-
- DSOnline: Gaming And Simulation 2007-03-30
- OGC Grid Collision, NCeSS e-Infrastructure, MoSeS, GeoLinking IE
- Emailed Dave Rawnsley to let him know what CAS data we are using in MoSeS
- We are using the following tables:
- CAS001
- CAS002
- CAS003
- CAS Key Statistics 002
- CAS Key Statistics 006
- CAS Key Statistics 008
- CAS Key Statistics 010
- CAS Key Statistics 015
- CAS Key Statistics 016
- CAS Key Statistics 017
- CAS Key Statistics 020
- CAS Key Statistics 023
- CAS Key Statistics 09b
- CAS Key Statistics 09c
- CAS Key Statistics 12b
- CAS Key Statistics 12c
- CAS Key Statistics 14b
- CAS Key Statistics 14c
- CAS Univariate Statistics 003
- One table that is particularly important is CAS Key Statistics 008.
- This table contains 9 cells and has the same definitions for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
- Arguably the two most important variables are allpeople KS00080001 and peopleWithLimitingLongTermIllness KS00080002.
- For some of the tables listed above there are differences in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland versions. In MoSeS we are only interested in those variables in all three tables.
- Primarily interested in Output Area (OA) data, but also Ward and MSOA data.
- It would be good to use GEMS/GEMS2 to look at the differences between aggregated OA data and data produced at higher levels.
- Teleconference
-
- MoSeS
- Brief feedback chat about yesterday with Mark who thanked me for going :)
- Web Content Updates
- Browsing
- SoG
- Mentoring
- Nanlin question:
- Last time you told me an economics word: farmers can enlarge the farm to take care of more sheep and thus reduce cost. What is the terms in economics about increasing production to reduce cost?
- My reply:
- Louise Dyson replied to my email about using RDF to develop mentoring/advice networks :)
- e-Infrastructure/GeoLinking IE
- Requested Mark authorize purchase of a web cam and microphone for access grid use at my PC...
- Timetabled a meeting with Chris Higgins and Mike Daw for sometime between 10th and 12th April to discuss marrying the OGC GeoLinking IE and NCeSS e-Infrastructure deliverables.
- PhD
-
- e-Infrastructure
- Went through the draft deliverable specifications again... I could do with Mark's feedback...
- Attended Day 2 of the NCeSS ShowCase Event
-
- Browsing
- Web Content Updates
- SoG
- GEOG5060
- Updated Andy Turner's GEOG5060 2007 Web Page
- Wrote an announcement to make everyone aware of the availablilty of an improved version of the practical materials.
- Richard Coppell asked to borrow the reports from previous years.
- I lent these out on 2007-03-16 on the understanding that they would be returned directly, but they were not.
- I sent an email to everyone asking for these to be passed back or on.
- MoSeS
- Paul provided me with a set of instructions for restarting the Demonstration Portal :)
- ssh in as tomcat on geo-s12 (or ssh in as your username, su to root, then su to tomcat)
- cd $CATALINA_HOME/bin
- ./startup.sh
- Feedback to Mark and Martin based on Mark's reply (received today) on the latest population initialisation:
- I think we could do with more information to analyse the results. Is there anything particular about difference in the characteristics of the well fitting and poor fitting results? What happens if we take one bad result track the optimisation... I am inclined to think that the random search we are using is not powerful or intelligent enough in some cases and in these we would benefit by employing need a more strategic way of searching the solution space... If I thought of a number between 1 and N and you had to guess it, then it could take you some time to find it at random without a memory, but if you had a memory, it should only take you N times at most, but the cruicial thing is that with each try you would be more likely to chance on it. Although this isn't a very good description of what we are doing, there are similarities and I think if we add some memory, or some strategy to the search in places we can find a better fitting solution faster. I have some ideas about how to do this...
- Mark: I am inclined to agree with you on both of the substantive points: that there does not appear to be any obvious logical error in the optimisation routine, and that the results still do not look to be useable. It is especially puzzling that some of the younger age groups (e.g. 20-24, 25-29) fit quite nicely, but the older groups are so difficult.
- Andy:
- Can you define what quality of result would be acceptable? Better than what we have - OK, but how much better than that? Give me some criteria that I can measure up to... I can then try more iterations, vary the Genetic Algorthm parameters, employ stricter convergence criteria and see if I can meet the criteria without fundamentally enhancing the algorithm in other ways.
- I expect that for some OA's, if we just allowed more time (more optimisation iterations), or changed the Genetic Algorithm parameters then a good solution could be found in a reasonable time frame. However, there may be a need to add memory or perform a combinatorial search in places.
- Mark: In order to make further progress we need to be able to provide a detailed description of the method as it currently stands. To begin with, please could you remind me of where we stand in relation to the following points:
- Please confirm that we are using both the HSAR and ISAR as inputs to the process, and comment on the way in which they are combined;
- Andy:
- Yes, they are combined to adhere to control constraints, and in those variables that are aggregated for comparison in optimisation constraints (ones based on total population).
