Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Research Tools Lecture 1 - Introduction
1-introduction.org and 1-introduction.mp3
This is a place where people can discuss lecture 1 of research tools. I'm interested in questions, clarifications, corrections, suggestions, etc for all the lectures. I'll do a post per lecture and video. However, the videos are on youtube, so commenting there is best.
The course material is all in emacs org-mode and in later lectures, I will use org-babel to execute code from inside the document to follow the concept of reproducible-research and "tangling" documentation and code. The Research Tools class website has HTML versions of the notes too if you are not interested in the emacs aspect of the course.
I am creating the lectures on the fly (despite trying to get ahead over the last year), so any feedback I get will help me improve the lectures for the rest of the semester.
Please note that I edit the audio files down from the full hour and 20 minutes to about 50-60 minutes. I clean up some of my "um"'s and "ahh"s along with white space, repeats and other non-useful bits. I walk around the class and there I often explain the same or similar concept to multiple people. I try to reduce the repetition. It's helpful in class, but with the audio, you can just rewind it.
The youtube videos are unedited, so they will show more of my typos.
Thanks!
-kurt
This is a place where people can discuss lecture 1 of research tools. I'm interested in questions, clarifications, corrections, suggestions, etc for all the lectures. I'll do a post per lecture and video. However, the videos are on youtube, so commenting there is best.
The course material is all in emacs org-mode and in later lectures, I will use org-babel to execute code from inside the document to follow the concept of reproducible-research and "tangling" documentation and code. The Research Tools class website has HTML versions of the notes too if you are not interested in the emacs aspect of the course.
I am creating the lectures on the fly (despite trying to get ahead over the last year), so any feedback I get will help me improve the lectures for the rest of the semester.
Please note that I edit the audio files down from the full hour and 20 minutes to about 50-60 minutes. I clean up some of my "um"'s and "ahh"s along with white space, repeats and other non-useful bits. I walk around the class and there I often explain the same or similar concept to multiple people. I try to reduce the repetition. It's helpful in class, but with the audio, you can just rewind it.
The youtube videos are unedited, so they will show more of my typos.
Thanks!
-kurt
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Turned off adds
I was playing with adds just to see what it was like. I reached $13 since I started adds and have not cached that out. I'm visiting Google, it does not seem right to have adds on my blog (unless there is a way to point the money at a charity of my choosing), and they were a bit overwhelming the way I had them setup.
Geotagging in Blogger
Draft Blogger now has geotagging! Where am I? I'm a Visiting Faculty at Google at the moment!
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Examples of great metadata?
Today, I am sitting in a metadata workshop at UNH run by Northeast Coastal and Ocean Data Partnership (formerly: Gulf of Maine Ocean Data Partnership) NeCODP... it's also their annual meeting. Back in January, I attended a Metavist metadata workshop put on at the Alaska Science Symposium by NBII's metadata folks.
I have been struggling for a long time with metadata. I have felt strongly that something is fundamentally wrong. I'm starting to feel that this is that we are missing examples that are held up to the community as best practices and examples of how this metadata is used. As Google has popularized, we need to dog food the metadata. And it has to be understandable by the 1st year graduate student, not just metadata experts!
So, what are example of best practices in ISO 19115 metadata (I consider FGDC metadata as dead and pointless for a global community). And it really sucks how closed the ISO standards are. So totally frustrating. Am I going to try to teach UML to new grad students? We need to be able to kickoff with metadata and get going in 15-30 minutes and UML is counter to this understanding in short time frames.
The keynote speaker is Ted Habermann who gave a fantastic talk. However, strongly disagree with Ted on a couple points. First is with the pay for standards model. We are not making light bulbs and the standards bodies are not paying us for our time writing these standards. Hiding software and data standards only degrades the ability of individuals to be empowered. Large companies like ESRI could care less one way or another about the costs, but it is up to us, the data producers and consumers to be empowered. It's getting way way too complicated! Ted's Metadata Standards page doesn't even cover a small fraction of the standards he talked about during his keynote. e.g. what is EML? He also mentioned UDDC - Unidata Data Discovery Conventions, NetCDF Markup Language (NcML), etc.
There has got to be something simpler, because with complexity comes increased error rates and all sorts of training problems. Can we use simpler strategies? e.g. Geodata Discovery and geo micro format
And to be different than the speaker, when it comes to researchers and especially graduate students, the do go to wikipedia to read multiple papes and you can make books out of groups of pages. Wikipedia:Books
I have been struggling for a long time with metadata. I have felt strongly that something is fundamentally wrong. I'm starting to feel that this is that we are missing examples that are held up to the community as best practices and examples of how this metadata is used. As Google has popularized, we need to dog food the metadata. And it has to be understandable by the 1st year graduate student, not just metadata experts!
So, what are example of best practices in ISO 19115 metadata (I consider FGDC metadata as dead and pointless for a global community). And it really sucks how closed the ISO standards are. So totally frustrating. Am I going to try to teach UML to new grad students? We need to be able to kickoff with metadata and get going in 15-30 minutes and UML is counter to this understanding in short time frames.
The keynote speaker is Ted Habermann who gave a fantastic talk. However, strongly disagree with Ted on a couple points. First is with the pay for standards model. We are not making light bulbs and the standards bodies are not paying us for our time writing these standards. Hiding software and data standards only degrades the ability of individuals to be empowered. Large companies like ESRI could care less one way or another about the costs, but it is up to us, the data producers and consumers to be empowered. It's getting way way too complicated! Ted's Metadata Standards page doesn't even cover a small fraction of the standards he talked about during his keynote. e.g. what is EML? He also mentioned UDDC - Unidata Data Discovery Conventions, NetCDF Markup Language (NcML), etc.
There has got to be something simpler, because with complexity comes increased error rates and all sorts of training problems. Can we use simpler strategies? e.g. Geodata Discovery and geo micro format
And to be different than the speaker, when it comes to researchers and especially graduate students, the do go to wikipedia to read multiple papes and you can make books out of groups of pages. Wikipedia:Books
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