Local Politics on the National Stage

NPR's All Things Considered ran a piece on a New Jersey group that is trying to help influence the outcome of the 2008 election.

Highland Park's mayor, Meryl Frank, explains why it is so hard for a candidate to get through to voters in the Garden State:

"You're in New Jersey now. Nobody believes in anything; they see politicians indicted every other week. We're asking people to believe in you. You need to inspire us. You need to tell us who you are, what's your story, what do you care about."

That pretty much sums up the impact of NJ politics on our perception of national candidates. It is a pretty high bar for them to get over.

A Grand walk

I've walked on the glass floor at the CN Tower in Toronto where you are looking straight down for about 1,400 feet. It was startling how hard it was for my brain to handle that, even though I never usually have issues with heights.



So, this proposal for a glass walkway 4000 feet above the floor of the Grand Canyon sounds utterly exhilarating until you read about the 9,000 acre development coming on its heels and then maybe it is alittle more frightening. If you read this report from the LA TImes you'll see that it is more complicated than it sounds. The Hualapai Indian Reservation really needs to generate some income and share the wealth with the folks who've already dug in and had some impact in the area. The question they are grappling with is whether this is the way to do it.

Housing Scholars 2007

Here's a great opportunity to get a prestigous form of recognition, a paid internship, and make a little impact in this world all at once. The Wachovia Housing Scholars program is a great summer opportunity for students in Environemtnal Planning and Design. And as EP&D students you should be quite competitive, especially if you have GIS skills. If you are serious about it you should know that the deadline is coming fast. I'd be happy to share what I know if you have the time.

Professionals and lawsuits

Those of you interested in the proper role for mapping and GIS professionals might want to keep on eye on a current lawsuit. The AAG has a website up about it where they say:

The case of MAPPS v. United States, currently pending in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, could have drastic consequences for the entire mapping community, including the GIS industry. Simply put, an adverse outcome could lead to the exclusion of everyone but licensed engineers and surveyors from federal government contracts for “mapping” services of every sort and description – not just those mapping services traditionally performed by surveyors.

They will add an update after the February 23rd hearing.

Survey on architecture

What're the best example of architecture in America? Survey says:
Empire State Building

The AIA worked with Harris to conduct a poll of America's top architecture. The White House ranks high too. New York City and Washington DC absolutely clean up.

Of course, another survey shows that only 10% of Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

GIS&T Body of Knowledge

What are all of the pieces of information that make up the total information base of geographic information science and technology? Well, the UCGIS has made a first effort at listing out all of concepts, ideas, and technologies that make up the field of GIS&T. The Body of Knowledge captures the breadth of the field in great detail in a new book published by AAG for UCGIS. It is cheap and very popular.


Even experts in the field won't be experts in all these areas, but all of these areas make up the field. How many do you know?

Defiant Gardens' During Wartime

March 1st we are having a guest lecture by Kenny Helphand, an Oregon landscape architecture professor, as part of his book tour promoting Defiant Gardens. National Public Radio posted a great set of photos to accompany the "'Defiant Gardens' During Wartime" audio story that they ran last year on Memorial Day. You can read or listen. They also reprinted an excerpt from Helphand's book on the topic.

It is great to see landscape architecture getting that sort of visibility. It is especially great to have someone like Kenny Helphand coming to Rutgers to share these stories with us. Jean Marie and I saw him present a small part of this material in Vancouver last summer and it was truly moving.

An Early Birthday Present

President Bush released his new budget this week and it included a nice birthday gift for the National Parks. In preparation for the NPS' 100th birthday he is giving them what is being reported as their biggest budget increase ever. Or, at least, his hypothetical balenced budget does that and now Congress has to sort through all of the other issues and see if they can preserve that reality.

Unassigned Reading: Metropolis

Although Metropolis Magazine is considered a print medium, their web presence is great. Their recent feature on the Greening of the Ivory Tower was a great call to those of us at the U to clean up our acts some. And they currently have two top structural engineers' picks for the Top Ten structural acheivements of all time.

We subscribe to the hard copies and keep them in the LA Reading Room. Stop by and absorb.

Does it matter when it is 10 degrees?

Washington DC is pushing forward a plan to make the city more pedestrian friendly. Not that it seems to matter on a day like today, but safer streets and better crossings always fit the bill. And a city worth exploring on feet sounds like a solid plan.

Kids With Cameras

http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/home/

Showing once again how many different ways there are to change the world.

Transit mapping

Sure, you can use MapQuest to find the fastest driving route from the casino in Atlantic City to the poorhouse on Baltic Ave. But can you find the fastest transit-based route across Eugene, OR? Yes, with Google Transit you can. I know that many will complain since our major cities (NY, Philly, DC) aren't included. But play around with Seattle (which has a pretty dense transit infrastructure) and you can see the potential.

When this thing learns to help you jump from city to city (even within a region) it could really start to get some people riding the rails. For my geomatics students, what sort of information do you think is required to make this thing work? What do you imagine the algorithm looks like?

Free Games

Maybe one of you can tell me how many of these are fun. As for me, I don't even have fun to download and play any of the top 101 free computer games online. I certainly don't have time to clean up my hard drive if they have virsues. Maybe late this summer...

The new Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi appears set to become the new design center of the Middle East. Especially as they work to turn Saayidet Island into a cultural Zanadu. As I read about the city, it is amazing to hear how quickly it is changing. One description said that there is no point in buying a map of the city, because none of them keep up.

