Spatial Computing (Essential Knowledge) - Shashi Shekhar and Pamela Vold ***

A part of the increasingly interesting MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, the topic of this book may at first glance be puzzling - but it's about something many of us use every day - information technology that makes use of spatial information, such as the GPS sat nav system.

One oddity of this series is that it is very inconsistent in the level the books are pitched at. Some are way too technical for the general reader. This one, though, is a straightforward descriptive text with very limited technical detail. There's nothing here that is likely to baffle someone from outside the field and lots of information on where the various technologies have come from (including John Snow's famous map-based identification of the source of a Victorian London cholera outbreak), the basics of how they work and where they are likely to go from here.

If you actually have a need to know this stuff, it's an ideal primer. My only real concern about the book is that I'm not sure I did need to know - it felt a bit too much like doing homework. In their preface, the authors say 'How could a technology used by billions of people around the world not have an accessible guide to describe it to a broad audience?' I think, for me, the answer is 'Because it's not very interesting.' I love using this stuff, but I didn't find reading about it particularly inspiring.

That's not to say that the book won't be useful, whether you've been set an assignment on remote sensing, positioning systems or geographic information systems or you work in a field that makes use of such technology - but as a daily user of GPS, I've already got the basics and I really didn't need to detail.

For those with an interest in the field but limited knowledge, though, it's an excellent, pocket-sized introduction.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied), the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

Search This Blog