Friday, March 21. 2008

Buy A Tree; Get KML

Remember the Star Registry? You pay a fee and get a star named after you. The deliverable is a certificate with the star's location. It's been offered as a gift for major occasions. Well, now there's a better, more earthly option. The World Wildlife Fund offers the chance to buy a sapling to be planted in the Sebangau National Forest in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia and in return, get a KML file of its location. It's called mybabytree.org.

Says Leslie Rule:

While the idea is great, the execution brilliant (JWT did the creative), the social good unassailable, what makes this unlike any online donation site is the process that connects the donor with the tree. Once the tree is planted, it is a given a number, geo-tagged with lat/long coordinates, and located in a Google Earth kmz file, which is then sent to the donor.

via MediaShift

Quote of the Week

"I guess it would mean the difference between listening to a story on the radio and seeing it on television."

Emergency Operations Center director Richard Smith on the old way of tracking storm related issues as a list of addresses on a whiteboard vs to seeing them, geocoded on a GIS created map. The center typically serves Leon County and Tallahassee but was put to work recently when a tornado hit Capitola, FL earlier this month. The system was joint effort of the city, county and contributions of ESRI.

- Tallahassee.com

Brookings Models All of Us

What if you wanted to model the spread of say a disease across the current world population of 6.7 billion people? Think it can be done? It can, by the Large-Scale Agent Model, which resides at the Brookings Institution's Center on Social and Economic Dynamics. It was developed with guidance of the Homeland Security Department's National Center for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response at Johns Hopkins University.

The cool part: the model includes factors like age and gender and how individuals are dispersed geographically. It even models the daily commute! Check out video of it in action in a GovExec article. They show the spread of a disease and a toxic release. (Those seem to be favorites these days).

ESRI History Talk

From the Redlands Daily Facts, this talk is set for next Monday:

"Jack P. Dangermond and the History of ESRI" is the program when the Redlands Area Historical Society meets, 7 p.m. in the Assembly Room at the A.K. Smiley Public Library, 125 W. Vine St.

Google Storm Surge Warning Tool Ahead

The director of the National Hurricane Center described a soon to be released tool where those fearing flooding from a surge caused by hurricane need only visit Google and key in an address for a prediction of the impact of the event.

Bill Read, the new head of the U.S. forecasting center describes the tool as a mix of data and Google apps (I'm guess maps?).

The plan is to have the app up and running by the coming Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30.

- Reuters (via WebProNews)