The OpenStreetMap UK community has come together for a 3-month "quarterly project" to find all the solar panels in the UK. And the results so far... wow!

-> We've just reached over 100,000 standalone solar PV installations mapped in the UK!

-> Plus we also have almost 600 solar farms mapped, representing almost 5 gigawatts!

To give you an idea of completeness: the UK government believes there are about 1 million solar panels in the UK, and official solar farm listings have about 8 GW. What we've mapped so far is way more than I thought we'd manage, so I really deeply want to thank every person who contributed, large or small. We can use these data to pilot CO2-saving initiatives - and so can anyone else. Open data for the win!

Here are a couple of simple plots from me, to show where the items are in the UK. (The data I've used are from yesterday, which is why my plot says not-quite-100,000 items.) I've plotted two different types of item: (1) "standalone" solar panels (i.e. ones that are not inside solar farms); (2) solar farms. You'll notice the distributions are really different:

Some of the darkest blobs on the map are evidence of focussed effort. I know that Jerry (SK53) has been mapping around Nottingham, Cornwall and other areas, so may be the source of some of these blobs. We've shown that with some local effort, and a bit of scanning through imagery, a lot of this can be done.

You'll notice that many of the solar farms are in the southern part of the UK, at least according to our data. That's not unexpected!

For more detailed data breakdowns, you can peruse Gregory Williams' solar mapping analysis site.

We have more time to go until the end of the quarter... and we'll be able to use the data for sustainable energy projects whenever you contribute - so please do join in!

The 2019 International Biocaoustics Congress (IBAC) was its fiftieth year! And it was a very stimulating conference, held in Brighton and organised by David Reby and a lovely team of co-organisers. Shout out to Eilean Reby who designed a really neat visual identity for the conference, with T-shirt and bags designed for everyone - we had a choice of designs featuring bat, bird, insect, fox...

It was my third IBAC (after IBAC 2015 in Germany and IBAC 2017 in India) and I was very happy to chair a session on advanced computational methods, and to see some great work in there. In this post I'll make notes of other things I saw.

Our QMUL bird group presented their recent work. Lies Zandberg spoke about her great work with Rob Lachlan, as part of our project to understand sound similarity from a birds' point of view. Mahalia Frank presented her studies (her PhD with David Clayton) on the neuroanatomy that might explain what zebra finches can hear while still in the egg.

The most shocking bird news, for me, came from the superb lyrebird. Now, the superb lyrebird is a famously showy Australian songbird - the male does this bizarre-looking dance on top of a little mound he's built. The shocking revelation was in Anastasia Dalziell's talk about her studies on the lyrebird's mimicking song. She showed us evidence that the song incorporates sounds from other bird species' mobbing calls (i.e. what groups of birds do when there are predators about), and further, that this mimicry might have evolved to con the female lyre bird into staying around for some copulation when she may be on the verge of wandering away. It's one possible way that complex mimcry might arise through evolution (antagonistic co-evolution) ...and it's very odd behaviour.

Also making a splash was ... RoboFinch! A very eyecatching piece of work presented by members of Katharina Riebel's lab, as part of a project called "Seeing Voices". Ralph Simon presented about the technical development, and Judith Varkevisser on her vocal learning studies. The idea is to explore how the visual modality affects vocal learning. They tried various things: young birds housed with the tutor, or watching the tutor from the next chamber, or hearing him only; or showing videos of the tutor to the young birds; then a "hologram" (a Pepper's ghost) bird... Then they went as far as building lifesize animatronic zebra finches, with robotic heads/beaks and colours painted to match the exact colour profile of real birds. It seems the young birds really do like to get along with RoboFinch, much more than the other methods, or the traditional audio-only "tape" tutoring.

We all like a clever and informative data visualisation technique. A few years ago it was Michael Towsey's "false colour spectrograms" I was excited about - and we saw some use of those at IBAC 2019. A new visualisation was Julia Hyland Bruno's work (part of her PhD with Ofer Tchernikovsky) - surprisingly simple, she renders many different renditions of a zebra finch song as a colourful image in which each row is a colour-mapped time series for one rendition. With a bit of judicious alignment, the effect is to give an immediate visual impression of the repeatability and the structure in the song. A paper showing the technique is here.

