data publishing ditty

A short article about data publishing and technology.

http://blogs.wiley.com/publishingnews/2011/06/28/it%E2%80%99s-what-counts-how-data-transforms-our-world/

Mentions DataCite, Mendeley, and Scribd.

Data management plans are becoming increasingly integral to project funding proposals – and will continue to become more stringent. However, both services (e.g., global standards, long-term curation) and incentives (such as academic credit, enforceable policies, and funder metrics) need to be overhauled in order to provide people with the resources and operability they need.


The current mismatch was illustrated by Todd Vision (DRYAD). Quoting a recent PARSE survey, he noted that there is a major discrepancy between researchers’ apparent willingness to share data (85%) and current levels of actual compliance with requests or funding mandates (27%).

metadata conference

There is an entire conference about metadata and vocabularies. This is insane. But important. I actually wish I could learn all the content about the conference without actually traveling.

Program:
http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/index/pages/view/program-2011

Metadata people say "Dublin Core" a lot and until you know what that is, it is very perplexing.

Dublin Core (from wikipedia):

The Dublin Core set of metadata elements provides a small and fundamental group of text elements through which most resources can be described and catalogued. Using only 15 base text fields, a Dublin Core metadata record can describe physical resources such as books, digital materials such as video, sound, image, or text files, and composite media like web pages. Metadata records based on Dublin Core are intended to be used for cross-domain information resource description and have become standard in the fields of library science and computer science. Implementations of Dublin Core typically make use of XML and are Resource Description Framework based.

mamp

mamp stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

http://www.mamp.info/en/index.html

"manage your websites locally"

we shall see.

README says:

README for MAMP 2.0

- Put your HTML and PHP files in the htdocs folder!
- Database files are stored in the folder db/mysql or db/sqlite.
- PHP errors are logged in the file logs/php_error.log. If you doubleclick the logfile, the console will be open, which show the last errors.

How to create a local environment using MAMP
http://drupal.org/node/66187

vim

I just installed macvim as a new text editor.

I still remember a command or two for vi.

Ready for my life to be changed now.

http://code.google.com/p/macvim/

I plan to do a lot of search and replace by script.
Maybe some html editing instead of in seamonkey.

earth cube

I'm adding a new topic to this blog, cyberinfrastructure (to take NSF's out-of-date word). And I'm not going to add propriety either. I considered having a new blog about geoinformatics but now I've decided that I should just add to the list of topics in matlabor. (Currently something like (1) matlab (2) GIS (3) stuff I like.)

In these new posts I will attempt to capture the interesting events and topics in the deluge of emails and announcements I get.

Random: I was thinking of building a matlab program to analyze Eminem lyrics.

Anyway, the first cyberinfrastructurey post is about Earth Cube.

http://www.nsf.gov/geo/earthcube/index.jsp

NSF ... recognize(s) the multifaceted challenges of modern, data-intensive science and education and envision an environment where low adoption thresholds and new capabilities act together to greatly increase the productivity and capability of researchers and educators working at the frontiers of Earth system science.

Writing about cyberinfrastructure often has a lot of very long sentences.

GraphClick - digitize points

mp told me about this one: GraphClick

http://www.arizona-software.ch/graphclick/

She is using it to digitize grain size distributions. I used it to digitize contours of the damage zone around Wenchuan earthquakes from historical documents and volume of continental crust through earth time curves. You need to pay the $8 to get all the features (like saving more than 10 points), but it is well worth it, and you can try it out before paying.

I LOVE useful software.

It is for mac only I think. sigh.

parsing text with Text to Columns

This is one of those things that you just want to hit yourself on the head for not knowing earlier.

In Excel (yes, I still use excel) there is a Text to Columns Wizard that allows you to parse data by either fixed width or a defined delimiter.

In Excel 2011 Mac (gag), it is under Data --> Text to Columns.

PARSING BY FIXED WIDTH IN EXCEL!

This is especially useful for delimiting degrees, minutes, seconds. Use it with Search and Replace to do what you need to do.

It is really sad that I just learned this today.