I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there.

A new study by National Geographic explains a lot about the state of the world: Most US young people can't find Iraq on map: study Reuters WASHINGTON - Most American young people can't find Iraq on a map, even though U.S. troops have been there for more than three years, according to a new geographic literacy study released on Tuesday. Other exciting facts: - Fewer than three in 10 think it important to know the locations of countries in the news. - While the outsourcing of jobs to India has been a major U.S. business story, 47 percent could not find the Indian subcontinent on a map of Asia. - While Israeli-Palestinian strife has been in the news for the entire lives of the respondents, 75 percent were unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East. - Half of respondents said it was "absolutely necessary" to know how to read a map, but a large percentage lacked basic practical map-reading skills. For example, most young people were able to locate a port city on a fictitious map, but one-third would have gone in the wrong direction in the event of an evacuation. There were some positive signs: young people who use two or more different online news sources show a greater knowledge of geography. Indeed, the full report is actually more interesting and complex than the widely circulated factoids, and good reading for those of us interested in education, outreach, and better map making -- see it here: http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/pdf/RoperPoll2006.pdf And read about National Geographic's education program aimed at filling some of the gaps here: http://www.mywonderfulworld.org/ (you can even take the test yourself)

Bush-Interrpution?

In reply to Esther's posting a while back, there was an article published in the March Ed. of 'Geospatial Soultions' about the Bush Administration's budget reguest for 2007. Most of us could probably guess as to what the administration wants to spend it's/our money on, so, I guess the article isn't too insightful in that regard. Be that it may, it took me 10 min. or so to scan the article so I ask that somebody out there glance it over. Here's the PDF Spatial Programs Just for good humor, go ahead and post a comment as to what you think the Bush. Admin might spend it's money on next year. Go ahead and be creative... you know they always are.

Cabspotting

Cabspotting is a pretty sweet art project from the explOratorium that tracks San Francisco cabs in near-real time. Via boingboing

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Google Maps making more news w/ Platial.com

Check out Platial.com, which was covered on NPR on Friday. Is Google Maps the start of the new autobiogeography phenomenon?

Virtual Earth Plugin for NASA World Wind

click thumbnail to see larger screen capture. There is now a plugin for NASA World Wind that allows you to connect to Microsoft's Windows Live Local. More details can be found on the Nasa World Wind Wiki and the developer's personal blog. download plugin here

Affinity for London

Digitally Distributed Environments is a great blog for all sorts of goodies that revolve around the visualization of London. There are a number (46 and counting) of panarama's that can be viewed w/ your quicktime browser plugin (shift zooms in, ctrl zooms out, and left-click drag pans the image). There are also a number of .kmz's and .kml's that you can download for google earth, and a recently posted Lidar movie as well. If you use a news aggregator, just subscribe to http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/atom.xml for all the latest syndications.

USGS 1906 Earthquake Simulations

The USGS has a page with some great simulations of the 1906 earthquake along the San Andreas fault, including some very cool animations. Via boingboing, as usual.

Add this to your GIS bibliography

Since some readers of this blog entered the fields of GIS and Remote Sensing fairly recently, it's possible that you may have never encountered McNoleg (1996), a keystone paper that even now, 10 years after its initial publication, deserves to be widely cited in the geospatial literature. I strongly recommend that you read it carefully tomorrow (Saturday, April 1st).

McNoleg, O., 1996, "The integration of GIS, remote sensing, expert systems and adaptive co-kriging for environmental habitat modeling of the Highland Haggis using object-oriented, fuzzy-logic and neural-network techniques," Computers & Geosciences 22(5): 585-588. Abstract: A report is given on several major breakthroughs in geomatics, and their application is demonstrated on a particularly difficult habitat modeling exercise...

Read the rest here in pdf format... (I may take this link down within a week or so but fear not - the article is available online through the UCB library).

Landsat-interruption?

I was reading this article today that my 92 year old grandma saved for me, in El Nuevo Herald (its in Spanish) -March 16th. It discussed how the Bush administration has cut funding for NASA and its corresponding satellites, such as Landsat. EOS stated that Landsat is in risk of interruption. Has anyone else run across articles discussing this? Also, I agree with Abe that google instant messenger would be a good idea.

A knight for open geodata

Recently, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the Internet by beating up Al Gore and taking it, along with lunch money) spoke out about opening up geodata from the British Ordinance Survey (analagous to the USGS?) for free public use. Seems Europeans are really starting to push for open geodata.