Get Thin by Living Near the Grocery (and other) Stores/Services

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have found that living within 1 km of the grocery store you are half as likely to be overweight than those who live in neighborhoods without a food store. And the more stores, the better: every additional store within a kilometre translated into an 11 per cent reduction in the likelihood of being overweight. Study author Lawrence Frank notes this is not really news and points out that it’s not just grocery stores that have an impact. The more goods and services of all kinds within walking distance, the more likely people are to walk.

Here’s another finding of interest: “The study found that people whose neighbourhoods includes stores that front directly onto a sidewalk — rather than those where a parking lot separates the store from the sidewalk — were half as likely to be overweight as those living in neighbourhoods without sidewalk-front stores.”

- Vancouver Sun via Worldchanging

Hotelicopter: Find a Hotel By Drawing a Fence on the Map

Update 11 am: Maxwell Lamb let me know via Twitter that he wrote the fence code when working at another company. Happy to give credit.

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Yes, Hotelicopter is a cute name and apparently the company behind it had a big April Fool’s joke (which I thankfully missed). Still the idea of narrowing your hotel search by drawing a fence sounds new to me. The site taps into data from 30 discount hotel brokers to find deals and uses the Google Maps API.

- Webware

GIS Consultant Fee Check

This news from Elmira, NY from the East Aurora Advertiser:

At its March 18 meeting, the board changed its position and agreed to give the Conservation Board $1,200 of already-budgeted funds to hire a geographical information system (GIS) consultant. The cost of the consultant will be $1,200 for 40 hours of work.

My math puts that at $30/hour.

Education Tidbits

The university website has nice profile of University of Nevada, Reno Ph.D. student Cassie Hansen. She got rave reviews of maps at the AAG meeting this year and her work won the 2007 National Geographic Award for mapping.

- University of Nevada, Reno

The deadline to participate in URISA’s Student Paper Competition is May 1. URISA will award students cash prizes for best student-authored papers. Winners will be recognized at the URISA Annual Conference in Anaheim, California, September 29-October 2, 2009. I’ll note here that some of my students’ final project papers could do very well. One other note: there is no fee, nor membership requirement to submit a paper for consideration. I for one frown on student competitions that require a fee.

- details

The State Department offers several activities for young people including a Google Maps Mashup that answers the question: Where in the world is the secretary? Two interesting tidbits about the map:
(1) It includes a Map Legend, with that title.
(2) It has this disclaimer: “* Names and boundary representation are not necessarily authoritative. ”