Podcasts about Geographic information science

Hello Interactors,It's been a while. Traveling for family, and a bit flooded by the relentless sneaker waves of unsavory world events — the kind that usually inspire me to write but lately threaten to pull me under.Spring in the northern hemisphere means Interplace turns to geographic information science and spatial analysis. How might we look at the complex unfolding of world events through this lens — and what happens when we push it further than emergence alone can carry it? That's what I attempt to explore here.PATTERNS PRECEDING PHYSICAL PLACESGeographic information science is a relatively recent field. It emerged from mid-20th-century cartography and land-use planning. Computer cartography and quantitative geography of the 1960s is often considered the first true digital Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It became a science (GIScience or GISc) in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Michael Goodchild questioned if there was a genuine scientific discipline lurking within the software.His answer was yes. He built an institutional home for that argument at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my alma mater. Goodchild was my senior advisor in 1989 as UCSB was becoming a generative intellectual hub in the field. UCSB's geography department continues to push the question of what space means analytically, not just how to map it. I'm personally invested in better understanding how GISc may be a natural partner for complexity science, a field I've been attracted to since I started researching and writing.This partnership isn't new. GISc provides a powerful framework for dissecting the spatial dimensions of complexity, where systems defy reductionist analysis and emerge through nonlinear interactions. In the early 2000s, geographer David O'Sullivan, and others, articulated this as the study of “the behaviour of macroscopic collections of many basic but interacting units endowed with the potential to evolve in time” emphasizing these characteristic elements of complexity science: self-organization, path dependence, and the irreducibility of wholes to their parts. Around the same time, sociologist John Urry (and others) extended this to global scales, portraying globalization as co-evolving systems marked by unpredictability, irreversibility, and positive feedback loops that amplify disorder within pockets of order.These parings are a good start, but computational biologist Michael Levin offers what can be seen as a genuinely unsettling upgrade. His recent work on the origin of cognitive and morphological patterns suggests the dominant appeal to emergence as an explanatory endpoint may itself be, in his words, a “mysterian” position — one that “does not facilitate further advances.” When a surprising pattern appears in a complex system, the emergentist says “that's just what happens” and catalogs it.But Levin proposes these patterns are not random facts to be noted and admired. They are part of an ordered, non-physical space that physical systems, when configured the right way, ingress into. Ingression is a term Levin borrows from mathematician Alfred North Whitehead as a potential that timeless abstract objects possess to become actual concrete experiences. “Red” only becomes red when its potential is realized. These ‘ordered spaces' of potential are portals into what Levin calls a Platonic Space. Plato argued that the objects we encounter in the world are imperfect instances of perfect, eternal Forms that exist independently of any physical thing. The most primitive form being the triangle. Levin's argument is the triangle participates in a kind of Triangleness; it realizes it's potential to exist.Nature keeps arriving at triangles independently, across wildly different substrates, as if drawn by the same attractor. The triangle is the only polygon that is inherently rigid: push on any corner and the shape holds, which is why trusses, bridges, and bones all rely on triangular geometry for structural strength. Radiolarians, single-celled ocean organisms with no brain and no blueprint, construct intricate skeletal lattices of triangulated geometry at microscopic scales.In Levin's terms, nature is ingressing Triangleness — repeatedly, across billions of years and countless lineages — because the Form has properties that reward any physical system stable enough to express it. The truth that a triangle's angles sum to exactly 180 degrees owed nothing to the first organism that built one.Physical systems are, in this sense, less like containers and more like pointers — a term borrowed from computer science. Pointers are variables that hold the addresses that reference more information. Levin's framework requires a specific kind of pointer: not a pointer to stored data, which retrieves a static value, but a pointer to a subroutine that calls up a routine that executes complex actions and outputs beyond the pointer itself. The pointer is small, while the executed routine may be vast and behave unpredictably.Think of a street address. The address itself contains nothing — it is a short string of numbers and words that fits on an envelope — but hand it to the right system and it retrieves a house, a history, a neighborhood, everything that has ever happened inside those walls. This is Levin's claim about physical structures. A genome, a city, an institution doesn't contain its pattern so much as it points at one — and when the pointer is well-formed, you get considerably more out than you put in.What does this mean for GISc? It means that spatial configurations — cities, borders, trade corridors, migration routes — are not merely sites where local interactions produce global outcomes. They are interfaces into a latent pattern space. When a hub city emerges, when a colonial border persists for centuries past the empire that drew it, when a pandemic spreads exactly along the topology of air travel, we are not only witnessing the consequential mechanical emergence of patterns derived from local rules. We are watching physical structures act as pointers that summon — ingress — specific patterns of collective behavior, whose full complexity exceeds what was put in. Levin's core observation about biological morphogenesis translates here with uncomfortable precision.Consider one of his more unsettling tadpole experiments. The creation of its normal bulging eyes are suppressed (by microscopically manipulating cellular ‘software') and a replacement eye is instead induced — ingressed — on the tail. The optic nerve growing from that tail-eye doesn't connect to the brain — it terminates somewhere around the spinal cord. By any conventional account, the animal should be blind. It isn't. The tadpoles can still see and perform well in visual tasks. Somehow, the system routes around its own abnormal wiring to recover function. The pattern being pointed to — sight — was never housed in the eye itself, or in the specific neural pathway, or in any single component. The eye on the tail is a wildly improbable pointer, and yet it retrieves something far richer than its own structure contains. You get considerably more out than you put in.Some GISc tools — like agent-based models or network analysis — already detect this excess in a geography context. A single infected traveler tips a system toward chaos not because of arithmetic addition of local interactions described in the GISc analysis, but because that traveler's position in a network acts as an interface to a pattern of contagion whose scope was latent in the structure all along. The “geographic advantage” O'Sullivan, and crew, describes — GISc's relationship to multi-scalar processes and human-environment couplings — is, in Levin's vocabulary, a sensitivity to how physical arrangements act as pointers into a rich space of possible collective behaviors.This reframes world events not as linear narratives but as navigations of morphospace — the full landscape of forms a system could take, where some configurations are reachable and others are not, and where attractors pull trajectories toward specific patterns regardless of starting conditions.What pattern are current geopolitical configurations pointing toward? What is being ingressed by the particular architecture of today's global institutions, communication networks, and urban densities? While GIScience sharpens our sight on outcomes, it leaves uncharted the deeper question of what is the shape of the latent space these material forms slip into.BORDERS STORE WHAT BODIES KNOWLevin's work suggests at every scale of organization, we are dealing not with mechanical aggregation but with collective intelligence. To understand what he means by that, it helps to borrow an image from Einstein.Because nothing travels faster than light, any event you could possibly influence — or that could possibly influence you — is bounded by how far light could travel in the available time. Draw that boundary in spacetime and it forms a cone. Everything inside it is causally reachable, everything outside it is not. Levin borrows this image to describe the reach of any cognitive agent. A single cell's light cone is tiny — it can only sense and respond within its immediate chemical neighborhood, over milliseconds. A brain's light cone is vastly larger — it can model consequences years out and coordinate behavior across great distances. The cone is simply a measure of how far an agent's agency actually extends. And just as the body is a nested hierarchy of such agents — molecular networks, cells, tissues, organs — each operating within its own cone, pursuing goals whose scale its parts cannot perceive, so too is human society.A city is not simply a dense clustering of individuals whose local interactions produce urban dynamics. It is, in Levin's sense, a collective intelligence with a cognitive light cone that vastly exceeds that of any constituent. It pursues goals (economic growth, defense, habitability) across spatial and temporal horizons no individual cell — or individual person — can access. Institutions, legal codes, infrastructure, and cultural norms function as bioelectric memory — rewritable