Frank Gehry is going to build a 300,000 sq ft Guggenheim there.

Jean Nouvel has designed a museum to house art from the Lourve.

Zaha Hadid has designed a bridge connecting the city's island with the mainland. She has also designed a Performing Arts Center for Saayidet.

The NY Times lays out some of the details in "A Vision in the Desert". And Gridskipper provides some commentary.

Let the weekend begin

Personally, the photography and imagery on the 'net is one of the great benefits of the World Wide Web. Here's a great set of photos from a professional photographer named Ned Kahn. It is a nice way to start the weekend.

A different spin on global warming

This weekend the media has ramped up their stories on global warming in the wake of the recent report by the world's top climate scientists reporting the certainty that global warming is caused by man. While the implications are many, here's one our remote sensing fans haven't braced for: Satellites are going to be speeding up. See, the changing outer reaches of the atmosphere will get just a little bit thinner. And without as many air particles in the way, those satellites will orbit a little faster. I assume that for some of them this will be a major issue and that for others it just means that their imagery or radio or TV connections will require some changes in programming.

Of the Top 10 Surprising Results of Global Warming, people will probably feel some (like increased hay fever and forest fires) more than others. But if this messes up GPS or Satellite TV broadcasts, well, you can bet that its impacts will be felt.

The Great Park of Orange County

While Ken Smith's winning entry on the Great Park of Orange County isn't as newsworthy anymore, the stories along the way are revealing about the landscape architect who some critics worried was too small time for such a large project.

Anyway, this weekend the NYTimes Real Estate Section ran a full half page story on the impact of Ken Smith and the park. The conversion of the old Marine base (where my brother-in-law spent a few years) has already led a developer to spend nearly $1 billion for land and infrastructure and Habitat for Humanity is reclaiming materials from the old military buildings that are being razed. Aside from impacting property values and new development, the park is clearly going to help create more public open space for Southern California.

The plan is quite urban for Orange County, which a generation ago was largely rural. Now, with more than three million people, it is the fifth most populous county in the United States.

These days, Mr. Smith said, everyone he meets in Orange County talks about the loss of open space. The great park, he said, is “a chance to give people back a chunk of what they’ve lost.”

And if that requires significant development around the park, Mr. Smith, a Manhattanite, isn’t complaining. “Having a little more density around the park,” he said, “means there will be more people to use it.”

In their preparation for one of the major parks of the world, the Great Park Conservancy has assembled short studies of many other parks and gardens. It is a nice list. For full disclosure, we should also mention that Rutgers' own Steve Handel is on the project team.

As an aside, a few years back we Ken Smith in as a guest speaker in the Speaker Series. The talk was great. Even though he was well known within LA, he wasn't nearly as widely known at the time. But the students who saw his talk could tell that this was a particularly special designer who just hadn't found that special job that would carry his reputation across disciplinary boundaries around the world. During his visit, we asked (of course) the 3 landscapes and his answers were:

Vaux le Vicomte,
Daitokuji, and
Worlitz

The Times also said somthing about the Earth heating up. Sort of a Good news, Bad News type day I suppose.

Saying No! to McMansions in Edison

I don't know whether it will help with the teardowns or whether it will even hold up in court, but our nextdoor neighbor, Edison, NJ, has passed an ordinance limiting the size of new homes based on the lot size, reports the HNT. The problem is that floor area ratios often result in MORE suburban-looking developments, not less. Real cities like Hoboken and New Brunswick have homes that take up a significant portion of the lot without looking like a Vinyl Village. This will encourage evenly spaced houses with lots of extra lawn around them. The article includes some explanatory language that makes it clear what they were trying to do. They even limited height as part of the ordinance.

The ordinance also keeps tabs on the height of a house, restricting it to 35 feet from the original lot grade to the highest point of the structure.

"It's going to ensure we don't have any towering homes in a neighborhood of modest houses anymore," Tomaro said.

Edison is terribly close to New York's city limits, so maybe its time to consider a denser City-style model that lives up to the locale. But I applaud the effort to try a different approach than they were trying. The problem they are addressing is real, the solution just might not fit.

UPDATE: The Home News followed up with an editorial supporting the zoning change.

Sea Level Rise

Wow. The Star-Ledger ran a graphic today that shows areas of New Jersey that would be most impacted by sea level rise. It isn't clearly sourced, but I am assuming that their own mapping staff ran the analysis by taking a DEM and reclassifying those areas below the usual predictions of new levels.

Sure, the beach communities are going to get wet. I hear that it floods in Monmouth beach everytime it gets cloudy. And Atlantic City will be "elevation challenged". But look how far inland the impacts are on the Raritan. And Middlesex County is spending all that money on its new marina!

The Public Health Movement

One of the key turning points in the public health movement came when London was suffering from deadly outbreaks of cholera. When cholera would hit a neighborhood, people would start dying within 48 hours of when they contracted the disease. But no one knew that the disease was waterbourne and coming from their wells. Dr. Snow was writing papers and using numbers to track the disease and show how it spread, but no one was listening. Then, one day, he used a map to tell the story of one specific neighborhood's outbreak. That map changed London's response to the disease and is still held up today as one of the more imporant maps (especially in lives saved and civilization changed) in the history of the world.

Stephen Johnson, author of Ghost Map, tells the story in just 10 lively minutes as a TED Talk. I've used Dr. Snow's map in my geomatics lectures for years, but have never told the story like this. The talk is especially fun since he tells his yarns of water-bourne intestinal diseases while his audience eats a lunch.