September 2007

cga_newsletter

CENTER FOR GEOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS NEWSLETTER 
September 2007 
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HIGHLIGHTS

  • GIS Credit Courses This Fall
  • GIS Training Workshops
  • GeoEye Imagery Agreement
  • Dr. Farouk El-Baz Lecture on Darfur Groundwater Basins Study with Remote Sensing
  • Kennedy School - Cross Boundary Transformation with GIS
  • CGA Completes Work on 4D Animations for Business School
  • News from UCGIS
  • ArcGIS 9.2 Manuals Online
  • GIScience Call for Papers
  • Crime Mapping Conference in Brussels
  • Africa Communications Technology Conference in Addis Ababa
  • Amazon Indians Use GIS to Save Land
  • Mechanical Turk Used for Image Processing
  • Interview on University GIS Education
  • Time Bar Released for ArcMap
  • Linking Photos to GPS Tracks
  • More…

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CGA NEWS

GIS Credit Courses This Fall 
Two GIS courses are being offered by the Department of Government this Fall. Sumeeta Srinivasan will be teaching “Introduction to Geographic Information Systems” and a new seminar entitled “Mapping the Census”. In addition, Wendy Guan of the Center for Geographic Analysis will teach “Introduction to GIS” at the Harvard Extension School.
http://www.gis.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k235&pageid=icb.page23199

GIS Training Workshops 
This Fall CGA will be offering four non-credit training workshops: “Introduction to GIS”, “Turning Data into Maps with ArcGIS”, “Getting the Most Out of Google Earth”, and “Making Sense of Spatial Data Using ArcGIS”. The workshops will be held from 12:00 to 2:00pm on 9/28, 10/26, 11/30, and 12/21. The order of workshops will be announced soon.
http://www.gis.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k235&pageid=icb.page23199

GeoEye Imagery Agreement 
CGA is excited to announce an agreement with GeoEye which will provide Harvard researchers access to more than 290 million square miles of high resolution satellite imagery. Imagery is from the IKONOS, OrbView-3, and GeoEye-1 sensors and will range from 1999 to the present. To obtain imagery, researchers must submit an application outlining their research goals and objectives to GeoEye. It is anticipated that most awards will consist of a few hundred square kilometers and will be made to support specific research projects. CGA will assist all Harvard users in applying. Please email contact@cga.harvard.edu to make an appointment. Received images will be made available to other users within Harvard through the Harvard Geospatial Library.

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HARVARD GIS COMMUNITY NEWS

Dr. Farouk El-Baz Lecture on Darfur Groundwater Basins Study with Remote Sensing 
The Committee on African Studies presents a lecture titled “Groundwater Basins in Darfur and Surrounding Desert” by Farouk El-Baz. The talk will be held Tuesday, October 16th at 4:15 in Room S020, on the CGIS Concourse, at 1730 Cambridge St.

Kennedy School - Cross Boundary Transformation with GIS 
Here are materials from a recent event entitled “Cross Boundary Transformation: Making it Happen with GIS”.
http://www.innovations.harvard.edu/xchat-transcript.html?chid=81&featured=1 
You must register to view the materials.

CGA Completes Work on 4D Animations for Business School 
Ben Lewis of CGA worked with Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History and Director of Research, and Carla Tishler, Director of Program Innovation for the Educational Technology Group, to develop time series animations for a variety of global phenomena. Animations include immigration to US, spread of communism, GDP wealth, petroleum output, coffee exports, and others. The project has also digitized and made available 10 related historical maps from the Baker Library Collections. The materials are being used by Professor Jones in his Elective on Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism and also in his Doctoral seminar on Business History. For more information please contact Carla at ctishler@hbs.edu.

News from UCGIS 
Harvard has been a member of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Systems (UCGIS) since last February, and the UCGIS Summer Assembly took place in late June at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Highlights of the meeting included a research plenary on global change, a workshop on “What’s next for UCGIS Research”, an education plenary on Geospatial Literacy Education, integrating GIScience teaching and research, and student paper presentations. For details see http://www.ucgis.org/summer2007/Schedule.htm. Harvard delegates did not attend this meeting.

ArcGIS 9.2 Manuals Online 
A useful collection of ArcGIS manuals is now available as PDFs online.
The link to the manuals is titled “ESRI Library of Manuals for ArcGIS 9.2”
on the CGA Services > Technical Support page:
http://gis.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k235&pageid=icb.page23178 
bottom left topic, only viewable if the user is logged in.

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CONFERENCES

GIScience Call for Papers 
“ESRI invites you to present a peer-reviewed paper presentation in a special joint GIScience Research Track for the 2008 ESRI International User Conference and Educational User Conference. Papers in this special Track must focus on cutting-edge research in GIScience.” The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2007. For questions or guidelines please see: www.esri.com/GIScience or contact Ann Johnson: ajohnson@esri.com.

Crime Mapping Conference in Brussels 
The IQPC International GIS Crime Mapping Conference will be held September 25th-26th in Brussels.
https://kb.iqpc.co.uk/events/3801/topic/11

Africa Communications Technology Conference in Addis Ababa 
The 2007 ICT (Information Communication Technology) Africa Conference will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia October 1st to 5th.
http://ictafrica.nepadcouncil.org/

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NEWS ON GIS RESEARCH AND SERVICES

Amazon Indians Use GIS to Save Land 
The nonprofit Amazon Conservation Team (ACT)is working with local governments in Surinam, Brazil, and Columbia to enable Indians to protect their lands. GPS, Google Earth, and the internet are being used to catalog and protect ancestral rainforests by monitoring deforestation and preventing illegal operations.
http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1114-google_earth-act.html

Mechanical Turk Used for Image Processing 
If you are not familiar with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform for developing or accessing jobs which use people to do computational heavy lifting, check it out: http://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=whatis. A job has been set up using GeoEye imagery to find explorer Steve Fossett’s plane.
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=9TSZK4G35XEZJZG21T60&kw=Flash

The GeoTag 
Tags are a new way to create metadata for online content using keywords. A new kind of tag (the GeoTag) uses lat/longs to go a step further and spatially enable online information.
http://news.com.com/Geotagging+links+photos+to+locales/2100-1041_3-6205734.html

Interview on University GIS Education 
The GIS Monitor presents an interview on developments in GIS education with Penn State Geography Professor David DiBiase, and ESRI’s Education Manager Mike Phoenix.
http://www.gismonitor.com/news/newsletter/archive/archives.php?issue=20070913&style=web&length=full#GISEd

Time Bar Released for ArcMap 
Applied Science Associates, Inc. has announced the release of a time slider bar for ArcGIS 9.2.
http://www.directionsmag.com/press.releases/?duty=Show&id=18999&trv=1

GIS Meets the Gaming World 
The latest version of Google Earth now contains the hidden functionality of a flight simulator. Type Ctrl+Alt+A to start.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/01/2038210&from=rss

India Mapping 
Good street level maps and directions for India have been hard to find. Now there is a commercial portal which is starting to pull it together:
http://mapmyindia.com/

Mapping the Human Body 
Stanford, NASA, and Google are teaming up to bring us “Google Earth for the human body”.
http://www.nbc11.com/health/14100380/detail.html

Linking Photos to GPS Tracks 
“GPicSync automatically inserts location in your photos metadata so they can also be used with any ‘geocode aware’ application like Picasa/Google Earth, Flickr, loc.alize.us, etc.”
http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/

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Editor of this issue: Ben Lewis
The CGA Newsletter is published monthly.
For the latest information, please visit our website http://gis.harvard.edu 
For subscribe/unsubscribe, please email contact@cga.harvard.edu 
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