Education GIS Tidbits
With the recent rash of natural disasters and political uprisings, The Sun Herald in Mississippi supports Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md's "Teaching Geography is Fundamental (TGIF) Act."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science to Achieve Results (USEPA-STAR) program has awarded a grant of nearly $500,000 to The Texas Center for Geographic Information Science in the Department of Geography at Texas State.
The grant will support a project entitled “Air Pollution-Exposure-Health Effects Indicators: Mining Massive Geographically Referenced Environmental Health Data to Identify Risk Factors for Birth Defects.”
The three-year project will develop air pollution exposure assessment methods, visual geospatial data mining tools, and epidemiological analysis procedures to define new air pollution-exposure-health effect indicators that cover three components of the hazards-exposure-health effects-intervention paradigm.
Forget GPSing trees on campus, at Utah State the GIS students are capturing his resolution imagery of campus with a small blimp.
Soaring above the Quad on Tuesday afternoon, a white blimp controlled by Utah State University graduate students was almost hard to spot against the Cache Valley's overcast sky.The only object that was clearly visible was a black digital camera, snapping one picture every five seconds, providing color georeferenced aerial photography of the entire Quad in UTM (metric) coordinates.
The students were conducting a lab by running a blimp survey for Joseph M. Wheaton's geographic information systems class. The objective: To provide aerial imagery of the entire Quad. The 1,000-plus pictures the blimp provides them with will be used to make an image that can fit "on top of" the images on Google map, said Bryan Watt, a USU graduate student in the class.
