I sat in on two "non-technical workshops" during the week. As many people pointed out, session quality varies quite a lot at the ESRI User Conference and the two sessions offered that stark contrast.

NASA awarded $3.29 million to a five-year project led by professor David Roy of South Dakaota State's Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence. The project is in collaboration with USGS. The two key parts of the project:

(1) Process "Landsat observations every 16 days for all the contiguous United States and Alaska for a seven-year period and process those data so that they’re available to the user community over the Internet in a seamless manner."

(2) "The project also sets out to fill in gaps in the data. Since 2003, Roy said, there has been a problem with the Landsat sensor so that it has been unable to record the data for about 22 percent of each image. In addition, an average of about 35 percent of the Landsat data is obscured by clouds." The team will fill gaps using MODIS data.

- SDSU News

There's a simulation (aka "game") called Space Shuttle Mission 2007. It includes actual "stories" from those missions and "players" get to toggle switches and follow each mission at different levels of difficulty. The game is $49.95. (I'm not a gamer and this was all news to me!)

News today there's a new set of free missions to download. One is based on the February 2000 Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Players "experience the launch, on-orbit mission including the deployment and operation of the special radar equipment, and return to Earth by manually landing the Endeavour at the Kennedy Space Center."

It sounds geeky, but also pretty cool and educational.

- IGN

The response the "Biggest Drawing in the World" in the blogosphere (noted here at APB, with appropriate skepticism in the comments) helped get clarification (it was there, in red, yesterday) from its creator. In particular, that the drawing was not made by a suitcase holding a GPS that travelled the globe on DHL vessels. As suggested by many, GPS wouldn't work inside a suitcase inside a plane/boat. And, the paths tracked don't make any sense; some stop in the middle of the ocean. Video below.

Also this month, the Air Force withdrew, at least temporarily, an ad that included misleading narration suggesting a single strike against a single satellite could take down cell phones, crash bank machines and disable GPS navigation. Again, the blogosphere pointed out the misleading part (it'd take downing several satellites to do those things). Video below.

These are great stories for instructors to use to help students understand how technology works and to highlight that you can't believe everything you read or see in a video!


Biggest Drawing in the World


Air Force "Above All" Ad

As of July 1, Dr. Daniel Griffith of UT Dallas will serve a three-year term as the journal’s editor. Griffith is an Ashbel Smith Professor of Geospatial Information Sciences in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences. Per a UT Dallas news article, he will be the first editor in 18 years who is not based at Ohio State University.

Also of note, this quote from Dr. Griffith: "A lot of graduate students enroll in our GIS program to complement their professional skills. The use of this technology has really taken off during the last 10 years, and will only continue to grow."

Arizona State University at Tempe's new School of Geographic Sciences has recruited Billie Lee Turner, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and most recently director of the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. He specializes in sustainability science.
Turner will join Arizona's faculty in July as the school's first Gilbert F. White chair in environment and society. Arizona State's School of Geographic Sciences launched in 2006 focuses on interdisciplinary study.

The university has hired four additional faculty members with expertise in urbanism, landscape ecology, spatial analysis, and geocomputation. "It's very unusual that a university makes a major investment in geographic sciences the way ASU has done," says Mr. Anselin [Luc Anselin, founding director of the geography school and director of its GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation]. "I've never seen a geography department hire five full professors in one year."

About 20 years ago Mr. Turner sat next to me on a plane to an AAG meeting. Before he told me who he was, he extracted that I was a geographer and proceeded to test me on my ability to explain our discipline. I recall thinking that this was a very mean thing to do. I've gotten over it and might perhaps do the same to a newly minted graduate.

- Chronicle of Higher Education