ESL Students Learn and Teach GPS and other Education GIS News

Teaching high school stduents and elementary students about GPS and having them use it to make maps is not a new idea. What is new in Urbana, IL is that the older students are teaching the younger ones. And, both groups are English as a second language students and the teaching and learning is occurring in English. My head spins considering how much learning could be going on in these hands on sessions.

- News Gazette

West Potomac High School students from Frances Coffey’s Advanced Placement Human Geography class were treated to a visit from Cathi Hoefler and Steven Keating from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency recently. Hoefler and Keating discussed the importance of using data to better predict and respond to natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 earthquake off the coast of Japan and tsunami.

- Connection Newspapers

California State University, Fresno's Division of Continuing and Global Education has just announced a new online certificate program focusing on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a field that uses digital technology to manage, map, analyze and display spatial information.

Classes in the 12 credit sequence begin in August. It's Esri-based (included in tuition).

- press release

ALK CEO Barry Glick Announces the Company will License its Data

TomTom, Waze and other "GPS" companies build and offer map data based on their users travel routes. ALK Technologies has been using its data internally for its consumer and trucking products for years. But now, the plan is to license the data to others.

Barry Glick? He of MapQuest, Webraska and NAVTEQ fame became CEO for the mobile navigation and truck mileage solution provider last April.

- GPS Biz News

Garmin Says Tablets Won’t Kill Dedicated GPS Devices in the Cockpit and other GPS News

We asked Garmin's Jim Alpiser at the Aircraft Electronics show in Washington, D.C. if this signals the beginning of the end for big ticket portable GPS. "We recognized that the tablets on the market today are very attractive for a lot of reasons. It allows, number one, to get a giant display in the cockpit and get charts on there," Alpiser told us in this podcast recorded at the AEA show.

Continue reading...

GPS Tracking Contest and other GIS Competitions

An group of companies including Deloitte, Deutsche Telecom, HYVE and The RWTH-TIM Research Group have banded together......to hold a contest with prizes worth more than $10,000, inviting people to use their imagination and present their wildest and best ideas for tracking anything—people, animals or objects of any size. The goal is to come up with new state-of-the-art, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications solutions.

Entries due: April 10.

- Ideabird via Sat News

The European Earth Monitoring Competition GMES Masters takes place on an annual basis and calls for new ideas and services making the best use of earth observation data from Europe's flagship program on Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES). Initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Bavarian Ministry of Economy, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and T-Systems and supported by the European Commission and European Space Imaging GmbH, the GMES Masters 2012 will call for submissions between 1 June and 16 September 2012 in six categories.

This year there's a new challenge centered on the use of new applications for very high-resolution satellite imagery.

- press release

GISCI reminds GIS folks:

NeuAer: Another Radio Wave “Location” Solution

Says CEO Dave Mathews of NeuAer in Venture Beat about apps like Highlight that launched at SXSW this year:

The problem at hand with LBS apps is that they require the GPS radio to run nearly full-time, have a clear view of the sky to get a signal, and report back to a server their location.

They eat your batteries leaving you alone with no tweets or Facebook or anything. But of course he has a solution: using a bunch of radio waves as a signature for not locating per se, but prompting your device to "do something."

Sadly, the NeuAer website does not have a "how it works" page or video. But I found this digging into the blog:

This marks the first time that our ToothTag engine for proximity plumbing is available for developers to create their own web services that can be executed based upon your smartphone seeing another wireless radio.

And, Rafe at C|net did the due diligence:

Mathews' technology, ToothTag (can we talk about that?), uses all the radio signals that come into a phone--Wi-Fi, GPS, near-field, and most importantly Bluetooth--to fingerprint a location or a person with high accuracy. Most of the real-world locations and things you care about, he says, emit a complex radio-frequency signature based on more than one transmitter. Mobile-phone location services don't use enough of these signals, he says. When it comes to mobile assets like Bluetooth headsets, you don't even have to connect to the other device or "pair" with it. In other words, once you collect the Bluetooth signature from someone you know, you could, with ToothTag technology, get an alert on your mobile device whenever that person came within Bluetooth range of you.

So, you capture a signature of the place/object of interest, then identify what you want to happen when that place/object is in range again. As Rafe notes, there are all sorts of privacy implications here. The first: must you ask permission to capture someone's electronic signature? The app and developer tools are available for Android, with iPhone coming later.

I'm not expecting to see this solution hit it big.