I continue to be interested in rhythm and timing in animal and human sounds, and IBAC is a good place to catch some research on this.

• Michelle Spierings presented a very intriguing new method she has been developing with Tecumseh Fitch: a "palimpsest" scramble of words on-screen, while the sound of a repetitive kick drum plays. The question: does the kick drum help you to entrain and spot the words appearing on the beat? The answer: yes. There are some other neat things you can think of trying with this method.
• Isabelle Charrier showed acoustic recognition of northern elephant seal mates used pulse rate (and spectral shape, spectral centroid) were super stable carriers of individual ID. --- Intriguingly, Juliette Linossier (separately) presented her work on indivudal ID in the sound of northern elephant seal pups: the mothers can recognise their pups' sounds, but those pups' sounds are weird-sounding creamy grunts, and it's very hard for us listeners to guess how the individual identity might be represented in there.
• Florencia Noriega showed her quantitative method for comparing rhythm patterns in animal sound sequences. It's based on the well-known inter-onset intervals (IOIs) and she has applied it to frogs, parrots and zebra finches, showing that it makes an apparently discriminative compact representation.
• Nora Carlson showed the very interesting setup she has at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour - a group of free-flying birds in a large barn, 3D motion-tracked using a Vicon camera system. She's running a study on vocal communication networks - which is of interest to me given that I've analysed smaller vocal networks of birds before. In fact in the paper I just linked to, there's a reanalysis of some of the work Manfred Gahr presented later in the same session - they have some great work studying bird vocal communication via tiny little backpacks that birds carry around. From the same group, Susanne Hoffmann presented their study of duetting weaver birds in the wild - amazing that they're live-recording the audio as well as neural activity of pairs of birds out in the wild.

Good to catch up on large-scale and ecoacoustic monitoring too.

• Sarab Sethi and Becky Heath presented their work on large amounts of acoustic data gathered in Borneo. They used 3G-connected Raspberry-pi based devices. I think Sarab's method of using the off-the-shelf Google "AudioSet features" as an audio representation has many appealing qualities: unsupervised, reproducible, and clearly representing ecoacoustic data in at least a partly-semantically-disengangled fashion. There are some definite residual questions: someone pointed out that since AudioSet is based on human-oriented Youtube audio, it's unlikely to represent high frequency events usefully, and clearly doesn't represent ultransonics at all. It would be a good thing if, as a community, we created a large "EcoAudioSet" and a fixed feature representation derived from it.
• Plenty of projects using AudioMoth as their audio gathering tool. One nice example is Tomas Honaiser Rostirolla's project to document Brazilian ecoacoustics - they made 20274 manual annotations (3988 of which at species level) from 6048 recordings, and openly published I believe. Great.
• Wesley Webb got a lot of attention, not only for his prize-winning presentation of his study on bellbird song in New Zealand, but also for introducing "Koe", a web-based an open-source tool intended to speed up the manual process of labelling large amounts of bioacoustic audio data.
• Paul Roe gave us an overview of their "acoustic observatory" in Australia, and in particular the institutional and collaborative efforts needed to create and maintain such a large monitoring project. For example, the use of piggy-backing on other researchers' projects ("heading out in to the bush? could you check this recorder for us while you're there?")

As usual for IBAC, I learnt some amazing things about bioacoustics outside the realm of birds. Some great bat work represented, e.g. from Sonja Vernes' group (I remember IBAC 2015 when I think she might have been literally the only person talking about bats).

One little observation: both Julie Oswald and Jack Fearey had used a neural net called "ARTwarp" to cluster the vocalisations in their whale data, to try and understand their repertoires. I don't know this method, but it seems to be an unsupervised clustering method incorporating time-warping - might be of interest.

