Berkeley/Penn Urban and Environmental Modeler’s Datakit

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Looking for GIS data for the U.S.? The Berkeley/Penn Urban and Environmental Modeler's Datakit has just been released. The site contains more than 150 downloadable ArcMap-ready shapefiles and raster datasets for the 48 contiguous United States.

The data were produced at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD) at the University of California, Berkeley and the Penn Institute of Urban Research (Penn IUR) at the University of Pennsylvania, in cooperation with Penn's Cartographic Modeling Lab (CML).

The data is free, and all interested urban and environmental planners, analysts, modelers and enthusiasts are encouraged to utilize the site to further narrow traditional disciplinary gaps between urban and environmental planning researchers/practitioners. It claims to be the first site to bring together spatially comprehensive and comparable urban and environmental GIS data.

Users who uncover problems (other than the fact that "Modeler" is mis-spelled on the title banner) or might wish to add their own national data to the website should e-mail John Landis at jlan@design.upenn.edu.

 

New ESRI office in Sacto…

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ESRI is pleased to offer a variety of instructor-led training courses to explain GIS concepts, explore GIS Applications, and teach you to use ESRI software to meet your specific needs. Below is a list of upcoming courses in Sacramento, California.  For more information or to register for a class, please click on the class name or visit www.esri.com/training . For other training questions, please contact your Training Coordinator at kmanorek@esri.com .

Sacramento, California Classes

 

March 10 – 11 – Data Management in the Multiuser Geodatabase

This course prepares GIS and database administrators to implement an ArcSDE geodatabase by teaching how to load and manage ArcSDE data. The course presents concepts applicable to both workgroup and enterprise ArcSDE geodatabases but focuses primarily on the enterprise ArcSDE geodatabase. Students learn the basic architecture of a multiuser geodatabase and are introduced to ArcSDE connection types. The course focuses on loading and managing vector and raster data and emphasizes best practices for interacting with a multiuser geodatabase. Students explore multiuser geodatabase design strategies and editing options for data stored in a multiuser geodatabase, including versioning. This course is designed for GIS and database administrators who want to implement a workgroup or enterprise ArcSDE geodatabase.

 

March 12 – 14 – ArcGIS Server Enterprise Configuration and Tuning for SQL Server

This course prepares Microsoft® SQL Server® database administrators to implement an enterprise geodatabase by teaching how to set up an individual ArcSDE server. Students get familiar with the ArcSDE architecture and learn how to configure SQL Server to support ArcSDE, install and configure ArcSDE, and identify and troubleshoot connection types and issues. The course emphasizes the importance of managing storage settings for loading vector and raster data and teaches techniques for maintaining geodatabase performance in an editing environment. Additionally, the course explains how ArcSDE interacts with SQL Server databases and presents solid strategies for maintaining and managing an enterprise geodatabase. This course is designed for experienced SQL Server database administrators who need to understand how to install and configure an enterprise geodatabase.

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)

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In addition to the volunteer computing, distributed thinking, and coordinated activities that David Anderson discussed at the Feb. 8th Geolunch, Volunteered Geographic Information is a growing form of "Citizen Cyber-Science." OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia are the most well-known examples of VGI, an emerging process in which citizens voluntarily create and combine spatial data for maps and mash-ups. I went to a talk last week by Rutgers Professor David Tulloch. He gave an overview of an interesting VGI site that was developed to let citizens help map vernal pools in New Jersey. Examples of other VGI projects and presentations on the ethics, reliability, and potential of VGI can be found on the Workshop on VGI site which includes info collected from an event held at UCSB last December. Also of interest is a site that provides the information presented at a Workshop on Agent-Based Modeling of Complex Spatial Systems. The talk was hosted by the Cal's Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, which will be hosting upcoming events on topics such as the SF green spaces, National Parks, and EU ecological policies .

Are you connected to mountaintop mining?

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Living in California, the issue of mountaintop mining seems pretty far away, but entering your zip code into this website: http://www.ilovemountains.org/myconnection/ makes the connection pretty clear. I really love the simplicity of this site -- the locations of mines and mining facilities, and clear lines drawn to show how we in Berkeley are connected to mining activities in Virginia. I also love that they give you a very clear action to take using the question "Wanna break your connection?" This same basic approach could be used for so many issues. It's almost like by drawing lines between places that seem removed from each other, they seem closer together.

Some of David Anderson’s Citizen Cyber-Science websites

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Dave's talk last week for Geolunch was AWESOME. Here are some of the sites he mentioned. Get started with your distributed computing and thinking people! SETI@Home Climateprediction.net Stardust@Home Distributed Proofreaders Rosetta@Home Just to summarize, they have 500k active participants and 700k computers making up about 2 PetaFLOPS of juice.

Star Wars

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The US is set to shoot down a broken spy satellite. This all follows last year's action by China, which fired a missile at one of its old weather satellite. The destruction of the Chinese satellite produced about 28% of the debris that is now in orbit, which poses a major threat to functioning satellites. In contrast the US plans to destroy their satellite as it reenters the atmosphere, allowing the fragments to burn up on their descent. Satellites leaving orbit and entering the earth's atmosphere is not uncommon, but military officials say that this case is being given special consideration due to hazardous materials on board.

