Here is a little bit of fun for you to enjoy at a staff social, after your Xmas lunch or in the pub one evening This is how the Sh*thole Geography Standup Quiz works. “At the beginning everyone stands up. Quizmaster asks a question with 3 suggested answers. If you think the answer is the first one put your left hand up, if you think it is the second one both hands up, if you […]
Yearly Archives: 2018
10 posts
I was invited to deliver a keynote last week at KortDage to an audience of nearly 800 Danish (and Scandinavian) GI professionals. There were just a few snags: The person who invited me said “Last year Jack Dangermond gave a keynote, this year we wanted something different”. No challenge there! The slot was at 9.00am on the final morning after the delegates had been up till 1.30am boogying I don’t speak Danish and I wasn’t […]
In case you missed it, Ken Field and I have started a new little venture called Mappery The idea started when we were on safari in Tanzania before FOSS4G 2018, hence the elephant logo. Our aim is to gather pictures of “maps in the wild“, who knows where this might go or what a map in the wild might be? If you have a picture of a map that you would like to send to […]
It’s a year since Marc and I ran the first S&M101 workshop at FOSS4G Boston, since then I have run two more workshops at FOSS4G Europe in Guimaraes and FOSS4G 2018 in Dar es Salaam. In total 36 people have now attended the workshop which is amazing to me. The two most recent workshops were fitted into a 4.5 hour slot rather than a whole day and that forced me to focus on the elements […]
I attended my first FOSS4G 5 years ago, I really had no idea what to expect even though I’d agreed to chair the organising committee! I’d been to lots of Geo conferences before and never experienced the passion, friendship and technical depth that a FOSS4G has. Since Nottingham, I’ve been to 2 more global FOSS4Gs, 2 UK FOSS4Gs and this year’s European FOSS4G and I can’t wait to go to Dar in August. The IT […]
This week a headline in the Telegraph caught my eye: Postcodes ‘no longer fit for purpose’ as study shows most people have one which does not go directly to their door The article goes on: Postcodes are “no longer fit for purpose” as three in four people in the UK have an address that does not lead directly to the door of their home or business, according to new research. British technology company What3words has said […]
If you follow me on twitter you may have seen a few tweets encouraging you to donate to Linkey, a charity that provides support to rough sleepers by donors buying sleeping bags, cold weather gear and toiletry kits in their web shop. It’s an inspiring charity that only started a few months ago. I reached out to a couple of the founders to see if there was any way I could help them and in […]
Last week James Milner and his organising committee staged a brilliant FOSS4G UK at the Geovation Hub. For the first time in ages I wasn’t organising a FOSS4G (well I did help with some financial bits and pieces), I wasn’t presenting (except for a lightning talk) so I could just hang out listen to interesting speakers and learn some cool stuff in the workshops. Here is what I enjoyed in roughly chronological order): Day 1 […]
Last week I wrote a post about making a map of the locations of US steel plants and the electoral results in their local communities. I concluded with this brief summary “it’s a first draft and needs a good bit of work, but you can certainly see a pattern – most of the steel plants (and all of the large ones) are in Republican Districts – hardly a big surprise but there you go. I guess […]
A couple of days ago a friend asked me if I could help a friend of his make a map showing the locations of US steel plants against US 115th Congressional Districts (2016). I tweeted out asking my American geogeek friends if they could help me find the data for this map. Within a few hours I had the Congessional District boundaries and the 2016 election results but the steel plant locations were a little […]