Monthly Archives: April 2009

Field computing solutions

Posted on April 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

I have been eyeing up the Nokia n810 tablet recently, thinking about how useful it might be in a field setting.  The n810 is essentially a small, slimmed down computer running on an ARM processor (versus your typical Intel chip in most computers). ARM chips are used in most low-power devices such as mobile phones, where battery life is an important consideration. Likewise, out in the field we don’t always have easy access to electricity, although we have started to experiment with solar panels and battery packs. There are similar (and likely more computationally powerful) devices that use Intel chips, but at this point their price is a fair bit higher, and from what I could see the power draw is greater as well. The thing about the n810 is that it can be charged from a USB port, versus the much higher power requirements of something like a laptop. While the n810 comes with a Linux distribution called Maemo, people have recently managed to port Ubuntu to the device (as well, Ubuntu has been working up an ARM distribution). By using something like Ubuntu on the n810, we have a full suite of applications that we can use, from word processing (although I think OpenOffice on it would be a little unwieldy) to GIS.

While ths seems like a neat idea, the question becomes also, why? While some of the things like GIS might be nice, so that we could be updating our databases in the field, they’re probably not necessary. I have thought about whether it would be useable for reading pdfs or books, to cut down on weight, but how much weight would we really cut out if we need portable power solutions? I still would like to try it out for writing things like manuscripts, but the small keyboard size may make this a problem too.

Nonetheless, I think that it could be a worthwhile thing to try, as the costs to try it out are always coming down.

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Teaching in the field

Posted on April 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

The yearly vertebrate field course is coming up in about a month, and we’ve started some more serious planning for it. One thing I am thinking about is the best way to try and teach people how to use some simple GIS and statistics programs, possibly while in a cook tent in the field, with everyone on their own laptops of every variety. I have been tinking of setting up a small server and local network that everyone can get on as a way to share information quickly, without resorting to swapping usb keys. I had the idea of getting something like a Eee or Acer Aspire One and turning it into a server, and using a cheap wireless router (we have an old one in the lab, but they only cost $25 anyhow) to set it up. I suppose I probably could go without the router, but it might make things easier than also trying to deal with setting up an ad hoc network on the server. I thought that by using something small and low powered like an Atom processor based netbook, we wouldn’t have to worry about power draw or even if it gets broken, as they’re so cheap. As it is, it would only really be used as a file server and not be doing much number crunching itself, so I would think it should work fine (if a little slowly).

Once the server part is set up, I need to get everyone with a copy of R and Quantum GIS on their own laptops. With QGIS everyone can access and view mapfiles I’ll have on the mini-server, and even update things if I want to let them if we find new localities. They can also use their own computers to download any old localities to their GPS units, instead of me doing it all. As for R, We can have an “Intro to R” session and get everyone running the same data set (preferably of something we have found in the field) and then get everyone to even upload their finished results to the server to be marked if we’re really ambitious.

However, if this whole idea doesn’t pan out so well, I’m still playing around with creating live USB keys for everyone to boot into. It’s easy enough to create them now with Ubuntu 9.04, but the only thing I need to figure out is how to get it to work with OS X. I thought as well about live CDs with the additional components, but then there is an issue of data permanence, as well as problems with computer speed. As well, if people start showingup with netbooks, CDs won’t work anyhow. At any rate, one of these ideas should work.

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The Alberta Oilsands: forget nuclear power, give us nuclear weapons!

Posted on April 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

Wired recently ran an article about how the U.S. government sponsored Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at one time was researching all sorts of ways to use nuclear weapons in a civilian capacity. One of the methods they had come up with was using nuclear weapons to aid in the extraction of hydrocarbons from oil shales (and oil sands, based on the chart presented). While their plans never actually resulted in any testing, the laboratory did inn fact test a similar line whereby they used a nuclear blast to create fissures in rocks underground to aid in the release of natural gas. The only major problem with it? It turned the gas radioactive (although apparently not that badly, they claimed). Red Deer, Alberta’s city motto (“A Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone!”)

