Geo Work Group

/

hi, starting thursday at 4 in the GIIF, we're trying to start up a weekly "geo work-group". it's still open as to what that means so come this thursday if you want to help decide. the basic idea is that we have a lot of people around here with diverse knowledge and skillsets so this will be a venue to share the knowledge and (to quote maggi) "develop a community of practice". potential happenings are: 1. people bring GIS/RS related projects they want some insight on and get help from appropriate people. 2. a large group project that will lead to a poster or paper. 3. short presentations or how-to's focused on the more technical aspects of software and what not. etc. so bring any ideas to the giif 4pm thursday. and to sweeten the deal, casey will give a demo on how to find the extents of a shapefile using a python script.

Imaging Environment: Maps, Models, and Metaphors

/

This is a free conference Nov. 8-10 down at Stanford, and the speakers / schedule sounds pretty cool. I probably can't make the Thursday talks, but is anyone interested in going down on the Friday? From the description:

The effects of globalization on the natural environment and its representations confront academic disciplines with the task of finding new approaches to charting the present and shaping the future. This conference will take on this challenge by reaching beyond disciplinary specificity to interrogate the very ways we figure the natural world, and the consequences of these figurations for our actions in the global environment.

Seeing Global Warming: The North Pole Thaws

/

Recent imagery from ESA satellites reveal a thawing of ice around the North Pole so dramatic that a ship could have theoretically sailed from the Norwegian islands of Svalbard directly to the Pole. From the ESA press release:

Observing data from Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument and the AMSR-E instrument aboard the EOS Aqua satellite, scientists were able to determine that around 5-10 percent of the Arctic’s perennial sea ice, which had survived the summer melt season, has been fragmented by late summer storms. The area between Spitzbergen, the North Pole and Severnaya Zemlya is confirmed by AMSR-E to have had much lower ice concentrations than witnessed during earlier years.

Via Slashdot

GISC: Towards Uncharted Ground: Accessing and Preserving Geospatial Data into the Future

/
"Towards Uncharted Ground Accessing and Preserving Geospatial Data into the Future" Date: Friday, September 29 Time: 9 am to 12 pm Location: 112 Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley campus Geographic information systems have become pervasive across academia, government, and industry. Much GIS data have long-term or permanent value, but little has been done to assure their longevity. Compared to traditional cartography, geographic data can encode more complex spatial information and are much more accessible. But data are also far more mutable and subject to loss. This meeting brings together a panel of experts for an informal discussion of the problem of managing the persistence of geographic information. * John Radke, UC Berkeley Geographic Information Science Center * Richard Marciano, San Diego Supercomputer Center * Dyung Le, National Archives and Records Administration * Steve Morris, North Carolina State University * Barry Napier, US Forest Service * Ray McDowell, State of California Spatial Information Library * John Wiezcorek, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology Presented by: National Archives and Records Administration, Pacific Region Geographic Information Science Center, University of California For more information go to: http://www.gisc.berkeley.edu Or contact david.piff@nara.gov (650) 238-3468 or ccary@berkeley.edu Free and open to the public.

Image & Meaning Workshop

/

One of my classmates told me about this cool workshop. From the site,

The Image and Meaning (IM) events began in the Envisioning Science Project in the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is now part of Harvard University's Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC). Our purpose is to help scientists, writers and visual communicators develop and share improved methods of communicating scientific concepts and technical information through images and visual representations. The goal is to enhance the level of discourse within the scientific community, among teachers and students and those who communicate with the public.

The next workshop is on February 1-2, at Apple HQ in Cupertino. I think I'd like to attend in some capacity, and thought maybe some of y'all might want to air some of your visualization issues too. Let's see if I can remember to register.

Flickr Finally Does Geotagging Right

/

I don't know how I missed it but Flickr finally added their own geotagging interface. It's built with Flash and based on Yahoo Maps (naturally), but it works pretty well. If you've already geotagged some of your photos, you can automatically add them to your map. Otherwise, you just drag them on, placing them wherever you took them. I think the coolest part is how it lumps together nearby photos at larger scales into larger and larger icons. Totally sweet. Check out everyone's photos, or, to really blow your mind, read up on some more of the details, including spatial updates to the Flickr API and tools for autogeotagging cell phone pics and automatically associating them with nearby events listed at Upcoming.org. Struggling . . . to comprehend . . . coolness!

GIS, Public Participation, and Marine Conservation

/

NYtimes has a very cool article about environmental groups working with California fishermen to establish "no-trawl zones." Apparently the group Oceana sued the National Marine Fisheries Service for not setting aside adequate habitat for some bottom-dwelling species, which resulted in a court-ordered release of specific geographic fishing data. From the article,

When it was accepted as the preferred alternative, the court granted the environmental groups access to proprietary information about the trawl tracks that fishermen follow. Fishing captains are required to record their exact locations using global positioning system monitors from the moment they lower their nets until they haul them back onboard. Often covering up to 20 miles in a 6-to-10-hour tow, those tracks provided a precise picture of fishing and a key to the solution the National Research Council had recommended. Scientists at the Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense overlaid the tracks on maps of underwater features like canyons and ridges, home to a wide variety of species vulnerable to nets.

Apparently environmental groups used this data along with data collected from interviews with the fishermen themselves, to create new conservation zones that would both preserve critical habitat without excluding fishermen from their livelihood. I think this is a neat story in a number of ways. The use of GIS for for conservation in the real world is exciting, as is the power of private organizations and private money in effecting large scale change in land management. Can anyone dig up any more papers on this? The NYTimes doesn't really cite its sources. Here's a related NPR story, and a Nature Conservancy press release. Oh, and a map!

no_trawl_map.jpg

NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet

/

Here's the article that Maggi emailed out to us this weekend: The following article was published in the New York Times yesterday - "NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet" by Andy Revkin This is a topic that should be important to all ESSN members, so a discussion thread has been initiated on the ESSN website (http://www.earthsystemscholars.org). Please login and share your thoughts and insights on this matter.

Mapping gas prices

/
gasprices.jpgSince I'm about to embark upon the most poorly-timed road trip in the history of automotive travel, I appreciate any opportunity to visualize my own masochism. That's why I was so happy to find GasBuddy's USA National Gas Temperature Map, which compiles GasBuddy.com's user-entered gas price data into a nationwide map of average gas prices by county. As you can see (and your wallet has been feeling) California is a festering red sore. My only consolation is that most of my meandering will occur in the lush green of the sub-three-dollar Southeast. The money I save shall be spent on smoked delicacies.

Bush-Interrpution?

/

marchcover.jpg In reply to Esther's posting a while back, there was an article published in the March Ed. of 'Geospatial Soultions' about the Bush Administration's budget reguest for 2007. Most of us could probably guess as to what the administration wants to spend it's/our money on, so, I guess the article isn't too insightful in that regard. Be that it may, it took me 10 min. or so to scan the article so I ask that somebody out there glance it over. Here's the PDF Spatial Programs Just for good humor, go ahead and post a comment as to what you think the Bush. Admin might spend it's money on next year. Go ahead and be creative... you know they always are.