- Can you point me to the tables which we are using as constraints, and confirm (or otherwise) that the same tables are being used in the optimisations at OA and MSOA levels. I hope I am right in thinking that the optimisations are essentially separate for the OA and MSOA geographies? Are the ward level outputs aggregated from the OA optimisations?
- Andy:
- Using CAS001 (Gender, Household/Communal Establishment, Age) to control constrain to the Household Population (HP) and Communal Establishment Population (CEP).
- Using CAS003 (Gender, HRP, Age) to control constrain by Age and HRP.
- Using variables from CAS001 (Gender, Household/Communal Establishment, Age), CAS002 (Gender, Marital Status, Age), CASKS008 (Health), CASKS020 (Household Composition), CASKS09b (Employment Males), CASKS09c (Employment Females) as optimisation constraints.
- In the main, the results I have generated are just for OA runs. These results are aggregated to MSOA and Ward results to provide three sets of results. I have done runs where we used MSOA constraints, but not recently.
- Can you provide a brief description of the method which is adopted by the genetic algorithm i.e. size of the population, mechanisms for crossover and mutation, ...
- Andy:
- The Genetic Algorthm is currently based only on mutation using:
- A maximum number of optimisation iterations of 10000 (numberOfOptimisationIterations = 10000;)
- An initial solution (population) size of 10 (initialPopulationSize = 10;).
- A maximum number of solutions (surviors) from each generation of 10 (maxNumberOfSolutions = 10;).
- A convergence threshold of 10 (convergenceThreshold = 100;) - stops the optimisation if no improvement is found in 100 iterations.
- A maximum number of DataRecords that can be swapped per solution in an interation of 12 (maxNumberOfMutationsPerChild = 12).
- A maximum number of solutions generated from a solution by a mutation. (There are potentially two types of mutation, those for houshold populations and those for communal establishment populations) of 10 (maxNumberOfMutationsPerParent = 10;)
- Provided Mark with simulated population from previous runs in which population aged 80-84 was weighted equally to the other demographic groups.
- Browsing
- Web Content Updates
- Made minor modifications to my foaf and other rdf files...
- CCG
- SoG
- Patrick Sim provided me with the documentation from the podcasting training session that was part of UPTAP, but opened to all :)
- Mentoring
- Had meetings with Helen and and Alison.
- Helen and I are both keen to help with improving mentoring at the university and within geography.
- I aim to be approachable so as to encourage informal chats with potential mentees, and that has always been the case.
- I personally feel that establishing an advice/mentoring network should be a very organic, bottom up, evolutionary process and that the network can extend outwith the university. I tried to put this view forward yesterday, but clearly it is not the only way to have things.
- Developing and having a good mentoring/advice network improves efficiency, a team, the individuals. Not developing and having one can be problematic.
- For staff, I think it should be down to the line manager of an individual to ask for details of their advice/mentoring network. If an individual does not develop one, or is not getting the advice or mentoring guidance they want, then this can be a concern raised to Human Resource. Maybe at that stage, someone can be partnered with their first non-line manger mentor within the institution that may help address the gap.
- The way in which I would like this to work is via the use of the Resource Discovery Framework (RDF) documents and tools derived from the friends of a friend project
- To start everyone could develop lists to show the start and end point of flows of advice and get a FOAF document using Leigh Dodds's foaf-a-matic
- I am going to encourage this in my advice/mentoring network.
- I have a FOAF document and I think both Helen and Alison are going to develop them too :-)
- I wonder if FOAF will get a mention on Helen's blog... Surely worthy of a first post in 2007?
- UPTAP
- A Strategic Approach to Data Developmentand Data Sharing in the Social Sciences
- Peter Elias
- Developing a National Data Strategy
- Peter is on a powerpoint blogging tour :)
- Probably working on this until 2010
- The Office for National Statistics (ONS) are being kicked by the Bank Of England who want more information for their models so they are happier about setting interest rates.
- The effects of international migration are not really being accounted for and the lack of available data is a concern.
- An excellent summary of why we need a strategy :)
- The UK Data Forum
- The Statistics Commision is to be abolished.
- UK Households: a Longitudinal Study (UKHLS)
- A new wrapper for the BHPS which will become a larger survey with a sample biased to include more ethnic minority populations.
- ONS are moving to Newport and we should expect human resources issues.
- Dave Martin is trying to improve access to 2011 Census Data... I wonder how...
- Proposal for an Administrative Data Service coming soon?
- This is about joined up government and will only work with buy in from the various government departments.
- Secure Data Service
- Still based on a physical separation rather than any new digital security or AAA system.
- http://esds.ac.uk/international/
- CESSDA (Council of European Social Science Data Archives)
- Looking global not just European
- Before UPTAP came into being it was a Secondary Data Initiative
- Proposal for the development of a Geographic Data Service
- Based on linking data.
- Very interesting...
