planetwater

December 7-10 Las Vegas homepage

1. – 17. Juni 2011 in Münster, Deutschland homepage

GEOINFORMATIK 2011 June 15th – 17th, 2011 Münster, Germany

Conference Theme: Geochange – ?GI and Global Change?

We invite submissions for participation in GEOINFORMATIK 2011. The three-day conference offers an opportunity to researchers in the field of GI Science to share ideas, discuss state-of-the-art applications, and explore emerging research directions. Whether you are a researcher in academia or a GI-expert in industry, you are welcome to participate in shaping the future of GI Science at GEOINFORMATIK 2011.

Main topics for the conference include but are not limited to:

1. Global Change: Modelling spatio-temporal processes
2. GI in Environment, Climate and Energy GI
3. Mobile Technologies, Location Based Services
4. Geosensor Networks
5. From Geodata Infrastructures to Spatial Information Infrastructures
6. Volunteered Geographic Information, Neogeography
7. Human Computer Interaction

Anybody with an interest in Geoinformatics in general or in the questions raised above is invited to submit a paper to the conference. Submissions can be made under two categories:

Research Submission (maximum 6 pages) of original and unpublished academic research. Papers must be written in English and according to the formatting guidelines. Submissions will be reviewed in a single blind review process based on relevance to the conference, originality, significance of results, research goals, clarity of conclusions, and organization and grammar. Successful submissions will be accepted for presentation at the conference and will be published in the conference proceedings (with ISBN).

Shortpapers about innovative applications (max. 1-3 pages): Submissions can either be in English or German and will be reviewed based on application aspects, innovation and relevance to market. Please note that product presentations will NOT be allowed under this category. Successful submissions will be accepted for presentation at the conference and will be published in the conference proceedings (with ISBN).

Important dates: January 21, 2011: Full paper submission March 14, 2011: Notification of full paper acceptance March 20, 2011: Camera-ready full paper copies due

IBM has recently launched an online game called “City One“. It was heralded to be similar to SimCity. You are something like the major of a city, and you have to “make decisions” in four sectors energy, water, retail, and banking.

Unfortunately, I found CityOne to be a worse game than SimCity. The decisions you make are in fact not real decisions. For each of the sectors you have an “expert”, who gives you three options. I never found that your decision has a major negative impact on the overall status of your city. In fact, all of the offered solutions sort of make sense. Sometimes it even seems like the proposed solutions could be out of a consultant’s (IBM?) catalogue. For somebody who has never thought about what a measure could be that could lead to less water losses in a distribution system, this game might be better suited for.

IBM's 'City One' game. I just earned a bunch of bonuses.

Some of the proposed solutions are more expensive than others, your funds are limited. However, the game is played in rounds, and in each round your funds recover. After the default 10 rounds my city’s status has been very positive, I had a score of 97,700. It remained unclear when the game is over, I could have continued to play.

A joiner likes to talk about his saws. Similarly, Phd students need to use some “tools of the trade”. Recently, some improvements on old tools emerged, and some new guys showed up on the scene. I thought these are worth pointing out. Mostly, these tools don’t offer incredible novel features. Rather, they offer slight improvements which on a daily basis offer nice benefits

Scrivener 2.0

As I see it, the new scrivener is a great tool to - organize thoughts; - collect data / “research” — it even has some features I wish DEVONthink Pro would have; - Write — I am writing this post in scrivener. However, I still haven’t found an ideal solution, hence I still write most of what I write in latex or markdown using TextMate. So far, I have even written all blog posts using TextMate (I am aware of MarsEdit, but I haven’t tried it yet). The thing is, for scientific writing, I don’t see an option to latex. And TextMate is probably as good as a latex editor in the foreseeable future will get.

I see scrivener’s strong points especially for writing combined with organization. It has some really nice features like split panes, internal links, or how it handles comments. But it does not cover my most important needs for scientific writing (even though there are some workarounds (here and here) via markdown, but they remain workarounds. Also for organization, DEVONthink Pro is still superior in my opinion. I haven’t tried the new Yojimbo. Also, there is the classic outliner OmniOutliner which together with OO3eq offers basic latex capabilities.

To conclude, I use a combination of DevonThink, Scrivener, and Textmate for blogging, OmniOutliner for writing notes in courses and meetings, and TextMate for scientific writing. It sure would be nice to have one for all. But isn’t that always the problem?

Pinboard

A common complaint is that Yahoo never gave delicious.com much love. Delicious.com is an online bookmark storage/sharing tool. Recently, pinboard showed up. It’s fast, it can be nicely integrated into Safari, and it has some nice features like “read later”.

Mendeley

As a PhD student, I need to read scientific papers. And since there are many, I need a way to store and find them. Also, I need to reference them when writing a scientific article. So far, I’ve been fairly happy with BibDesk‘s capabilities, especially, it’s easy link to writing latex documents in TextMate and its ability to automatically store pdfs. A factor that counts pro BibDesk is that BibDesk is open source software.

