Visionary Geospatial Leaders Interviewed (Not Jack Dangermond)

Read about  Howard Veregin, Wisconsin's State Cartographer in Good Magazine.

Listen to FCC GIO Michael Byrne on FedNewsRadio.

CDC Offers Interactive GIS for AIDS and other Health GIS News

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has launched a new interactive web tool—the NCHHSTP Atlas—that allows users to create maps, charts, and tables using HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted disease (STD) data collected by CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention (NCHHSTP).

Amont other things it offers data for a number of diseases (AIDS, HIV, Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and primary and secondary syphilis and more to come), for a number of years (2000-2009) and unlike other visualization tools, is powered by GIS (ArcGIS for Flex).

- AIDS.gov Blog

A Legionnaire's disease outbreak popped up in Wisconsin. But geography came to the rescue, as did good surveillance. Thomas Haupt an epidemiologist for the Wisconsin Division of Public Health explains how it was tracked to a hospital waterfall. 

Well, it started off with our routine surveillance for Legionnaires' disease in Wisconsin. We did notice that within a four week period in this small area we had at least eight cases of Legionnaires' disease. Our follow-up is to ask questions as to where they may have been in the 10 days prior to their onset of illness. At least six of the patients identified that they had been in one particular hospital.

- NPR

On Curacao a GIS is helping health workers keep track of efforts to minimize dengue fever, reports of breeding grounds and the levying of fines against those not taking care in prevention.

- Amigoe

Education GIS Tidbits - 6/7/11

A Vietnam map was created with 1,500 students wearing blue uniforms standing on the Nha Trang beach Sunday to mark the start of this year’s Vietnam Sea and Islands Week in the city.

The Paracel and Spratly archipelagoes were included in the breathing map on Nha Trang City’s main square.
A Vietnam map made by 1,500 standing students on the Nha Trang beach on June 5, 2011 (Photo: Tuoi Tre)

The joining students stood hand in hand firmly on the April 2 Square to convey the meaning of Vietnam’s territory.

I wonder if this is educational in any way?

- SGGP

Recently, Fox Valley Technical College students enrolled in Bruce Cecka's Surveying II class helped clarify the park's [Peninsula State Park, WI] infrastructure, including the 40-mile trail system. Forty students spent two days at Peninsula State Park, using a global positioning system to map everything from roads to sewer covers.

- Appleton Post Crescent

Kristin Somerville, 15, also a freshman [at Wausau Engineering & Global Leadership Academy], melded a variety of academic categories into her project. It was an interactive computer map that focused on the German concentration camps of the Holocaust.

She created a program that uses Google maps and allows the user to click on a map of Europe at camp sites to get information about those camps. The user can focus on the details of the camps, or widen the map to look at a larger area.

- Wausau Daily Herald

Local (City/County/State) GIS Tidbits - 6/3/11

Several city, county and federal agencies and nonprofit organizations in an around Helena Montana have come together to for all-encompassing interactive map of trails.

The interactive map, called the Helena Area Trails Viewer, is the result of a cooperative pilot project among the City of Helena, Lewis and Clark County, PPLT, HNF, Montana FWP, the Montana State Library, the Montana Department of Administration Base Map Service Center, the Montana Geographic Information Clearing House, Adventure Cycling Association, BroadwaterCounty and Jefferson County.

Tech: GeoCortex

- Helena Independent Record

Where are the highest risk areas for wolf attacks in Wisconsin? UW Madison researchers have put together a map.

...of the parts of Wisconsin within 60 miles of a wolf pack -- most of the state, excluding the southern and southeastern-most regions -- only one-third of the study area was found to be at risk of wolf attacks on livestock. The highest-risk areas comprise just 10.5 percent of the state, concentrated in the northwest and a few pockets near Lake Superior, researchers said.

- UPI
- press release with actual map

I did not realize that having a GIS means lower flood insurance rates. So explains St. Tammany Parish President Kevin Davis said Thursday.

According to Davis, his staff worked with FEMA for two years to get their community rating down.

“We still don't have the levees, which would give us credits, so it's things like green space," Davis said. "GIS, our mapping system, our public works system on all of our drainage canals, those kinds of things give us higher points."

- WWLTV (New Orleans)