EAST Students Map Hospital and other Education GIS News

By request from the local SWAT team, students in the EAST Lab Program at Paragould High School [AR] are working on a huge project. They are constructing digitized maps, floor-by-floor, of a local hospital to better assist officers in handling an emergency situation.

- KAIT

Complaints from parents about schools manipulating the distance from home to school to give preference to some students in some schools has led a few schools to use Google Maps as a measurement tool.

“It’s the most transparent way to ascertain the distance between the school and the residence of a child. We have also adopted other methods including taking a declaration from the parents over their claims of the distance,” [Ashok] Pandey [principal of Ahlcon International School in Mayur Vihar] told PTI.

The tool used for the measurement and if the measurement is crow flies or along roads is not clear.

- FirstPost

Darren and Sandy Van Soye will spend the next 14 months travelling the world and teaching geography per a press release from Pricess Cruises.

The couple, who are chronicling their journey at www.TrekkingthePlanet.net, were inspired to plan their trek after they saw first-hand what a positive impact a previous family trip around the globe had on their two daughters' lives. Their full travel itinerary incorporates five different Princess Cruises voyages, totaling 96 days at sea. Both the first and last legs of their journey, plus three legs in between, will be aboard a Princess cruise ship.  ...

In total, the Van Soyes' journey will cover 50 countries on six continents over the course of the 424-day world tour. Throughout their travels, the couple will share 60 different geography education modules they have created as well as pictures and videos of their travels for anyone in the world to use. So far more than 700 classrooms around the world will be following their travels, representing 50,000 students.

Would you use such a resource in your teaching?

- press release

The Geographical Sciences Committee of the Royal Irish Academy aims to support the development of geographical studies throughout the island of Ireland. Following on from this we are pleased to provide an introductory resource [pdf] on the geography of climate justice prepared by the Committee (with support from the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency) for dissemination to geography students across Ireland. The resource is intended for use with transition year students in the Republic and for students from GCSE level upwards in Northern Ireland. 

Royal Irish Academy via @theaag

Breast Cancer Hotspot App and other Health GIS News

GE is hosting a HealthyMagination Challenge to support innovation ideas to fight cancer. One of the competitors proposes a Breast Cancer Geospatial Application.

We propose to utilize the publicly available (e.g. Census, HHS, SEER, etc) and privately available data (e.g. IMS Health’s PharMetrics) to create a “heat map” that is able to aggregate the rate of incidence of breast cancer, by stage at the time of diagnosis. The target is to identify top 15% regions or hot spots where rate of late stage cancer diagnosis is atypically higher than normal. It can be inferred that if earlier diagnosis can be achieved in these regions, then increasing number of patients would be detected at an earlier stage of cancer than current state, thereby improving the overall survival. Thus, recommendations can be made to organizations (government and non-government) to direct the educational/screening program resources to these identified “hot spots”. 

Winners of different types of support will be announced in early 2012.

via @jsteffensson

A Canadian Medical Association Journal editorial says Canadian hospitals should do away with hospital parking fees, arguing they add avoidable stress to patients.

A Google Map shows the variation in parking fees in Eastern Ontario.

- CBC

The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.

The New York Times also includes a map of the distribution of demand by state.

- New York Times

Health GIS Tidbits - 5/3/11

ESRI Canada congratulates St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto for being selected as a 2011 Laureate winner for innovation by the International Data Group's (IDG) Computerworld Honors Program.  The annual award program honors visionary applications of information technology promoting positive social, economic and educational change.  ESRI Canada nominated St. Michael's Hospital for BIO.DIASPORA, a scientific platform that leverages ESRI's geographic information system (GIS) technology integrated with other solutions to analyze the relationship between commercial air travel and the global spread of emerging infectious disease threats.  The project was selected from over 1,000 international entries, and joins more than 250 others from 23 countries as Laureates in this year's program.

- press release

Researchers are planning to create a detailed map showing levels of radioactive contamination around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

About 300 experts from Osaka University, Hiroshima University, the University of Tokyo and other academic and research institutions will start collecting soil samples in May at up to 10,000 locations in 1,500 designated areas, mainly in Fukushima Prefecture, to create a soil-pollution map.

The map will be designed primarily to help designate evacuation areas.

Asahi.com

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today introduced an Internet-based mapping tool that pinpoints the location of "food deserts" around the country and provides data on population characteristics of census tracts where residents have limited access to affordable and nutritious foods.

ArcGIS API for Flex is the client tech.

- press release