- I asked Peter if the Administative Data Service, the Secure Data Service and the Geographic Data Service could be all the same thing and we had a chat over lunch:)
- I suggested he liaise with Ann Borda and James Farnhill at JISC
- He suggested I look up:
- OGC GeoLinking IE
- Email with Dave Rawnsley:
- One of the key sets variables we need are health related variables, the main one being LLTI. Paul or I will get back with a specific list of variables we are using currently... I am actioned to do this, but Paul actually knows what we are using in our portal I think...
- A key variable of interest is Age. There are a huge number of tables with age counts for different age groups. If you were to focus on metadata for age that would be extremely relevant to other work we are doing. In CAS tables there are many different age aggregations used. Always these are based on yearly age. It is commonly in other data to derive age from date of birth, in surveys like Census data, often some arbitrary set of categories are used. If age is to be used as one variable to link or integrate data then some general way of mapping between one type of age variable and the next is wanted. I digress...
- Another thing that is interesting for the GeoLinking IE is that Output Areas aggregate to Wards and these aggregate to Local Authority Districts. For any CAS variable at LAD level there are at least three potentially different values. There are those that can be calculated by aggregating OA data, those that can be calculated by aggregating from Ward data and those that come from LAD tables directly. I am not sure if that is something we are looking at here either, but I think it is relevant to mention.
- Teleconference
- Agenda
- Report on access to wiki, etc. (Chris)
- GLS (Michael and Lihao)
- GDAS (MIMAS)
- GDAS accessor (EPCC)
- GLS client (Andy and Paul). Short discussion on data requirements, the use case and test data.
- Short discussion on the security model suggested by Glasgow (John)
- Next steps, next meeting
- AOB
- People
-
Chris Higgins (Chair),
Ally Hume,
Lihao Liang,
Michael Koutroumpas,
Paul Townend,
Andy Turner,
Gail Millin,
Keith Cole,
Dave Rawnsley,
John Watt,
(apols) Pascal Ekin
- Introduction
- According to the IE timeline, we should be getting on to the bug fixing and testing phase
- Because we are only getting up to full speed, a revised goal for this is the end of April.
- Going through the agenda:
- Report on access to wiki, etc. (Chris)
- MIMAS people still not sure if they have access to the wiki. Kamie is the named contact for OGC so he should be able to help.
- GLS (Michael and Lihao)
- Michael reported GLS conversion working
- Results of GLS can be returned
- GLS adds custom properties to produce a new GML stream or file
- No use of OGSA-DAI yet
- Want to start configuring for GDAS data served out from MIMAS
- MIMAS to send a copy of GEMS output for a simple OA file for Leeds.
- How differnt would the data from the GDAS query be?
- GDAS (MIMAS)
- Conversion of the GEMS XML output to be compatible with the GDAS XSD XML
- Pascal doing this with support from Dave and Gail
- GDAS accessor (EPCC)
- Ally has talked with Michael and don't think there is much to do on this.
- GLS client (Andy and Paul) Short discussion on data requirements, the use case and test data.
- What is to be returned by default from the GLS?
- Andy to detail the use case and provide a list to Dave of what variables MIMAS to provide.
- Short discussion on the security model suggested by Glasgow (John)
- Host on a servlet container e.g. tomcat, jboss
- Use an apache server protected with shibboleth
- Shibboleth to control users identity and their privalleges and roles in the collaboration.
- SDSS team supporting this.
- Chris to get some discussion going.
- All databases have a very internalised data security model.
- Most of the work is on setting up Shibboleth
- Paul reported that Leeds are well on down this line.
- Talk of potentially relevant work on an ATHENS to Shibboleth gateway
- Chris to get a meeting set up for the security people and noted that Pascal gave a list of questions about security.
- Next steps, next meeting
- Agreed to a weekly teleconference at 14:00 on Friday's for the next few weeks.
- AOB
- Collaboration with Thomas Moore (TJ) who has just started work at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center
- Browsing
- SoG
- Meeting about Informal Mentoring
- Facilitated by Paul Heaton :)
- Documentation
- Making Mentoring Pay
- Mentoring Guidance Notes
- Presentation Slides (to be emailed to Angie Grain)
- How do I learn? Learning Styles Questionnaire
- The GROW Model
- Formal Mentoring Agreement Form
- History of Mentoring
- ...
- GEOG5060
- MASS
- MoSeS / e-Infrastructure
- Browsing
- Trying to Debug Grids...
- OGC Grid Collision GeoLinking IE
- Teleconference being planned for Friday afternoon...
- MoSeS / e-Infrastructure
- Called to Manchester on Wednesday next week to give an introductory talk (45mins) at the NCeSS showcase event...
- I plan to present "A General Introduction to the Aims and Objectives of Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science and an Outline of Current MoSeS Work".
- I aim to add in a personal perspective of collaborative working in e-Social Science based on my experience.
- Web Content Updates
- Released Grids1.0Beta7
- There is a concerning issue with getMax and getMin identified in some geomorphometrics work:
- When producing images of the grids, the results returned for getMax and getMin are incorrect...
- Issue may be to do with referencing of grid in statistics and vicea versa...
- The grid referenced in the statistics should be the same as the grid containing the statistics...
