Vladimir Putin: a stolen speech

Vladimir Putin stole the text of speech from Argentine politician.

Interactive Round Table on Separate Waste Collection in St. Petersburg, Russia

The other day I took part in a very interesting event - an interactive round table on a separate waste collection in the city (En), that was organized by Musora.Bolshe.Net (Waste.No.More) NGO. There were representatives of the St. Petersburg city administration, waste treatment companies, hotel business, cleaning companies, NGOs, mass media and science (a humble me).

It was great that there were no presentations from the experts, etc. The main point was the direct and open discussions (of course it was moderated) about the existing issues and challenges in the field of separate waste collection and recycling and the ways to solve them.

The second part of event was a development of waste related projects in small groups. Every one took part in development 3 projects and the group members were different each time. Of course the plans itself are quite useless: what kind of plan can be developed in 15 minuets? But the shearing of knowledge and opinions with others and development of the common view at the issue helps to get new ideas. 

I was lucky to work in the same teams with representatives of the city committees. Unfortunately they are not open-minded enough and I think they do not fully understand the main economical and legislation obstacles that prevents separate waste collection or not motivated enough to overcome it. But seems that they are not hopeless.

It was very interesting to discover that many people are interested in (speaking professional language) GIS-portal dedicated to shearing information about locations of relatively small amount of recyclables, that will let waste producers and recyclers find each other for the common benefit. So if you were looking for ideas for a start-up or expanding of your GIS-business - here you are ;-) Seems that I should develop my web-GIS skills...

How to update BIOS for free if you don't have a CPU

In the situation when you need to update BIOS to let your new CPU work and you (and your friends) do not have another CPU that would be able to start the system, you have to pay for service to so called "experts". In my case prices varied from 20 to 50 Euro... for this 5-minuets work O_o. New CPUs have the same price...

Solution is quite simple actually. You just have to buy new suitable CPU ;-) I've purchased the cheapest model for 25 Euro, used it for a 5 minuets to update BIOS and then just returned it in the perfect condition to the warranty department of the shop where I've bought it. Now I have BIOS updated and my 25 Euro back. The only expenditures were for the public transportation - about 1 Euro.

Relation Between Fires and Distanse to the Nearest Road (Recalculated)

As you may already know, I'm a proud owner of AMD FX-8150 8-core CPU. And I've purchased it not for gaming reasons, but for science. My previous CPU was painfully slow with such calculations as determination of the relation between fires and distance to the nearest highway. I even didn't try to perform that calculations on the whole dataset of the roads mapped in OSM in Leningrad region. But now I can do this!

With the new CPU I've recalculated previous distribution (with the same data) in dependence only on highways and performed new calculation on the whole roads dataset. Some numbers first: 

• 6,990 - number of fire points detected by FIRMS for the last 10 years in Leningrad region;
• 10,966 - number of the highway features used as highways for calculations;
• 87,422 -number of features from whole dataset of roads;
• 2,3 Gb RAM and a single core were consumed by R during calculations for the whole dataset.

Results:

Recalculated fire distribution for the highways

Recalculated values for the highways are different to the acquired at the last time despite the data was the same. But there were hardware update and most important - software updates for R and its packages (OS was updated too). But this graph looks far more reasonable than the previous one.

Lets see what we've got for the whole roads dataset (I will compare it to the graph above).

Distribution calculated for the whole dataset of roads

The maximum distance from road decreased almost in to times: from 41 to 26 kilometres. The distance for the highest values decreased accordingly: a rapid decreasing stops at 7 kilometres and for only highways it was 18 kilometres.

So the first 5 kilometres from the road are the most probable zone fore the fire event. This distance is easily covered on foot in two hours. Another evidence of the massive anthropogenic impact on fire starting.

If I will ever lay hands on the road data from the topographic maps (here OSM data used) I will perform the calculation again to get the most precise data.

Conclusion: FX-8150 worth buying )))

Sverdlovskaya Region, Russia: a Field Survey in Autumn (Part 1)

While every normal environmental scientists perform their field surveys in Summer (unless there is a need to do this in a specific time of the year) I had to do mine when the weather was not that good. In a five days my colleague and I had to collect land monitoring archives of 3 districts of Sverdlovskaya region, soil samples for analysis for heavy metals concentrations and take pictures of the disturbed lands.

Hit the "read more" button to read the rest of the story...

AMD 8-core processor: finally I can use it!

Over a month ago a motherboard of my 4 years old desktop died right in the middle of the important work. I had to make a decision whether I should repair it or buy a new PC. At that moment I've already faced a lack of performance and knew that a simple upgrade will not help much. But I had no intentions to spend money for purchasing completely new PC. So I decided to buy new powerful CPU, a corresponding motherboard, and a lot of fast RAM.

Wuala vs Dropbox: a decision making

After sudden death of my computer I've understood the necessary of the backup storage for the most important files. Of course I would like to store hundreds of Gbs of my GIS projects, but no such option is available for free. 

Actually there were no problem at all with retrieving data that I need for the current project. I just went to the friend of mine with my hard drive, connected it to his desktop and copied about 40 Gbs of crucial data to my laptop. Seems Ok, but there are some files that I would like to have now, but I need another 3 hours for traveling to get it or buy some SATA adapters (and I don't want to by something just to use it once).

The sizes of these files are actually small: my scientific library, my articles, my writings maybe some shp-files. So common free of charge 2 Gb of space that is provided by several companies would suit me well. There are a lot of options nowadays but I limited it to a Dropbox and a Wuala. I need to pick up one... Let's see...

Dropbox do not offer RPM for openSUSE, Wuala do. Dropbox requires Nautilus to be installed (when I prefer Dolphin and KDE), and Wuala don't. Conclusion: Dropbox sucks, Wuala.