Community Engagement 1,... 20, 21 & 22
My web presence
Thursday, 29 June 2023
AI Prompt Engineering Trial 1
Wednesday, 28 June 2023
Cottenham Open CIC rebooted
Community Engagement 1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 & 21
Monday, 26 June 2023
Sea Level Rise update
The last post before peatlands (recent update here) was the East Anglia flood protection infrastructure here - both used extensive Environment Agency data, publicly available if needing some (at time extensive) work as described therein. Here are further DIY resources to create maps like this fun pirate map of East Anglia under 12 m. water est. around 2150AD (from here updated here):
Friday, 23 June 2023
Community, climate and maps - an update
Update: see a follow-on post to sea level rise in East Anglia here.
This is a follow on to this post: lets address one of the update items, Fire & Ice, in the light of an early and vicious start to the Canadian fire season. The question is: notwithstanding this year's events, is there an increase in fires and if so, can they be related to climate change as, say, in California?
Thursday, 22 June 2023
Rewater peatlands to mitigate climate change update
Update: see a follow-on post to fire maps in the news here.
In my Story Map Portfolio, step past the first five on climate issues, and the next seven on East Anglia environs affected by climate emergency, to my last and most comprehensive one: Fenlands Challenge - below and fully here - was submitted to a UN Sustainable Development Goals call for story maps; it lays out opportunities and challenges in rewatering peatlands as the most effective way to counter greenhouse gas effects on climate warming.
Tuesday, 20 June 2023
A brief history of mine
Update 2: see my journey on the web here.
Update 1: a duo of posts on my Medium professional channel here relates my early computing.
As I go through a 'hard reset' in my life and plan to exit social media, this may be a good time to pause and reflect on my IT journey.
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Calgary 1986 see here |
Anecdote 1: as an undergrad at University of Calgary, I learned of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project (here), to catalog the world's information via what later became Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) - few people realise Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent anything, he built on exisiting systems... as we all do - but Nelson was a propeller-head who couldn't market his idea (here). John Walker, co-founder of Autodesk, reportedly bought the technolgy but it never got anywhere... I heard of this as I was cooling my heels awaiting to meet him, with Carol Bartz his then PA - the same who eventually lead Autodesk then Yahoo, a true pioneering woman in IT - when a surveyor friend and I tried to sell them the idea of a mapping front-end to AutoCAD ... in 1986! Remember MS Windows was launched just the year before (see Side Story here and illustration here incl. photo above). Did you know I received a copy of Windows v.1.O as part of a hardware upgrade to boost my computer's memory from 640Kb to 1Mb?! Sidebar: Was Bill Gates not famously quoted that no personal computer would ever need over 640Kb RAM (here)?
CD-ROMs
Anecdote 2: Microsoft was largely credited with popularizing CD for software distribution. While that is true, the real initiative was the US Dept. of Defense - the same people whose DARPA developed the precursor to the internet linking US military to government contractors, chiefly universities in the beginning - the reason? In the Cold War era, it was feared the Soviets might detonate an atom bomb at 5-10 mi. altitude that would fry the entire electronic infrastructure of mainland US, thus disabling the military - oh! and the rest of the country is collateral - I learned via the USGS mentioned above, that CDs were immune to resulting electromagnetic pulses.
Anecdote 3: as I had been on contract to the Geological Survey of Canada Calgary office across from the university, we visited the geological library and offered to scan the index cards to electronically catalog them on CD-ROM - after all our software came from a school library application - do you know what the librarian said then? "If we made the catalog that easily accessible, can you imagine the amount of work that might create?" We obviously had work to do, convincing a traditional business of the advantages of electronic access, taken for granted now!