General

Working with radiocarbon dating in R has long been possible, especially since the Intcal dataset itself contains R code in the supplement. Other tools like Bacon (Blauuw and Christen 2011), the slightly simpler Clam (Blaauw 2010), and BChron (Haslett and Parnell 2008) have helped users calibrate radiocarbon dates and produce reproducible age models.

Matt Hall from Agile Geoscience recently wrote a post on the problem of finding the shortest possible pangram (sentence containing all letters in the alphabet) using only mineral names. The post goes into the details on the set cover problem, of which assembling a pangram from a list of minerals is one example.

The problem of matching GPS points collected from a phone or dedicated GPS device to actual defined roadways is becoming more prevalent as insurance companies move to sensor-based platforms for risk management.