Tuesday, November 3. 2009

Education Tidbits

There are more and more places to learn GIS! You can now take a three course series on ArcGIS from the KeyBank Tacoma Professional Development Center. After completion you receive a certificate. It's run through the Univ Washington Tacoma. It's rather cost effective at about $2500.

California State University Northridge is updating a campus tree atlas that predates the big earthquake. Among the challenges? Tagging trees not appropriate for "nailed in" metal tags, student stealing tags, and identifying species.

- CSU Sundial

Get free teaching tools related to the upcoming census. The Census in Schools materials are available free online at www.census.gov/schools "for educators, students, parents, home-schoolers and the public. Teachers can use the lesson plans -- as they are or adapted as needed -- to teach a host of topics including mapping, math concepts, data literacy and civics."

- press release

OS Has First OpenSpacePro Client: A Tracker

OpenSpace is the Ordnance Survey's "free for non-commercial use" API. OpenSpacePro is the offering for commercial users. And, now there's an app that uses it: Locatorz offers a tracking solution for children, workers in hazardous areas and those who many wander. There's nothing new about the app, but it's a first for the OS.

- BBC

Impact of Weather.com's Use of Bing Maps?

I really enjoy when tech journalists look at some new "neat" tool and get right down to the nitty gritty of "does it matter to me?" Clint Boulton did just that when reviewing the new Weather.com tool built on Bing Maps (Flash, not Sivlerlight, he's quick to note) that shows future weather (up to six hours in the future) in a tiny (1 sq mile) area. (Chris Pendleton gushes about it here.)

From a developer's perspective, that must be neat, but I don't care so much about that as that this program really works and is useful for me.
...

Will this make me switch from using Google Maps to Bing Maps? No -- I'm very invested in Google Maps' new and emerging features -- but I've always used Weather.com to get my weather updates.

So, there we go, another confirmation that regular folks (ok, he's a techy) don't really case about the source background or API used, just that there's interesting data and the app "works." As Joe Francica notes in today's podcast, all that branding aimed at the consumer matters less and less; API providers and data providers are "back" to selling to developers.

- eWeek

Podcast: With Geodata, Developers, not Consumers Rule

If consumers think of geodata as a commodity, what does that say for its future? What are the key data relationships? And what, if anything, will differentiate one offering from another? Our editors ponder these questions in light of evidence that consumers know and care little about who makes, manages and updates basemaps.

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The Gravestone Project: Graveyard Geology for air pollution and climate change information

This from one of our readers: The Geological Society of America (GSA) is using cemetery data to serve as global climate monitors. To participate all you need is a GPS and a micrometer to measure weathering. This 2 year project should help create a global map to provide data for climatologists. Watch to video to find out more: