Thursday, October 2. 2008

NSF Grant to Map the Holocaust

The National Science Foundation has awarded $430,000 to Alberto Giordano, an associate professor at Texas State University-San Marcos, and Anne Knowles, a geographer at Middlebury College in Vermont to conduct a two-year study focusing on four aspects of the Holocaust: the evolution of the concentration camp system, the deportation of Jews from France and Italy, life inside the Budapest ghetto and the death marches from Auschwitz. This will be first study of the topic using GIS tools.

- Austin American-Statesman

TomTom Shares at All-time Low

Yes, the economy is challenged and yes geo and tech companies are feeling it, too. But TomTom is a bit worse off: analysts fear it may have to "refinance its debt before end-2009 and as consumer spending slows." TomTom's debt is 1.3 billion euros which includes debts from the 2.9 billion it spent on Tele Atlas.

Share dropped to 10.88 euros, the lowest ever. For comparison, share were at 17.5 euros in May 2005 hit a high of 66.70 euros last October 29.

One challenge analysts note is that sat navs have never been tested in an down market - all the recent sales have been in "good times." It's hard for me to think getting a first or upgrading an existing device would be a priority in tough times - UNLESS vendors offer them as money saving gadgets to find cheap gas and create more efficient shorter routes. They'll need to start telling that story right away.

- Reuters

Florida's Efforts at Statewide GIS Coordination

GovTech reports on Florida's efforts toward statewide GIS coordination. Of note:

- The state ranks 49th in its efforts for coordination based on NSGIC's rubrick
- The state has the most GISPs
- This is the fourth time the state has tried to develop a coordinating body

The ranking on the NSGIC list is incredibly important - not to put down the state - but to push for it to move up the ladder. The fact that a sidebar highlights the rubrick shows what NSGIC is doing to push forward on its Fifty States Initiative, that is, to develop coordination and ideally a state coordinator in all 50 states. I'm not sure if NSGIC publishes rankings, but if you want to help push your state forward you might want to see how well it does meeting the listed requirements.

A first for NZ: Virtual Earth Implementation

Computerworld New Zealand reports on what's thought to be the first implementation of Virtual Earth in that country. It replaces the recently unstable app for the Maori Land Information Base, but provides no new functionality. The "old" app is here and was last updated in 2000. The article reports the company that provided the technology has since gone out of business.

If I understand the article correctly an Oracle/open source solution as well as a Google one were explored before selecting Microsoft in part because of previous use of its tools. The site is not yet publicly available. It was developed by E-spatial of Wellington.

Modeling Wi-Fi Dead Spots

I'm not sure why this is not referred to as a model, but it sounds like one to me. The goal? Identify dead zones in Wi-Fi networks.

The technique identifies locations at which the network should be tested by combining wireless signal models with publicly-available information about basic topography, street locations and land use.

The app from HP and Rice University was detailed in paper that won top honors at the annual MobiCom ’08 wireless conference in San Francisco recently . The good news: it's 90% accurate and reduces the number of locations that need to be tested to just 2%.

- ITNews Australia

- via Slashdot