27 September 2019

Take a walk

With a great weekend coming up, maybe you should head to a city for a chance to stretch your legs and explore.

Urban walking has certain benefits, as these comments from readers of the Guardian remind us.

25 September 2019

North Central NJ GIS jobs


For those in New Jersey,  I was recently sent this set of job opportunities in Morris County:

SCE's GIS Department is expanding! If you are a current or aspiring GIS professional and are looking to work in a team oriented dynamic GIS Department that works on innovative GIS projects throughout the Country; please feel free to check out and apply to the positions below. Reach out to me if you have any questions or are looking for more information!






23 September 2019

The changing nature of portfolios

Students in landscape architecture, environmental planning and environmental geomatics have all asked me recently about whether and how they should develop a portfolio. Fortunately, the Medium has posted a thoughtful essay by Rachel Berger on The Death of the Design Portfolio. To me, the take home message is that while the design portfolio is changing, you need to find the right way to share (let's be honest, to show off) your work such that it highlights your abilities but also says something about who you are. There isn't a single answer for all of these students, or even for all of the students of each career path.

12 September 2019

Clean water protections


Wide coverage is being given to today's rollback of clean water protections. But Politico warns that this is simply a preface to a much bigger rollback to follow:
And it clears the way for the Environmental Protection Agency to finish a follow-up regulation in the coming months that could leave most of the nation’s wetlands without any federal safeguards. (emphasis added)
At a time when cities like Newark and Flint have water crises, it is interesting to see the regulations becoming more lax.

10 September 2019

Cholera map in 3d

Almost every conversation about public health and mapping includes a reference to John Snow's famous cholera map. (Not that John Snow) And generally the sites and slides and posters all use a similar reproduction of the original map. But I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered one group that produced a 3-d version of the map, and did it in a way that made the visualization meaningful.


h/t Robin Hawkes' Spatial Awareness Newsletter

04 September 2019

VGI for protesters

Here is an interesting example of VGI. In support of protesters in Hong Kong, a small group of volunteers are making real-time maps showing locations for riot police and water cannons. By building on crowdsourcing, the map is updated quickly as the situation changes. Like many VGI projects, it sounds like a bit of mixed methods:
Out on the frontlines are “runners” dressed as regular passersby so as not to attract too much unwanted attention. Working with pen and paper on a clipboard, or through an illustrator app on an iPad, the runners mark up a blank map with the latest updates. The so-called “integrator” in the control room then assembles the updates, adding additional information from live-streams and news sources, to collate all available information at that moment into a single map, which is then published online and sent out via Telegram.
One of the technical barriers is that, with so many protesters gathered so densely, mobile phone data capacities can be poor. QUartz reports that the protesters at the edge of the crowds are being encouraged to download the latest map and then airdrop it for easy access by those in the middle.