For more information, visit Public Astro Night.
Image from AstroMcGill
A date with the stars
Comment
Category Archives: Blog
Conference
The 85th annual meeting of the Eastern Section of the Seismological Society of America will be held 6-8 October 2013 at the Manoir Richelieu located in La Malbaie, Québec, Canada. To know more details about the conference, please go to the following link:
Science meets wizardry
Last April I visited the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal in Orlando. I have to admit, it was pretty neat. Now, thanks to Google and Warner Brothers Studios in Hertfordshire, everyone is welcome to Diagon Alley on Google Maps. How cool is this for Harry Potter fans?
If you have ever thought about making your own custom maps take some time to explore Google Maps and Google Earth tutorials. That is, after you have spent some time exploring the virtual exhibits in Diagon Alley. Just drag the street view symbol (little person) onto the map and away you go!
“Maptember” in the UK
The United Kingdom will hold a month of map and GIS related conferences in September:
Society of Cartographers Conference 2013 in Stoke-on-Trent (2nd to 4th Maptember)
Conference on Spatial Information Theory 2013 in Scarborough (2nd to 6th Maptember)
British Cartographic Society Mapping 2013 Symposium in Leicestershire (3rd to 5th Maptember)
Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society 2013 Conference in Glasgow (4th to 6th Maptember)
State of the Map 2013 in Birmingham (6th to 8th Maptember)
European Planetary Science Congress 2013 in London (8th to 13th Maptember)
OpenStreetMap Professional Large User Summit in Birmingham (9th Maptember)
The Second Joint FIG/IAG/ISPRS Symposium on Deformation Monitoring in Nottingham (9th to 11th Maptember)
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team House Hack Week (9th to 13th Maptember)
QGIS-Dev Meeting in Brighton (12th to 16th Maptember)
Association for Geographic Information (AGI)’s Annual Conference, AGI’s GeoCommunity ’13 in Nottingham (16th to 18th Maptember)
GEOMED 2013 in Sheffield (16th to 18th Maptember)
FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham (17th to 21st Maptember)
Read more at http://www.maptember.org/
Ice Breaker
This may not be the most seasonal of posts, considering today is the first day of summer, or the most current, since this video caused quite a sensation more than a month ago – but who can resist a gorgeous time-lapse video of an ice breaker traveling through Antarctic waters?
Cassandra Brooks, a Stanford University doctoral student with the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, produced this video aboard the icebreaker, Nathaniel B. Palmer. The video is a time-lapse sequence, compressing about 60 days into less than five minutes. Enjoy!
Photo credit: Peter Rejcek / NSF
OpenupEd – the European MOOCs portal
A European portal of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) was recently launched at www.openuped.eu. It offers online courses, free of charge, in different languages from partner universities in Europe. The subjects cover from learning skills, management, climate change to mathematics. If you are interested in how a topic is taught in Europe or something outside of your curriculum , take a course at this website. Other major MOOCs providers include Coursera, Udacity, edX.
Friday fun: Which great genius was most like you?
Take this fun short quiz from the Discovery Channel website to find out which artistic or scientific genius was the most like you. Apparently, I resemble Pablo Picasso 🙂
Photo of Pablo Picasso’s “Young Woman” from jmussuto (Flickr)
Apps Showcase at Data.gov
I recently came across Developer Apps Showcase at Data.gov, where I was surprised to see how those apps made the Data.gov‘s open datasets more accessible and perhaps comprehensible for the public. Yes, data can be presented in a way that is interactive, innovative, and inspiring! Find more at here.
Image from http://images.apple.com/
1000000000000000 bytes
Who doesn’t love Internet Archive? I am a big user of the Wayback Machine, where they are capturing and archiving websites back to 1996. Take some time to explore thier site and you will certainly find something in the audio, video, or text archive (they recently hit 10 petabytes). For example, I have been listening to a radio mystery series called Mr. and Mrs. North that aired on CBS from 1942 to 1954. What I didn’t realize about Internet Archive is that they are collecting print books with the goal of archiving one copy of every book ever printed – watch this video – it will blow your mind.
Internet Archive from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.
Our bad habits using technology
Do you leave your laptop unattended, forget to take breaks, fail to backup your data, reuse old passwords, print everything, or text at the table? If the answer is yes, then reading the article, “The 21 worst tech habits—and how to break them,” published in PCWorld, might help.