COST Actions

It's been a busy few weeks but a good few weeks. After some great advice from a colleague,

Gavin

I decided to have a look at EU COST Actions. COST Actions are part of a European framework supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe. I found a COST Action in a very relevant area - EO and UAV applications for agriculture. It even crosses into UAV accuracy assessment - something that I presented a paper on at the RSPSoc conference in Glasgow last September.

Pdf programme 

I got talking to someone from Edinburgh university afterwards about the same thing and it turned out that months later when I started looking into COST Actions, he is the one chairing it. So after a quick email to make sure the goals of the study corresponded with ours, I started to put together an application for the Enterprise Ireland reviewer, as they decide who to nominate as the Irish representative for the management committee. She agreed to nominate me, and the rest is history. I'm off to Brussels in the next few weeks for the kick-off meeting. Lots of excellent opportunities for networking and a chance to find out how people are getting on with their own multispectral or hyperspectral cameras - something I mentioned a few posts back.

                             

Added to that, I got some good reviews of a journal paper and found €200 in an envelope in the attic when throwing out old files! Which will come in handy - as this comic from The Upturned Microscope should explain nicely.

Sentinel 1a Launch

Great to see it go - it's the first satellite that I have followed the progress, watched the launch and also actually really cared about it not crashing.

I was following the countdown during the day and 'stayed up' (launch was around 21:30GMT) for the whole thing. It wasn't too far behind the scheduled time either, I think only delayed by about 5 mins compared to the countdown timer. It must be a really impressive sight to see a rocket launch and I've just added it to my 'bucket list'. Maybe I can get a job as a book loader with Amazon?

Books in space

Of course even though launch went well doesn't mean it was out of the woods. Landsat 6 didn't make orbit, so I watched Sentinel 1b past the first three stages and the mission control team seemed happy so I left it at that (plus I was now just watching a computer simulation because no camera were on it). And although Landsat 7 did make it, the problems don't stop there. Sensors can develop problems (Landsat7 is optical - Sentinel 1a is RADAR) so lets hope it is all working fine in a few months time when calibration is complete.

So now the next big event is Sentinel 2a in 2015? Sentinel 1b won't be lauched until 2016. Considering how many funding applications and projects around the EU probably depend on the safe launch of these satellites we should probably have had a party afterwards! Shame the guys in the ISS couldn't see it - how cool would it have been if we could have followed it post launch on this!

ISS Cam

LinkedIn, groups and profile views

One benefit of LinkedIn is that it is a useful tool for connecting with people after conferences or meetings. It's easier than filing or organising the growing pile of business cards that build up on your desk. It's also good for getting noticed in the world of research but how best to do that?

Another benefit is that there are lots of groups of experts online that you can ask questions of and be pretty sure of an answer. I had a few queries on different multispectral and hyperspectral camera types for UAVs and I thought this might be a good place to start. Added to that, I read an article recently on ways to increase your number of LinkedIn views

Linky

And one of the top 5 tips is, 'start a discussion'. So I decided to kill two birds with the one stone and started a discussion in late January on LinkedIn on UAV cameras. The results were interesting...

Ok - they aren't astronomical figures. I'm not rivalling One Direction's follower numbers on Twitter and I'm about to return to anonymity, but the improvement is undeniable. I made contact with a number of researchers working in UAVs around the world - useful contacts for future queries or joint applications and I even got a promise of free data. But more importantly I got some valuable first hand reviews of different UAV camera types. Once you filter out the guys trying to sell you their latest hardware you can spot the people who have practical experience of hardware and they are willing to share that info, warts and all.

This led to a tough decision - do you openly criticise hardware on LinkedIn? Are you opening yourself up to a barrage of complaints from the manufacturers online representatives, or even worse, are you making yourself liable for any legal proceedings by harming their sales? In my discussion introduction I erred on the side of caution and mentioned that we had had problems with, 'hardware' in the past - and asked what hardware would people recommend? Unfortunately, by far the most common reply was, 'what hardware have you tried?'. So that left me three options - ignore the replies and never log in to LinkedIn again, reply no-holds-barred on the group discussion thread, risking what I have already mentioned, or chicken out and reply in a PM.

I PM'd anyone who replied asking me to name-and-shame the hardware we had tested. I'm a post-doc, not a professor!

Inaugural Post

I should probably explain the name of the blog.

A few months ago I read a blogpost about, 'How academia resembles a drug gang'

Linky

It was this authors take on Freakonomics. There is a chapter in that book called, “Why drug dealers still live with their moms”. The chapter is based based on the findings that in street gangs income is skewed in favour of the kingpins, while the gang members on the corners selling the drugs earn very little (even less than their peers in legitimate low-skilled employment) and have all the risk.

The author of the blogpost had drawn a parallel between people starting out in academia (like me - I'm a post doc) and those low level drug dealers. One thing we both have in common, he claims is that,

''the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth'.

It was an interesting viewpoint and that one I could see quite a bit of truth in. But more importantly, when I was scratching my head trying to think of a suitable blog name, it was one that seemed better than some others I came up with. The url of this blog is the initials for the chapter in Freakonomics. Although it's probably not the best title for a blog if I am hoping for random internet traffic, Blogger is telling me I have already racked up 25 hits in the 5 minutes since I set the page up - all from America. Post Docs must really have to work those corners to get that paper in the US.

Edit: Changed the name August 2016 to "Contour Lines", Con referring to Conor - Contour Lines referring to mapping and Lines also referring writing. But you know what they say - if you have to explain it then it ain't funny.