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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Palm Beach County Florida is all set for the new school year with a GIS for parents of school age children.
One of the tools available at the district’s back to school page, allows parents to “find my school. The district partnered with the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser’s Office to create the school finder tool, said Donna Goldstein, the district’s GIS coordinator. Parents can type in their address and it shows what schools at the elementary, middle and high school level they are zoned to attend.
The tool will also show the attendance boundaries and the “two mile walk zone” for each school. Only students living outside the two mile walk zone are eligible for school bus transportation and those living within two miles of the school must either walk or be driven to school by a parent.
- Palm Beach Post Blog
Scofield leaders went to Washington, D.C. last week to present the school’s STEM work in water quality at a congressional hearing. ...The grant money—$330,000 through an Innovations in Education grant and a $160,000 Catalyst Initiative grant [from HP]—has allowed the school to purchase laptops, scientific calculators and cutting-edge geographic information systems (GIS) to collect data about the water surrounding the school and integrate their findings across the curriculum.
Scofield is Stamford, CT's magenet school.
- Stamford Patch
Proof of this [that Girl Scouts do more that have camp fires and sell cookies] was evidenced at a recent Huntley [Illinois] Village Board meeting when Girl Scout Troop 828 presented the village with a map of the Huntley Cemetery, detailing the final resting places of every veteran interred there. The map also detailed in which war each veteran served and their dates of service. Veterans are buried in 146 of the 225 grave sites at the cemetery.
Good stuff. I wonder if technology was used? The article does not say. If it were Boy Scouts do you think it'd say? Another article (Patch) confirms there is a spreadsheet of the data. Do Girl Scouts do mapping, surveying and GIS? It seems the Boy Scouts get more press on their work and Eagle Scout projects. This was, by the way, a Bronze Award project for the girls involved. And, no, I don't know what that is...
- Currier News
by Adena Schutzberg on 08/08 at 03:56 AM |
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