Energy Day and Geography Awareness Week 2008

This update comes from Dr. Barry Wellar, Program director, GAW, CAG - Dr. Wellar always keeps me informed of the CAG's plans for celebrating GAW and GIS Day. The following explains a change for this year's plans...

The very successful "Theme Day" feature that was introduced for Geography Awareness Week 2007 will be continued in 2008, but with a major change. That is, Energy Day will be added to Weather and Climate Day, Water Day, Transportation Day, and Food and Health Day in the CAG's Geography Awareness Week Program.

This change enables us to connect with Canadians from coast-to-coast-to-coast on a matter of increasing importance. Further, the spatial aspects of energy supply, distribution, and consumption are especially appealing in terms of the various ways of graphically illustrating the energy-geography relationship. Clearly, those are two very good reasons for adding energy to the Theme Day portfolio.

I would welcome hearing from individuals who will assist in identifying, selecting, and 'recruiting' ten non-academic organizations whose websites would be the basis of the Energy Day component of Geography Awareness Week 2008. For those seeking guidance, the model of what I have in mind for Energy Day is any of the Days posted on the CAG website at: http://www.cag-acg.ca/en/geography_week.html

Atlas of Yellowstone Park

Yellowstone area universities, National Park Service experts, and other federal and private agencies have joined forces with the University of Oregon to develop the Atlas of Yellowstone, the first atlas dedicated to a national park and its surrounding region. The geographic focus of the atlas will be on Yellowstone National Park; however, maps and graphics will cover the entire region, including Grand Teton National Park. The Atlas began as a UO geography class project in 2002. The students focused on mapping a very specific area within Yellowstone National Park. Since then, the Atlas has expanded dramatically to be inclusive of the Greater Yellowstone region and is now approximately 30 percent complete. See Atlas of Yellowstone, http://www.atlasofyellowstone.net

Remember Statistics can be very misleading - watch your local market

Stats are a funny thing. They are great for identifying trends, however, when not conveyed in the correct context or with the whole story they are also very misleading - case in point, the real estate market. It drives me around the bend when I hear the national news and the national real estate numbers are released, this in an effort to freak-out and scare the heck out of Joe Public! It's a given that the economy is tanking pretty fast and the real estate market is correcting (it had to happen sometime didn't it?) but the numbers reflecting the national trends simply don't mean anything to me when considering the local market.
Here's a recent sampling of details released on our local housing market:
- Local sales are down but the average sales price has continued to rise.
- March home sales were down 12.2 percent but average sales prices were up 4.5 percent.
- For the first quarter, home sales were down 13.8 percent with sales prices up 5.1 percent from last year.
- Sales of existing single-family homes dropped 13.8 percent, but the average selling price rose to 7.9

Last year's price drop was mostly due to building getting scared and dumping their product while they could... that inventory has since been absorbed.

So remember, consider the local market and your local sales figures before you panic... oh, and quit watching the news so much!

Reminder - LizardTech adds RSS news feeds

I recently got a reminder from the gang at LizardTech that they now have an RSS feed available for those interested to add to their news reader (iGoogle etc...) You can view all of LizardTech’s RSS feeds at http://www.lizardtech.com/company/rss.php. Jon Skiffington of LizardTech describes this (and other handy tips for LizarTech product users) over on the company's blog

Autodesk revenues exceed expectations in Q1

Some numbers out of Autodesk regarding Q1... With less than one week remaining in the first quarter, revenue is now expected to be between $590 million and $595 million. The previously provided guidance range for revenue was $575 million to $585 million. For the second quarter of fiscal 2009, revenue is now expected to be between $600 million and $610 million. Previously provided guidance for revenue was about $590 million. This from CEO, Carl Bass, "We are very pleased to get fiscal 2009 off to such a solid start, which demonstrates the resiliency of our diversified business -- across industries and geographies," said Carl Bass, Autodesk president and CEO. "Our business in international markets, both developed countries and emerging economies, remains strong.

Grab the 2007 TIGER/Line Shapefiles Free from the Census Bureau

I see that some of the free "data flogging" websites are now flogging the free 2007 TIGER/Line files (SHP format) for $100+ bucks! OR.... you can always simply go to http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2007/tgrshp2007.html for your self and take a few minutes to download these data yourself - sounds like a no-brainer to me!

