NJ Hospital Mortality Rates and other Health GIS News

The New Jersey Department of Health rated 72 major hospitals across the state according to the number of deaths per 100 patients for pneumonia, stroke, heart attack, and heart failure. That data was used to create the Google Map.

- NJ Spotlight

An independent study conducted by mapping analytics firm PetersonGIS shows that locations with the highest obesity rates contain the fewest farmers’ markets.

...Please note that correlation is not the same as causation.

The static, low resolution map makes local exploration challenging. 

- GIS Lounge

Health 2.0 announced today that it launched its first Health 2.0 Developers World Cup in which teams of developers, innovators, and entrepreneurs worldwide will compete in code-a-thons to build applications and tools that improve healthcare. The winners from each coding competition will face-off in San Francisco at the 6th Annual Fall Health 2.0 Conference for the Developers World Cup title. All finalists will receive free passes to the conference and a travel stipend. The winning team will receive a $10,000 cash prize, the opportunity to showcase their winning product on the main stage of the conference, and international visibility as world champions.

- details

Stewart County, TN's Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention is anxious to put in place a program already up and running in neighboring Houston County:

The point of the mapping system for a coalition is to plot hot spot locations on a map and supply them to anyone who asks for them as well as giving them to police officers and county commissioners.

Hot spot locations are ones that they police have been called out to anywhere in the county that may be an undesirable location for juveniles to be in.

The Stewart County data will come from a new 911 system. I wonder if this program will get the same backlash as the recent Microsoft patent aiming to keep people out of bad neigbhorhoods?

- The Leaf Chronicle

San Diego (Open Data) App Challenge and other GIS Competition News

Mayor Sanders and the City of San Diego are challenging the software developer community to create new apps using city and partner data. They’re also inviting the public to share their ideas for innovative new apps.

Winners will receive $50,000 in cash prizes as well as promotional exposure. Prizes will be awarded for apps that enhance city services and quality of life for San Diegans, and that use the data in innovative ways. Submitted apps can run on the web, desktop computers, tablets, or smartphones. The public is encouraged to share application ideas related to energy, tourism, economic development, transportation, the environment, health and other areas.

The public will have one month to share ideas for San Diego apps they’d like to see created. Developers will have approximately three months following the challenge launch to build their submissions. A panel of distinguished judges from the tech industry, venture capital, and partner institutions will select winners, and the general public will vote to identify two “Popular Choice” winners.

The Get Outdoors Massachusetts contest is open to the public and seeks public participation in developing technologies that feature Massachusetts outdoor and natural resources. The goal of the competition is to provide software developers with data to create a mobile application for the public to use a smart phone to map to public lands, access points and other outdoor venues for outdoor recreation. The agencies will provide data about state parks, wildlife management areas, public boat ramps, agricultural tourism locations and parking locations and lists of available activities at each facility or location.

The 2012 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest is designed to investigate the potential of multi-modal/multi-temporal fusion of very high spatial resolution imagery. This year, participants will download three different sets of images (optical, SAR, and LIDAR) over the downtown of San Francisco and each participant will get to choose their own research topic to work with. Proposals should describe in detail the addressed problem, the method used, and the end result.

Harvard’s WorldMap and other Education GIS News

I think the online mapmakeing tool WorldMap is out of beta, but the article does not make that 100% clear. It's open source and developed by Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis, 

- Harvard Gazette

The GeoTech Center has published its 2012 newsletter (pdf).

- GeoTech Center Blog

A team of students from the University at Buffalo Law School has been named a winner of the 2012 New York Redistricting Project, a national competition that challenged student teams to draw new congressional, state senate and state assembly district maps.

- UB News Center

Free Google Fusion Table Course and other Education GIS News

On Monday, January 9th Geospatial Training will be releasing a free self-paced, web based, e-learning course titled: Bringing Data to Life with Google Fusion Tables

Part 1 of this course will be released in January with  Part 2: Programming the Google Fusion Tables API coming later this year. The course has video lectures and exercises. I wonder how geography/GIS eduators might use these resources?

- Geospatial Training Blog

FIG is offering acadmic grants in areas related to geospatial to those who qualify who are in approrpiately designated countries. Proposals due Jan 15!

- announecement via @micheal_d_gould

The GeoTech Center has made ten sample questions for its National Geospatial Technology Comptetition Round 1 multiple choice test available in a PDF. I'm pleased to report I got them all correct, though some of them were on topics I never studied. The actual test must be taken by March 15 to be in the contest. This year both Round 1 (test) and Round 2 (project) scores will be used to determine the six semi-finalists who will be invited to the Esri EdUC.

- GeoTech Center Blog

ERDAS IMAGINE-DigitalGlobe 2012 Geospatial Challenge

Intergraph and DigitalGlobe are pleased to offer a geospatial challenge for the ERDAS IMAGINE community to exploit WorldView-2 using the power and flexibility of ERDAS IMAGINE tools.

Enter the 2011 Geospatial Challenge to get free imagery for your study and a chance to win five (5) WorldView-2 scenes of your choice anywhere across the globe from the DigitalGlobe archive. In addition, our three finalists will be sent to present at ASPRS in Sacramento, CA March 21-23, 2012.

Submit your Proposal by December 20th

All accepted proposals will be granted a pre-defined set of free 8-band multispectral imagery, in order to conduct the study. Completed papers will be evaluated by a panel of experts from Intergraph and DigitalGlobe who will select a winning paper.

The winner will be announced on February 15, 2012.

- website