Locatum

While I tend to regard myself as generally pro-technology and pro-science I find I also have a long and deeply held anti-GMO 'position'. Glyn Moody's recent post on the subject reminded me of this and stirred me to ponder this view. In essence you can take it as a given that I am as deeply suspicious of the corporatism so ably detailed in Glyn's (and Andrew Leonard's) post as they are. If you're not then pretty much any scientific/technical objections are going to fall a long way second. A very good friend of mine worked for a while in a unit within the EC that amongst other things used to test for the presence of GMOs in various crops both in field trials and on the dockside. In a purely statistical sense a negative presence (even in parts per billion) does not disprove the null hypothesis regarding whether or not the sample is 'contaminated' by GMOs. This is depressing enough as we know that field trials of GMOs always leak into the surrounding env...

Apologies for so much grammar in the title but those of you who have been following this since November 17th will know exactly whence the implied skepticism comes. In the intervening months you may have observed (as I have not been 'anon') various comments I have made to various posts and other blogs (I can't remember them all now so no links!) correcting factual errors and establishing a soap box of sorts from which to contrast and/or challenge in a "you can't prove that your emperor has any clothes" kind of way some of the statements, demands and assumptions of the 'georati' (?). Now of course you may argue that I, on behalf of emapsite, have an agenda of my own, what with being an OS Premium Partner (that's value adding reseller) and all. You may be right and I am not going to be sharing corporate information here so you'll just have to speculate but on the whole you won't find me hiding behind some smoke-screen of nobility and social g...

Well, technically, boy 2 (aged 9) and my better half. Rather a last minute decision (last week) saw the rapid creation of a team (of 2) - http://www.mysportrelief.com/jedstars?SID=118239 and a modest fund raising target. Delighted and grateful for the immediate response. And today was the day, at 1030am allegedly - I say allegedly....the school car park was home to what appeared to be an amateur motorcycle display team; happilty we did have the right day, just the letter and original website time had been wrong and the whole thing was scheduled for 3pm. Not content with running 3 miles later boy 2 then played football and tennis for over an hour. Back at the school and self consciousness took over during the 'warm up'. But come the off and boy 2 was running 4th of some 200 souls after the first 400m as they left tarmac for grass and mud. Each circuit a mile with many finishing after one circuit boy 2 strode on, revivified after 2 miles, as the picture shows, to finish the 3...

Had the iphone a month now and am a total convert - how can anything else be so difficult and lacking in intuition!? Still not done much in the way of Apps for myself - SnowReport, WindGuru, TideApp, GPSLite, Ship Finder, Eurosport, Palringo, Twitterific, Skype, Trainline, TubeMap, Tube Status and mashup ASBOromoter demonstrating a combonation of interests if nothing else. On that note, what is the excitement with the ASBO thingy? As with the bike mashup it begs the asking of more, serious questions than it can hope to answer. Perhaps that is the point, go and look at it yourself, examine the metadata (its not s**t by the way, it is just worthy and dull and, per a discussion of the use of digital signatures, vital to provenance, confidence, trust, re-use etc). All for that but in the meantime it certainly doesn't provide social value or as the contrarians might have it, create/perpetuate ghettoes. Anyway, back to the iphone.....yes, I have a password, no the boys don't know ...

You regular readers will know that I don't put much public relations related material on this blog; however, I do think you will be interested to know that our mapshop now has a plug-in free map interface for the first time. Back in 2000, yes 10 years old this week too, so we see it as a kind of celebration, ERMapper's Image Web Server and the underlying ecw format and its accompanying protocol (ecwp://) opened up the possibilities of an e-commerce data delivery platform. Yes, it required an ActiveX plugin but boy did it change the way in which geographic data, particularly mapping and imagery, could be viewed and obtained. Then 5 years or so ago we launched a Java based solution for viewing large scale (notably OS MasterMap) data online and for completing planning applications and similar things for PDF output. More developments here shortly too. Although IE remains the de facto browser across the vast majority of users in the enterprise space this is changing, fast in som...

Statistics was compulsory when I studied geography, maybe it still is, but it is dull, worthy, grey and complicated which means that few labour over the minutiae of sampling methods, aggregation units, timelines, confidence intervals, error and so on. Too many shades of grey for politicos, lobbyists, media and the hobbyist too. So what happens in the mashup, in the creation and consumption of information, the thirst for knowledge and some degree of certainty? Both producer and consumer can define and divine intelligence in their mashup and the chosen analytical methodology (though few would think in those terms). And so we have it, a few producers, a myriad consumers, a willing public, a naïve one, ripe for gulling. It is an interesting area…. We are in the arena of filters, choice architecting, framing effects and the tools of cyber balkanisation - data through a lens, information of the providers making, online. The often self-referential, self-reinforcing nature of this information...

At a recent presentation a slide was put up using PSI made available through the MPDP initiative that ranked local authorities according to the %age of potholes (again, I know) repaired. So Torfaen, with 3 reported holes, all fixed, came out 'top' and then the slide changed. Does that make Torfaen the best council in Britain? Does it mean they have fixed all the potholes? Does it mean the repair will last? Did we know where Torfaen ranks in the passenger kilometre travelled per day charts (I made that one up but you get the idea)? Flipping that table around does it make whoever is at the bottom the worst? Of course not. Where does our money go indeed, and on what justification? What are the underlying statistics, the hard facts, that drive decisions, be they central, local or further devolved? Are there any (think WMD here!)? What process has been used to say yes to potholes and no to something else? What problems are we trying to solve? How do we measure the relative v...