Students Build City Basemap and other Government GIS News

A pair of California State University Stanislaus students are conducting the mapping project for the city as interns, using equipment on loan to Newman from Stanislaus County.

There is no word if they or the school is getting paid.

- WestSideConnect.com

Allen County will abolish most fees previously charged for county maps and will join 85 other counties participating in the IndianaMap initiative.

...The county will continue to charge for customized mapping or for printing a map, but map fees ranging from $85 to $15,000, depending on the detail of the request, were eliminated.

- The Journal Gazette

Southwest Regional Police Dept (that includes Pittsburgh, PA) is the first in the Commonwealth to get the RAIDS crime mapping system. So why is there never a direct link to the maps?

This useful text is from the SWRPD blog:

Residents can now view the criminal activity in their communities online, free of charge. Visit the “RAIDS ONLINE CRIME MAPPING” link under “COMMUNITY-ORIENTED POLICING” tab to begin analyzing. Residents are reminded that only incidents reported to SWRPD are mapped using this service.

This from the local paper:

The information is available on the crime map at www.raidsonline.com or at www.swrpd.us using the community-oriented police link. 

The second link from the paper (to another blog post) has this link to the map. Is there a legal reason you have to search so hard to actually see the map?

- Post Gazette

A new system has been developed that can estimate the scale of crustal movement within minutes after a big earthquake, much faster than the system widely used now that takes more than five hours to do so, government officials and academics said Friday.

The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan and Tohoku University began testing the new system using the satellite-aided global positioning system Friday, aiming to start full operation in fiscal 2013.

- Mainichi

Vanderburgh County, Indiana thinks it has a first:

It['s] called "VC Election Office," and it allows voters to see locations and estimated wait times in real time.

The free application, available on Apple- or Android-based devices, was created by Mark Rolley Consulting, Inc., the company the city and county contracts with for several information technology services.

Kirk said, "We are the first county — period — to have this kind of an application." Matt Arvay, the city's chief information officer, said that's based on research by the leading geographic information systems (GIS) software company, ESRI.

GeoCoda Steps Up to Take On SimpleGeo Clients and other LBS News

Geocoda is launching to provide a replacement to the SimpleGeo service, which is being terminated on March 30, 2012. Geocoda aims to provide many of the services previously offered by SimpleGeo, with a simple migration path.

For now you can just sign up for info; the services are not yet ready.

- GeoCoda

With today's announcement, Preserve is launching a free iPhone app that allows anyone to find the nearest #5 collection area to drop off their plastics, and earn Recyclebank points for their earth efforts.

I'm glad my city does recycle #5 plastic. I'd hate to have to separate it out and drop it separately. On the other hand, we continue to add to the number of unique "find the nearest" sort of tools.

- press release

Stats NZ received anonymized data on the movements of mobile phones that were active in Christchurch city in the run up to February 22. By tracking the location of the unique IDs linked to where voice calls and text messages were sent, researchers were then able to pinpoint where these people went in the wake of the quake, how far from the city they travelled – and when they came back.

An undisclosed number of mobile phone users were tracked ...

and some patterns discovered. It's not clear how this information can help with future emergency planning, but collecting it is a start.

- National Business Review

Mapping Japan Earthquake Debris and other Crowdsourcing GIS News

A Canadian paper now offers a map where readers can post details of where they see debris from the Japanese earthquake of 2011.

Now, The Province is offering an interactive map on its web-site where readers can post the sites where they find Japanese debris. Simply log on to theprovince.com/debris and follow the instructions.

- The Province

In the Horn of Africa, Somalia makes headlines, but often only because of drought, famine, crisis and insecurity. Al Jazeera launched Somalia Speaks to help amplify stories from people and their everyday lives in the region -- all via SMS.

Somalia Speaks is a collaboration between Souktel, a Palestinian-based organization providing SMS messaging services, Ushahidi, Al Jazeera, Crowdflower, and the African Diaspora Institute. "We wanted to find out the perspective of normal Somali citizens to tell us how the crisis has affected them and the Somali diaspora," Al Jazeera's Soud Hyder said in an interview.

It's great to see crowdsourced, geotagged news in one of the world's most challenged places.

- MediaShift Blog

Want to thank our troops? How about letting them know from where the greetings come? How about a crowdourced Thank You map? That's what the USO created.

- South Brunswick Patch
 

Mapping Ghost Bikes and other Crowdsourcing GIS News

The Guardian is spearheaing a mapping project, worldwide to map ghost bikes. Ghost bikes commemorate a lost cyclist. The project is Flickr based and will use the geocoded images to create the map.

- The Guardian

Eight months after a tsunami caused a nuclear accident in Japan, ordinary people are using new technology and the power of crowdsourcing to find radiation hotspots. 

- PBS Newshour

It turns out zebra patterns are unique for each zebra...so

that makes it possible to be scanned like a bar code.  McDermott reports that scientists and citizen scientists can use an app called Stripe Spotter created by the University of Illinois at Chicago and Princeton University to upload the zebra’s identity into a database. 

 - Very Spatial

Mapping UC Berkeley’s Dangerous Buildings and other Education GIS News

The Daily Californian uses a an interesting symbology to locate seismically challeged building on the Berkeley campus.

The map below highlights UC Berkeley buildings that are seismically rated “Poor” or “Very Poor” by the Seismic Action Plan for Facilities Enhancement and Renewal report released in 1997. The green pins mark buildings that were labeled “Poor” while the yellow pins mark buildings labeled “Very Poor” by the report, which was last updated in July 2011.

- Daily Californian

Among the presentations at “Reimagining the City-University Connection,” a symposium held October 21 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, were:

Jessica Simes, [a] ... sociology doctoral student, and Benjamin Lewis, senior GIS specialist at Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis, collected data from the Boston Redevelopment Authority and mapped it onto the Boston Research Map, part of the open-source WorldMap system that allows users to publish their own maps and add to others’, integrating multiple data types and sources for the same geographic area.

- Harvard Magazine

Fourth-grade students at Tucker-Capps Elementary School took a yummy approach last week to learning about Virginia's five regions.

Using sugary ingredients such as green and blue frosting, strings of red licorice, corn flakes, caramel corn, and a chocolate cup, the students created edible maps of the state.

The activity was supervised by fourth-grade teacher Petra Roehrle in Georgie Burton's art class.

"Sometimes students have a hard time visualizing what the landforms look like because they don't have a map that they can feel and touch," Roehrle wrote in an email.

- Daily Press (Newport News, VA)