About the data... The 2007 TIGER/Line Shapefiles contain current geographic areas (boundaries of governmental units as of January 1, 2007) and Census 2000 vintage geography. The shapefiles also contain some additional post January 1, 2007 feature updates reported in the Boundary and Annexation Survey (BAS).

Download the 2007 Tiger/Line SHP files HERE
A tip, if you want fast access to an entire county's data, simply copy/paste the url of a file that you want to download and then trim off the filename.zip. You'll then view the directory folder for the county with all the .ZIP files for fast, simple download. A tool like GoZilla is also handy for quick site eating of data!

What makes Software green?

What makes software green? Is it the packaging, or perhaps the people that use it? Maybe it's open sourced, perhaps developed by a company with sustainable practices, or maybe it's simply the name? I'd like to find out more about green software but apparently Autodesk is already all over that. I was interested to see that Autodesk was listed on the list of presenters in a session recently that was called "Green Software" - see more

NASA shares Earth Day programming via NASA TV

In honor of Earth Day, April 22, NASA will make those views available to people here on Earth with an event highlighting imagery taken by astronauts and the science behind it. Check it out at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

The intelligent social network for enterprises

This from Trampoline Systems... SONAR Dashboard, the world’s first intelligent social network for enterprises. How it works... SONAR Dashboard is an intelligent social network designed to increase cohesion, collaboration and innovation in large organisations. Interactive network visualisations and expertise search enable users to find and connect with the people they need at work and see the social networks and information flows operating across the enterprise ecosystem. It provides employees with individual profiles, a news feed of network activity and a contacts list. SONAR Dashboard is automatically updated through integration with employees’ everyday work such as email, via Trampoline’s SONAR Server. SONAR Server analyses the social networks, information flows and expertise hidden within corporate information. See www.trampolinesystems.com

Going green on earth day

Happy Earth day all... hopefully you're kicking in and doing your part to reuse and recycle... if not, perhaps you will after the barrage of news and earth day tidbits that you'll see and hear about today. Earth Day has always been a fun day in our household... for several years we made a trip to Pensacola, FL for the event when we lived down South... the community put on an excellent educational event and to this day we miss going there. Still, we no celebrate in different way but we're more focused on the environment than we used to be. Some of the things we're doing regularly:
- combining trips and driving less when possible
- using cloth grocery bags
- changed out all the heavy-use light bulbs to energy efficient models
- changed all the shower heads to energy efficient models (huge savings)
- using rechargeable batteries
- watering the grass less (heck, the dogs will ruin in eventually anyway!)
- turning off the gas fire pilot light for several months out of the year (huge savings)
-unplugging cell phone chargers when not in use and turning off computers at night
- recycling more by taking trips to the county recycling drop off
and much more
Have fun today! What are you doing? See also http://www.earthday.gov/

Twittervision Local Rolled out

Cool to see that Twittervision has expanded offerings via a local flavor - see Twittervision local - eg. Colorado - see http://twittervision.com/local/colorado

Create your own mini planet of geospatial feeds

Are you familiar with Jaiku? If not you might like to check out their tools. the company, owned by Google has some great offerings enabling users to mobilize and share their content, feeds, photos etc... I've been a member/user since way back but one feature I haven't used much is the Channel option. It enables me to create a channel - in this case called Geospatial. I add a description - ie. an aggregator of GIS and geospatial feeds. Then I hand-pick the feeds that I want to keep tabs on. Much like what James has created with the awesome Planet Geospatial, however, this lets me hand-pick only the feeds I want to watch (maybe there's feeds on PG that I don't care to watch, or feeds that aren't showing up etc...) , heck, I can even add Planet GS to the list of feeds since they have an RSS feed to sniff out. I can also add photos via feeds from updates. Jaiku then offers handy widgets for posting onto a blog or website - see right-sidebar. It shows the latest Jaikus to the channel. Finally, the cool part of Jaiku is that people can become members of the channel and comment on the feeds updates for all to see. Also, the app has an excellent mobile app so you can easily take your feeds with you - Jaiku actually has been heavily promoted and used by the Finish smartphone user community and is a popular Nokia/S60 application. Check out what you can easily do, see the geospatial Channel at http://jaiku.com/channel/Geospatial and if you want your blog feed added tell me about it.