Professor Nagarjuna G from the Gnowledge lab of the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education and hist team are mapping nine villages in Raigad district of Maharashtra Statea in India and adding the data to OpenStreetMap The project grew out of a "one laptop per child" effort in the remote villiages, areas G and his colleague regularly visit. But how to gain access to GPS devices?
It was a year ago that a team led by set out to map these villages in Khalapur taluka of the district bordering Mumbai. With some basic engineering, transparent spectacle cases were turned into Global Positioning System (GPS) devices at a cost of Rs 6,000 each; the contraptions are cheaper than GPS trackers available in the market at Rs 25,000 upwards.
Teachers are developing wikipages about their villages and students are recording stories told by parents and grandparents to document their hometowns.
- India Express
The Mapping Montana lecture series will take place in Helena at 6:30 p.m. on four Thursdays in January and February. Topics run from the historical to the current.
DAT/EM Systems International donated 16 licenses of their SUMMIT EVOLUTION Professional digital stereoplotter to the Geomatics Department in the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) School of Engineering. Valued at over $300,000, this gift forms part of DAT/EM’s on-going initiative to sponsor higher education through software, software support, student training and consultation to the faculty.
- press release
The Geospatial Information Research Center opened in Beijing in early December. It's a partnership between the Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping and the U.K. University of Nottingham.
This new joint venture will promote innovation and technology transfer, leadership training, and staff and student exchange. It will explore funding opportunities and new project work, integrating resources to support long-term collaboration; and it will act as a world-leading incubation centre to realise beneficial combinations of research and development, production and commercialisation.
- press release
[Matthew] Huffine, 53, of Victorville [CA] has been teaching for 24 years, including nine years at Hesperia Junior High and the past 11 years at AAE, the Apple Valley charter school run by the Lewis Center for Educational Research. He has three children, ages 26, 22 and 14 — the youngest now an AAE student.
He started his career in the Forest Service and USGS and come to teaching later. Nows he's being honored as a local person who made a difference in 2011 and a great teacher who brings education beyond the walls. Among his students is one studying GIS at the University of Redlands. Lesson learned: we need GIS users to go into teaching to grow more GIS users.
- Victorville Daily Press
by Adena Schutzberg on 01/04 at 04:24 AM |
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Bob Brunswig, a professor of anthropology at the University of Northern Colorado, discovered many sacred American Indian sites in Rocky Mountain National Park. This summer, he and colleague UNC professor David Diggs’ tested a GIS model they built to predict where others might be; and it worked.
- Greeley Tribune
A water study by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Michigan State University targets the transport pattern of fecal bacteria around beaches in southern Lake Michigan. Lead scientist Zhongfu Ge, Ph.D., said that predicting pathways of contaminants and indicator bacteria is feasible through the use of existing ocean current models that NOAA adapted for the Great Lakes. And, the model can be taken elsewhere, if you plug in the local geodata. It might be possible to use design principles to help keep beaches clean and swimmable!
- EP Online
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell gave a technology award to Staunton for its “Virtualized Public Access Workstations” program, and to JMU for its “Geospatial Semester” program.
- WHSV
University of Kansas students are using “ancient technology” to map trails in Lawrence Kansas. The are using compasses, tape measures and paper. Per the local TV station, it’s called “orientering,” [sic] an ancient form of mapping. I never learned about that in school, though my classmate Jeremy Crampton at Penn State did his dissertation on a sport called orienteering.
- KTKA
by Adena Schutzberg on 09/14 at 06:00 AM |
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Along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the city of Seattle helped the University of Washington launch GeoMapNW in 1998. They’ve joined King County in supporting its work, making geologic and soil maps for many years. But - the city and county have had to pull their funding, about $100,000 a year. Local cities that use the data don’t have the funds to commission maps, leaving just the USGS funding, about $75,000 annually. The upshot: layoffs and the potential the whole project may be shut down. Organizers are looking into charging for data which thus far has been free and for donations to keep the project running.
- Seattle Times
Windsor High School (Colorado) students in the Introduction to GIS class are mapping out park amenities in town using GPSs and software provided by ESRI as part of the Community Atlas project.
What are they learning?
“The students will learn reasoning skills and learn how to use the GPS units. They will also get to learn what is working in the parks and what is not and how to plug in the information they gather into a system where they can create maps and then pass it on to the town.”
- The Coloradoan
Daniel Ames, associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Idaho State, is receiving an Outstanding Researcher award. He developed the open source MapWindow GIS, among other accomplishments. He was recently invited to give the keynote address at a GIS conference in Bahrain. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Idaho National Laboratory.
- Farm and Ranch Guide
And here’s a write up of the MapWindow User Conference.
- USU Statesman
by Adena Schutzberg on 04/14 at 06:00 AM |
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In our weekly podcast covering the week’s news Adena Schutzberg reviews what you need to know about MapInfo Q1 revenues, a univeristy teaching Pictometry, ESRI and Software Oriented Architecture; explores why LiDAR is hot, how yet another GIS packages goes open source, and details how the technology community has come together to find missing Microsoft researcher Jim Gray. The podcast is 12 minutes (~ 4 Mb) and was recorded February 5, 2007.
Here are the show notes. What are show notes? Links to all the things we mention in the audio.
Missed any podcasts? Here’s the index.
by Adena Schutzberg on 02/06 at 01:00 AM |
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