- SoG
- EGC Global Warming Information
- NCeSS MoSeS and e-Infrastructure
- Events
- MoSeS
- After a frustrating fight with systems concerning long filenames I emailed Mark and Martin and pointed them to the latest outputs from the population intialisation. These are presented below as links in 2 sets of 3 with some comment inline:
- There are results for which the only optimisation (constraint) variable was Age80AndOver:
- This run was done to show that this age group could be optimised for and that there was no major logic or other error in the optimisation routine. They also provide a benchmark.
- The results for OAs, MSOAs and Wards are given in the following 3 links:
- OA
- MSOA
- Ward
- I think these results show what I had hoped.
- There are results for which the optimisation (constraint) variable for Age80AndOver was weighted ten times higher than all other optimisation variables.
- This run was done to test if such a weighting produced satisfactory results.
- Again these provide a benchmark and they are comparable with previous results and the above results.
- Again the results for OAs, MSOAs and Wards are given in the following 3 links:
- OA
- MSOA
- Ward
- I think the results should give some confidence in the genetic algorithm method developed. However, I do not think the results are entirely satisfactory. It is almost certain that there is a better result. Is there something strategic that can be done with regard the optimisation routine? The results generated now are based on choosing convergence criteria that are a compromise.
- We do not yet have a method which can restart the optimisation based on the output (for the sampling with replacement version that uses the Household SAR to comprise Household Populations, we do have one for other versions of the population intitialisation). It would be useful to have such a method as it would allow for the worst fitting results to be re-optimised in the hope of producing better results. This can be thought of as: Step 1 go through and find OK results for a set of areas; Step 2 Go back and try to improve the worst result; Step 3 Repeat Step 2 until some further convergence criteria is met (e.g 1000 times, or until the program has run for a set amount of time).
- In general the more aggregated results are worse.
- There are probably spatial patterns in the quality of the results.
- We do not have method which automates the mapping of these results.
- Published results for heavily weighting the optimisation of Age80AndOver group.
- Email exchange with Junaid in preparation for a discussion on e-science and e-social science and the differences between them, particularly in security:
- I'm not an expert in this, so this gives us time to read up and think before we meet.
- I have a few initial thoughts:
- Both e-Social Science and e-Science are a form of e-Research and in that have much in common. I suspect that issues of authorisation, authentication and access are commomn to both.
- Social Science data is often about people and confidentiality issues are important. There are other ethical issues about gathering information about people without them knowing. This is not unique to e-Social Science, for example medical imagery has some of the same security concerns. Anyway, there is a key focus on data security and there is a concern that publishing results can effect people.
- Because Social Science has policy aspects and because government is in charge of policy, there are a set of interactions between scientists and policy makers which are important to e-Social Science. How do organisations involving civil service workers (including the police, health service planners, policy makers), academics, and business people come together in examining problems and evaluating mitigation options? How do they share data?
- e-Infrastructure
- e-Infrastructure Away Day & Node Jamboree
- Networking
- Web Content Updates
- SoG
- GEOG5060
- Called to help in the lab :)
- Investigated upness and downness measure:
- It seems upness (downness) measure upness (downness) to a place, not upness (downness) from a place.
- It can be argued that the latter is more intuitive, but in either case the documentation is inadequate.
- Informal chat with Alison and Robert about blogging and automating information management
- I was advocating the practice and trying to outline the benefits.
- Robert seemed contemplative and Alison was openly skeptical.
- Alison has fed back to me and I've modified this entry:
- Thanks Alison for your on-going collaboration...
- I recall at least two occasions where you have helped improve the web content I'm compiling :)
- I wonder if Robert will start blogging before Alison or if neither of them will.
- I wondered if either of them would read this, but now know Alison has :-)
- Getting started with Grids Lesson with Erling Dalen
- We learned various features of the Netbeans IDE
- How to create a project with existing source.
- How to compile run and debug a program.
- We wrote a simple test program to:
- Create a Grid2DSquareCellDouble from an ESRI asciigrid format file
- Key learning:
- That Grid2DSquareCellDouble are created using Grid2DSquareCellDoubleFactory.
- Casting from Grid2DSquareCellAbstract to Grid2DSquareCellDouble
- Getting and setting cell values using getCell() and setCell()
- How to access and print out properties of the Grid2DSquareCellAbstract
- An introduction to OutOfMemoryError handling.
CCG
- Özcan ESMER from http://www.arch.metu.edu.tr emailed to ask about Conventional, Neural & Genetic Spatial Interaction Models having seen some of Stan Presentation Slides which he has asked his students to review.
- I emailed a reply with the following gist:
- A link to some presentation slides Stan developed and used in the following year - That presentation covered more topics.
- Stan realised that you can parametrise any equation (including Spatial Interation Models (SIMs) and Neural Networks) as a genetic algorithm. The way I understood it, Genetic Algorithms worked well for a general search and Neural Networks worked well for fine tuning SIMs. Stan was in the latter stages of developing a Spatial Interaction Modelling System (SIMS) and accompanying book when he had a stroke. I am not sure what the others involved in this work did with it. I don't think anything was published, though I beleive a book was prepared although nothing has yet come of it. Hopefully in due course we can find the resources to put it online.