pattern memories that store the target morphology of the social body and guide error-correction toward it. Colonial borders, or the Great Wall of China, persist not merely through inertia but because they function like historic bioelectric setpoints. That is, they encode a spatial pattern that downstream processes continuously re-instantiate, even after the circumstances that produced them have dissolved.Levin's planarian flatworm experiments demonstrate this in biology. When bioelectric circuits are disrupted, the worm grows heads of other species — without any change to its genome. The pattern being expressed was latent in the space of possible forms, and a change in the interface (the bioelectric circuit) changed which pattern was ingressed. Geopolitical history offers analogies. How much of what we call a nation-state's “character” is not in its people but in the pattern stored in its institutional circuitry? When those circuits are disrupted — by revolution, invasion, or collapse — new patterns rush in from the adjacent possible, sometimes from regions of the latent space that are recognizable, sometimes shockingly novel.Pandemics also embody this scalar nesting. Viral replication is a molecular-scale process; its spread is topologically determined by the network of global mobility; its political consequences are mediated by institutional pattern memories about sovereignty, solidarity, and resource allocation. The COVID-19 pandemic did not merely “emerge” — it ingressed a set of patterns whose latency was already encoded in the physical architecture of 21st-century globalization. Competitive resource hoarding and cooperative vaccine-sharing were not just policy choices but different attractors in a landscape of a kind of “social morphospace”, pulling collective behavior toward different setpoints.GISc tools (like spatial game theory and network percolation models) map the surface of these landscapes. But Levin's framework asks us to go further. He wants us to not just map the attractors, but to ask what structured space those attractors are features of, and whether that space can be systematically explored.The scalar interplay extends outward. Local ethnic tensions, mapped via GIS hot-spot analysis, interact with what social theorist Zygmunt Bauman might term “global fluids” — arms, money, diasporas — to produce cascades that reflect not random chaos but path-dependent trajectories through a space of historical patterns. History's “nightmare on the brain of the living” becomes, in Levin's terms, a pattern-memory etched into the social substrate. Territorial borders, attempted genocide, human displacement are held as bioelectric setpoints, where trauma lingers as a morphogenetic field, quietly organizing the tissue of the present long after the original wound.MAPPING WHAT MATTER MERELY MISSESComplexity science, via GISc, forecasts world events as probabilistic landscapes rather than deterministic paths. Urry describes global systems as “adapting and co-evolving,” with attractors drawing trajectories amid chaos. GISc simulates this through fitness landscapes like agents navigate peaks and valleys of viability, local adaptations generating global patterns like economic booms or institutional collapses.Levin's framework intensifies this picture in two ways. First, it insists that the attractors are not randomly distributed. The latent space of possible social patterns — like the latent space of morphogenetic outcomes — has structure. Evolution, as Levin argues, progresses rapidly precisely because the space has “a relatively smooth character” in which “past interactions with it carry non-trivial information about the adjacent possible.” The same may be true of cultural and institutional evolution. The reason certain forms of governance, urbanism, or economic organization recur across independent civilizations is not purely because of convergent environmental pressures, but because they represent attractors in a structured space of collective intelligence patterns that sufficiently complex social interfaces tend to ingress.Second, and more provocatively, Levin's framework suggests that we do not simply make the social forms we inhabit. We invite patterns to temporarily inhabit our collective embodiments. To see why, consider one of his most uncontroversial and disarming experiments. Levin's lab studied simple sorting algorithms — the kind computer science students have used for decades. These are short deterministic procedures that take a jumbled list of numbers and rearrange them into sequential order. Nothing mysterious here but made for many an interview question at Microsoft!When Levin's team visualized the algorithm's progress as a movement through an abstract sorting space, unexpected behaviors emerged that nobody had noticed in all those decades of use. When the algorithm encountered a number that refused to move — a piece of broken data blocking its path — it didn't simply halt. It temporarily de-sorted the rest of the array, moved things around the obstruction, and then recovered its progress. It was exhibiting something resembling delayed gratification — the capacity to temporarily move away from a goal in order to reach it more completely later. Like a soccer player kicking the ball backwards to advance it forward.This ability was not written into the algorithm. Nobody put it there. Then, when the team ran a distributed version where each number ran its own variant of the algorithm, numbers sharing the same variant spontaneously clustered together — a kind of social behavior, emerging without a single line of code instructing any number to notice or prefer its own kind. The algorithm was doing something it was never designed to do, and had been doing it, unobserved, for decades.Now, imagine a democracy is not constructed from scratch by rational agents but an interface that, when configured appropriately, ingresses a pattern of distributed decision-making whose properties exceed what any designer or participant imagined or specified. Cities, constitutions, and international institutions become pointers. The patterns they summon may even surprise their architects — and may have been quietly surprising them and us all along.This has immediate consequences for how GISc could approach attempts at predicting futures. For example, prospective spatial modeling — Markov chains, scenario planning — maps the probability surface of possible trajectories. But a Levin-inflected GISc would ask this: what new pointers are being constructed right now, and what regions of the latent pattern space are they configured to access?The answers could become bewildering in a world of AI-mediated governance, hybrid human-machine urban systems, and the synthetic biological constructions Levin's team pursues. These are vehicles of exploration into regions of Platonic space we have not navigated before. “We are now fishing in regions of Platonic space we have never explored before,” he writes — with implications not only practical (”what will it do to us”) but ethical (”how do we fulfill the opportunities and duties of an ethical synthbiosis with beings who are not quite like us”).For GISc, this need not be merely philosophical. Spatial planning and governance literally configure the physical interfaces through which collective intelligence patterns are ingressed. Urban density fosters certain attractors of solidarity and innovation while sprawl ingresses different ones. Green civic infrastructure designed to buffer floods mechanically also reconfigures the relationship between human settlement and ecological pattern space which invites a whole different class of emergent resilience. The question is no longer only “what will happen here, probabilistically” but “what are we building a pointer toward?”Fatalists may see the latent space as already barring our options. Pessimists will amplify the risks of novel pointers we cannot control. Realists might attempt to quantify via more Monte Carlo simulations. And techo-optimists may try to engineer and configure interfaces to access and profit from whatever attractors emerge. But what I like most of all about Levin's framework is that it offers something more nuanced than any of these: structured humility. We do not know the full topology of the space we are pointing into. Every new city, every new institution, every new technological architecture is, in some sense, a bioengineering experiment — and like Levin's Xenobots and Anthrobots, it may manifest competencies and patterns nobody designed or predicted.If Levin's intuition is correct, we are but temporary self-organizing forms that hold together for a time, perform actions that exceed their physical composition, and then yield to the impermanence built into any pointer's relationship with the patterns it accesses. Humility does feel like the appropriate response. But more importantly, the recognition that mapping the structure of the space we are ingressing into is, at this moment, among the most important things we could do.The information embedded in Geographic Information Science has the potential to demystify fatalism, especially when death's certainty yields to spatial agency. Levin reminds us that information, at its Latin root, means to give form — to in-form. That is what geographic information has always done, long before it became a science. It did not merely transmit data, but impose structure on space, render the implicit geometry of human existence legible and actionable. Every map is an act of in-forming. The world is no doomsday script, but a co-evolving field — its attractors mappable, its interfaces legible, its vectors steerable — if we aim with care, with intent, and with the humility to know what we summon may exceed what we design.REFERENCESLevin, M. (2025). Ingressing minds: Causal patterns beyond genetics and environment in natural, synthetic, and hybrid embodiments. PsyArXiv. O'Sullivan, D., Manson, S. M., Messina, J. P., & Crawford, T. W. (2006). Space, place, and complexity science. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.Urry, J. (2003). Global complexity. Polity Press. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

