Albert Einstein

Something I strive to do on a daily basis…

As part of my burgeoning interest in the use of GIS to supplement the visualisation of health-related data, this post is about some of the resources that I found during a very late night spent surfing on the iPad into the wee hours.

It may interest you to know that this post is being dictated into my new PC, well rebuilt PC, using my Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. I also have a cold which means that this is not the most efficient way of getting text into the posting but whatever let’s go for it.

One of the things I’ve been looking to do is create ESRI shape files of elevation built from freely available datasets without any restrictions against commercial use. Not the easiest proposition as understandably, the open source community is keen to protect the exploitation of their data by commercial organisations.

In the investigations that followed last night, I’m indebted to two fellow bloggers whose  pages have provided hugely useful links to free and open source datasets and to the tools required to manipulate them.

Terrainmap and Robin Wilson’s blog, particularly the free GIS dataset page.

Although I had been peripherally aware of NaturalEarth data, this little surfing session really cemented the utility of using this vector-based data as a replacement for commercially licensed data from folks like ESRI or CollinsBartholomew.

The gold standard of digital elevation models data is that hosted by CGIAR but this has restriction against commercial use. It is based on NASA data from the space shuttle remote sensing mission in 2003 with postprocessing but for the purposes that I need, namely rough calculations of the limits of malaria transmission in order to create some customised shape files, the original NASA data will likely suffice or it may in fact be possible to do what I need with less specific data. I’ll probably end up using the Earth Explorer interface to select and download the required data.

I also looked at the USGS GTOPO30 data but think it might lack a little resolution for what I need.

A derivation/enhancement of the STRM data is provided by the DeMontford University ACE2 project.

Software for manipulating the data:

(shamelessly “borrowed” from terrainmap)

Free Software

Some good free applications that every terrain modeler should have in their toolkit:

Google Earth The former heavyweight champion of GIS applications. Makes all the rest virtually obsolete. (can’t really use this in a commercial environment without a PRO licence)
World Wind The former heavyweight champion of GIS applications.  (does exactly what it says on the tin – looks like I might be using this)
3DEM The (former) best application for producing overlays. Great 3D renderings.
MicroDem The best application for merging DEMs. Reads a fairly wide variety of formats. OK for 3D rendering and overlays.
Terragen The best application for photo realistic terrain renderings. Reads only its own .ter format. (Several converters offered on this site).

Also worth considering is DEM2topo which I found on Leszek Pawlowicz’s Free Geography Tools Blog.

Filed under: GIS ]]> http://drbazuk.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/gis-digital-elevation-models-and-free-data/feed/ 3 drbazuk http://drbazuk.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/professors-encode-with-e-coli-news-the-harvard-crimson/ http://drbazuk.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/professors-encode-with-e-coli-news-the-harvard-crimson/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:02:25 +0000 DrBazUK http://drbazuk.wordpress.com/?p=192 Continue reading →]]> Professors Encode with E. Coli News The Harvard Crimson.

Well, now I’ve heard it all – colour coded bacteria as the ultimate encryption. Just don’t eat the message to stop it from being uncovered – there’s a pretty good chance that either:

1. it won’t agree with you and you’ll get sick or;

2. It’ll colonise your gut and you’ll never be rid of the secret message…

This is one of those examples from an NGO I have a lot of time for:
Oxfam Food Prices

I’m working on developing my GIS skills and will post more on this subject in the coming days/weeks as I get to grips with some of the Open Source software that is out there.

8Gb is much more useful than 2Gb…

The little machine in the playroom now has twice the memory of my desktop and is a good deal quieter… perhaps there is a lesson in this for me… hmmm <note to self – do not get tempted by the new Mac mini…>

Those Thunderbolt ports and the ability to link it to a NAS/SAN box means that you don’t need masses of onboard storage… I really have become an Apple Fan – woe is me for I am undone…

to this:

Thanks to this:

Thankfully I bought it before the jump in price…

I’d figured that something like this was in the offing following reports last week that CSC were not going to have their contract reviewed until after the NAO published the report. After all, the NAO has been saying things like this for some time. I don’t suppose I should be too surprised having read Prof Greenhalgh’s 234 page review from May last year which also suggested that SCRs and HealthSpace weren’t going to be the ringing success that was promised…

And the media outlets have taken little time in jumping on this.

