Apple mobile mapping software? coming soon!

We mac users are all a-twitter about the news of an impending Apple mapping software. Here is a sample from NPR:

There's been speculation for months that Apple will try to elbow Google's popular Maps app aside on the iPhone and unveil its own map app, and some of the best evidence yet comes from Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.  The paper looked into the reasons for the impending switch and the broader implications it would have for the smartphone market.  The article continues...

The new software is rumored to be leaner, meaner, and packing a rad 3D visualization capability. It will be unveiled as soon as next week at the annual Apple developer conference in San Francisco.

Deal reached for tracking Sierra Nevada wildlife

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/04/4537900/deal-reached-for-tracking-sierra.html

The U.S. Forest Service and conservation groups have reached an agreement to strengthen monitoring of Sierra Nevada wildlife.

Solar Eclipse

On sunday a solar eclipse will be crossing over the Western United States. This link has a few maps of the path of the eclipse, scroll to the bottom for an animation of the eclipse path.

http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/2012-annular-eclipse-of-the-sun-china-to-texas-in-may

SNAMP feature in Cal Ag

A nice article about SNAMP is now in the recent version of California Agriculture.  In the same edition is a great series of articles about the 150 anniversary of the Morrill Land-Grant College Act which made higher education available to those in every social class, and brought practical information to a nation that was then more than 50% farmers. Cooperative Extension was born with this Act, and it continues to evolve today. A summary by Janet L. White is here.

California Agriculture 66(2):39-39. DOI: 10.3733/ca.v066n02p39a. April-June 2012.

In 1862, in a nation torn by secession and Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed a visionary law that laid the cornerstone of public higher education. The Morrill Land-Grant College Act gave federal public lands to states, allotting 30,000 acres for each Senator and Representative. The total endowment was $7.55 million, then the value of 17.4 million acres. Today, more than 100 land-grant universities serve the nation and the world, including what many believe is the greatest public university in the world, the University of California.

On the 150th anniversary of its passage, we pay tribute to this profoundly democratic law, which made higher education available to those in every social class, and brought practical information to a nation that was then more than 50% farmers. It was followed by other landmark education laws: the 1887 Hatch Act, establishing Agricultural Experiment Stations at universities; a second Morrill Act in 1890, initiating regular funding; the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, establishing Cooperative Extension; and in 1944, the GI Bill. Today, UC's land-grant university thrives as the Agricultural Experiment Stations at UC Berkeley, Davis and Riverside, and in UC Cooperative Extension offices that serve every county.

See see pages 40 to 49 for special coverage of the Morrill Act and its role in building the University of California.

Livehoods: Dynamic maps of place via social networking

Livehoods is an interesting research project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University which maps social networking activity and patterns using tweets and check-ins to examine the hidden structure of cities and neighborhoods. For example below on the map each point represents a check-in location. Groups of nearby points of the same color represent a Livehood. Within a Livehood statistics are calculated aggregating check-ins overtime and depicts how a place is used. For more information on Livehoods click here.

Livehoods Screenshot

cal-adapt article in new BAAMA journal

cal-adapt.org is featured in the Spring 2012 BAAMA journal. In an article led by Kevin and Brian, new tools in the cal-adapt.org website are highlighted. For example, one of the most serious threats to the public health of Californians are extreme heat events. Climate models, developed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, project that extreme heat events will increase in frequency, intensity, and duration given future climate change. Cal-adapt.org shows future projected number of heat waves, timing of extreme heat days, maximum duration of heat waves, and daily high temperatures. Check out the new tools here.

Report on the April 19 Careers in GIS event at UC Berkeley

GIS @ Berkeley

Careers in GIS

On April 19 the College of Natural Resources and the College of Environmental Design held an informative workshop on Careers in GIS.  This workshop covered many aspects of Geographic Information Sciences: resources on the Berkeley campus, options for the new Minor in Geographic Information Science and Technology, and highlighted areas of GIS research.  Over 40 people attended, and we had a lively program, including a welcome from Jennifer Wolch (Dean of CED), Doug Richardson (Executive Director of the AAG), Maggi Kelly (Professor in ESPM); Scott Stephens (Professor in ESPM) talked about his work using GIS and spatial data for forest fire modeling, Mei-Po Kwan (Visiting Professor in Geography) discussed GIS Analysis for transportation and health studies, highlighting some of her fascinating work in spatial-temporal analysis of human movement; and Paul Waddell (Professor in CRP) showed highlights of his GIS and urban mapping, including UrbanSim, a very novel open source approach to city planning and accessibility studies. In addition, Jon Ridener from the Earth Sciences and Map Library discussed the GeoData@UCBerkeley, a GIS data portal and repository created by the UC Berkeley Library. Wow! All great stuff.

The event was brought to you by: College of Natural Resources, College of Environmental Design, Geospatial Innovation Facility. For more information on GIS at Berkeley, please see the GIS @ Berkeley website.

New high resolution coastal elevation data for California

The California Ocean Protection Council has released state-wide high resolution elevation data for coastal California and much of San Francisco Bay. LiDAR data were collected between 2009-2011 and cover nearly 3,800 square miles. Data can be download from NOAA Coastal Services Center's Digital Coast website:

http://csc.noaa.gov/dataviewer/index.html?action=advsearch&qType=in&qFld=projectid&qVal=1005 

http://csc.noaa.gov/dataviewer/webfiles/metadata/ca2010_coastal_template.html 
http://csc.noaa.gov/dataviewer/webfiles/metadata/ca2010_coastal_dem.html 

Follow up on Supreme Court gps+privacy case

From the NYTimes. Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool. By ERIC LICHTBLAU, Published: March 31, 2012.

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

A GPS tracker. The Supreme Court recently ruled that such a device placed on a suspect's car was an unreasonable search.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that such a device placed on a suspect's car was an unreasonable search (but sidestepepd the question of how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies). The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

Lidar + OPALs geolunch and workshop next week!

Full waveform lidarOur colleague Bernhard Hofle from the University of Heidelberg will be here next week as part of an international exchange project: Airborne Laser Scanning for 3D Vegetation Characterization: Set-up of an International Signature Database. Bernhard is interested in Open Source GI and Spatial Database Management Systems, Object-based image and point cloud analysis, radiometric calibration of full-waveform airborne LiDAR data, and other topics.

Bernhard is part of a group that now has one of the first Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) systems worldwide with full-waveform recording capability (upgraded Riegl VZ-400). Deeper understanding and substantially improved analysis of the laser shot backscatter of natural objects by having direct access to full-waveform signatures and physical observables are expected. The unique system will be applied in new research projects dealing with the extraction of 3D geoinformation in e.g. precision farming, geoarchaelogy, geomorphology and forestry. Furthermore, an extensive web-based database of reference signatures for known objects will be developed based on calibrated waveform features derived by TLS.

He is a leader in analysis of discrete and waveform lidar data in urban and forest applications and one of the developers of the cool OPALS lidar software. He'll be giving a geolunch and a workshop afterwards on the software. The geolunch is 1-2, then we will stick around and learn about OPALS.