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Twitter updates via satellite phone

Posted on April 5, 2009 | 4 comments

I have been thinking about various ways to keep those at home up to speed with what I’m doing in the field. Obviously, the easiest is to find a payphone, which is probably the most ideal. However, fossil hunting quickly takes one away from all landlines (and cell towers), leaving me with just satellites as a way to get messages out. I have seen the Spot Personal Tracker, which has some nifty features, but it runs off the Globalstar satellite network, which doesn’t cover polar regions unfortunately. This leaves me with the Iridium network, for which we currently have a sat phone. We could theoretically set up the phone as a modem, but the complications of that, as well as the data lag and speed, make it relatively unattractive. What I had thought of before was to somehow set up a system which could update a webpage when it recieved a text message (as the sat phone can send SMS messages). This way, we could possibly update a map with our coordinates, have short messages about what we found, and simply let all the significant others know that everyone is still OK. I had thought of this before I had really heard of Twitter, but because the platform is so open, someone has even created a WordPress (the software that runs this site) plugin to update your blog when it recieves a Twitter update. Theoretically this plugin would do more or less what I wanted, but I will have to wait to try it out as I can’t add the plugin to this specific blog because of certain restrictions. Hopefully I can figure something out for the future, but even if all I do is post tweets from the field, it could still be a good way of letting people what’s going on.

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Portable OS

Posted on April 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

Lifehacker (and a few other places) have a story on Portable Ubuntu, a take on the more popular Portable Apps suite of programs. This makes me start thinking about how far off we are to a truly portable operating system. With Portable Apps at the moment, I can take all my programs and settings with me and use it on any computer (provided it runs Windows, which in my family is actually pretty rare). However, my ideal scenario, which may never occur, is to have a full OS-on-a-stick that I can insert in virtually any computer, whether it be Mac, Windows or Linux, and use it just like I would the native system. This would include things like a mapping suite, some version of R, as well as all the other typical office programs. In some way, this could be the ultimate stripped down laptop; super portable, useable almost anywhere you can find a computer. Thinking of it again, having the stick be a mirrored image of (most) of my laptops hard drive would be great as well, so I can take my work with me and not have to worry about what version I’m working on. Of course, for that I could always use Google Docs or something, but until they have internet access in the field, I need a non-cloud solution.

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Blogging our way to a more open science community?

Posted on April 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

I have been thinking lately about the use of Web 2.0 tools (and specifically a blogging platform like this) as a way to increase exposure and draw feedback on research. I have been thinking about how we used to (and still do) get together at yearly conferences in meat space, and that was enough. Especially in paleo — a field I think is notorious for a slow turnaround time — getting together once or twice a year was just fine. I don’t expect the old boys (and they are overwhelmingly that) to change and start blogging in the field (“OMG! U will blow ur mind when u c this fossil!”), mainly because it would do them no benefit. I think when you have a way of working, and it works well for you, that if you are 5 years from retirement it ususally doesn’t make any sense to change a working formula. However, for those of us raised in the time of the interwebs, I think our brains actually work different in some ways. Personally, I want my data to come to me, not to have to go to a library for journals (although I still think libraries are great places for actual books and a nice place to sit quietly and study), however I know plenty of people (much older than I) who still like to print off their email.

But back to my main point: openness in science. Blogging can be a useful tool for sharing what you are doing when it comes to research, and may even lead to collaboration if someone else working on similar material stumbles upon you (I know I cruise google often, looking for things similar to projects of my own, usually for references). There is always the possibility of someone poaching your project, but I have to be convinced that blogging would make it worse than it is. Also, I think the in progress comments and feedback that could be possible is another good reason for it. I know I feel isolated in my lab, working on a project that is virtually unrelated to everything everyone else is working on.  I would love to have more feedback on my work that is more meanful, and I think a lot of others would as well.

Another reason I advocate for the web 2.0 tools is the idea of making interactions searchable. I would love to have a better way of keeping track of people and ideas, so that when I come up with something, I can look to see if it is already done, or to see what other people are doing, without trying to rely solely on my memory. Any more, there is getting to be too much in the way of researchers and projects for me to keep straight, and I need some way of looking stuff up. I have started trying to do this with my own thoughts as well, in that I have started to use Tomboy Notes to keep track of new ideas so that I can easily search for specific things later, without trying to remember where I wrote it down.  Anyhow, just a few thoughts for the moment. I’ll be coming back to this idea a fair bit, I think.

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