A collaborative community for planetary sciences.

At the 2009 DPS Meeting, I held a workshop on Open Access to the Planetary Sciences Literature. There weren't many people there (completely my fault for not doing more advertising for the workshop), but we did talk about the issues of Open Access in Planetary Sciences, particularly in relation to articles in Icarus, the DPS-endorsed journal.

John Spencer, via a recent Division for Planetary Sciences newsletter (which you should all be members of, and should have gotten), provides the following simple guidelines for how to design graphics for your next talk:

• Don't use a complex image as a slide background—it's distracting and reduces legibility.
• Don't show bright green (or worse, yellow) lines on a white background. They may be much more visible on your computer monitor than when projected.
• Similarly, don't show pure blue lines on a black background
• Beware 1-pixel wide lines and fonts
• Be sure plot axis labels are large and clear enough, particularly if they are from a published figure. Consider overwriting axis labels with new ones in a larger font if necessary.

This article about creating Scientific posters is quite good. I don't agree with everything, but it contains lots of good advice and is remarkably thorough. Although not mentioned in the article, Scribus is a very good open source desktop publishing solution that I use to make posters.

The JPEG2000 image file format is pretty darn cool, however, there are a dearth of good bits of Open Source software for dealing with them. The HiRISE team distributes the IAS Viewer to allow you to browse the HiRISE JP2 files on their JPIP server, or you can also use it to view JP2 files that you have downloaded. A colleague of mine let me know about the JHelioviewer software that is an Open source JPEG2000 viewer capable of loading local JP2s and reading from JPIP servers. It is developed by the solar physics community (they have big pictures of the Sun), and many of its user aide features are geared towards the solar physics community (and their need for time-domain movie-like data). However, it works just fine for HiRISE images, and provides an Open Source alternative to the IAS Viewer.

The Web page for Detexify² really says it all, but it is essentially a handwriting classifier that turns your mouse-drawn scribble into the appropriate LaTeX symbol code. I appreciate that this is for LaTeX-nerds only, but wow, is it ever awesome.

At LPSC, I was introduced to planetaryGIS.org. This site seems to have the sames goals as Orrery.us, but for the more narrow planetary GIS community. Although the ISIS Support Center's Planetary GIS Discussions section actually does a rather robust job of this already, and certainly sees more traffic. It seems like a secondary goal of planetaryGIS.org is to facilitate the landing site selection process for ESA's ExoMars, so perhaps once that process starts ramping up, this resource will only get better.

Lots of blogs (here and here) and news outlets have covered some of the great new Mars features in Google Earth. I will assume that you have read those blogs, watched various demonstration videos, or even watched some of the Guided Tours available in the Google Earth client itself. I will most certainly assume that you have at least taken a cursory spin around the Mars in Google Earth (we refer to it as Google Mars internally—at Ames and Google—but since that has meant the 2D Google Maps API Mars maps for so long, I don't want to confuse people).

For the discerning visitor I present a number of little perks that you might not notice. Mars in Google Earth is primarily targeted at a general public audience, but we've also slipped in some pretty cool extras (if I do say so myself) for scientists and advanced explorers alike.

If you can see past the buzzword doublespeak in the title, Google is trying to implement a true peer-review system that functions without a central reviewing authority. The idea is that you publish your work first, and get the reviews later. Your work's importance will then be gauged by how the reviews of your work come out as a function of time. For now this idea would complement journals, but it could eventually render them obsolete. At the least, it could make editing new online journals really easy!

HiRISE images are huge, frequently 1.5 GB, and they are in JPEG 2000 format, which many image software programs don't (yet) handle. So what do you do if you need to work with just a small area of that image at high resolution? This post explains how to get that subframe.

Harvard's science faculty have voted to require that all papers published by faculty in the college be available to the public free-of-charge. As I understand it they are not required to publish in open access journals, but are required to be able publish in journals that allow Harvard to place a version on its website for free. Can Harvardians no longer publish in Elsevier journals like Icarus?