Date archive for December, 2007
| December 13, 2007Vita è bella Not So For ItaliansGeographyA study by Italian economist, Luisa Corrado, found Italians to be the least happiest of 15 Western European nations (Denmark was ranked the happiest ). An article in the New York Times details the decline of the Italian way of life. Eleven percent of Italians live in poverty and 15% have trouble making their salaries ... read more UPS Mostly RightFeaturesSomething you don’t see very often is a UPS truck trying to make a left hand turn. The New York Times Sunday Magazine pointed out that by avoiding left hand turns where reasonable, UPS “shaved 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and ... read more  Neighborhood PostersMapsThe way different artists view their environments is always fascinating. ORK Posters was started by Jenny Beorkrem, a graphic designer who was looking for a neighborhood Chicago poster but couldn’t find any that appealed to her. Using a modern typesetting, ORK Posters visualize neighborhoods in Chicago, Brooklyn, Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston through the use of ... read more December 12, 2007Raster TutorialsLearning GISListed here are resources for working with raster data. Learn how to work with digital elevation models (DEM) and other raster GIS data in order to preform spatial analysis. Resources are organized by software application. General Raster Tutorials Remote Sensing Tutorial Introduction Introductory tutorial on remote sensing provided by the Applied Information Sciences Branch at NASA’s Goddard Space ... read more GPS Gang TrackingGPSSolving the murder of a young woman killed in a drive-by shooting was made easy by the fact that one of the seven gang members involved was wearing a GPS bracelet issued to him by the Los Angeles Police Department. On November 12, authorities starting tracking the movements of about twenty paroled gang members through GPS. ... read more December 10, 2007GeoSciML – Geologic Markup LanguageProgrammingGeoSciML is a markup language specific to the geosciences and is designed to support the exchange of geoscience information. It is being developed through the Interoperability Working Group of the Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI), a commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). GeoSciML – the CGI Datamodel and ... read more How Well Do You Know Your World?GeographyA fun way to learn about where places are in the world is to take advantage of the plethora of free geography games on the Internet. One such game is “How Well Do You Know Your World?” The object of the game is to accurately locate places on the world map as quickly as possible. ... read more December 5, 2007GPS Not Welcomed HereGPSSome British towns, up in arms over repeatedly experiencing trucks getting stuck on roads too narrow to accomodate them, are moving toward the drastic step of asking companies that supply mapping data to in-vehicle GPS navigation systems to remove roadways that are inappropriate for commercial travel. In an article from the NY Times: “We’ve said, ‘Just take ... read more Volunteered GeographyCommunity, Data, Issues in GISMichael Goodchild, a professor of Geography at UC Santa Barbara, explores the historical and current trends of collaborative geographic data creation in what he terms “volunteered geography” in an article published in GeoJournal. In dissecting this phenomenon, Goodchild seeks to answer the following questions: “what drives people to do this, how accurate are the results, will they ... read more December 4, 2007Map UsabilityCartographyAdvances in web technology and mapping have triggered countless discussions on how online mapping technology is changing how people use and make maps. An interesting study by Thomas Porathe from Mälardalen University in Sweden on User-Centered Map Design was presented at the June 2007 Usability Professionals’ Conference held in Austin, Texas. Porathe’s study looked at how the human ... read more |
