Geospatial Community May Newsletter
Please consider signing this e-petition to increase PhD stipends to minimum wage. Petition reason from the online petition is copied below.
Petition Reason
PhD students contribute enormously to Australia’s research every year, with their time accounting for 56% the total research output. They are the future professors and industry professionals of this country, responsible for driving innovation and ensuring strong international collaborations and competition. Their contribution is often rewarded with a stipend intended to cover the cost of living, with a minimum rate set by the Australian government. Currently, this scholarship rate is $29,863 per year for PhD students to live on while usually working more than 40 hrs per week on their research. Not only is this below minimum wage, but it is even forcing students to live below the poverty line. With this treatment, students are incentivised to accept positions abroad, reject higher degrees by research, or quit midway through their degree due to financial distress. Australia is actively discouraging higher education and slowing its economic growth and productivity by underpaying PhD students. We believe the government should support higher education and ensure a competitive standing for Australia. The way to do this is by setting a fair, liveable rate for PhD scholarships, which is at least equivalent to the minimum wage.
Next workshop – Interactive Map with Python + Folium
Thursday May 18th, 3-5pm
Dr Tony Howes (UQ, School of Chemical Engineering) will be sharing how Python and Folium (a wrapper for Python of the JavaScript Leaflet library) work together to create an interactive map. The data will be from the Brisbane Dawn Nav, May 5th MapRun. Workshop materials will be in a Jupyter notebook and downloading Anaconda is recommended if you wish to follow along.
Previous workshop
In April, Dr Jacinta Holloway-Brown presented a very informative and interesting workshop that outlined her use of Stochastic spatial random forest SS-RF methods for filling missing data in satellite images due to clouds, and also went over using raster2data for working with spatial image files (such as rasters), and converting these to dataframes in R in order to perform statistical analyses. Expect the blog post and recording associated with this workshop to be available shortly.
Geospatial Community Updates
First Thursday help sessions
If you have a geospatial problem (or are good at answering them), we will be trialling help sessions on the first Thursday of each month. We will do our best to have people from a variety of backgrounds answer questions and will circulate a Teams link over email.
Website changes
You will have noticed some major changes to the website, which now includes an easy way to join the group, and a calendar so everyone can quickly see when the next workshop will be. A massive thanks to Nick Wiggins for all the work in getting this together.
Geospatial Jobs
GIS Consultant, WSP Australia, Brisbane GIS Consultant, Arcadis, Brisbane Spatial Officers, PowerLink Queensland, Brisbane Spatial Data Officer, Unitywater, Moreton Bay GIS | Data and Analytics, EY, Brisbane city / flexible Biodiversity Modeller / Spatial Ecologist, CSIRO, Canberra
Training
UQ Library Training
UQ R User Group (UQRUG) - Wednesday 31st May 2023, 12-2pm QGIS: Introduction to Mapping - Friday 19th May 2023, 9:30 am - 11:30 am QGIS: Custom Maps on your phone - Friday 26th May 2023, 9:30 am - 11:30 am QGIS: Vector Analysis - Friday 2nd June 2023, 9:30 am - 11:30 am
Experimental Design and Data Analysis for Testing Casual Hypotheses in R
Find more details and registration here. Date: July 2nd 2023 Time: 9:00-16:00 Location: Griffith University Gold Coast Campus, Building/Room G14_1.13B Cost: $30. Note: This isn’t a spatial workshop, but if you’re interested in statistical analysis and R programming, this will be a good one. Spots are limited so please only register if you are sure you can make it.