In this week's episode, Pastor Kevin sits down with Shane Kleiman, a member of SSPP who first attended while a student at Michigan Tech and oversees the Media Booth.While at Tech, Shane earned two Master's degrees - one in Forestry and the other in "Geographic Information Science" (GIS). But Shane's passion for nature extends beyond his professional life.In this conversation we talk about humanity's relationship to Creation. Shane brings real-world examples from his experience working in the forests of the U.P. and around the country.Listen and consider your own relationship to Creation. What aspects of Creation point you back in gratefulness to your Creator? Which aspects are difficult to navigate faithfully? We'll explore these same questions as we seek to live as the human creatures God created us to be.As always we hope you enjoy it.

This week, we welcome Dr. Michael Jerrett, an esteemed professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, to The Hamilton Review Podcast. It's been just over a month since the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles. In the span of one day, thousands of people lost their homes, thousands were displaced indefinitely and the cities of Altadena and Pacific Palisades were burned to the ground. The toxins in the air are heavy and the question on everyone's mind is: "How does the air quality impact our health and how do we navigate through this challenging time to keep ourselves and our children safe?" Dr. Jerrett is an expert in his field and we are honored to have him on the show. To our valuable listeners, you'll want to share this important conversation with your friends and family as we continue to pray for our city. Dr. Michael Jerrett is an internationally recognized expert in Geographic Information Science for Exposure Assessment and Spatial Epidemiology. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the Jonathan Fielding Chair in Climate Change and Public Health. Dr. Jerrett earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Toronto (Canada). For the past 22 years, Dr. Jerrett has researched how to characterize population exposures to air pollution and built environmental variables, how to understand the social distribution of these exposures among different groups (e.g., poor vs. wealthy), and how to assess the health effects from environmental exposures. Over the last decade, Dr. Jerrett has also studied the contribution of the built and natural environment to physical activity, obesity, and several health outcomes. In 2009, the United States National Academy of Science appointed Dr. Jerrett to the Committee on “Future of Human and Environmental Exposure Science in the 21st Century.” The committee recently concluded its task with the publication of a report entitled "Exposure Science in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy." In 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency appointed Dr. Jerrett to the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Sub-Committee for Nitrogen Oxides. From 2014 to the present, Dr. Jerrett has been named to the Thomson Reuters List of Highly Cited Researchers, indicating he is in the top 1% of all authors in the fields of Environment/Ecology in terms of citation by other researchers.  Dr. Michael Jerrett at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health   How to contact Dr. Bob: Dr. Bob on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChztMVtPCLJkiXvv7H5tpDQ Dr. Bob on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drroberthamilton/ Dr. Bob on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bob.hamilton.1656 Dr. Bob's Seven Secrets Of The Newborn website: https://7secretsofthenewborn.com/ Dr. Bob's website: https://roberthamiltonmd.com/ Pacific Ocean Pediatrics: http://www.pacificoceanpediatrics.com/  

This girl is on fire! Stop what you're doing and spend an hour with us getting to know Jazzmen Wilson! Jazzmen risked everything by joining the guys (& Dr Nik) in-studio for this spirited conversation. She is a graduate of ASU with a B.S. in Geographic Information Science, a mid-level GIS technician for the Salt River Project and fellow podcaster. Just some of the items discussed include GIS applications in the utility sector, the evolution of GIS, the importance of collaboration, working with land surveyors, connecting GIS communities together through storytelling, and of course The GIS Chat Podcast! Music by Alicia Keys!

The future of personal mobility isn't yet clear, but it's not likely to be based on privately-owned gas-powered cars forever. Personal mobility will come many future forms: autonomous cars, improved mass transit, high-speed rail, new modes of electric aerial transportation, and urban street infrastructure that prioritizes pedestrians and bikes and makes cities green, walkable, and inviting. This CMC forum features an in-depth discussion about the future of personal mobility that might change the way you think about getting from A to B. The panelists are: Ted Angel, Aerospace Affairs Director, The Dayton Development Coalition  Preeti Choudhary, Executive Director, DriveOhio Harvey J. Miller, Ph.D., Bob and Mary Reusche Chair in Geographic Information Science, and Professor and Director, Department of Geography Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, The Ohio State University The host is Walker Evans, Co-Founder & CEO, Columbus Underground  CMC's partner for this forum was The 2023 COSI Science Festival. It was supported by the Grange Insurance Audubon Center. It was recorded before a live audience in Columbus, Ohio on May 3, 2023. 

