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According to a February 17th article in the Wall Street Journal:
The Pentagon's latest spending plan marks a little-noticed but important shift for the space industry, scaling back a push to use commercial satellites to supplement the military's communication and space efforts.
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.
The Univeristy of Minnesota has some great, inexpensive courses in LiDAR coming up. Some are full already.
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.
Want to know what a tree species is on your hike? Take a picture of the leaf and Leafsnap will help you identify it. The app will also upload your image and location to help create a database of species distribution. The free app is form free app developed by Columbia University in New York, the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution.
How about mapping the local Halloween decorations? Oddity: the story is hosted at Castro Valley, CA Patch but the map is from Google built with ZeeMaps. I wonder if the folks writing for Patch are aware they are owned by the same company as MapQuest? Or does MapQuest not yet have a crowdsourcing solution? Or maybe its going to be mqVibe?
NASA is crowdsourcing exploration of the ocean bottom.
Using a new platform which takes a square kilometer of ocean-bottom imagery and parses it out into an easily navigable, compelling user interface, we humbly ask you to help find scientifically relevant items, in order to allow us to outline them for a broad representation of the reef. Then, traverse planning scientists can then use this aggegated data to target, or confirm the interest items for further study. We can't do this kind of science on our own. We need your help today and again when we send humans beyond the surly bonds of Earth.
- SpaceRef