And even more, I continue to learn from the weird world out there beyond the vertebrate animals. Amazing little insects that nibble holes in leaves, for example, so that they can create little acoustic cavities to broadcast well. The most out-there bit of acoustic communication was as follows... a type of ants drilling holes in acacia tree thorns, which then create a whistling signal in the wind, to scare away cattle. Even better, the researchers are currently tested this hypothesis by drilling thousands of little holes in trees in Africa, to see if the reduced whistling affects the cattle behaviour. (This was presented by Kathrin Krausa on behalf of Felix Hager.)

Oh one more thing -- the vocal imitation competition had some fantastic results. As the final event of the entire conference, we listened to a deluge, a menagerie of inexplicable animal sounds that had been imitated by IBAC attendees themselves. This could become a fixture in the calendar...

It looks like the bigger consequences of the Brexit vote are about to hit. Everyone thought "no deal" was a laughable extreme back in 2016, and now our government seems to be sailing deliberately towards it.

Do we blame David Cameron, who naively called an ill-prepared vote? Theresa May who dogmatically stuck to extreme "red lines" in the negotiations, failed to get a majority in a General Election, failed to get the agreement voted through, and yet dogmatically refused to consider compromise positions, again and again? Or do we blame incompetent cartoon character Boris Johnson - whose main achievement as London Mayor was the foolish "garden bridge" plan that went nowhere after wasting tons of our money - now arrogantly pushing us to no-deal despite the danger for ordinary people, as well as the democratic deficit?

It's crucial to remember that none of these people is at the root of all this. The Conservative Party as a whole should carry the blame. (Or the credit, if no-deal is a success - sure, why not.) They are currently pushing a heck of a lot of effort into trying to blame the EU for any no-deal Brexit: pretending the EU is refusing to negotiate, when in fact the EU is refusing to reopen negotiations it's just spent two years on, or at least refusing to reopen them unless the UK government proposes a way forwards. The Conservative party have got us into this mess - not just the British public! There were many different routes the government could have taken from 2016 onwards, and this embarrassing mismanagement comes from the Conservative party, again and again. Their MPs and leaders, the government ministers, the membership. We can consider blaming Corbyn for not being an EU cheerleader, but frankly, his subdued triangulating is a minor footnote in this shambles of bad tactics.

I might be tempted to go deeper and say our First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) voting system is on the hook, since that's the reason that the Conservative Party (and Labour) sticks together in the shape it does, and why they feel the need to pander to extremists. But that might be a little too indirect.

We're already suffering the consequences of the Brexit vote. (Personally: I've lost multiple colleagues who have gone overseas, lost opportunities, etc. Collectively, we've lost a lot of influence, and we've wasted a heck of a lot of time we could have been spending fixing the climate crisis.) I'm particularly concerned about what will happen next. In particular, a perverse incentive of a crisis such as no-deal: it gives the sitting government a rare opportunity to ram through emergency legislation which might reshape the British settlement more radically than is normally achievable. The Conservative Party has already shown simple-minded cruelty in voluntarily imposing a cost-slashing "austerity" agenda on the UK for a decade - an agenda wihch may have led to over a hundred thousand excess deaths. They have demonstrated that they don't worry about whether poorer people suffer the side-effects of their big ideas. What more would they like to do?

We see some hints of changes that Brexit might enable: today the food industry claimed it's going to need exemption from the laws of fair competition in order to keep everybody fed. That argument wouldn't get anywhere near the table in ordinary times.

I'm opposed to Brexit but I certainly think naively "cancelling" it would be as harmful as going forward. The right way to proceed, clearly, is to take more time to find a true compromise outcome (which may well turn out to be a soft-ish Brexit, although no-one on any side wants to admit that). The rush now is for selfish reasons. We don't yet have a plan. - And, for our current government, perhaps it's more than just a necessary evil, perhaps not-having-a-plan is an opportunity they are looking forward to?

We've sampled LOTS of alcohol-free beer in the past year. Why? Well - you might not believe me about this - some of it's getting really good. And it's great to be able to have a lovely beer even if you don't want to be woozy afterwards.

So WE HAVE DONE THE RESEARCH and YOU can benefit from it! We've drunk beers good and bad from all over Europe. Here are six fabulous alcohol-free beers that are truly excellent and you should DRINK THEM!