"Mission Resilience" is a podcast series hosted by Mike Glover, CEO of Fieldcraft Survival, that explores resilience through conversations with people who have overcome adversity. In this episode, Eric Neal, a highly decorated combat veteran and Army Special Forces, Green Beret, and now the range manager at GRITR Sports, shares his experience during multiple deployments. Eric graduated from various advanced courses and earned a bachelor's degree in Geographic Information Science from the University of North Texas and a master's in business from the University of Southern California. Eric talks about his time in combat, the losses and regrets he faced, and offers advice on building resilience. Sponsors and Affiliates: HOIST Hydration: (Code fieldcraft10 for 10% off) Ketone-IQ: (15% Off with code FIELDCRAFT) Vertx: (Code: fieldcraft for 20% off) Ten Thousand: (15% Off with code FIELDCRAFT) Athletic Greens LMNT: FREE sample pack- Just Pay Shipping Manscaped: (20% Off with code FIELDCRAFT) KC Hilites: (Code: fieldcraft for 10% off) Anthem Snacks: (Code FIELDCRAFT10 for 10% off) Qalo Silicone Rings: (20% off order USCCA Kifaru FOLLOW US: https://fieldcraftsurvival.locals.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcj3FycZBXIPNj7QIBKTIDw http://www.instagram.com/fieldcraftsurvival

Today's guest is Daisha Williams who is the Environmental Justice Manager for CleanAIRE NC. CleanAIRE NC utilizes action, education, and innovation in their partnerships to restore the environment. They started in 2003 as CleanAIRE Carolina where volunteers banded together to improve air quality and noticed the link between that and climate change and public health. Their focus today is on climate change and air quality; addressing it through advocacy, education, and community-driven research and programs. CleanAIRE NC has 4 programs; health, policy, citizen science, and environmental justice. The Health program provides information to help health professionals talk to their patients about climate change, air pollution, and how it is affecting their health. The Policy program advocates for strengthening environmental policies to limit the factors that contribute to air pollution and climate change. The Citizen Science program uses air monitors in impacted communities to translate data for actions and improvements. The Environmental Justice program incorporates all of the other programs to make sure those who have been affected the most by climate change concerns are being included in efforts and decisions as well as empowered with knowledge. While CleanAIRE NC is based in Charlotte, NC, they assist communities all over North Carolina and have offices in Greensboro and Durham as well. Before landing at CleanAIRE NC, Daisha received her Bachelor's of Science in Sustainable Development from Appalachian State University and was interested in animals so she joined the Woodland Park Zoo in Washington. From there she learned she was more interested in working with people, so she got a job as a Legislative Assistant at the Washington Environmental Council where she worked with students in Title I schools in the Seattle area on the legislative process, who their representatives are, and how to use their voice for change. She was also part of a team that helped create a policy strategy that was passed to safeguard the environment. Next, she decided to get a graduate degree in Policy at John's Hopkins University, and moved back to Charlotte where she got a job working with the Americorps' Regional Stormwater Partnership of the Carolinas and began her work in the Historic West End. Because of her strong work in the community, it made sense to be involved with CleanAIRE NC as the new Environmental Justice Manager. She also has a graduate certificate in Geographic Information Science and Technology. The Historic West End in Charlotte was subjected to red lining back in the 1930s which caused this area to have a lot of pollution due to the nearby highways and industries. Three highway systems cross through this neighborhood. The Airkeepers program through CleanAIRE NC was launched in 2017 which was the first one in the state. This system measured particulate matter. This is important as our lungs cannot remove certain sizes of particulate matter as it reaches deep into the lungs and bloodstream. The intention for this program was to arm the community of how much particulate matter is present and when it's at the highest concentration. In 2018, community members and CleanAIRE NC created a report on pollution and health concerns to present to the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioner's in order to advocate for a federal EPA monitor which they received. The importance of the federal EPA monitor is that now the government is responsible for implementing programs to address the present issues. This also helped them formalize a Historic West End Green District which is designed to improve air quality, reduce emissions, and improve overall health. The community-led program started with 3 volunteers and now has 13. The health impacts of poor air quality are great and include issues such as inflammation, imbalanced nervous systems, can exacerbate diabetes, heart disease, and asthma. Recent studies have even found that poor air quality has a strong link to death by COVID. "It really disheartens me that pollution touches this community and many communities like it in a cumulative way; it's not just water quality concerns, it's not just air quality concerns, it's also a concern of a lack of resources, whether that's lack of access to fresh and healthy food, lack of access to medical services, you also have concerns of displacement as Charlotte expands and grows rapidly and these communities are getting pushed out of their neighborhoods." The Historic West End Green District's projects are chosen by the residents and have 3 main goals; strategic tree planting and maintaining of current trees as well as installing green walls and roofs, advocating for electric car charging stations and increasing access to more clean transit, and education on sustainability and solutions for clean air. The Historic West End Green District is working on Community Benefits Agreements which would work with industries in the area to help cut down particulate matter and pollutants. "So building up those relationships because that's where you start is just listening and building up trust and expanding this work and even connecting other environmental justice communities to each other because there is power in numbers and there's also a lot of solidarity in listening and creating solutions with those that are experiencing the same things." If you would like to support CleanAIRE NC, Daisha recommends educating yourself first on the historical inequities, environmental justice, and the legacy it has left behind. From there you can speak out against it and vote for people who will support efforts. You can join their Advocacy program or donate to support them. For self-care, Daisha enjoys spending time in nature, walks with her dog, and baking. To connect with CleanAIRE NC you can visit their website here or email Daisha at daisha@cleanaire.org.

Born in Pasadena, California, Brian Fuller has called the San Gabriel Valley home for most of his life.  An IT professional working for MSP, Impact Networking, Brian is employed as a vCIO for their client, Warmuth Law.  Information technology has been a career choice for him for over twenty years after graduating from USC with a B.S. in Business Administration.  Beyond the walls of academia and commerce, he enjoys the outdoors that bless the San Gabriel Valley area.  If not hiking in the hills of the Angeles National Forest above his childhood hometown of Altadena, it may be enjoying the manicured gardens of the Huntington Library in San Marino, Descanso Gardens in La Canada, and the Arboretum in Arcadia.  A fan of all things Pasadena, he is a volunteer known as a white suiter with the Tournament of Roses that holds the New Year's Day Parade and the famous Rose Bowl.  Seeking to accomplish a significant feat every year, Brian is currently completing his master's thesis in Geographic Information Science at his alma mater, USC.Email: bfuller@impactnetworking.comLinkedIn: brianmfuller __________MusicPodcast Intro and OutroEveryday, Jason Farnhmam, YouTube Audio LibraryPodcast AdvertisementI love you, Vibe Tracks, YouTube Audio LibrarySour Tennessee Red (Sting), John Dewey and the 41 Players, YouTube Audio LibraryDewey, Cheedham, and Howe (Sting), John Dewey and the 41 Players, YouTube Audio LibraryFilm Project Countdown.flac Copyright 2013 Iwan Gabovitch, CC-BY3 license

