NYGeog - finals

NYGeog is working on some graduate school finals and won’t be posting for the next two weeks…

Music Monday: My Girls - dance remix; new Dylan; Bela Fleck Africa Music CD & new song pricing

Animal Collective's My Girl's has been remixed to an awesome dance remix-mix by Hatchmatik.

Dylan releases another CD (NYTimes review here)


And Bela Fleck released an awesome CD called Throw Down Your Heart as part of his Acoustic Planet series. NPR does a segment on him here.

And NPR discusses new song pricing schemes of iTunes.

Gowanus Canal Superfund contraversy; new GeoServer Release; NYS Passes on Google/MS Online Map & GIS help soldiers learn about their patrol areas

Wow, spring is officially here in NYC. The Tribeca Film Festival is in full effect and its nice enough to ride bikes to work.

Gowanus Canal superfund contraversy!

A Univ. of Maryland GIS grad student gets crowned Miss College Park.

There's a new GeoServer release. I'd love to check it out since I'm a sucker for UI's (because I'm terrible at terminals and coding).

from All Points Blog:

NYC Passes on Google/MS Online Map Apps; Writes App "from Scratch"

Colin Reilly, director of citywide GIS for New York's Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) explains in a Government Technology article that writing its NYCityMap2.0 with a reusable framework was the way to go. "Using an off-the-shelf mapping application, like Google Earth, would have been the wrong fit, Reilly remarked..." - more here.

When soldiers are deployed the geographic knowledge of the outgoing soldiers is often lost.
Learn about how GIS is helping soldiers in Iraq learn about their patrol zones faster and more in depth from O'Reilly's Where 2.0.

Earth Day!

Celebrate Earth Day! Check out the Earth Day Network.

ArcGIS on my MacBook, water bottle use down & ESRI User Conference 2009

And here it is, ArcGIS on my MacBook (finally). I've been wanting to do this since I got my first mac in 2005 and found that ESRI doesn't support macs. I'm still a little torn up about what to do with the license. I'm using the 60 day trial license for now. The goal now is to have this as my single machine since I used my work's desktop for ArcGIS and my home computer to run open source app's that I couldn't install due to IT restrictions.

It looks like the combination of the recession and environmental concerns have finally caused a drop in water bottle sales. Check out NPR's piece Bottled Water Sales Flatten During Recession.


And just a reminder, the 2009 ESRI User Conference is coming up: GIS—Designing Our Future

Join us July 13–17, 2009, at the San Diego Convention Center in California.

ESRI users across the globe are invited to attend the world's largest gathering of GIS professionals.

Just joined the GIS Forum and GeoCommons and so close to ArcGIS on a mac

I just joined the GIS Forum. I hope this is the last GIS forum I join. Check it out here. I've also joined the GeoCommons.

And I'm about three hours away from having a fully-functioning (though license confused - using the 60 day trial until I figure that one out) ArcGIS on my new macbook. Read about how spanring installed ArcGIS. I basically did the same thing (with Parallels) but bought a copy of OEM XP SP2 from Tiger Direct. Also, Geolibre did it too, but in 2006!

Teacher Shortage, how internet got rules and rescued Cptn. of Maersk Alabama

Mapping the potential for teacher shortages here (NYTimes).

And How the Internet Got Its Rules.

And the Navy Seals rescued the Captain of the Maersk Alabama. Read about Adena Schutzberg's Strange Geographic Connection to Capt. Richard Phillips. See the ICC's Piracy Map online to view all the points where reported Piracy attacks have occurred.

'The Geography of Buzz' & Blind Pilot Bicycle Tours

'The Geography of Buzz' a study on the influence of urban culture - NYTimes
Apologies to residents of the Lower East Side; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and other hipster-centric neighborhoods. You are not as cool as you think, at least according to a new study that seeks to measure what it calls “the geography of buzz.”
The research, presented in late March at the annual meeting of the Association ot the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, locates hot spots based on the frequency and draw of cultural happenings: film and television screenings, concerts, fashion shows, gallery and theater openings. The buzziest areas in New York, it finds, are around Lincoln and Rockefeller Centers, and down Broadway from Times Square into SoHo. In Los Angeles the cool stuff happens in Beverly Hills and Hollywood, along the Sunset Strip, not in trendy Silver Lake or Echo Park...more here

Last year musician Chris Bell paddled down the Hudson on canoe and now NPR is telling the story of the California bicycle-touring band Blind Pilot.

Finding a GIS job & Postal deficit grounds wilderness mail

from OMG!:

How to find a GIS job in tough economic times

This is the question on minds of all the fresh graduates and people who are seeking a job right now. With the recession setting in and affecting all industries, the GIS industry has not been an exception. I thought I would share some insights and ideas with all of you on how to increase your chance of landing up with an employment, especially in tough times like these....continue reading here

And from NPR: Postal Deficit Grounds Wildnerness Mail

"Is Google Good for Geography?" Presentation

Here's some notes from the AAG: "Is Google Good for Geography?" from Off The Map There's plenty of other presentations that are worth looking into that show up when this presentation is finished.

Aag 09 F1 Good Good

View more presentations from seagor.

Video of the receding Columbia Glacier

AK-03 Columbia Glacier from Cliff from Extreme Ice Survey on Vimeo.

Gmail Autopilot (April Fools)

The easiest email could possibly be.

As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages.

How does Gmail mirror my communication style?

The more Gmail messages Autopilot can sample, the better. With fewer than 100 messages, there may not be enough data to calibrate Autopilot effectively. You can adjust tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings.

You may want to log in every week or so to ensure Autopilot is calibrated optimally.

Does Autopilot work for Gmail chat too?

Yes. Chat was actually simpler to build, given the natural language headway made by Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA. While many claim ELIZA oft times passed the Turing test, Gmail Autopilot passes with 99.9% accuracy due to the inclusion of human-like qualities such as compassion and wisdom and CADIE's related ability to calibrate to match your chat style.

What happens if a sender and recipient both have Autopilot on?

Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.