1. Mariestads "Sommarlager" (Sweden, 0.5%): a delightful lager, perfectly balanced, fizzy yet with creaminess/butteriness. I'm amazed that a lager (rather than an IPA) is in here in the top spots but there you go. It's refreshing and beery and delightful.

2. van de Streek "Playground IPA" (Netherlands, 0.5%): This IPA is phenomenal, with the full complex and vibrant flavour you want from a modern IPA. I don't know how they did it. Out of all the low-alc IPAs, this one is the one that can compete with normal ones.

3. Värmdö "Ingarö Eko IPA" (Sweden, 0.5%): delightful unsweet, slightly sour almost kombucha-y, yet juicy and no bad notes. I liked this one for being a little bit different.

4. Big Drop "Pale Ale" (UK, 0.5%): Another IPA that passes the test. I've no notes on this one, and only a fuzzy paparazzi photo (must have been a good night huh?) so you'll just have to try it.

5. Mikeller "Drink'in the sun" (Denmark/Belgium, 0.3%): A good IPA (allegedly a wheat pale) with summery juicy grapefruit.

Others which are ALSO recommended:

• Mariestads "Alkoholfri" (Sweden, 0.5%): good reliable beer.
• Sigtuna "NAPA" (Sweden, 0.5%): good IPA with a hint of Nanny State.
• Adnams "Ghost Ship" alcohol-free IPA (UK, 0.5%): pretty convincing! A little bit drying imho.
• Brewdog "Nanny State" (UK, 0.5%): Brewdog's well-known low-alc, with a very nice complex flavour, a malty pale ale.
• Sainsburys "Low alcohol Czech lager" (Czechia, 0.5%): Surprisingly not bad for a supermarket lager. Pilsner-style.

Plus there are plenty I don't recommend, of course :) but I won't bore you with them. Some more of my tasting notes are in this twitter thread.

While writing this, I found a nice list of top 70 low-alcohol beers from "Steady Drinker". However... it looks like he hasn't been to Sweden! He hasn't reviewed Mariestads, Värmdö or Sigtuna, which is why he's missed some of my top ones. In Sweden they have quite hefty taxes on alcohol, which may be why it's become a great place for innovative low-alcohol beers.

Our holiday this year was great "grounded travel" - we went from the UK to Sweden, going all the way by train! We stopped in multiple cities on the way, in Germany and Denmark as well as Sweden.

I want to tell you how we did it. But before all that there's one handy thing you need to know:

• Yes you can go by Interrail - it might be the cheapest way - and no you do not need to be a teenage student, any age can do it!

We met LOTS of people on our travels who said "Oh I thought that was just for under-25s". It's not. There are some extra-cheap offers for young people, but even without those it was the most economical way for us to do it.

I'm not going to tell you the details about Interrail passes, because I don't need to: the magnificent Seat 61 Interrail guide is all you need. We bought ourselves Interrail passes, and then added a couple of reservations: there are some services in particular Eurostar (Channel tunnel) where you'll need a reserved seat in addition to the pass. I used the UK phoneline for Deutsche Bahn to book my Eurostar and other reservations, and it was all really easy and friendly.

Taking the train in Europe is great. The trains are generally more modern, spacious and relaxing than UK trains, at least in the countries we've seen. You get to see some great countryside - fields, mountains, lakes, rivers, little town centres - from your seat. And of course there's none of the hassle of flying (getting to the airport; going through security; hanging round after security). We only had to show our passports at two points: the Eurostar, and at the Danish border when we got off a boat.

Oh yes, a boat: we didn't 100% exactly take the train all the way. There was one point in Denmark where we took a rail-replacement bus. And in order to get from Germany to Denmark we took the train that goes on a ferry, woo!

We met lots of lovely people on the way. We shared food with people, we got some excellent local tips for things to do. We even played Yahtzee with some strangers, and played a game of memory-game with a six-year old Swedish girl :)

How far did we get? Stockholm. It takes two days to get from London to Stockholm (stopover in Hamburg or Cologne) and seat61 has some tips for other ways to do it.

We then went into the Swedish countryside and stayed in a... converted train! In a beautiful setting by a lake.

