Alex Kovac

The state of play, a week into Elon's assault on USAID. USAID is in a state of suspended animation - it has been powered down, but it's not *quite* to the point where it can't be powered back on. What happens next comes down to the courts & Congress. 🧵

🚀 We are thrilled to announce the release of the Icechunk storage engine, a new open-source library and specification for the storage of multidimensional array (a.k.a. tensor) data in cloud object storage. Read our blog post about Icechunk here: earthmover.io/blog/icechunk

I'm so excited to finally introduce Fields of The World (FTW!) - the largest & most diverse ML dataset for field instance segmentation in satellite images. FTW has >70k samples from 24 countries (4 continents), with semantic & instance labels + Sentinel-2 RGB-NIR from 2 dates. 🧵

@drvolts The trendy undergrad poli sci take in the 2010s was something like nber.org/papers/w19027

Who is writing a book on why Democrats in one of the bluest states in the nation suck so badly?

@mouthofmorrison VIIRS lunar BRDF correction ain’t got nothing on me

There are only three real advantages that visual spectrum electro-optical has over SAR: 1. Land use classification and associated metrics (eg crop yield forecasting) 2. Base mapping 3. Being able to moon the camera and actually see it

@NWSFairbanks @capitalweather No sense in heating a deadhorse, amirite?

A record setting day in Alaska. An All-Time record high was shattered in Deadhorse. Barter Island, which is in the Arctic Ocean, set a record for their warmest temperature ever in August. And a surprisingly warm low temp in Delta Junction (if it stands). 🔥☀️🥵 #akwx #hotweather

@kepano Some fascinating research on “subtraction neglect” bias: People systematically overlook subtractive changes: doi.org/10.1038/s41586… (paywall) People overlook subtractive changes differently depending on age, culture, and task: doi.org/10.1038/s41598… (open access)

What can we remove? Our bias is to always add more. More rules, more procedures, more code, more features, more stuff. Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly. When a piece of trash drifts across the beach, it is our duty to pick it up so the next person can enjoy a pristine shoreline. When a thousand pieces litter the beach, it is too late. We can only lament the landscape. That’s just how beaches are now. A good system is designed to be periodically cleared of cruft. It has a built-in counterbalance. Without this pressure, our bias drives us to add band-aid after band-aid, until the only choice is to destroy the whole system and start from scratch. Why is it so much easier to add than to remove? Maybe because we attach our identity to what is visible. But there is a difference between the ornamentation that defines our style and the vestigial burdens we carry. Remember those who did the invisible work of removing. Their legacy was not to build a sand castle, but to care for the beautiful beach on which we play.

@rsimmon This sounds like a good start! Thinking through export formats for carto applications: gdaldem color-relief, rio-tiler, mapbox-gl, SLD, what others?

@koovac Nice list! Something like HCL Wizard with some additional export formats, and the option to go linearly through an HCL color space, rather than spiral around the outside (to go from yellow to blue without green, for example).

I love discovering new color tools. This is a screenshot of huetone by @ardovalexey huetone.ardov.me It generates palettes using the OKLCH color space, which addresses some issues with CIEL*C*h. bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/

@rsimmon I’ve been thinking of taking on something like this as a weekend project, a sort of ramp interchange utility - what do you have in mind? Sharing a list of tools and resources on my radar in case you find anything new: precious-justice-9eb.notion.site/Color-resource…

Anyone want to collaborate to build a tool to generate continuous palettes for #dataviz and #cartography?

@protomaps @sotmus @openstreetmap I am a fan of this hillshade addition!

At @sotmus today? here's the repo and slides for the "Protomaps from the Ground Up" workshop at 11AM. github.com/bdon/protomaps… We'll build a Great Outdoors interactive map from @openstreetmap trails and terrain data, hosted on your own GitHub Pages

if your company asks privately about why a "critical" feature is missing in an open source project, and isn't willing to pay to have it implemented, it is not, in fact, "critical"

GDAL 3.9 was released today with a bunch of updates for @GeoParquet, including support for spatial filtering in the upcoming GeoParquet 1.1 version! Credit to @EvenRouault and other GDAL contributors 🙇‍♂️! #vector-drivers" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blo…

@mouthofmorrison @rosszb Yeah team quarce all the way

@rosszb Oh I see, it’s actually true of all 2D data. That’s good…that’s really good.

50cm resolution satellite imagery is ______ the resolution of 1m imagery

I appreciate the nod to "File over app" from @mbostock and the @observablehq team in the latest announcement. It's so cool that a Markdown file with code blocks can be the source for complex data visualizations and dashboards. This means the files are interoperable with @obsdmd. Here I am running an Observable site from Obsidian

We need #machinelearning for satellite data ("SatML") to address planetary-scale challenges 🌍 but mainstream ML is ill-suited to SatML data & contexts. It's time we recognize satellite data as a distinct modality for ML research to unlock its potential 🦾arxiv.org/abs/2402.01444

someone should create a collection of implementation examples and success stories for companies who have migrated off paid service APIs to open-source, self-hosted solutions (or open-source solutions on a cloud-hosted platform) everyone is learning the same patterns in silos

open sourced a small cost calculator: estimate the monthly bill of running @protomaps on AWS or Cloudflare based on usage, compared to Google Maps and hosted base map APIs. Now part of the Documentation site! docs.protomaps.com/deploy/cost

A comprehensive list of 9,043 #NASA Earth science data products available in TSV and JSON formats. Integration into #leafmap for interactive search and visualization is coming soon 🗺️🌎 ➡️ github.com/opengeos/NASA-… @NASAEarthData #opendata #geospatial #earthobservation

Check out my new post with details of a new #GEE workshop for #DynamicWorld and the result of a mapathon event at Nairobi in collaboration with @RCMRD_ , @EarthOutreach and @WorldResources spatialthoughts.com/2023/11/22/dw-…

We’re excited to publish our data on @source_coop, a utility dedicated to making it easier to share and access data using open standards. Thanks to @OurRadiantEarth for this 🙏 🌐 Use to measure land, carbon, and biodiversity impacts from agriculture: beta.source.coop/repositories/v…