- I copied this reply to Graham Clarke suggesting he might be able to point to some more publications of relevance.
- Andy Evans pointed to Alison Heppenstall suggesting that she might help.
e-Infrastructure
- Contacted Mike Daw to ask for a copy of the letter about the delay in the start of this project.
- Discussion with John Parsons to see if he is interested in working on the project.
MoSeS
- Published results for optimising on only Age80AndOver
- Examined results for heavily weighting the optimisation of Age80AndOver group
- For some reason there is a problem with an incomplete set of results.
- Result for areacode OODAFB0058 missing.
- Still, there is enough result for me to be confident that this is much better in terms of fit for Age80AndOver
- However, the question is whether the results are satisfactory to Mark and Martin.
- Attempted to help Hazel Parry with Beowulf configuration
- Browsing
- Web Content Updates
- Is it wise to flip things around and rather than write first to my blog then distill to web pages, focus on writing web pages and automatically populating my blog...
- Maybe I need to start by defining a taglib based on the pages I aready have...
- SoG
- House Price data for Stuart Hodkinson
- Quantifying Anthropogenic Global Warming: A reaction to "The Great Global Warming Swindle" Programme directed by Martin Durkin on Channel 4 2007-03-08.
- By chance yesterday I discovered that Andy Evans had been looking out for a scientific reaction to "The Great Global Warming Swindle" programme. I emailed him the email threads from the Ecology and Global Change Research Cluster.
- I've looked at this and at John Houghton's riposte.
- I wonder if this is really creating waves in the scientific community and like Andy I am keen to see a quick and collective response by climate modellers and the IPCC.
- What are the views of report authors on the conclusions and on the development of the report?
- Another view from UoL
- NCeSS e-Infrastructure
- Meeting with Mark Birkin and Angela Jackman about the Collaboration agreement, finance and project management
- We are using a total budget of Ł27604 of which Ł18021 is for salary
- The project is pre Full Economic Costing FEC
- The plan is to combine the salary with some from MoSeS and make a 6 month appointment
- Potential recruits:
- Chen Chow
- A workplacement student working on data linkage of the Household SAR and BHPS
- John Parsons
- Junaid
- Mark has also talked to Dianna Smith about 3 months work on MoSeS.
- Anne Kenny (sp?) is to take on some of David Hughes work in finance.
- Andy to contact Mike Daw to ask for a copy of the letter about the delay in the start of this project.
- Angela to talk with Sheelagh and work out what proportion of Mark's time is to be allocated to this project.
- Mark is talking with David Hughes about what money is left in MoSeS tomorrow.
- Andy to chat with John Parsons to see if he is interested in this work.
http://www.diracproject.org/
http://journalofmaps.com/about.php?helpfile=smartyOS.html
http://www.landmap.ac.uk/
http://www.freethepostcode.org/
New Popular Edition Maps
Tony Cohn
Web Content Updates
SoG
GRADE
OGC Grid Collision, GeoLinking IE, NCeSS e-Infrastrucutre
- Communications with Chris Higgins and Paul Townend.
- Web Content
- Updates
- In a drive for efficiency, I am trying to develop a new way of managing my SoG Web pages:
- The idea is to develop Java code and use Netbeans to read, write and distill the web content.
- Browsing
- UoL
- Met Shiv Kaushal and Paul Townend for lunch :)
- Cosmic Rays ionize the atmosphere
- Shiv Came back with a couple of interesting links:
- SoG
- Provided feedback to Karyn Morrissey on the details of the upcoming CSAP Microsimulation Seminar on 2007-04-27
- Penal Spaces Chat with David Sibley
- It seems the workshop went well
- I mentioned the talk on Radio 4 this morning about Women in prisons
- This outlined an opportunity to reconfigure prisons given the funding entering the system due to the shortage of prison places.
- Currently womens are generally housed in prisons further away from home thatn their male counter parts.
- Perhaps smaller womens units are the way to go.
- It does seem that prisons is a very relevant research topic for CSAP
- Anthea Hucklesby is a local expert on Penology and might help us with the MoSeS Demographic model in terms of moving people in and out of various forms of communal establishments.
- I emailed Anthea and copied in Belinda:
- Belinda and I are working on developing a Demographic Model of the UK for MoSeS (http://www.ncess.ac.uk/research/nodes/MoSeS/). The model is to work at an individual, household and communal establishment level based on 2001 UK Human Population Census Data. A dynamic model is to operate on an annual time step with people being born, dying and moving. For the moving part, we recognise the importance of incorporating movements in and out of communal establishments (hospitals, prisons, residential schools etc...). The problem we have is that the census does not contain much information that we can use to drive the model. Can you help? Are there other data we should be examining and people we should be collaborating with? David Sibley here in geography has suggested we approach you for expertise.
- GAM
- Interest from Juan Du from Michigan State University (MSU)
- Juan is developing a versions of GAM/K written in R...