The Cognitive Crucible is a forum that presents different perspectives and emerging thought leadership related to the information environment. The opinions expressed by guests are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of or endorsement by the Information Professionals Association. During this episode, MAJ Cassandra Brooker presents her Master's research report entitled: “The Effectiveness of Influence Activities in Information Warfare.” Cass asserts that Western democracies are already at war in the information domain and are being out-communicated by adversaries. In her study, she fuses three research disciplines: systems thinking, influence, and behavioural science to better understand mental models and enable a deeper understanding of influencing tactics. We discuss the notion of feedback loops, which are critical to understanding influence. Finally, Cass reviews two case studies–ISIS and the Hillary Clinton 2016 Presidential campaign. Resources: The Effectiveness of Influence Activities in Information Warfare by Cassandra Brooker Rand Paper: Systems Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare: How the Chinese People's Liberation Army Seeks to Wage Modern Warfare Systems Thinking For Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results by David Peter Stroh Link to full show notes and resources https://information-professionals.org/episode/cognitive-crucible-episode-81 Guest Bio: Major Cassandra Brooker is an Australian Intelligence Officer, who is currently posted to the Advanced Warfighting Evaluation Section developing future and emerging threat products in support of the Australian Army's Aviation capability. Major Brooker was born in New Zealand and served two years in the Royal New Zealand Air Force before immigrating to Australia. She graduated from the Royal Military College in 2002 and has held a diverse range of postings throughout her career, including: developing aviation intelligence, collection and targeting capabilities; specialisations in remote-sensing and geospatial intelligence; campaign planning to defeat ISIS at the Combined Joint Forces Land Component Command in Baghdad; and as the ADF's first bilateral student to study at the Military Science Academy in Hanoi.  MAJ Brooker undertook a Masters of Research in 2019 at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra, on a Chief of Army's Scholarship. Her thesis spanned three academic disciplines of: Systems Thinking, Influence Activities, and Cognitive Theory to investigate solutions for improving Australia's influence effectiveness in information warfare. She also holds a Bachelor of Professional Studies (Peace Studies) from University of New England, a Master of Justice (Intelligence) from Queensland University of Technology, and a Graduate Diploma in Geographic Information Science from University of Queensland. About: The Information Professionals Association (IPA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring the role of information activities, such as influence and cognitive security, within the national security sector and helping to bridge the divide between operations and research. Its goal is to increase interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars and practitioners and policymakers with an interest in this domain. For more information, please contact us at communications@information-professionals.org. Or, connect directly with The Cognitive Crucible podcast host, John Bicknell, on LinkedIn. Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, 1) IPA earns from qualifying purchases, 2) IPA gets commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

Ivy Lu: How To Organize Data Science Teams and Data Science Projects for Startups [Audio] Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSSIvy Lu is the head of data science and machine learning at Oxygen. Ivy's onboarding marked the launch of Oxygen's banking platform. She has bachelor's degree in Geographical Information System from Peking University, a Ph.D in Earth Systems and Geoinformation Science and a Master's degree in Geographic Information Science and Cartography both from George Mason University. Episode Links:  Ivy Lu's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivy9lu/ Ivy Lu's Twitter: https://twitter.com/oxygenbanking Ivy Lu's Website: https://www.blog.oxygen.us/ Podcast Details: Podcast website: https://www.humainpodcast.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/humain-podcast-artificial-intelligence-data-science/id1452117009 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6tXysq5TzHXvttWtJhmRpS RSS: https://feeds.redcircle.com/99113f24-2bd1-4332-8cd0-32e0556c8bc9 YouTube Full Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxvclFvpPvFM9_RxcNg1rag YouTube Clips: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxvclFvpPvFM9_RxcNg1rag/videos Support and Social Media:  – Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast– Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/humain/creators – Twitter: https://twitter.com/dyakobovitch – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/humainpodcast/ – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidyakobovitch/ – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HumainPodcast/ – HumAIn Website Articles: https://www.humainpodcast.com/blog/ Outline: Here's the timestamps for the episode: (00:00) – Introduction(01:42) – I joined Capital One as a data scientist after my graduation from George Mason University with a PhD in Geographic Information Science. After I moved to the west coast, I joined Apple. So, at Apple, I work on an anti-fraud team where we fight against all kinds of fraud and abuse within the whole Apple ecosystem to bring trust and safety to the Apple customers. Both experiments helped me prepare for my new challenge at Oxygen as a FinTech company. So, that's my career , how I passed from the traditional banking industry to a large technology company. And now I'm at the spin hat company Oxygen. (04:05) – A collaboration challenge, since you are the only one and only data scientist on the team, basically, you are collaborating with so many different teams and departments: from operations to marketing customer support or product features. So, you need to collaborate with every single one in the different departments and understand their needs, understand their pain. That also comes related to the first challenge. Collaboration comes with prioritization.(06:57) – Data science teams should be positioned as the foundation and the cross team within the whole organization. So for each line of the business, data scientists should have domain knowledge about the problem that they are trying to deal with(09:20) – I collaborate with our fraud team to set up a lot of protections in the core sets. We collaborate with different fraud vendors on how to set up all the parameters, all the controls in place in the fraud vendors for our sign up status. After the sign up flow is pretty under control, I built a preliminary machine learning model for the fraudsters, to detect fraudsters after sign up for the behaviors they show with our card.(14:48) – I see these days, as data scientists it may require different skills than before. Nowadays, maybe, coding skills are not required anymore with such a good tool for data scientists and for machine learning engineers. But, ultimately, I still think the important thing is the study section background on the machine learning algorithm, the deep understanding of the machine learning algorithms. Also what's important is the deep understanding of the problem they're solving.(17:41) – There are two types of team structure. One is like the data science team belongs to one centralized team and then people may wear multiple hats. So, one day you may work on project A, then another day and work on project B, versus another one that is more embedded.(20:33) – We launched a new product called Elements. So we are now offering four tiers of the product, with increasing cashback with different saving APRs, as well as other retail and travel benefits like priority pass, launch access, reimbursements, like digital subscriptions, like Netflix, and the Peloton Digital.  (23:08) – We are going to raise our series B soon and a series B is all about metrics. Whether your company is going to be sustainable, what's your retention, what's your user growth. So a lot of KPIs and the metrics you send show to not only our internal business, but also to work presents for our VC.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Planning in Appalachia, convincing a community that you're not taking their jobs, and the future of autonomous vehicles in rural places. My guest this week, Jason Pyles, and I discuss all this in more in one of my favorite interviews yet. As a kick off to our discussions centered around Geography and Geographic Information Science, I turn to Jason for his expertise. Jason works for the Buckeye Hills Regional Council as one of two GIS professionals supporting the agency's work. His position is unique in that he is sort of a one-man-GIS-show and does all the work entailed in GIS from top to bottom. He shared some great insights into what it means to serve his regional community through his role in technology. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/stemsandleaves/message