Maps for the Blind

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Great story on KQED QUEST the other day: tactile street maps for the blind. This is about TMAP, a project that essentially aims to make a street map GIS for the blind, including web-based delivery of images that can be printed on an embossing printer, and phone-based request for mailed maps. You can learn a lot about the technical details in this Google Tech Talk given by Dr. Josh Miele (a Cal alum).

Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0

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John Deck was way ahead of Google when he created Berkeley Mapper. His service includes a feature that allows users to input point data into a Google Documents spreadsheet. The data is then added to a database and displayed in Google Maps. Well, Google has just released its second version of its spreadsheet mapper. Similar to Berkeley Mapper, users simply enter their data into a spreadsheet and the appropriate KML and Google Map are generated. There are still many differences between the two tools and Berkeley mapper is more tailored to the needs of collaborative research. Nonetheless, Spreadsheet Mapper offers yet another option for compiling and mapping tabular data.

Call for biofuels work

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Today's NPR story by Richard Harris and related article by Tim Searchinger et al. highlight exactly the concerns with global biofuel production that prompted us to put in our grant (with Norm Miller and Dave Sunding) to BP and EBI on campus. What are the social, economic and environmental tradeoffs associated with widespread biofuel growth? How can we plan to spatially optimize use of landscapes so that increased carbon emissions do not result? Anyway, cool stuff.

Keeping Up with Science

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If you're an academic, or even a pseudo-academic like me, you need to stay current on the research in your field. You could just go to the library and grab journals off the shelf (boo), or perhaps steal your advisor's copy of Science every week and and peruse it over an Americano at your coffee shop of choice (yay), OR you could harness the awesome power of the Intertron. Well, you could, if there was some kind of killer app to help you out. As it is, there are only a few apps that range from impotent to mildly threatening, but some of them might be useful.

Feeds

Big feed iconA feed is a machine readable log of frequently updated content on the Internet (you might have heard of feed formats like Atom or RSS). Say you have a favorite website, like the Kelly Lab Blog. Instead of coming back here every day to see if things have changed, you could subscribe to the site feed (or the comment feed) with your favorite feed reader, and check that instead. That way you could check to see if lots of resources had been updated in one place. Many journals that have their digital act together publish feeds of their content (Nature, Science, TREE, PLoS), so you can always know when new content is available, and/or peruse titles and abstracts. Feeds are a good way to keep up to date, but they might not let you do much cataloguing or recommending. Google Reader (my feed reader of choice) let's you "share" items publicly (and with your GTalk contacts), but doesn't let you specify who you're sharing them with (my shared items are mostly just things I find both amusing and not incriminating, but you could use them for papers). You can also "star" things, which is like bookmarking, and there are tags, but stars lack specificity and I feel like their interface for tags could get unwieldy if you use a lot of them. Other feed readers might be different (Bloglines, Firefox, Thunderbird, NetNewsWire, heck even Outlook 2007).

del.icio.us

del.icio.us logoThe premier online bookmarking site isn't a bad tool for keeping track of articles. It won't tell you when resources are updated, but you could use it to save and organize articles you find interesting, by bookmarking and tagging them. Perhaps more importantly, you can recommend papers to other people using del.icio.us by using a tag like for:kueda, and likewise receive recommendations. Used in combo with a feed reader, it could be pretty useful. I actually use del.icio.us a lot for web resources in general. For instance, here's my limited collection of GIS data sources (tagged "gis" and "data"): http://del.icio.us/kueda/gis+data

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Connotea

Connotea logoNow we're entering the realm of specialized sites. Connotea is a sort of social bookmarking site specialized for journal articles, created by the Nature Publishing Group. It's got tagging, like del.icio.us, but it also lets you form explicit groups, and it will auto-extract citation information from the Web versions of articles (they even have a video). You could use Connotea to keep on top of what people are bookmarking by perusing tags (e.g. methane), or by subscribing to a tag's feed. I've found some interesting stuff browsing around the tags, but I haven't benefited from any of the social features like groups, because I don't know anyone else who uses Connotea. It also does some decent citation export in different formats, but it doesn't seem to export in different styles (Chicago vs. APA, for instance). citeUlike is another site very similar to Connotea, but I don't have as much experience with it. Also worth mentioning is Zotero. Zotero is an awesome plugin for Firefox that helps you manage citations. It's a local app without any social functionality (yet), so it's not really for keeping up to date, but it is great for extracting and exporting citations from papers and web pages. I've used it a bunch for writing papers. When it gets some network functionality it will be truly amazing. Ok, that's it for now. Anyone have any other favorite tools for keeping on top of academic literature?

New Mission; New Sensor

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Just heard this story on "Talk of the Nation." NASA is embarking on a new mission, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide. A new sensor will be launched in 2008 and will have a few interesting features. First, this sensor contains three separate spectrometers, each capturing a different band. Second, the sensor will detect three distinct bands in the near infrared. Two of these bands are carbon dioxide bands, which measure the wavelength ranges that are absorbed by carbon dioxide, but little else on the earth's surface. As far as I know, this may be the first sensor designed to directly detect atmospheric gases.