- Web Content Updates
- SoG
- House Price data Gary Wainman
- GEOG5060
- Bethan's query
- Meeting with Junaid Arshad
- Concern about the deadline which was appearing on the portal calendar as being this week
- Changed it to be the end of the course with the same deadline as the main profect 2007-05-25.
- Junaid interested in developing the wikipedia contribution.
- I encouraged Junaid to get involved with the other groups considering a contribution in this fashion during the practical session last Friday.
- Meeting with Richard Coppell
- Richard interested in developing a proposal for his 50% project.
- These are due by the end of the week 2007-03-15.
- After suggesting a few ideas, Richard seemed most interested in developing axis based metrics.
- He plans to go away and look up Peter Fishers work on this topic.
- More emails on Green Day Exposure and the Global Warming Debate
- SoG
- Chat with David Sibley
- I got an opportunity to challenge David on whether the Penal Spaces Workshop had geography in it.
- There is lots of interesting geography to do with prisons, the demographics of the inmates (in particular related to where they came from and where they're head), the locations and characteristics of the prisons, etc...
- I still think that physchology, spaciality and sociology within a prison is only very tenuously related to geography.
- When challenged as to what was geographical about it, David simply replied that it showed what a broad disciplin geography was if I could not recognise what he was doing as geography.
- I countered that there was a middle ground, but he argued not.
- GEOG5060
- Practical
- This seemed to go reasonably well.
- We based the session on the 2006 practical documentation.
- It seemed like 4 main groups formed.
- Kirk was great :)
- Hopefully all will work out OK.
- Louise Waite pointed me to the University of Leeds Green Day Document
- Chat with Adam Booth
- I was sorry to have missed his presentration in the school seminar yesterday.
- I asked about the crux of his work and if he had finished fieldwork and sensor design.
- He has identified a systematic problem with some velocity equations caused by the refraction of signals at boundaries between materials.
- I wondered if this could be automatically corrected by attaching a computer to the sensor to control and measure pulses from the emitter and the location and orientation of the sensor/emitter/receiver. The idea is to focus first on understanding the structure and nature of the material closest to the sensor so as to understand the refraction and remove noise from signals as the focus becomes understanding the structure further away.
- My arguement is that some of what Adam is doing can be automated by the production of better equipment.
- Adam did not seem to be interested in experimental geophysics. He wants to continue to develop theory based on human interpretation of the outputs of current sensors.
- We had a bet:
- I thought that within 3 years there will be a sensor that automates much of his interpretation of a signal and that he will be using data from it to develop more advanced theories.
- Adam thinks that the established way of doing geophysics using ground penetrating radar will be fundamentally unchanged and that computers will be unable to do the interpretations that are currently done.
- Channel 4 Programme The Great Global Warming Swindle
- A consideration of Global Warming, Climate Change, and Climate Change Science and Society.
- I had not been aware of the importance of cosmic rays in the ionization of the atmosphere leading to the formation of water vapour.
- I am interested to learn more about the relation of cosmic ray incidence, sun activity and cloud formation on earth: this:
- I think it is important to be aware of and maybe address some of the issues raised in this programme.
- I believe in science more the more objectively it is done.
- A worry is that the influence of media and governmental can lead to poor results and over stated or inaccurate conclusions.
- Browsing
- GRADE
- On the request of Rebecca Seymour I filled out the survey at Scoping a Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction
- I tried to save/obtain my response for future reference, but this was not easy so I didn't think it worthwhile in the end... The key points were Web Accessibility Initiative and Dublin Core. all the rest were suggested improvements.
- Bex fixed my name so the following is a link to My GRADE deposits
- Web Content Updates
- PhD
- SoG
- Seminar
- Forest Resource Management in Ghana
- Joseph Teye
- Approximately 25% of 8.2Mha of forest estate remains (1900-2003)
- Focus on policy formation
- Based mainly on qualitative data
- Relation between Social and Government Actors
- There is little or no feedback into poicy formation from the local level.
- Implementation of policy has not happened
- Analysis of power relations
- Focused on where different actors have power.
- I can imagine working with Joseph to develop an Agent Based Model based on what he has.
- Urban Cellular Automata Models
- Khalid Al Ahmadi
- Focus on Saudi Arabia Riyadh
- Developed a Fuzzy Celluar Urban Growth Model
- Fuzzy reasoning engine based on VBA language, Matlab, ArcGIS and something else.
- In a way this is very similar to what we were doing in MEDALUS III
- Made three requests to the Web Team (Andy Evans, Mike Crabtree, David Appleyard):
- On http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/internal/web/web.html we should link to the current web access stats http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/stats/Report.html.
- I would like the Cluster news which appears in the SoG Newsletter to be linked somehow from the research cluster home pages. What I recommend is either RSS feeds or "news" and "old news" links in the "latest" div on the research cluster home pages.
- Conformance to W3C (http://www.w3.org/) WAI (http://www.w3.org/WAI/).
- David got back to me quick :)
- Done.
