed me to this story from the guardian: There is a catalogue of bibliographic content, called OCLC. Then there is worldcat, which offers web access to OCLC. Now the problem:

OCLC shares only 3m of its 125m records with Google Books; none of them show up in an ordinary search.

The guardian offers two open source alternatives:

• openlibrary.org
• librarything.com

At a first glance, both sites offer great search possibilities for books. However, I think it’s still a long way until I can look at a website, click a few times, and then either get the book to my local library, or somehow, maybe even by paying a fee, get the book’s content online.

What are your online resources for written material?

update Monday; January 26, 2009: google research is an interesting site, especially their publications section which contains some interesting papers

update Tuesday; January 27, 2009: On gribblelab I found an interesting article that contains some interesting thoughts on how to manage ones research articles. It seems that I am oldfashioned, as I like to keep a pdf copy of every article, if possible. Instead of EndNote or Papers, I like to use BibDesk for managing my references. The ideas of a social-network like web-portal for citations seems very powerful. This article might be related. The authors present a few search portals, which were new to me:

• ISI Web of Knowledge
• Scopus
• CiteSeer

According to the authors of this study, citeUlike is the “warmest” online portal, because it adds a social component: users can add content and retrieve content.

Johannes, a regular follower and contributor to planetwater.org created a nice little tool that allows any Nokia cell-phone users to get a notification on their phone, as soon a new blog entry is posted to planetwater.org. The logo of this service is shown below:

Nokia Notification Service Logo

All necessary information, including how to get things working on your Nokia cell-phone are provided on this site.

Thank you very much, Johannes!

update Monday; January 26, 2009: as Johannes points out, this is for a lot of phones. They just need to fulfill these requirements

2009 World Water Week in Stockholm, August 16-22 Responding to Global Change: Accessing Water for the Common Good

The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) hosts the World Water Week, the leading annual global meeting place for the planet’s water issues.

SIWI invites you to submit workshop abstracts as well as proposals for seminars and side events for the 2009 World Water Week, from August 16-22. To learn how, please download the First Announcement

Interesting side-note: There’s a workshop on “Transboundary Waters and other flowing things”.

Water is Clouds is Wind is Atmosphere is Development is this Planet:

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

The “Sky in Motion” – a wonderful collection of time-laps videos, by Till Credner via Epic Edits Weblog

NovCare 2009 will showcase newly developed and refined methods, novel applications of existing methods, and new concepts for subsurface characterization and monitoring. This conference will provide a rare opportunity for researchers and practitioners involved in meeting the field challenges of subsurface characterization and monitoring to exchange ideas and experiences. For further information please see: http://www.ufz.de/met/novcare

There are seven thematic categories • Soils and unconsolidated materials, • Fractured bedrock • Stream-aquifer interactions, • Subsurface transport • Geotechnical site characterization • Watershed characterization • Long-term monitoring,

Yesterday, my girlfriend bought a water bottle. When I saw the back, my immediate reaction was a positive surprise, because what I saw, seemed to be a hydrogeologic cross-section. And that can’t be a bad thing, right?

Label of a German Water Bottle

Unfortunately, some thoughts came to my mind which don’t add up everywhere… Let’s look a little closer at that label:

Enlarged Label of a German Water Bottle

• The first layer, indicated in green, is labeled “earth- and rock- layers” — does the green indicate that in these layers are living plants? Why does the text indicate that there are multiple layers, and the picture shows only one green layer?
• The second layer is called “ground- and surface water”. Why should they be mixed? And why is the surface water below the ground surface under earth- and rock- layers? It is shaded in blue, I guess indicating the presence of water. What does the arrow in that layer imply? Why is there a relatively thin, darker blue layer?
• The next layer down in the sequence is shaded in grey and labeled “water impermeable layer”. So this layer is a steel plate?
• The bottom most layer is labeled “Ice-ageSpring – the perfectly protected mineral water from the ice-age”. This layer is indicated by a really nice variable shading in blue in white resembling a glacier. Does that mean there’s a glacier down there? Why is that layer perfectly protected? By the water-impermeable layer on top? Does it mean that layer is also impermeable for contaminants? The arrow on top, pointing vertically towards ground surface indicates input from “agriculture and industry” — where does that input go? “Just” into ground- and surface water?
• The boundaries of all the layers are parallel, and all except the bottom most layers have constant thickness everywhere.

All these questions in my mind, I thought I’d strive for clarification, and have a look at the webpage that the label indicates. This is what I found under the section “expert opinion“:

„EiszeitQuell weist nur alte, gereifte Grundwasserkomponenten auf. Das eiszeitliche Mineralwasservorkommen wird gegen Umwelteinflüsse in idealer Weise abgeschirmt. Die ausgewogene Zusammensetzung der Inhaltsstoffe und das Fehlen von anthropogen bedingten, vom Menschen verursachten Stoffen wie Nitrat oder Nitrit bewirken unter anderem seine in zahlreichen Untersuchungen nachgewiesene ursprüngliche Reinheit. Es ist natriumarm und für die Zubereitung von Säuglingsnahrung geeignet.“

If you don’t understand German, and even if you put this only into the google translating service, you will notice, that they talk about this water as if it was the main course in a five star restaurant!

What was the company thinking? Is there anything we could do?