Apple making map apps, 3 Google Earth trends & Dave Bouwman on Emergency Response Apps

Apple to Take iPhone's Maps App to 'the Next Level'

Three Google Earth trends for 2010

Dave Bouwman on Emergency Response Apps

Usability for Emergency Response Applications from Dave Bouwman on Vimeo.

Online Map Crowdsourcing & SUNY Div. I?

Online Maps: Everyman Offers New Directions - from the NYTimes - a piece on map crowdsourcing

Should SUNY schools focus on sports or drop them? I'm a graduate of SUNY undergrad (Geneseo, where I played D III lacrosse) and grad (Buffalo) and fully support athletics.

Rift in Africa (new Ocean), Go

New Ocean May Be Forming In The Desert (NPR)
- listen here

and Google's Go Programming Language (interestingly, I've, for the first time ever, disregarded Google Maps b/c they didn't have the street linework I needed and used Bing Maps----did I just choose Microsoft over Google!!! NOOOO!!!)


or looking for a job as a Grateful Dead Archivist - UC Santa Cruz needs you!

And head over to OpenGeoData blog.

Even more Google Maps data mishaps

Henderson, NV mislabeled as Rochester

Peter Batty ponders if the Google Maps data change was a mistake...

Google Author interviewed on Fresh Air

Fresh Air's Terry Gross interviews author Ken Auletta (mp3) about his new book on Google.

Geoprocessing for Environmental Modeling

As of late I've been taking Highway/Rail/BRT CAD drawings converting them into Geodatabases (GDB) and processing these GDB's to analyze the environmental effects (wetlands, tax parcels, aquisitions, displacements, etc.) of each possible Option. While I've done this task before for many projects. I've never completed anything like this in a comparable scope.

What we have are 6 Options for a 15 mile corridor combining Bus Rapid Transit (BRT/BRT HOV), Commercial Rail Transit (CRT), and highway extension alternatives along with their stations. Each Option has 3 sub-options and there are 36 possible station scenarios. Now imagine doing about 10 geoprocessing steps for each of these 18 Alignment and 36 Stations by hand for each environmental constraint.

This is exactly why modelbuilder exists. We accomplished what took 4 months of environmental analysis that was done by hand for our Transit Mode Selection Report and finished it in 1 week (granted under immense pressure and dozens of hours beyond the 40 hour work week) for our Transit Alignment Options Report.