Gentle Introduction to GIS
GIS Lounge have a good summary of a Gentle Introduction to GIS, a PDF manual and accompanying datasets for use with QGIS. Sponsored by the Department of Land Affairs, Eastern Cape, South Africa, it covers the main introductory conceptual areas and provides examples. Its not going to win any writing awards, but it is nice and succinct. In that sense it complements the book from MapAction which covers somewhat similar ground for MapWindow.
With my educational hat back on, it will be interesting to see how schools around the world start picking up on these resources. Certainly in the UK the market is wide open with schools starting to look at software. Both QGIS and MapWindow could fill this introductory niche very nicely.
Students have 10 minute attention span
Students only have ‘10-minute attention span’ - it’s a great headline from the BBC and the first part of the copy reads: “University students have average attention spans of just 10 minutes and many miss lectures because of the need for part-time jobs, research suggests.” Actually, the 10-minute attention span is a pretty well known phenomena; John Medina outlines this in Brain Rules (amongst other things) and discusses how he structures 1 hour lectures in to 15 minutes blocks to leverage attention spans. So not so much a real headline as a storm in a teacup.
Very small world map
A world map with a difference - this one is only 40 microns (that’s about the same as the wavelength of thermal infra-red light) in in size! This one is done using CMOS fabrication tools and put on a chip. Nice :)
Importance of Geography
Nice article over at The Economist espousing the importance of Geography (with a big “g”) and it’s centrality to everything important that is going on in the world. Of course, I would at to that that GIS underpins a very large part of the data collection, analysis and presentation of much of what goes on in geography.
Snow covered UK
It’s already been flagged up on the BBC, but a Terra MODIS image captured a nearly cloud free, almost totally snow covered, UK yesterday. It’s quite simply stunning and is available from the MODIS Rapid Response System which provides near real-time access to MODIS imagery on Aqua and Terra. This particular image is the highest resolution (250m pixels) version and is available with a worldfile meaning it can be loaded straight in to a GIS.
