What's wrong with the geospatial workforce? Victor Valley College (California) adjunct professor Fon Allan Duke knows:
There’s not a good enough pool of trained individuals to step up and work in these catastrophic events. And the problem you have in industry is either you have people with master’s degrees that are overqualified doing work that they don’t really want to do and you’re overpaying for it, or you have people that have been trained on the job who don’t really understand all the specifics and so you get poor product.
He was quoted as the school launches a new certificate program, moving on from courses focused on geo use in agriculture:
VVC’s new GIS for Emergency Response and Management certificate aims to equip community college students with skills needed to develop GIS tools for governments or private companies.
There are still openings for the new program which begins the week of Feb 13.
- Victorville Daily Press
The Univeristy of Minnesota has some great, inexpensive courses in LiDAR coming up. Some are full already.
- Montevideo American News
Huntington High (WV) teachers and students attended the White House Science Fair to show off their geospatailly themed project.
Their project involved gathering data about how cloud cover affected the temperature of different surfaces such as pavement and grass, and it captured the attention of NASA. The students were asked last week if they wanted to attend the science fair, hosted by President Barack Obama. They jumped at the chance, and the school system worked hard to make it happen, Sharpe said.
The school is part of the GLOBE program.
- Herald Dispatch
by Adena Schutzberg on 02/10 at 07:08 AM |
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At Holt Elementary in Durham, NC, the local GIS users are teaching about GIS via Google Earth. I'm not sure how I feel about this exercise:
To illustrate the difference that GIS technology makes, [GIS analyst from the GIS division of the city’s Technology Solutions Department, Robert] Cushman asked the students to locate their homes or school on paper maps within 30 seconds. They hunched over the maps, furiously searching for familiar street names or landmarks. At the end of the 30 seconds, just one student said he’d located his home.
“Now we don’t use maps like this anymore – very rarely,” Cushman said. “The maps we work with are made to be easy to use” – like traffic maps on morning TV newscasts and those used by vehicle navigation systems.
- Herald Sun
Engineering researchers at the University of Arkansas are developing an emergency communications network that will maintain operation during natural disasters and provide critical warnings and geographic information to people affected by the disasters. The researchers are honing and testing the system now and expect to deploy a pilot network at the end of 2012.
Geo challenges include how to arrange the "mesh" network that enables the network and running GIS on low power devices. The work is funded by an NSF grant.
- press release
- project page
Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Massachusetts, Boston (UMB) have created a detailed map (and accompanying study) of where terrorism attacks have occurred since 1970.
...while certain areas (those surrounding Manhattan and Los Angeles, for example) have endured as terror 'hot spots' throughout the study, others have come and go. In the 2000s, for example, there has been a higher-than-average rate of attacks in Maricopa County, AZ, Phoenix's county. King County, WA, on the other hand, was a terror hot spot in the 1970s and 1980s, but has been largely quiet since.
- HuffPo
- press release
by Adena Schutzberg on 02/06 at 03:00 AM |
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