Make Smarter - GWS, Motivating Workers, and Real Time Disaster Mapping

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.