GIS and Geospatial Stories I’m Reading - 3/4/13

• Keeping an Eye on Online Test-Takers Cost of online proctoring? $15-$90. A whole new biz! #edtech
• How Google And Bing Maps Control What You Can See The latest on satellite imagery/aerial imagery censorship
• A Real-Time Map of the Odds on Where the Next Pope Will Come From Why? My guess? "Because we can."
• Interactive Map: Voucher Schools Teaching Creationism Tableau Map - I don't see those in the wild much.
• Why so quiet re NSF #Geography Ed Road Map? NatGeo answer: "... public release of reports ...late March 2013." 
• Spatial Analysis and Basketball Defense (my title. pdf), paper at Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (Mar 1,2)  
• Amid new technologies, ‘cartography has its place’, 175th anniversary of the federal mapping agency swisstopo 
• Will There Always Be A Tube #Map? Yes, And Here’s Why  … Long but thoughtful piece. 
• London Zoo Cat Map: "Open Layers with a Drupal content management system and D3 for data viz."  
• I think this story is about EsriUC...but I'm not sure.
• Beyond Foursquare: Geolocation Services Proliferate, Mature  … Nice classification of LBS offerings.
• The City With the Worst Traffic in America A map of traffic congestion by metropolitan area. 
• Obama CIO: Location... (and personalization) will be key to next campaign  … at Salesforce.com  event 
• Data visualization on MOOC completion rates
• Q&A w/ Edward Tufte - good stuff on graphics and presentation strategies  
• Map: Potential Teacher Losses from Sequestration (looks kinda population-y, no?) 

LocalData: A Toolkit for Geodata Collection from Code for America

All sorts of formal and informal organizations need to collect location-related data including nonprofits, cities, and community groups. They might use the data to enhance environmental causes, support political campaigns, map local assets, or perform fundraising. But, the data collection itself can be a challenge.

The Knight Foundation is supporting LocalData, a Code for America effort to build open source solutions to collect such data. There are two solutions: one uses smartphones with apps run in mobile browsers and the other uses good old paper and pencil along with scanners to make the results digital. Users can look at the data "live" as it comes in and then output it in csv, kml, shp, or GeoJSON for use in Google Earth, Fusion Tables, and ArcGIS.

LocalData started in Detroit, where the Code for America team saw how long and painful it was to collect data. The current open source code, in private beta, lives on GitHub. The front end is built on HTML5, JavaScript, and Leaflet, with the backend using Node.js and PostGIS. 

This sounds like one of those toolkits geospatial folks should be aware of as it matures.

via @timoreilly

Exelis Has Tough 2012; Expects Cuts in 2013

Virgina-based Exelis was a stand alone entity in 2012, not longer part of ITT. While announcing its latest quarterly results last week, executives shared plans to spend as much as $70 million in 2013 to restructure and cut about 6% of the workforce. With the downturn in government spending, the company needs to refocus.

The company expects to cut 10% of its office space in 2013, and perhaps that same amount in the following year or two. The 6% reduction means about 1,200 people including nearly 600 who have already accepted early retirement offers, will be let go. It's not clear which offices will be impacted, but Power Solutions, currently based in Massachusetts will be moving to Rochester, NY, home of much of the geosptial work.

- Democrat and Chronicle