This summer we are collaborating with Dr. Xiumei Pu in her Project, "Mountains and Stories: Building Community Among Asian and Pacific Islander Refugee and Immigrant Families in Salt Lake Valley," with the support of a Whiting Public Engagement Programs Seed Grant (https://www.whiting.org/scholars/public-engagement-programs/about). Anchored in the theme of mountains, the project consists of a twelve-part podcast and a documentary, a storytelling-conversation cultural event (June 26, 2021), and a group hike in the Wasatch Mountains (October 23, 2021). It is our hope that these efforts will amplify the environmental voices of Asian and Pacific Islander refugee and immigrant communities, and spark more public interest in thinking about the connection between culture, identity, and the natural environment. You can listen to previous episodes here (https://podcast.mountainresearch.org/) on the IMR Podcast website. At the heart of the project is a podcast series featuring the life and work of twelve storytellers who come from a range of age groups, occupations, and ethnic and racial backgrounds. Some of them are born in the United States; many of them are born in another Asian country or Pacific Island and immigrated to the US at a young age. Their stories show fascinating complexities of immigration routes and histories, incredible cultural richness and resilience, and long-lasting contributions of the Asian and Asian Pacific Islander communities to the social life and cultural landscapes of Salt Lake Valley and the broader Utah. https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/1/1fa521c0-f451-41ad-b95a-11b649737210/OTyc50-U.jpeg Kripa Thapa recently graduated from the Master's program in geography and Geographic Information Science master's student from the University of Utah (UofU). Over the two-year run, she worked under the supervision of Dr. Summer Rupper. During my first year, she was recognized as a Graduate Fellow under the Global Change and Sustainability Center (GCSC) at the UofU. In her second year, I was engaged as a Teaching Assistant (TA) for Geography Department. Currently, she is working as a Research Assistant (RA) at the Snow and Ice Lab, UofU. Besides these engagements over the past two years, she conducted my research titled "Assessment of mountain water supply and storage at sub-basin scale in Nepal". The study aims to elucidate the primary drivers of water vulnerability in the mountain ecosystems of Nepal and provide a framework to help combat potential water scarcity that will be of interest to policymakers and researchers in the long run. In August, Kripa will be pursuing an internship – with the Software Products Team at ESRI, one of the world's leading GIS software companies Jeff Nichols and Brent Olson co-direct the Institute for Mountain Research (http://mountainresearch.org) and our 2018-2019 Mountain Fellows are Katie Saad and Naomi Shapiro. Our theme song is “Home” by Pixie and the Partygrass Boys. (https://www.pixieandthepartygrassboys.com). As Naomi likes to say, “They are awesome and you should check them out.” The Institute for Mountain Research is located on the ancestral and traditional lands of the Ute, Goshute, and Shoshone Peoples. Special Guest: Kripa Thapa.

Hello Interactors,Welcome to spring. We now transition to cartography. This post weaves the story of how I came to study cartography as an undergrad, the challenges of drawing maps, and how a spinning logo led to a mapping feature in Excel.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or feel free to email me directly.Now let’s go…I didn’t set out to be a geography major. I didn’t even know the word ‘cartography’. My primary interest in high school was computer graphics. My two favorite subjects in school were math and art and I saw computer graphics as a way to combine them. I was also addicted to MTV. Yes, I was there for the music, but I was also in love with their animated logos. That’s when I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. Animate graphics with a computer. Finding a university to teach me this proved elusive. I ended up following a high school friend to Colorado State where he was already studying graphic design. But toward the end of my fist year, the head of the design department settled with me, “Look Brad, I don’t think you’re going to find what you’re looking for here. You might try California.” So I loaded up the truck and I moved to Beverly. Hill’s, that is. Swimming pools, movie stars.My cousin lived in L.A., so I moved in with her and her husband. I took a year off, worked, and searched for the right school. By this time, 1985, Dire Strait’s video, ‘Money for Nothing’, had come out. It’s was one of the first ever computer animated videos. It also featured Sting’s familiar cry, “I want my MTV…” I hear you, Sting. I still want my MTV. Having seen this video, I was even more certain of what I wanted to do. In a twist of fate, my cousin helped me land a job as a corporate gopher for a consumer electronics distributor. I was living that line from the ‘Money for Nothing’ video: “We gotta move these color TVs…”In 1987, the popular computer graphic conference, SIGGRAPH, was in Anaheim so I attended. I was in heaven. These were my people. I found my way to a booth with a cool logo and name: Wavefront Technologies.The people were cool too. Best yet, they were located in Santa Barbara. I decided I wanted to work for this company, so I headed north and enrolled at University of California, Santa Barbara. Then came the hard part. What do I major in?Computer graphics was only offered in graduate level computer science courses. That seemed too long and arduous for my taste. I remember sitting there frustrated one day, thumbing through the course catalog my roommate had left open to his major, environmental studies. I saw a class offered by the geography department in mapmaking – cartography. As I looked further I found computer cartography. I soon realized I could learn computer graphics and graphic design through cartography. I then declared geography as my major and was finally on a path to my ultimate goal — Wavefront.DRAWING ON THE BRAIN TO DRAW MAPSDrawing maps is difficult. It seems easy. From last week’s post on cognitive maps we learned making maps comes natural to the brain. We all have what we need to draw a map right there in our head, but getting it to come out of our hand and on to paper is challenging. And error prone.Around the time I started at UCSB, geography professor and mental map legend, Reg Golledge, conducted a study on the ability and accuracy of sketching a map from memory. Inspired by research dating back to the 50’s, the study focused on children. Young people have the cognitive skills to recognize anchor-points in the environment, but lack the skill, expertise, and experience in drawing maps.  Golledge had an 11 year old boy walk a designated path forward and reverse in his suburban neighborhood just off campus in Goleta, California. He repeated this path over the course of five days and was asked to write down his navigation strategy; including the list of landmarks and features used in his strategy. He then wrote down a list of steps required to complete the journey that another kid his age could understand. And, lastly, he had him draw a map. Similar to the Carr study mentioned last week, the boy was also shown a video of the journey and was asked to anticipate which landmarks would be next in the sequence of his path.  What Golledge found is that by day five, the boy was able to draw a fairly detailed map of the path. Like the Carr study, the more times the boy walked the path, the more detail the brain was filling in.As you can see, the origin and destination of the journey were easier to sketch. Over time, other segments progressively filled in over time. But what’s interesting is the gaps found in the boy’s early maps weren’t there in his verbal description of what was to come next in the video. Even in early trials the boy could accurately describe what was coming next in the sequence watching the video, but he couldn’t draw it. His brain had the list of segments neatly ordered in his brain on day one, but drawing them completely and accurately took until day five.There have been a number of similar studies conducted since. Including other methods of giving directions like pointing to a location with a finger or simply walking someone to a destination. What researchers have concluded about sketch maps is summarized here by Golledge:“Of these various methods, pointing, sketch mapping, and walking to targets parallel research methodologies that have been used extensively in cognitive mapping. It is significant to note that perhaps the most prominent of these methods - sketching - was found to be among the least reliable! After evaluating nine different ways of indicating direction, [the research] showed that simply using a finger or a device extended like a finger (e.g., a stick) was the most accurate technique.”It turns out drawing maps is hard.CHARTING A COURSE IN CARTOGRAPHYOne of the first things I learned in cartography is the best maps are copies an existing one. All of our mapping assignments used translucent paper (vellum) that we would lay over an existing map and trace by hand with a technical pen (Rapidographs). Old school. But I was a rebel. After spending four hours hand drawing a map assignment, I would walk three floors down to the computer lab and crank out the same assignment on a Mac in under an hour. Much to the chagrin of my TA (and now friend), Greg, I would hand both in just to prove a point. Computer cartography was upon us.But the most valuable lesson Greg taught me wasn’t about how to unclog my pens or how to use the photo enlarger in the dark room to create glossy reproductions of our pen and ink masterpieces. It was how to blend data visualization with mapping. Most of the maps I remember drawing were choropleth maps. These maps are commonplace now. Probably best known for showing ‘red’ and ‘blue’ disparities by region during U.S. elections. Here’s one from the 2016 election by the New York Times. It gives the illusion that most people in America voted for Trump. The choropleth doesn’t take into account how many people live in each county making the map somewhat misleading.The New York Times has been doing choropleth election maps since 1896.In 1992 they added a bar chart to give the reader more information and increased accuracy over just the map alone.Many of my mapping assignments included charts and graphs as well. Which were also drawn by hand. It would have been impossible for the 1988 me to imagine that just five years down the road I’d be managing a team of designers working on charting in Excel.I’D RATHER BE SPINNING LOGOSI wasn’t learning to make maps because I wanted to be a cartographer. Sure I wanted the graphic and information design training, but I was mostly there for computer graphics. Apart from a couple projects on my Commodore Amiga with computer cartography legend Waldo Tobler, my most exciting project came in my senior year. I had secured an internship at my dream company, Wavefront and wanted to make the most of the opportunity.My senior advisor was Michael Goodchild. Considered a pioneer in Geographic Information Science, he was also kicking off a new academic consortium called the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). He needed a flashy intro to a promotional video for its launch, so we decided that was my senior project. It was no MTV music video, but I was getting closer to my dream. I remember once being stuck behind a car in L.A. with a bumper sticker that read, “I’d rather be spinning logos.” I thought to myself, me too. I decided professor Mike needed a spinning logo for his video. So with a little help from my friends at Wavefront, I download a 3D topographic model of Santa Barbara, brought into Wavefront’s 3D animation software, and modelled a nice NCGIA logo that was ripe for spinning. Before long I had the logo soaring over the Santa Barbara foothills as the camera swept down the coast. I high fived Mike, checked the spinning logo off my list, and the next thing I knew I had a job offer from Wavefront. Mission accomplished.I soon fell in love with designing software more than modelling and animating graphics. I designed and coded the user interface for the Data Visualizer – a 3D science and engineering analysis tool. It was way ahead of its time. But the success of this product, and Wavefront, hinged on U.S. Department of Defense contracts. It was 1991 and the first Gulf War had broken out, those contracts dried up, and I was laid off. So I headed north to Microsoft in pursuit of a new dream.CHOROPLETHS FOR THE WORLDAfter a long career leading big design and research teams in Office and Windows, I went back to Office in 2014 to manage a smaller team focused on Excel. I was also scratching a decades-old data visualization itch. At the time, Microsoft was also making forays into 3D maps in Excel.But despite these eye popping graphics, users still couldn’t make a simple map out of geographic data – like a choropleth, for example. So I pushed to change that. Now anybody can make a choropleth in less than a minute. No vellum. No ink. And no dark room. No drawing required, at all.  But they’re very limited maps. Excel can’t yet display two data series in a single map. It turns out making maps is hard, even for Microsoft.But you can change the mapping projections – how the computer draws a region of a curved surface (earth) onto a two dimensional surface (paper or screen). The Mercator projection is the most popular, and the default, but it skews the size of regions as the get further from the equator. Excel offers alternatives, like the Miller projection. This technique better maintains proportions of regions along the equator, but still has some skewing.Consider Greenland. This island is typically shown to be way larger than the United States, but that’s because the Mercator projection has skewed its true size. Greenland actually fits inside the United States with room to spare. To help us decide if Excel should make a statement around proper projection, I reached out to my senior advisor, Mike Goodchild. We hadn’t spoke or seen each other since I spun his logo in 1989. Mike had recently moved to Seattle to be closer to his daughter and her family. She’s Anne Goodchild, a transportation logistics superstar at the University of Washington. While Mike admired our attempt to mend the Mercator mess with a more preferable projection, he felt familiarity would probably be most prudent. So there you have it. After nearly 30 years since first being introduced to cartography, drawing my first map with pen and paper, and never losing my love for computer graphics, now anybody in the world can draw their own choropleth map. No pen, no ink, and no vellum. But that laser printer is still sitting there ready to show off your mapping skills. Just hit ‘Print’, slip it in a manila folder, and smile at your smug self as you recall from your brain that next segment in a chain of your journey along the earth’s curved plane. Subscribe at interplace.io

