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Archive for the ‘Brains’ Category
TED Talk: Tim Berners-Lee
Monday, March 8th, 2010
Tim Berners-Lee (yes, that Tim Berners-Lee) gave a great TED Talk called The Year Open Data Went Worldwide. And it’s all about maps. OpenStreetMap gets a special mention.
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Make Smarter – GWS, Motivating Workers, and Real Time Disaster Mapping
Monday, February 15th, 2010
There are slim pickings in the make smarter department this past month, but there were a few things that jumped out at me.
First, via Vector One, Cynthia Dietz, Map Librarian at the University of Stony Brook NY, wronte an excellent paper called Geospatial Web Services, Open Standards, and Advances in Interoperability: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography. From the abstract:
This paper is designed to help GIS librarians and information specialists follow developments in the emerging field of geospatial Web services (GWS). When built using open standards, GWS permits users to dynamically access, exchange, deliver, and process geospatial data and products on the World Wide Web, no matter what platform or protocol is used.
Next up, via InfoQ, comes an interesting piece from the Harvard Business Review titled What Really Motivates Workers. Most studies have found it isn’t money that motivates workers, but the other assumption, that it’s recognition, isn’t the case either.
In a recent survey we invited more than 600 managers from dozens of companies to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five workplace factors commonly considered significant: recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, support for making progress, and clear goals. “Recognition for good work (either public or private)” came out number one. Unfortunately, those managers are wrong.
As it turns out, they found the #1 motivator for employees is progress – the sense that people are making headway in their jobs or are overcoming obstacles.
Finally, ESRI put out a good video on their YouTube channel called Social Media and Geo-Services: Real-time modeling of the disaster situation in Haiti. It showcases some of the abilities of ArcGIS Explorer, which is my mind is one of ESRI’s best, least hyped products.
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TED Talk: Geomedicine
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
TED Talks has a good presentation by Bill Davenhall titled Your health depends on where you live. It’s an interesting talk on the new science of geomedicine (so new I couldn’t find geomedicine on Wikipedia). This must be why Dr. House orders his staff to do so many home invasions.
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TED Talks: Making Maps to Fight Disaster
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
TED Talks has a good presentation by Lalitesh Katragadda titled Making Maps to Fight Disaster, Build Economies. The focus is on Google Map Maker, and how during a 2008 cyclone event in Myanmar 40 volunteers from Google digitized 120,000km of roads, 3,000 hospitals, and logistic and relief points in 4 days, helping the UN and others get relief workers and supplies to the area.
One of the interesting stats: in 2005 only 15% of the world was mapped to a “geocodable” level. Stuff like this is why I love TED Talks.
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Make Smarter – GeoDjango, Karmic, HTML 5
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
First up in Make Smarter this month is a good GeoDjango tutorial by the folks at Linfiniti.com. This tutorial doesn’t assume Django knowledge, so it’s a good introduction to Django as well, from installation (Ubuntu/Debian centric) to making your first project. I’ve been wanting to break into Django, and this will be a big help.
Unless you’re living under a rock (or you’re one of the 99% minority that doesn’t run a Linux desktop) you already know that Ubuntu 9.10 is out. I run Ubuntu on my workhorse machine at home and I’m running the latest Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) on my netbook. If you want to check out the Linux scene, check out the Ubuntu Karmic Koala Bible, a 54 page PDF create by makeuseof.com. It’ll guide you through choosing an Ubuntu edition to geek stuff like setting a swap strategy.
As HTML5 support improves in every browser (including IE to a small extent), getting a handle on what’s new is a good idea. Tech Radar has a high level overview of HTML5, including using html5shiv to get IE to recognize HTML5 elements. In the web development area, Six Revisions has an interesting post on 5 technologies that will keep shaping the web in 2010, HTML5 being among them.
InfoQ has an interesting presentation entitled Five Considerations for Software Architects. For the impatient, those are economy, visibility, spacing, symmetry, and emergence.
And last but not least, Free Geography Tools links to A Practical Guide to Geostatistical Mapping by Tomislav Hengl, which available as a free download, including the datasets used in the text.
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