Kurt's Weblog

Today, Trey made a post about the Best Talks at PyCon US 2013. I didn't make it to pycon (other than stopping by a sprint session for an hour), so this is definitely awesome. The first video that I watched was this:

Log Analysis with Pandas [Taavi's web notes]

Video Link



Next on my list is:

Building an image processing pipeline with Python



I will be following that up with:

Building full-stack scientific applications in Python

IPython and especially the Notebook feature have been awesome additions to my python toolbox. I think that Fernando more than deserves this award... more than a decade in the making.

Fernando Perez, Winner of the 2013 Free Software Foundation Award

Sadly I was out sick and have to catch Matt Deans' talk via youtube. Matt and I worked together at NASA Ames back in the 90's in what then called the Intelligent Mechanisms Group (IMG) and is now called the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG).



Also, in a frustrating moment, I was talking to someone at the NSF Earth Cube workshop last week at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and they were asking me about Google's tools for education. For some reason I didn't write down which one of the attendies asked me that and Philip's name escaped me during the short time of the conversation. So in the hopes that who ever that was reads my blog, please check out Philip Guo's Google Research page. Philip indroduced me to Course Builder:

Helping the World to Teach [Google Research Blog] by Peter Norvig about Course Builder.

I have been talking about a github like community around databases. Thanks to Dustin Mitchell for pointing to the city of Chicago's posting of their databases literally to GiHub.

https://github.com/Chicago/osd-pedway-routes/tree/master/data

Back when I was working with Rob Braswell and Michele Jacobi back 5 or 6 years ago, I really didn't think that the "Portsmouth Reponse" web app that we were working on would be come the big deal that is now called ERMA. Pretty amazing.

From Paper to Pixels: Mapping Pollution Response in the Digital Age [NOAA'S RESPONSE AND RESTORATION BLOG]

I am wishing this was around when I took Peter Shearer's seismology course at SIO. Left side is the data, right side is a model for the event. This is from the IRIS Tutorial Data Visualizations

I have been enjoying Michelle W's illustrations ever since she started adding them to her posts. Her topics range from life as a PhD student to ocean acidification. Now she has done up two about the Whale Alert project. Thanks Michelle for the post and the illustrations!

Save the whales? There's an app for that! [Deep Sea News]





If you want to know more, I've made a video that goes through most of it.

Dive into the Great Barrier Reef with the first underwater panoramas in Google Maps