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.
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.
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
