Update:  Korean Rocket Launch Prompts Officials to Propose New US Satellites

Update: The proposal was approved by the administration on Tuesday. Included: more funding to purchase commercial imagery from GeoEye and DigitalGlobe. The $10 billion number may be off, according to one senator.

- Associated Press

—- Original Post 4/6/09———

The Wall Street Journal reports that Saturday’s rocket launch from North Korea has prompted proposals to restart federal efforts for surveillance satellites. The $10 billion proposal includes “a pair of large, cutting-edge spy satellites along with two smaller, less-expensive models commercially available today.” Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week asked the White House to approve the plans.

- Further details from the Press Association

Another New Englander Who’d Make a Great Keynote at a Geo Conference

Neil Nichols offers the “Geography Game Show” to schools all over the country. The cool part? He draws the maps from memory and based on responses from students in Massachusetts, he’s very cool. During the summer he teaches art on Cape Cod. Book early; he sounds like a busy guy.

- Marshfield Mariner

GPS-enabled….inhalers

David Van Sickle, an epidemiologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has rigged up asthma inhalers linked to GPS devices. The idea is to locate where asthma sufferers are when they need their medication. For now, he’s looking for 31 volunteers in a trial of the devices which are about the size of an inhaler paired with a nine-volt battery. In time, he hopes to have folks all over the country tracking where attacks happen.

- Discovery

The Buzz Study

Many other blogs have mentioned the article in yesterday’s New York Times that explores research by Elizabeth Currid, an assistant professor in the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and Sarah Williams, the director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, presented at the AAG meeting last week in Las Vegas. I give the Times writer Melena Ryzik credit because I tried to decipher the paper (pdf) and didn’t get far. The toughest part for me was trying to understand how they found and felt confident the data they used as a proxy for their explorations.

The unfortunate part, if there is one of the New York Times covering geographic research, is finding the meaning of the research. In Paul Simkins (one of my profs at Penn State) definition of geography (What is where? Why? So what?) the “So what?” still eludes me.