Evansville IN: Plan Fire Station Closings, Then Consult GIS

Evansville (Indiana) Fire Department Chief Keith Jarboe has proposed closing two of the city’s fire houses. The union and local citizens don’t like the idea. And, more is wrapped up in the decision besides city costs - if the city does nothing it may receive a lower Insurance Services Office (ISO) rating which will in turn, perhaps, raise local insurance rates. So, the decision is a big deal.

So, to get more information, the Chief is asking for the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) to use its GIS to produce a map showing the best placement for stations. That he thinks, might help evaluate the plan.

Now, the challenge is collecting all the data needed as inputs (including “the number of high rises to the locations of all the nursing homes in town”) to the GIS app and then having the Association do the analysis. Those may push a reply far into the future. And, the union leaders point out that the app does not take into account some factors including “he proximity of houses to one another in the affected areas, older construction or a large population of people who can’t self-evacuate,” so that any response may not be that helpful.

An IAFF page explains that local depts should collect the required data. The Association then can produce “a complete and defensible GIS Analysis.” From what I read there, many depts submit a paper map.

- Courier Press

Tele Atlas Signs Deal with Intermap

Intermap has a signed an agreement to provide terrain data to Tele Atlas. For what geographies? I asked Intermap:

...the contract includes our NEXTMap coverage area – NEXTMap USA covering the contiguous U.S. plus Hawaii and NEXTMap Europe – covering 21 Western European countries – complete country list is detailed on http://www.intermap.com/nextmap-europe.

When will the data be in vehicle nav systems? “The Company is delivering data assets with a targeted launch into equipped automobiles in late 2010.”

- press release

Education Tidbits

Two graduate assistantships are available at the University of California, Santa Barbara on an NSF-funded project using remote sensing, GIS, and computer models to study land use and coupled urban systems. These are PhD positions.

- Environmental Research Web

Engineering students at UC San Diego played a critical role in helping the university and the San Diego region secure a total of $154 million in federal bonds for solar installation projects. What did they do? They put together a tool for prospective users of solar installs to calculate cost, energy output, and payback time of solar arrays, data required for the bonds.

“What we did was put addresses into Google Earth and used satellite images to calculate the areas of the rooftops and parking lots where local applicants wanted to install solar panels. We then used an online tool called PVWatts Solar Calculator to help calculate the expected annual output, and a spreadsheet we designed calculated the 10-to-15-year payback of each installation project,” explained Karl Olney, a second-year Ph.D. mechanical engineering student. “The thing that was nice for our projects was that with our tools an individual site’s application could be completed in about 10 minutes.

Another bonus: high school interns were taught to use the system to help file applications.

- PhyOrg

A team from the University of Miami, University of El Paso and University of Rochester have employed Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) images compiled over a decade to study volcanic activity in the African Rift. The study, published in the November issue of Geology, studies the section of the rift in Kenya.

- InSciences

In what is perhaps the longest press release I’ve seen of late, Education Logistics touts the savings by school districts using its school bus routing app. The total savings is over $11 million by 9 school districts. No word on how much the 9 districts spent on the software, so there’s no way to calculate an ROI (even on these handpicked likely high savings clients).

Podcast: Windows 7, a Netbook and/or the Cloud?

Windows 7 is out and getting good reviews. But, the Mac continues to rule in customer satisfaction. And what of those cheap, lightweight netbooks? What role should the cloud play in picking your next hardware and software, both for general productivity and geospatial production work? Our editors (one Mac and one PC) explore the options.

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