- Claimed to be done, but when I checked, I could not confirm... OK the link is in the "further infomation" div. Check :)
- This issue will require discussion and much work. David to lead this :)
- Andy replied with a lot more detail and some good ideas and pointers as usual :)
- Alison got back to me with a clarification point on the minutes from the CSAP meeting yesterday. Hurray, there are other normal people around. Thanks Alison! :)
- Working on Phil Rees in an attempt to get him to realise that my blog is but a means to an end, not an end in itself.
- This could be hard going... I hope I don't upset him....
- The process of distilling the information is underway.
- Phil would like a separate document for this... It is happening...
- MoSeS
- Moving things forward with regard the streaming service from digimap
- e-Infrastructure
- Began making modifications to the first draft specifications documents for Work Package 4.1
- Browsing
- Web Content Updates
- SoG
- CSAP Meeting
- Andy Turner's CSAP Meeting 2007-03-07 Web Page
- I was delighted to be asked to take the minutes of this meeting :(
- I'm sure I was asked because I was on time, had a laptop and Graham thought I would do a great job :)
- I think this should be the job of a cluster support person.
- Although I find it is not so easy to focus and contribute to a meeting if I am responsible for documenting it, but it is a useful skill to be able to do both. Practice should make us efficient at this...
- Mentor meeting with Nanlin Jin
- Nanlin wanted me to point to two experts in SoG to discuss developing general ecosystem models and modelling tools.
- Considering the more general aspects and complexity, I suggested Alison Heppenstall.
- Considering a specific example, I suggested Ian Brown.
- I encouraged Nanlin to write down her ideas and generate some web pages suggesting that the key was trying to work out what is in and out of scope and how what she is doing relates to ongoing work she is involved with.
- I assured Nanlin again that I am happy to try and find time to look over anything she wants me to, and comment/feedback.
- I tried to explain that Nanlin is a geographer now and that she has background in geography.
- GEOG5060
- Quick meeting with Steve.
- We touched some files on geogweb and changed their permissions so I can overwrite them.
- Steve is heading to Montanna so won't be around whilst Assignment 3 should be happening.
- I keep having to spend time copying and pasting information from emails into my calendar about meetings and seminars
- I understand it might be difficult for external parties to do this, but it should be easy for others in our Outlook system to...
- It is not just the time it takes one person to copy and paste the information that is the concern. Additionally copy and paste is more error prone. Also if the inforamtion changes, everyone has to update it. Moreover the meeting organiser hasn't a clue who will turn up and whether the the room (and refreshments) will suffice.
- MoSeS
- Paul drafted a workplan for Junaid
- Security within the Context of e-Social Science Research
- Formal Statement
- e-Science refers to large-scale science that is carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists. Over the last five years, much work has been performed both world-wide and as part of the UK e-Science Core Programme, to develop tools and infrastructure (often known as Grid Computing) to support such large-scale science.
- The social sciences are a group of academic disciplines that study human aspects of the world. They diverge from the arts and humanities in that the social sciences tend to emphasize the use of the scientific method in the study of humanity, including both quantitative and qualitative methods. e-Social Science refers to the use of Grid infrastructure and tools within the social sciences. Recently, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded the creation of the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) to investigate specific applications of e-Social Science, develop tools to support them and to advise on the future strategic direction of e-Social Science and e-Science.
- Of particular importance to both communities is the subject of security, in terms of access to data, access to results, delegation, trust within a virtual organisation, etc. Whilst a significant amount of work has been performed in security research within the context of e-Science, this is less the case when considering e-Social Science. This project seeks to examine the particular security challenges faced by e-Social Science projects, with reference to a particular e-Social Science project as a case study (the Modelling and Simulation of e-Social Science project - MOSES - based at the University of Leeds). The security issues and challenges faced by the MOSES project will be reviewed in detail, with the aim of providing a solution to resolve at least a subset of these issues through the use of existing (if possible) Grid-based security scheme. An assessment of the effectiveness of the new security scheme will then be performed.
- Minimum objectives:
- A thorough review of the major approaches to security today (PKI, Kerberos, Shibboleth) as well as existing Grid-based security schemes.
- A comprehensive review of what differentiates e-social science and e-science projects, with especial regard to the security domain.
- A case study of the MOSES e-social science project, and an analysis of its particular security issues and challenges.
- The application (and extension, if necessary) of an existing Grid-based security solution to MOSES to address at least some of the issues raised.
- An assessment of the effectiveness of the new security mechanisms applied to MOSES.
- I suggested a couple of minor modifications:
- To be consistent with the capitalisation of e-Social Science and e-Science.
- Modelling and Simulation of e-Social Science should be Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science (http://www.ncess.ac.uk/research/nodes/MoSeS/).
- There are a few other places where MoSeS is expanded using "of" instead of "for" (Google search: "Modelling+and+Simulation+of+e-Social+Science"). I think that at those places the wording should be changed. The difference is only subtle, but using "of" implies an introspective modelling of what we are doing. I suppose introspection is part of what we are doing and I think that that when I first saw "of" used instead of "for" actually helped me focus on the process rather than the deliverables a little more.
- These were accepted :)
- e-Infrastructure
- First look at deliverable specifications drafts for Work Package 4.1
- What is a common ontology?
- What is an Ontology?
- An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization
- Pragmatically, a common ontology defines the vocabulary with which queries and assertions are exchanged among agents.
- Web Content Updates
- Browsing
- UoL
- Steve showed me http://myuni.leeds.ac.uk/
- SoG
- Chat with Gordon Mitchell:
- The differences between planned and unplanned urban areas case study of Helsinki and a nearby town in Finland.
-
- James Jones (Jamie) Level 2 Dissertation
- Jamie is looking to do a dissertation based on a sports recreation theme and is developing a proposal:
- With London soon to host the world’s largest and premier sporting event – the Summer Olympic Games – there has been much public rhetoric about London 2012 being “our” Games; an opportunity for the whole of the UK to participate to some extent in the world’s largest and premier sporting event.
- The laws of nature dictate that only those of a certain age can compete in a large number of the associated Olympic disciplines, but that aside . . . Is there equal opportunity and provision for every Briton to become an Olympian and reach the peak of sporting greatness?
- My report will encompass largely quantitative research methods (GIS most likely), investigating and discussing the sporting facilities, the provision of funding and the past distribution of athletes.
- The relevance of the location of facilities and participation rates could (also) potentially be related to good / bad health rates, obesity levels, socio-economic status, LTLI(LLTI sic) rates to name but a few areas of investigation.
- He wants a supervisor and contacted Rachael Unsworth who gave my name.
- I provided some feedback by email:
- At http://www.uwo.ca/olympic/links.html there are some research and Documentation Centres listed.
- The following journal/article might be of interest: http://jss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/4/420
- I did this search which pulled some interesting links, including:
- James R. BULLER (1999) SOCIAL EXCLUSION FROM HIGH PERFORMANCE SPORT: ARE ALL TALENTED YOUNG SPORTS PEOPLE BEING GIVEN AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY OF REACHING THE OLYMPIC PODIUM?
- To realise the study as outlined a dataset is wanted that contains information about the background of UK Olympians.
- Consider the Seb Co v Steve Ovett comparison.
- In the past running required little or no equipment really.
- Nowadays one can argue that access to the best coaches, fitness and physio facilities can make a difference.
- Hmmmmm..... At the moment they are after tall people... Are more likely to be in the tall if you are from a particular background? Hmmm not sure this is an issue.... I think what you are doing is interesting, but I'm not sure you can do anything quantitatively. What I expect is that for those elitist sports (expensive equipment and what not) there are mainly and maybe only competitors from the "higher" social classes...
- This topic may have some interesting policy implications and might be something that the CSAP Research Cluster are interested in?
- The more I think about this, the harder I think it is to do what James is outlining.
- It may be easier to focus on a specific sport, or look at a comparison between two classes of sport (elite v non-elite)?
- Anyway, the data compiled for such a study might be a useful resource.
- Unfortunately, none of us know what data is available in this area.
- I would like to think that a point GIS dataset can be produced which gives the locations of different sports facilities.
- I expect that such data do not already exist in an accessible form and will be hard to generate (I might be wrong - Seb et al might have it all under control?!...).
- I wonder what geographic information the UK Olympic organising committee are using...
- What might be more feasible is to attempt to map the change in access to public sports facilities before, during the planning for and after the Olympics. Using census or neighbourhood statistics you can then perform some geographic analysis. I'm not sure even if this can identify which social groups benefit most, but it is interesting....
- Rachel noted:
- It will be very hard to draw any firm conclusions re the correlation between Olympic chances on the one hand and sporting facilities/expenditure and health on the other."
- Reasonable data on health differentials (poorer areas = poorer health in the main) should be available, but will you be able to get hold of meaningful data across the country on sporting facilities, expenditure (past, current and planned)?
- What evidence is there for PAST determinants of success?
- It seems that many gold medallists have come from some pretty disadvantaged backgrounds and sport has been the route to upward mobility - contradicts the generalisations about geography of health?
- http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/internal/web/reports/report97/
- Edith Benten Funds
- GEOG5060
- Lecture went OK, I am not happy with the quality of the slides...
- Should redo pictures in colour and so that they are clear when projected on a white background
- The practical session is from 12-4pm on Friday
- I am to learn to use the portal for this...
- Steve explained that the major problem with the portal is that there is a 1MB file size limit
- Reading list for module GEOG5060
MoSeS
- GOLD Meeting
- Rob Smith, Belinda, Mark, Paul, Andy
- Paul Watson has offered MoSeS use of a 2000 node Condor Pool at University of Newcastle
- Understanding Virtual Organisations
e-Infrastructure
- The meeting on Friday clashes with the GEOG5060 practical so I sent apologies.
- Looking over Deliverable Specification Drafts
- SoG
- Preparation for lecture tomorrow
- Read Newsletter
- Travelling back from DS Online meeting
- Browsing
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