We spent about £350 each on getting the Interrail pass that lets you travel on 10 different days (over a stretch of two months), plus about £60 extra on reservations (mainly the Eurostar). In the end we only travelled on seven of the days meaning we could have gone for a cheaper (£300) ticket, but we weren't sure which we'd need.

You can do it much cheaper if you don't want to visit other places on the way. We deliberately wanted to hop around.

Here's our route:

Some random tips for you:

• Use The Man In Seat Sixty-One to work out how to do your trip, wherever you want to go. You can also use the German train website bahn.de for searching all kinds of trains (NOT just German trains), to work out your timetable. You can also make reservations using the site, or as I said before, you can ring their helpful English phoneline.
• Brussels Midi station (Eurostar) is great for connections, and there are food shops there, but there's not much you can do for a short stopoff (e.g. 3 hours) - there are very few good eateries in the area, for example. Conversely, Paris is good for that sort of thing, and the Eurostar to Paris drops you in the heart of it.
• The Scandinavian trains were all on time. We were surprised that lots of the trains in Germany were delayed (I really expected them to be more efficient than that...). However the Deutsche Bahn website gives you live information about all of that, and even recommends journeys that take account of any delays live as they happen. It was very useful for us to be Interrailing because it meant we could switch on to a different train, going via a whole different German city, at no extra cost.
• Our Interrail pass was accepted on a long bus route in Sweden too (we didn't expect it to be), so it's always worth trying.
• Pack some snacks - sometimes you don't have time to buy food in the station, and sometimes there's no onboard catering.

And enjoy it! We did :)

I've been enjoying using Mopidy and ncmpcpp as my music player.

On Ubuntu though I encountered a persistent problem:

1. I had set Mopidy up to run as a service, which seemed like a good idea - it's not just some application I want to start from time-to-time, it's the main music player for my flat, so I want it to be there on tap.
2. I had set Mopidy up to connect to PulseAudio, which seemed like a good idea since then it should "play nicely" with other things on the computer, e.g. it should be able to play music even when there's a video playing from Firefox.

However, it kept failing to connect to PulseAudio. It seemed to be unable to make any sound play back, unless I manually killed pulse, after which it could start playing.

Yes I had followed all the instructions. I had changed Mopidy's config as well as PulseAudio's config. I tried everything, setting PulseAudio to be as permissive as possible (allowing remote connections etc).

The solution, as far as I can tell, for my standard Ubuntu 18.04 is: you should not do both of these things. This is because if you run as a service, you're running something that starts up as soon as the computer boots, and doesn't use your login userid. PulseAudio, however, does not run on startup, but is part of your login session. So it simply isn't there for Mopidy to connect to, until you log in. (I still don't know why that should mean it's unable to connect, even after logging in. I suspect it's because it's running under a different user id.)

So here's what I've got now: instead of running Mopidy as a service (using mopidyctl to control it), I'm running it as a "startup application", i.e. something that runs on my own user account as part of my graphical desktop login. On Ubuntu there's a program called "Startup Applications" that you use to add/remove things easily. The one small drawback with this approach is that the music player won't be running if the machine reboots and I haven't logged in yet. However, there's usually a logged-in session running.

You might think that "running as a service" and "outputting audio via PulseAudio" would be compatible, especially as they're both listed on the same piece of documentation on the Mopidy website. Perhaps there's an extra trick (e.g. some permissions) that my system needs. But this non-service setup works fine.

The OSM UK community is great, but it's hard to guarantee we can do the detective work to spot all 800,000 solar PV installations. There's a "long tail" of solar panels tucked away down side-streets. It's very much a needle in a haystack, and we would benefit from as many hints as possible.

(We're already working with (a) machine learning and (b) official data sources. They're good sources of hints too, but not the full picture.)

We could ask the general public for help with this. Almost everyone must pass a solar panel during their daily commute, their weekend stroll, or suchlike. But we can't expect the general public to use map editing tools, or in fact anything that requires technical commitment or expertise. Also nothing that requires login or user registration.

Can we make a tool that makes it so simple, that many thousands of people can send in just one or two sightings each?