Brian Jefferson discusses his book Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age with Chris Richardson. Jefferson is Associate Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. He edits the digital magazine societyandspace.org, serves on the editorial boards of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Urban Geography, and is author of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age.

Dr. Jennifer Devine, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, and Dr. Nate Currit, associate professor and director of the Texas Center for Geographic Information Science, discusses the staggering environmental destruction and human suffering being wrought in Central America by narcotics traffickers clearcutting huge swaths of rainforest to establish cattle ranches to launder drug money.

Dr. Jennifer Devine, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, and Dr. Nate Currit, associate professor and director of the Texas Center for Geographic Information Science, discusses the staggering environmental destruction and human suffering being wrought in Central America by narcotics traffickers clearcutting huge swaths of rainforest to establish cattle ranches to launder drug money.

Planning in Appalachia, convincing a community that you're not taking their jobs, and the future of autonomous vehicles in rural places. My guest this week, Jason Pyles, and I discuss all this in more in one of my favorite interviews yet. As a kick off to our discussions centered around Geography and Geographic Information Science, I turn to Jason for his expertise.Jason works for the Buckeye Hills Regional Council as one of two GIS professionals supporting the agency's work. His position is unique in that he is sort of a one-man-GIS-show and does all the work entailed in GIS from top to bottom. He shared some great insights into what it means to serve his regional community through his role in technology.Credit for our theme song (Rosy Ross) and album art (Aaron Thomas Art) here: https://stemsandleaves.com/credits/For more episodes and updates head to STEMSANDLEAVES.COM

Trucks, buses, autonomous cars, scooters and bikes: everyone is crowding onto roadways. Professor and Chair of Geographic Information Science in the Department of Geography Harvey Miller talks with David Staley about how GIS can help make sense of it all. After you listen to the Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences podcast, available at https://soundcloud.com/voices_arts_sciences and on iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/voices-of-excellence-from-arts-and-sciences/id1436204139?mt=2 , see Prof Miller when he's the featured speaker at the February 17 Science Sundays: https://artsandsciences.osu.edu/research/science-sundays