BBC - the schedule is slipping, GP practices are pulling out yet the costs remain broadly the same -

Remind me how does that work again? Who on earth negotiated the contracts that allowed such profligate spending to go unchecked with no comeback on the providers for such significant failures or was the scope of the work so far removed from the reality that those that bid for the contracts underpriced their work…

BMJ – most of the article is hidden behind a paywall – surely an opportunity to stick in the knife would be better seen by all?

Daily Mail - the claws are out again ‘has cost billions without delivering ANY benefits’
Richard Bacon Conservative MP who has followed the program since it was launched said: ‘It is perfectly clear that throwing more money at the problem will not work. ’This turkey will never fly and it is time the Department of Health faced reality and channelled the remaining funds into something useful that will actually benefit patients. The largest civilian I.T. project in the world has failed.’

No benefits at all? – Really Mr Bacon, I suppose NHS net and the N3 network pale into insignificance but the infrastructure investments had to be made… the issue is what to do about the EHR mess we are faced with.

Well perhaps going forward we should be looking at open source solutions that can be tailored by individual hospitals but retain a universal user interface/look and feel like CURIO – That would be ONE HUGE improvement given that junior medical staff change posts every 6 months and have to get used to yet another system from the cowboy that offloaded the last shiny bauble onto the IT commissioners who never ask the opinion of the medical professionals who have to use the systems…

Reuters singles out BT and CSC for particular ire and poor outcomes…

And the medical bloggers:

eHealth Insider does a nice summary timeline of the troubled program too – but the issues with Lorenzo seem to have been a major issue for the delivery – no doubt iSoft financial troubles and being bought out by CSC can’t have made it any easier…

Northern Doc is his usual intemperate and coruscating self goes on to comment that these failures of delivery are not news to frontline staff and that the rollout really didn’t/doesn’t engage with the people best able to spot the pitfalls: “This is apparently the third report by the National Audit Office and what it says is a reflection of what we troops on the ground see and deal with daily. We however knew that. Thank you Auntie for just realizing that.”

OnMedica focuses on the failure to deliver the Summary Care Records:

“The goal that all patients should have an electronic care record will not be achieved, the National Audit Office reported today. It said the rate at which electronic records are being generated “is falling far below expectations”.”

Pulse remains measured:

“The report from the National Audit Office report – published today – is highly critical of the the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) begun by the previous Government and finds that it is running five years late, at a cost of £11.4bn and with no end in sight.”

<rant>

So exactly why do we continue to remove the development from the end users – are we destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again? I for one hope that the NAO report forces the companies that have been contracted to provide equipment and software to wake up. Perhaps they will for once realise that by failing to engage with the end-users, the systems that they develop will not meet the needs of the end-users and therefore the systems’ usefulness will suffer.

</rant>

Xobni, yes, it’s Inbox backwards and that pretty much sums up the approach to sorting out the morass of email that we all have to deal with these days. So far, I have it installed on my WORK machine only.

As might be apparent from previous posts, I’m all about making it easier to find stuff in a hurry.

1. Windows 7 desktop search is pretty good,
2. Outlook is OK at finding things if you give it permissions to crawl through everything but…
3. Xobni actually makes a huge difference to finding those rogue emails (assuming you haven’t deleted them) :)

I’ve been using the Xobni Outlook client for a while now and recently added (today) the BlackBerry mobile app for managing and finding stuff whilst out and about.

I hadn’t appreciated quite how dependent on my Outlook archive I had become until I lost a huge amount of data recently, the only backup of which was eaten by a rogue security installation which has ensured that I now have EVERYTHING of value synced to the cloud through Evernote.

Incidentally, Xobni does a nice plugin which fires stuff to Evernote and tags your contacts which is kind of useful if you move about a bit…

I’ve also been mucking about with the BETA for Xobni in Gmail and have signed up to the alpha program in iOS when they get around to publishing it…

I’ll let you know how I get on but as of today, I no longer have >1500 emails in my Gmail inbox thanks to yet another freemium product: Activeinbox which provides a GTD plugin for Gmail. Thus far I haven’t had too much to do with it to know if it’s worth upgrading (personally) but it’s nice to be able to have a ZERO inbox in more than one location. Now to sort out my personal inbox at home and maybe harmonise everything so that I can manage personal stuff on the iPhone – more on this in a future blog post…

For the moment, however, I’ll sign off with every intention of getting some kip…

Inkscape. Draw Freely found this whilst looking for a free, open-source editor of Adobe Illustrator and SVG formats – this is AMAZING.

Ended up making some buttons for the SharePoint views at work – will wait for feedback from my team before going nuts – the nice thing is being able to work in vector then output PNGs.

Ace product and FREE!