Tuesday, January 12. 2010

Health and Science Tidbits

Portland Oregon is one of 41 cities among recipients of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation multi-year grants to 41 communities across the country as part of the Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities initiative, a landmark national program to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015. The city will use GIS to help locate areas where new resources for healthy living are needed.

Portland, Oregon, will use GIS (geographic information system) mapping to identify disparities such as a lack of parks, grocery stores, or safe walking paths. The project will then build such features into lower-income areas of the city.

My city, Somerville, MA is a past recipient of Robert Wooed Johnson Foundation grant for our Shape Up Somerville program.

- QSR Magazine

To track the tiny 3.5 ounce arctic turn on its 43,000 mile round trip you can't use GPS. Instead you use a tiny light sensor:

A team from Greenland, Denmark, the US, the UK and Iceland attached small (1.4g/0.05oz) "geolocators" to the animals to find out exactly where they went on this polar round trip.
The devices record light intensity. This gives an estimate of the local day length, and the times of sunrise and sunset; and from this information it is possible to work out a geographical position of the birds.

- BBC

Blizzard lets tribe map residents with health conditions

That headline is so clear I'm not going to change it. The story, in short, is that a blizzard at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation made it clear that authorities did not have a complete list of residents with health issues that required regular visit to health service providers - including those on dialysis, those with cancer or in hospice situations. Luckily, the recent blizzard results in no injuries or issues, but it did prompt collection of names and addresses so that public works officials could provide needed assistance to these individuals in case of a weather or other type of emergency. I am aware of several senior services organizations looking to collect similar data for municipal residents. While there are privacy issues, there can also be great benefits.

- Rapid City Journal