We don't have the resources to make a fancy phone app. (And would people use it if we did?)

Option one: "drop a pin in a map" approach. Provide a simple webpage which lets people, with no login required, put a pin at a location where they think there's a solar panel. This is fairly easy to code (and could use the OSM Notes API, e.g. with a specific pre-agreed template for the Note text). However it's not ideal for people out-and-about with a smartphone, since it's all about the top-down birds-eye view.

Option two: people can take a photo of a solar panel they see, and post it to a service they already use. (Smartphones often record GPS location along with photos.) Posting to Twitter (with a particular hashtag) would be easy to set up and to scrape. However not everyone uses Twitter. Loads of people use WhatsApp. Can they report their solar spottings directly through a WhatsApp number? It would need someone to set up a number, fine - and then the coding required is to create a system that can slurp whatever photos were sent in, do a bit of sanity-checking and maybe some basic "bot" interactivity, and output a dataset of suggested-geolocations for panels. (These suggested-geolocations would not go into OSM directly, they're not appropriate for that. We can simply provide them as a dataset for mappers to refer to.)

Thanks to Max+Esther at 10:10 for suggesting the second idea. I approached them because 10:10 has previously been involved in something a little bit similar (a mobile app for spotting rooves that would be good places for new panels). They've clearly got the right idea for the kind of simple everyday interaction that's needed.

The H-index is one of my favourite publication statistics. It's really simple to define: a person's H-index is the biggest number H of publications which have been cited H times each. It's robust to outliers: if you've a million publications with no citations, or one publication with a million citations, this doesn't influence the outcome - it's the "core" of your H most cited publications that matter. This makes it quite a nice heuristic for the academic impact of a body of work. A common source of the H-index is Google Scholar, which automatically calculates it for each scholar who has an account, and influential academics with long publication records typically have a high H-index.

However, the H-index should not be used as a primary measure for evaluating academics, e.g. for recruitment or promotion.

Why?

The main reason is it's straightforward, in fact almost trivial, to manipulate your own H-index. You can make it artificially high.

Google Scholar doesn't exclude self-citations from its counting. It even counts self-citations in preprints, so the citations might not even be peer-reviewed. You could chuck a handful of hastily-written preprints into arXiv just before you apply for a job. (Should Google exclude self-citations? Yes, in my opinion: it's trivially easy given that they have groundtruth of which academic "owns" which paper. However, that wouldn't remove the vulnerability, because pairs of authors could go one level beyond and conspire to cross-cite each other etc.) Self-citations are often valid things to do, but they're also often used by academics to promote their own previous papers, so it's a grey area.

Google Scholar often automatically adds papers to a person's profile, using text matching to guess if the author matches. I've seen real examples in which an academic's profile included extremely highly-cited papers... that were not by them. In fact they were from completely different research topics! Google's text-matching isn't perfect, and like most text-matching it often has a problem with working out which names are actually the same author.

You can further manipulate your H-index, by choosing how to publish: you can divide research outputs into multiple smaller publications rather than single integrated papers.

Or you can do that after the fact, by tweaking your options in Google about whether two particular publications should be merged into one record or not. (Google has this option, since it often picks up two slightly-different versions of the same publication.)

Most of the vulnerabilities I've listed relate to Google's chosen way of implementing the H-score; however, at least some of them will apply however it is counted.

The H-index is a heuristic. It's OK to look at it as a quick superficial statistic, or even to use it as part of a general assessment making use of other stats and other evidence. But I'm increasingly seeing academic job adverts that say "please submit your Google Scholar H-index". This should not be done: it sends a public signal that this number is considered potentially decisive for recruitment (which it shouldn't be), creating a strong incentive to game the value. It also enforces a new monopoly position for a private company, demanding that academics create Google accounts in order to be eligible for a job. Academia is too important to have single points of failure centred on single companies (witness the recent debates around Elsevier!).

When trying to sift a large pile of applications, people like to have simple heuristics to help them make a start. That's understandable. It's naive to think that one's opinion isn't influenced by the first-pass heuristics - and so it's vital that you use heuristics that aren't so trivially gameable.