The Coastal Blue Band

Would be a great name for a Geomatics music group.

Coastal Blue

Wrecks off the Irish Coast

10 minutes to kill before a seminar - so no better time for a quick post!

The work I do with the SFI bathymetry project means I have to gather lots of different datasets. Two of the datasets are found on the GSI or INFOMAR GIS viewers, these are multi beam SONAR and aerial bathymetric LiDAR. They have a lot of great data freely available on there - but one distraction I came across was the shipwreck dataset. This is a dataset showing the location of, and information on, multiple shipwrecks along the Irish coast. Another cool feature is you can see the scan of the wrecks.

Here is one of the RMS Lusitania - a very famous WW1 ship whose sinking was credited with helping to bring America into the war.

Obviously they are not all as easily identifiable, some are old Napoleonic Frigates, etc. A very cool website - but the lack of wrecks on the west coast is quite puzzling...

Bramor from c-Astral

I spent the end of last week going through the ground school and simulator training for the Bramor from c-Astral. The Asctec Falcon 8 is a great piece of kit and lots of our earlier projects went really well, but the Bramor is really in a different league. The Falcon 8 is an Octocopter, small, very sturdy and manouverable, useful for surveying small areas or inspecting buildings and other vertical structures. It can be carried in one hand, launched from a roof, and if you're brave enough, caught in your hand on return as the manufacturers demonstrate.

The Bramor on the other hand, looks like a stealth-bomber

Needs a catapult to launch

And a parachute to land.

High speeds, long range, high altitude capability.

All currently forbidden by regulations.

Shiny New Year

Happy New Year to everyone.

First post of a shiny new year is nothing to do with remote sensing or Geomatics, but rather an interesting research article I came across on Science Direct about the reason behind our love for shiny things. Apparently our love for shiny/glossy things goes back to our need for water! Paper is here. People generally prefer things printed on glossy paper, but their preference for shiny/glossy material increased significantly after the survey participants had been given 8 salty crackers by the Belgian scientists.

A busy 2015 ahead, the next few months particularly so. A new Remote Sensing module to give at the end of the month, multiple SFI reports due, a SFI bathymetry project deliverable, UAS groundschool and flightschool in Cork, persuade the SCS to let me transfer the IIS commission on Remote Sensing over, software development with NorbSoftDev (we hope to have the alpha version ready by the end of February, then only have two months to get to Beta and a RC - June release deadline).

Looking at that list after the last week or so of slothful gluttony it makes me want to go home and eat turkey and cry into my tin of Roses.

The Bridge

Page 23 here - a short article published in the Maynooth Alumni magazine on the SFi project. The Bridge goes out to alot of people (do they do a print version? I'm not sure), and always good to get a mention anywhere.

Two TV appearances this year, a photo with a minister, three newspapers/magazines and a radio interview on Tuesday about my work with Santa - this showbiz lifestyle of mine!

Shame I'm just a poor Post-Doc.

Happy Christmas and New Year to everyone!

See you in 2015.

Santa's Official Scientist

Remote sensing has lots of uses - forestry, coastal, agriculture, engineering, marine - but lets face it, it's really all about Christmas. I had a short article published in the, 'Science of Christmas' supplement in the Irish Independent last week. The link is here if you are interested in reading how Santa uses remote sensing to find people's houses.

IIS SCS merger

I posted a while back about a proposed IIS/SCSI merger. At the Extraordinary General Meeting in the Davenport hotel, Friday 29th November 2014 - 70 IIS members (roughly 25%) voted on the merger. This was easily the best turnout for an AGM or EGM that I have seen since the days when the AGM used to follow on in the evening from Survey Ireland. Great to see too, it was an important vote - easily the most important vote.

The Vote

The result was surprising. Off the top of my head I think the final tally was: 68 for the merger, 1 against and 1 abstention. That is about as unanimous as you could ever hope for. One of the worries I had was that it would be a 51/49 split but thankfully that didn't happen. The night was also a celebration of the IIS's 25th anniversary to it served a dual-function.

IIS Commission

What does that mean for the IIS commission on Remote Sensing? I honestly don't know but I hope to propose it to the board of the Geomatics division of the SCSI in the new year. Now that we have the clarity that was missing due to the question mark over the future of the IIS we can start to get something done. 

So what does this mean for me?

Much higher membership costs for one thing. Almost double what I currently pay if I opt for Fellow of the SCSI and Fellow of the RICS. And that's IF I get the academic discount. I need to look into that. If I don't I'm looking at nearly €850. Do I need to be a chartered surveyor in research and lecturing? That remains to be seen, I'll probably pay it for the first year at least.