Australia Through Time - iPad App

On the weekend 11-13 July 2014 various Australian government institutions had invited to join GovHack 2014.

Governments collect and publish enormous amounts of data, but have limited resources to get it into the hands of their citizens in engaging ways. GovHack is an event to draw together people from government, industry, academia and of course, the general public to mashup, reuse, and remix government data. GovHack is about finding new ways to do great things and encouraging open government and open data.

Most projects targeted the obvious data, like census data or the national archives. Science data are not that attractive because the sources are normally not accessible through simple API and often domain knowledge is needed to understand the data. Not all entries have to be applications in the sense of an app, also interactive infographics are welcome. One entry this year made use of data from Geoscience Australia to make an interactive infographic of the development of the Australian continent through time.

The Australia Through Time iPad App is an interactive app that runs on iPad or in the browser, showing the geological, mineral and biological history of Australia from the Cambrian to the present. It is based on the Australia Through Time poster by Geoscience Australia.This app presents the data in a visually appealing format, condensing it into smaller, readable screens and includes an animated sea-level bar and continental-drift visualization which makes changes in the data more apparent. It uses an intuitive drag gesture to slide through the timeline and display varying content.

EarthObserver as iPhone App

Columbia University recently published yet another earth science application for Apple's iPhone. The app is called EarthObserver and is available from Apple's iTunes store. EarthObserver provides

• Basemap (computer-generated color-shaded relief of land and ocean floor)
• US Coastal Bathymetry (with color palette appropriate to provide details of bays, sounds, estuaries, harbors and rivers)
• US Nautical Charts (paper raster and digital electronic at all scales for Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, Bering Sea, Arctic and Great Lakes)
• US Topographic Sheets (entire USGS collection for US mainland, Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico)
• Geologic Maps (entire world, by continent, by country and by US state showing formation ages, names and rock types)
• Geophysical Maps (global earthquakes, tectonic plates and boundaries, gravity anomalies, geoid height, magnetic anomalies and the configuration of world stress)
• Land Surface (temperatures day and night, primary productivity, vegetation index, land cover classifications and diversity, forest cover types and fragmentation)
• NASA Visible Earth (global earth scenes for each month)

And many more. See EarthObserver's homepage for more information.

How did dinosaurs move?

Recent advances in computer technology allowed remarkably realistic animations of dinosaurs (and other creatures) in films. But how realistic are these animations?

In a recent feature, Danielle Venton of International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW) writes:

In a memorable scene from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, a Tyrannosaurus rex gallops behind a jeep, close to overtaking it, lunging to take a bite out of Jeff Goldblum — to the horrorified delight of millions of thrill-seeking movie-goers.

Assuming dinosaurs could be resurrected, how realistic would this situation be?

Not very, according to Karl Bates, a researcher in dinosaur locomotion. In fact, our scrawny-armed, prehistoric friend would probably have trouble outrunning a bicyclist. Depending on how fast you run, you may or may not be in trouble if you were on foot.

(...)

By his best guess, this dinosaur ran at about an average running speed of 15 miles per hour (24.5 kph) and would have walked at about 5.5 mph (9 kph), faster than the average humans — but not the fastest ones.

It turns out that muscle size is the single most important determinant for dinosaur speed. Since we know little about their actual muscle mass, there is a lot of guess work involved. But with these new high-performance models it is an educated guess. The model allows to study different scenarios in a physical environment, including gravity.

Playing with PSICAT

PSICAT is a nice piece of Java software programmed by Josh Reed which is an excellent tool to draw sedimentological profiles. It was used and promoted within the CHRONOS project and Josh brought it to ANDRILL where he used it to document this exciting antarctic drilling program.

The tool is useful for 95% of all cases when you wish to provide nice graphs and illustrations of your profile. However, it is a bit specialized on core descriptions. For example, if you need to document outcrops and you are used to describe it from the bottom to the top you will feel a bit lost, as PSICAT expects core descriptions which start at the top of each segment.
On the other hand it is very flexible, you can for example add e.g. lithological styles and patterns etc..

For us developers it offers a cool XML export, which allows to use the data within other programs. For example, PSICAT data can be used in the ICDP core decription tool 'DIS' as well as within the extremely cool 'CoreWall' which is used for IODP. As far as I know PSICAT is going to be merged with the Corelyzer tool soon.

... What a coincidence, I just started writing this post on PSICAT and saw Johannes post on profile drawing software.