GIS Ed Weekly: Remembering Michael Jones and Kobe Bryant

On and Off Campus

 

Yahoo News: Web app helps GPs map out best route for vaccination of housebound patients - "VaxiMap, created by two students from Magdalen College, Oxford, comes up with the optimal route and has already been used for more than 61,000 home visit vaccinations in Britain in the last few weeks."

 

Worcester Telegram: Clark to partner with city, local organizations on $10M workforce training grant - Clark University received a U.S. Department of Labor H-1B One Workforce Grant and will collaborate with Quinsigamond Community College, the City of Worcester, the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, and MassHire Central, among others. "Participants will be able to take part in on-the-job training, paid internships, and apprenticeship programs, the university said, and become prepared for jobs like information security analyst, GIS technician, software developer, and computer support specialist."

UChicago: UChicago computer science team receives $1.2M to map the digital divide in Chicago - "The project will collect new, fine-grained data on internet access and performance in thousands of Chicago households, the physical infrastructure of internet service to those neighborhoods, and human factors such as affordability, digital skills, and usage for education and employment services." 

 

Penn State: Sanborn Fire Insurance maps newly available online through University Libraries - As of Jan. 1, materials published or copyrighted in 1925 became part of the public domain and are now freely available for use. Among the most anticipated collections of such materials in the Penn State University Libraries are the Pennsylvania Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of 1925, a collection of maps of 69 towns consisting of 1,600 individual map sheets, most notably four volumes each of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

 

UNG: Junior designs app for Chattahoochee Riverkeeper - "Catlin 'Cat' Corrales developed and designed a GIS app for CRK's Neighborhood Water Watch program. The app would allow volunteers to physically visit different areas of the Chattahoochee River waters and use their smartphone to drop a location pin." The junior is pursing a degree in environmental spatial analysis.

 

University of Illinois: Culture shapes willingness to share personal data to reduce COVID-19 spread - "Junghwan Kim, a graduate student in geography and geographic information science at the U. of I., co-led a study of people’s attitudes toward sharing their geographic data with public health officials."

 

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Critical School Geography - An e-book from John Huckle that "explores how school geography guided by critical social theory can address the UN’s sustainable development goals." Per Antipode, "John Huckle is a retired teacher educator who was a member of the group that edited Contemporary Issues in Geography and Education in the 1980s. He has long argued for a more critical and relevant school geography and has written on the subject’s links to moral and political education and its potential to act as a vehicle for environmental, development and citizenship education. The lack of a single text to introduce school geography teachers to critical geography and education encouraged him to write Critical School Geography." Via @GIPedagogy.

Business Insider: A hotel in Aruba is offering workstations on the beach for digital nomads — see the setup - Geography matters. Compare the Aruba version to the Somerville, MA version. The latter, outside my local library offers heaters, light and wi-fi 24/7. Via @businessinsider.

 

Aruba

 

 

 

 

 

Somerville Public Library

 

New York Times: America Has a GPS Problem - I often ask applicants for jobs and scholarships to explain how GPS works. I'm trying to confirm they have a model of it in their mind and explore how they can describe that model. Now I think I need to add a follow up: "Is GPS at risk? What could break it?"

 

Mapping for a Sustainable World - The e-book, from the UN and ICA is available for free download. Via @RobertERoth, one of the collaborators.

MIT Tech Review: Envisioning better health outcomes for all - "The crucial role of geographic thinking to address the pandemic needs goes beyond dashboards to aid all communities." Sponsored content "in Partnership with Esri." 

Kobe Murals: A fan provides maps and details of murals memorializing the basketball player and his daughter after their deaths last year. 

Events and Opportunities

Storytelling & Google Earth 2/9 at 7:00 - "Come learn how to make tours of your own using the new Google Earth Creation tool. This powerful creation tool allows our students to combine literacy & writing with an in-place based experience giving them a global voice." For NYSCSS members(NY statewide professional organization of social studies educators) only, but membership fees are low.

UC GIScience Symposium: Students are invited to submit an abstract for the June event to the Student GIScience Research session. There are monetary prizes. Deadline February 1st. Via @UCGIScience.

 

Meanwhile in our Industry

 

Techcrunch: Ex-Uber team raises $6M seed for geospatial analytics platform Unfolded.ai - "Some of the first customers of the Unfolded platform have been in agtech, including a company called Indigo Agriculture, which focuses on helping farmers grow crops and livestock sustainably. Unfolded sees potential in many markets where location data intersects business, but for now, remains mostly heads down building out its platform and readying itself for more customers."

 

PC Mag: 25 Google Maps Tricks You Need to Try - Not a bad list, especially for those who don't use the app too often. 

 

Programs and courses

 

Papua New Guinea Today: PNG University of Technology Survey Department Advances with Drones of Aerial Surveys - "The Phantom RTK Surveying and Mapping Combo drone has been installed with software that will be used by the Surveying and Geography Information System (GIS) Studies of the Department while the MAVIC2 PRO Done will be used by the Property Studies." 

People

The Atlantic: How Michael Jones Changed Our Daily Lives - James Fallows explains how Jones, creator of  Google Earth, redefined how everyone sees the world. See also:  Geospatial World: Goodbye, Michael Jones, the man who gave the power of maps in our hands and this San Francisco Mercury obituary. I met Jones a few times and remember the conversation I had with him about his watch collection over lunch at this event.

Jamestown Sun: Cathy Goehring receives teaching award from ND Geographic Alliance - Cathy Goehring is the recipient of the 2020 North Dakota Geography Teacher of the Year, given by the North Dakota Geographic Alliance. She's a 13 year veteran third-grade teacher at Wishek Public School. 

Esri

February GIS in Higher Education Chat: Tuesday, February 2nd , 2020 | 12 NOON (ET), 9 AM (PT): Introducing the new ArcGIS Field Maps:  The All-in-One App for Field Data Collection.

Geospatial Semester: Jason Smolinski, a Geospatial Analysis Teacher at Fairfax County Public Schools, developed this video to advertise his courses to next fall's students. Jason has a big fan club here at Esri.