GIS Ed Weekly: What defines an advanced GIS course?

Resources for teaching and learning

Today UK News: The geography of AI - "AI activity in the U.S. is highly concentrated in a short list of ‘superstar’ aggregations and early adopter hubs, often arrayed along the coasts"

Twitter: Carl Churchill notes: "You can extend the interactivity of #StoryMaps with live charts made with #d3 and @observablehq notebooks. Here is a chart sitting in a notebook, hosted in a #Github pages site and then embedded right into a Story Map."

COSMOS: Wired for sound: The observatory that’s always listening - "The Australian Acoustic Observatory (A2O) is a continental-scale acoustic sensor network, designed to collect data over five years from 90 sites across seven different Australian ecoregions." 

NASA: Landsat Science Videos and Podcasts - Many of these were produced in the last few months. Via my colleague Delphine Khanna.

Boston Magazine: His Mission: To Map, and Eat, Every Cider Doughnut in New England - "One Cambridge man's quest to sample every cider doughnut has led to a list of 191 purveyors and counting." 

Yale News:  Analysis unlocks secret of the Vinland Map — it’s a fake - "The Vinland Map, which purports to be a 15th-century map with a pre-Columbian depiction of the North American Coast, was drawn with modern inks, suggests a new analysis by Yale scientists and conservators."

UC Davis: New Model for Solving Novel Problems Uses Mental Map - It seems decision making may take advantage of "grid cells" that are also used in solving spatial problems.

CNBC: This map shows how Amazon is rapidly growing its air fleet across the U.S. - "As a result of recent expansion, 70% of the U.S. population now lives within 100 miles of an Amazon Air airport."

Education

Twitter: Randall Hale writes: "Saying 'Advanced' and pushing for a good working knowledge of QGIS means squat. People taking the course had no clue what geopackage was and very little idea of what 'basic things' qgis did. So that's a problem. Next adjustment will be more flexible." A confirmation that education is messy, no matter what you teach or at what level. 

Geography and diversity

Colorado State: State health department, CSU team start work on environmental justice mapping tool - "CO EnviroScreen will enable users to identify disproportionately impacted communities based on the definition in Colorado’s Environmental Justice Act (HB21-1266). Its fundamental goal is to help users maximize funding and resources for interventions to avoid, reduce, and repair environmental harms. For example, the Environmental Justice Advisory Board at CDPHE will use EnviroScreen to determine where to distribute environmental justice grants created by the new law."

The HR Director: Remove geography from the hiring equation, increase diversity of talent - The promise from one company: "no matter where you live, the compensation is based on the role, not the location."

Awards

Indiana University: NASA grant aids geography professor's climate research on dryland regions - "New research by Indiana University professor Natasha MacBean, supported by a NASA grant, aims to better understand dryland ecosystems, which cover about 40 percent of the Earth's surface. Drylands support about 38 percent of the world's population but are sensitive to moisture availability."

URISA's Vanguard Cabinet Announces the Results of the 2021 University Student and Young Professional Digital Competition - There were eight finalists and three winners.

Programs and courses

UW Eau Claire: Brady and Jeanne Foust donate $1M to establish UW-Eau Claire scholarship - Dr. Brady Foust, a professor emeritus of geography at UW-Eau Claire, and his wife, Jeanne now retired from Esri, are donating $1 million to a scholarship for geography students. The couple is also donating $1 million to Pablo Center at the Confluence.

Events

GeoCapabilities Webinar – "REGISTER FOR THIS WEBINAR to find out about the GeoCapabilities approach addressing teaching challenging subjects from a social justice perspective." On September 14 2021 18.00 CET members of the GeoCapabilities 3 project will present the outcomes of the project. 

Spatially Enabling Campuses with ArcGIS is a three-part webinar series. The first webinar, Spatially Enabling Campus Utility Data, will be September 23 at 9 a.m. (PT). "The series will cover how campus utilities can leverage ArcGIS Solutions to quickly configure ArcGIS to manage electric, gas, sewer, stormwater, and water distribution data. We will elaborate on how ArcGIS Solutions adds new, prebuilt capabilities to existing implementations and gives campus utilities a system of record, a system of engagement, and a system of insight in a complete data model."

People

UNE: McKayla Arsenault ’22 joins UNE North as GIS and communications intern - "Arsenault will assist the institute in its communications efforts, including the use of geographic information systems (GIS) to help tell the UNE North story."

Pitt: Alumna Chases Opportunities at NASA - "Recent alumna Stephanie Jiménez (A&S ’21) spent the summer in NASA’s DEVELOP program. Her mission: to 'integrate NASA Earth observations with society to foster future innovation and cultivate the professionals of tomorrow by addressing diverse environmental issues today.'"