Day: September 18, 2009

Mapping the Greenest Universities

/ Matt Artz

455…from the GIS Education Community Blog…

“Map and analyze the Sierra Club’s 2009 “cool schools” ranking—colleges and universities judged to be doing the most to help the planet. The judging criteria included efficiency, energy, food usage, academics, purchasing, transportation, waste, and administration. More and more college applicants say that a university’s environmental stewardship could influence their decision to enroll there. The spatial thinker always wants to map things to determine if a pattern exists, so we built a geodatabase to analyze the 135 universities included in the study. 19 out of the 20 greenest universities have an ESRI GIS site license and offer a GIS program of study.”

Melting Of The Greenland Ice Sheet Mapped

/ Matt Artz / 2 Comments

…from Science Daily…

“Will all of the ice on Greenland melt and flow out into the sea, bringing about a colossal rise in ocean levels on Earth, as the global temperature rises? The key concern is how stable the ice cap actually is, and new Danish research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen can now show the evolution of the ice sheet 11,700 years back in time – all the way back to the start of our current warm period.  The results are published in the journal Nature.”

Three Spatial Analysis and Policy Positions Open at the Centre for Spatial Analysis and Policy, University of Leeds

/ Matt Artz

leeds“The School of Geography, sixth in the 2008 RAE ranking, would welcome applications from individuals of (or with potential of) international standing who will complement and strengthen existing expertise in any of the following areas: demography and population geography; regional science and spatial economics; quantitative social policy (including health, deprivation, education and crime); geocomputation.”

Positions available:  Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader.

Mobile Application Helps Professional and Citizen Scientists Collect and Analyse Data in the Field

/ Matt Artz

…from BBC News…

“The EpiCollect software collates data from certain mobiles – on topics such as disease spread or the occurrence of rare species – in a web-based database.  The data is statistically analysed and plotted on maps that are instantly available to those same phones.

“The approach is outlined in the open-access journal PLoS ONE. The software has been developed for so-called smartphones that run Google’s Android open-source operating system.

“Researchers can report back to the EpiCollect database with results from experiments they do in the field, and ‘citizen scientists’ can send back photos or videos of certain species from their own backyards.”