JP2 on Ice

I was listening to a BBC technology podcast on the flight down to Atlanta for the OGC TC meeting, and there was a piece about tracking icebergs in the Antarctic. I was half-asleep as they said something about needing to compress data since they have poor bandwidth down there, when suddenly I was wide-awake as they said they were using JPEG 2000 -- and with geospatial extensions!

Subsequent investigation showed they're not using GMLJP2, but still...

Text version of story here.

Nonstandard economic meta-indicators

From a piece by David Leonhardt in the NYT:

Nonetheless, a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable. Benjamin M. Friedman, author of “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the firm’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that firms were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders.

“I have the sense that in many of these firms,” Mr. Friedman said, “the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity.”

(Emphasis mine.)

"Bluffer's Guide" published

The September issue of GeoWorld magazine contains another piece by me and my favorite coauthor. I've not yet seen the actual copy, so I'm not sure what they finally titled it, but our internal working title was "A Bluffer's Guide to Image Compression".

Will provide link if/when available.