I’m aware that the functionality for reading and commenting in Papers is supposed to be improved compared to BibDesk. Recently Mendeley showed up on the scene. It’s an approach to social-web-style-reference management funded by Skype, last.fm, and Warner Music. You have to sign up, and the basic version is free and comes with 500MB personal space and 500MB shared space.

Mendeley is still pre v.1.0, and I had and still have issues importing my bibtex library into Mendeley. The interesting part is that you can look for people with similar research interests, say statistics in earth sciences, and see what those people are reading. Also, Mendeley has a public API, so programmers can access research paper statistics, for example. It will be interesting to see what will be created with these options.

MS Office 2011 for Mac

Since MS Word 6.0 is gone, my positive feelings for Word and its office suite have disappeared. However, sometimes it’s not possible to avoid it, especially since at work we’re using Excel to teach students. And granted, excel is pretty intuitive. Recently, a new version for the Mac came out, and some of those long-lost positive feelings have re-surfaced.

• the biggest plus: it finally is fully integrated into OSX 64bit. Hence, general performance is improved.
• Excel: the formula bar is back to a fixed location! Yay!
• Word has a distractive-free writing mode, similar to writeroom, think!, or the even more general solution – because it provides a distraction-free environment for any application isolator
• VBA is back – not that this is huge, but it sometimes helps in labs that I teach
• Excel: some improvements to charting, but I bet it’s still the same old charting engine from the last millenium
• The solver is again VBA-based and hence better “includeable” into excel

• at #IAHR BW annual colloquium: http://ke-we.net/8gp #water #climate #change #

April 11-13, 2011 homepage

Objectives of HGS 2011 are to

• Meet with the HGS developers and discuss problems.
• Present anticipated or ongoing research activities, associated modeling issues, and preliminary/final results.
• Exchange ideas and coordinate future research.
• Increase communication between users in order to make modeling studies with HGS more efficient.

I just had the problem to convert a fairly big number of png files into a movie. It turns out, the solution on a mac is fairly easy.

1. convert the png’s to jpg. This step seems necessary — I couldn’t get the movie to work with png’s. I’ve done it under OSX comfortably with a fairly simple automator workflow:

   • get specified finder items
   • copy finder items
   • change type of images
   • make finder item names sequential

2. download and install mencoder. All I ended up doing is downloading these two executable files and copying them into /usr/bin

3. the all you need to do is go into the directory where your jpgs are and execute

   mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -o movie.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg
   

The original suggestion I found here. Some more suggestions here. I played a bit with the framerate -ofps (see manpages). Here’s the wikipedia page. Here’s a video encoding wiki.

• @seismotom I'd be happy to talk #Python How much feedback have you gotten so far? in reply to seismotom #

• "Running the Numbers" exhibit http://ke-we.net/6rv in Berkeley is great visualization of stats/data by http://ke-we.net/6rw (via @cbdawson) #
• TAZ titles today on #water #privatization in #Berlin http://ke-we.net/6m7 and puts the contracts online: http://ke-we.net/6m8 #
• Stories and #Statistics http://ke-we.net/6lc #
• three gorges #dam almost full for first time: http://ke-we.net/6gx #

The city of Berlin has some of the highest prices for drinking water in Germany. In the last decade, water prices in Berlin have risen twice as much compared to the German average. People who felt they paid too much suspected that the high prices were related to the fact that Berlin’s drinking water infrastructure was privatized in the late 1990′s. Since then, the two involved companies RWE and Veolia made 1.3 Billion Euros profit!

Part of the problem was that the content of some of the contracts between the city who has a monopoly on supplying drinking water and RWE / Veolia, were not known to anyone other to the two parties. Some groups, like the “Berliner Wassertisch” have been campaigning to make those contracts publicly available. Planetwater.org mentioned in January 2008 Berlin’s water problem. This saturday, the Berlin-based newspaper, “die TAZ”, made those contracts public. Most notably, these contracts contained information on how the two parties had made sure that there could be profits — despite the fact that an open contract allowing profits had earlier been judged to be illegal.

A. Loiser points out in his article: “the Berlin example shows how companies are allowed to make huge, almost deliberately high, profits to the detriment of the citizens” (TAZ, 30./31. Oktober 2010, pages 16-17). It’s not the case that there was not enough water available, nor that the available water was excessively contaminated — both scenarios would lead to increased costs. Neither was the water distribution excessively difficult and expensive.

Research by Sebastian Heiser shows (article, xls sheet), how not only the profit rose, but costs for employees as well as costs for investments diminished between 1999 and 2009.

Most politicians involved with Stuttgart 21 now agree that the public has not been included sufficiently in the decision process for the project. Hence, the arbitration led by Heiner Geisler is broadcast publicly via internet and on TV. It remains to be seen if this leads to more data being publicly available.