thoughts on spatial tools and practices
Or Skype, or Google Meet, or GoToMeeting, or whatever.
As I bounce around social media, I keep running across a lot of spurious advice on how to project a “professional” impression as you, like everyone else, participates in video calls from home. This seems to be particularly true on LinkedIn.
Most of that advice is hogwash.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, I was trying to get information from my local electric cooperative about outages. There were many (including my neighborhood) and I wanted to see the scale of the problem. It turns out, they have a page with a map that shows current outages by zip code.
It’s pretty old-school as far as web maps go but it gets the job done. Their day job is making electricity, not web maps, so I won’t critique it too much. One thing I did notice is that the map seems to be dynamically generated (as do the tables on the page) from some inaccessible data source. I search and tried to find some kind of feed, to no avail.
A couple of weeks ago, I took some gentle razzing from some quarters for admitting I still have a land line:
As actual voice communication devices, mobile phones still suck. This why I still have a land line. #oldtechthatworks
— Bill Dollins (@billdollins) August 13, 2011
This tweet was the result of yet another dropped call, which is annoying, but the unreliability of cellular networks can be more than just annoying, especially given the fact that they are now the primary communications medium for many people.
Almost ten years ago, on September 11, 2001, I was being evacuated from the building I was in and was trying reach my wife via cell phone. I heard a few garbled words about my parents and our dog before the line went dead. The mobile phone network was down for quite a while and my old analog cell phone was a paperweight during that time. We met up at my parents house later and she had our son and dog with her.
I went on to spend the next several years closely involved with critical infrastructure protection efforts and, specifically, the application of geospatial tools to those efforts. A lot of time, effort and money has been invested to make sure infrastructure works better in such situations.
I was reading Brian Timoney’s excellent post “Open Government is a Slammed Door at the BLM,” when I encountered this line:
Top-down, large scale spatial-data-integration-by-directive simply doesn’t have the track record of success to justify the costs…
This resonates well with observations that I have made during the course of my recent work with the Arkansas GIO office. The immediate focus of that work was to help AGIO assess the current state of their GeoStor platform and gather data about current and emerging capabilities in order to support decision-making about whether to migrate to a hosted (cloud) environment. In the course of doing that work, I learned about the collaborative approach AGIO has taken with the cities and counties of Arkansas, which also informs some of the functional requirements of GeoStor.
Read moreOpen Government, Open Data and Some Lessons from Arkansas
A few days ago, Randal Hale posted an announcement about the upcoming Southern Appalachian Conference on GIS to be held at East Tennessee State University. I have never attended that conference and probably won’t this year but, if you live and work in that area, you may want to check it out.
I read Learon Dalby’s latest GISuser.com expert column (disclosure: I am a contributor there also) with great interest since it addresses an issue with which I have worked closely over the years: availability of GIS data in a time of crisis. Over the years, the proliferation of “operating pictures” (you’re not in style unless you have your own UDOP) and other systems has obscured the fact that the data is really what matters. Certain segments of the community, especially those more focused on man-made disasters rather than the natural variety, have gotten very good at putting multiple layers of technology, services, security, policy, etc. between GIS data and the people who need it.
Today is World Diabetes Day. I am a parent of a child with Type 1 diabetes (also known as juvenile diabetes). As such, my child is dependent upon insulin and will be until a cure is found. I am using my blog today to discuss the issue of interoperability (or lack thereof) of medical devices.
Don Meltz has kicked off the most recent round of discussion about the nature/state of “GIS” (I put that in quotes since I am the one who declared it a myth). James and Sean also weighed with their thoughts on the subject. Like it or not, they are right. The technology that has for years been labeled as “GIS” and segmented (somewhat artificially) from the rest of the IT industry is, with increasing speed, being integrated into the tapestry of mainstream IT. This trend is not only something that I think is irreversible and good, it is something that I have been actively working toward for my entire career.