At the junction of Computer Science and Geographic Information Science, GIScience lecturer Dr. Ben Adams is uniquely placed to witness and comment on blockchain technology's convergence with geographic information science. Explore how the merging of these two disciplines can help improve our lives or how their unintended consequences might make things worse. Listen for his subtle, yet profound, comments on privacy and data quality. For all aspiring “geochain” researchers, take note of his a call for articles for The Journal of Spatial Information Science at the end of the podcast. Enjoy.The Journal of Spatial Information Science - josis.orgThe Geospatial Knowledge Exploration and Acquisition (GeoKEA) Research GroupUniversity of Canterbury Geography DepartmentGuillaume Chapron, The Environment Needs Cryptogovernance, May 2017, NatureFree and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G)Blockchain startup references: foam, platin, blockcities.cobenjamin.adams@canterbury.ac.nzSupport the show (https://www.layoftheland.space)

This week I'm joined by Dr. Forrest Bowlick and Dr. Will Daniels, both of the Geoscience Dept. at UMass. Forrest Bowlick is a lecturer and graduate program director for the Geographic Information Science master's program. He shares his thoughts on map projections, the scarcity of helium, and his new project to develop online accessible GIS-education modules. Will Daniels is a postdoc who studies lake sediments to understand past climates, but today we focus on his recent experience as a participant in a NASA human research program simulating a mission to an asteroid. Cartoonist and comedian Woozy Kurtz joins as co-host.

For all the moms who were so overwhelmed that they couldn’t even read Natasha’s fabulous article, pop in some headphones and listen instead! And be encouraged. You are not alone. To read the original article, go to: http://christianmomthoughts.com/for-all-the-moms-overwhelmed-by-raising-christian-kids-in-a-secular-world/. Robin LopezRobin Lopez has a master’s degree in Geospatial Intelligence and was formerly a Geographic Information Science […] The post AAB Episode 15: For All the Moms Overwhelmed by Raising Christian Kids in a Secular World appeared first on Mama Bear Apologetics.

CyberGIS represents an interdisciplinary field combining advanced computing and cyberinfrastructure, geographic information science and systems (GIS), spatial analysis and modeling, and a number of geospatial domains (e.g., emergency management, smart cities, and the nexus of food, energy, and water systems) to enable broad scientific and technological advances. It has also emerged as new-generation GIS based on holistic integration of high-performance and distributed computing, data-driven knowledge discovery, visualization and visual analytics, and collaborative problem-solving and decision-making capabilities. The growing importance of cyberGIS is reflected by increasing calls for solutions to bridge the significant digital divide between advanced cyberinfrastructure and geospatial communities in the big data era. This presentation discusses challenges and opportunities for synergistically advancing cyberGIS and geospatial data science to transform geospatial discovery and innovation through interdisciplinary approaches. Dr. Shaowen Wang | Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Department of Geography & Geographic Information Science and Department of Computer Science

Shaowen Wang is a Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. He explains the immense opportunities for climate scientists using big data. That there are large amounts of geospatial data that people can collect with newer technology (i.e. mobile devices, sensors, and drones) and use to help them understand complex climate systems.

Dr Shane, Dr Ray, Dr Jen and Dr Catherine discuss Dr Jen's return from a research trip up to northern Australia, Buzz Aldrin's visit, research on coffee drinking, The innuendo effect, how roundworm infection increases fertility and a new study into beeswax found in ancient pottery.First guest via Skype call: John Hessler, modern cartographer/specialist in Geographic Information Science, curator at The Library of Congress in Washington D.C tells us all about the role of cartography with the advent of big data & virtual reality and also discusses the launch of a new book called Map.Second guest: Dr Samantha Grover, Postdoctoral Fellow, Soil Plant Interaction Group Department of Animal, Plant and Soil Science at La Trobe University tells us about her research into the extremes of soil organic content and how in WA vast amounts of crops are grown in low organic level soils.Program page: http://www.rrr.org.au/program/einstein-a-go-go/Facebook page: Einstein A Go GoTwitter: https://twitter.com/einstein_agogo

Speaker: Dr. Diana Sinton – Executive Director, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science

In this thesis, hierarchical graphs are investigated from two different angles – as a general modelling principle for (geo)spatial networks and as a practical means to enhance navigation in buildings. The topics addressed are of interest from a multi-disciplinary point of view, ranging from Computer Science in general over Artificial Intelligence and Computational Geometry in particular to other fields such as Geographic Information Science. Some hierarchical graph models have been previously proposed by the research community, e.g. to cope with the massive size of road networks, or as a conceptual model for human wayfinding. However, there has not yet been a comprehensive, systematic approach for modelling spatial networks with hierarchical graphs. One particular problem is the gap between conceptual models and models which can be readily used in practice. Geospatial data is commonly modelled - if at all - only as a flat graph. Therefore, from a practical point of view, it is important to address the automatic construction of a graph hierarchy based on the predominant data models. The work presented deals with this problem: an automated method for construction is introduced and explained. A particular contribution of my thesis is the proposition to use hierarchical graphs as the basis for an extensible, flexible architecture for modelling various (geo)spatial networks. The proposed approach complements classical graph models very well in the sense that their expressiveness is extended: various graphs originating from different sources can be integrated into a comprehensive, multi-level model. This more sophisticated kind of architecture allows for extending navigation services beyond the borders of one single spatial network to a collection of heterogeneous networks, thus establishing a meta-navigation service. Another point of discussion is the impact of the hierarchy and distribution on graph algorithms. They have to be adapted to properly operate on multi-level hierarchies. By investigating indoor navigation problems in particular, the guiding principles are demonstrated for modelling networks at multiple levels of detail. Complex environments like large public buildings are ideally suited to demonstrate the versatile use of hierarchical graphs and thus to highlight the benefits of the hierarchical approach. Starting from a collection of floor plans, I have developed a systematic method for constructing a multi-level graph hierarchy. The nature of indoor environments, especially their inherent diversity, poses an additional challenge: among others, one must deal with complex, irregular, and/or three-dimensional features. The proposed method is also motivated by practical considerations, such as not only finding shortest/fastest paths across rooms and floors, but also by providing descriptions for these paths which are easily understood by people. Beyond this, two novel aspects of using a hierarchy are discussed: one as an informed heuristic exploiting the specific characteristics of indoor environments in order to enhance classical, general-purpose graph search techniques. At the same time, as a convenient by- product of this method, clusters such as sections and wings can be detected. The other reason is to better deal with irregular, complex-shaped regions in a way that instructions can also be provided for these spaces. Previous approaches have not considered this problem. In summary, the main results of this work are: • hierarchical graphs are introduced as a general spatial data infrastructure. In particular, this architecture allows us to integrate different spatial networks originating from different sources. A small but useful set of operations is proposed for integrating these networks. In order to work in a hierarchical model, classical graph algorithms are generalised. This finding also has implications on the possible integration of separate navigation services and systems; • a novel set of core data structures and algorithms have been devised for modelling indoor environments. They cater to the unique characteristics of these environments and can be specifically used to provide enhanced navigation in buildings. Tested on models of several real buildings from our university, some preliminary but promising results were gained from a prototypical implementation and its application on the models.