Back to the New Normal

Posted on June 1, 2011 by John Reiser

It’s been a while since I last posted to the ol’ Blog. After I returned from the DevSummit in March, my free time dwindled down to nothing. The end of the spring semester has been a whirlwind of activity; developing an online course, tackling several research projects, presenting at the National Guard’s CFMO University, and the usual end of the semester tasks like grading, projects, etc. Now that the semester is over and I’m a little more free to tackle projects, I hope that I’ll be able to blog some more about GIS in New Jersey. I’m still going to be busy; we have two faculty members to replace and even more students in our GIS courses, but I think summer will be a good time for me to refocus on programming and developing our GeoLab into a more robust research lab.

One interesting project that has popped up recently is NJ’s Broadband Map. You can dig through the data to find which areas of the State are served with broadband Internet. I think the color scheme needs to be rethought, as dark green to light purple is better suited to divergent or bimodal data, not to a linear progression of 1 to 8 broadband providers.

I’ll be at the ESRI DevMeetup tonight in Philadelphia, giving a lightning talk on the Land Change Viewer app I developed. Next week at the NJGF, I’ll give a 5 minute talk on the ArcGIS license monitor application I’m writing. I’ve got a couple other tidbits in the pipeline and hopefully I’ll be able to share them here in the next few weeks.

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Some thoughts on the ESRI DevSummit

Posted on March 16, 2011 by John Reiser

Geography Word Cloud BannerI’m back from the sixth ESRI DevSummit. It was a great event full of informative sessions, socializing and networking. This was one of the first conferences in a while where I did not participate more than simply attending. The DevSummit is truly for devoted developers and while I do some development, it’s nowhere near what I could call full time. Many of the user presentations were incredible displays of GIS geekery and I’m still in awe with what some people are doing with the software. Continue reading →

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March Madness

Posted on March 2, 2011 by John Reiser

Back in January, I had every intention of updating this weekly, but once the semester starts, all bets were off.

It’s been a crazy few weeks, juggling several research projects, two classes and compiling everything needed for my recontracting at Rowan. The last two weeks have been especially tasking; even without the occasional curve ball, I still lacked the hours in the day to get everything done. I need a break, but before that can occur, I need all the boxes checked on my to-do list. Tomorrow and Friday are going to be a blur of activity in attempt to get everything wrapped up by the week’s end.

Next week, I’m fortunate to be heading out to Palm Springs for the ESRI DevSummit. I’m really looking forward to learning more about the latest web mapping technologies. When it comes to server-side GIS, the Windows/.Net-based “ESRI Stack” is still a little foreign to me and it’ll be good to see how I could incorporate some ArcGIS-based technologies into my open source-based map services.

I’m also hoping to meet up with a few GIS folks I’ve followed on Twitter. While individuals at ESRI have been incredibly helpful with specific issues, I’ve found their online documentation to be lacking. There are several ESRI staff and third-party developers whose blog posts about an issue or a technology have clarified things for me and I’d like to let them know that in person.

Also, the DevSummit is the week before Spring Break. I’m not one to cancel class, so I’ve put materials online for my students and will likely Skype back in during class time. The question is, do I video call from my hotel room or do I conduct class poolside under a clear blue sky? Decisions, decisions.

Posted in Conferences, Events, Technology, Tools and Scripts, Web Mapping | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Thoughts on the start of the Spring Semester

Posted on January 18, 2011 by John Reiser

Today marks the beginning of the Spring Semester. For many students, this will be their last semester at Rowan University. For me, I’ll be teaching GIS II, which is mostly upperclassmen, and Intro to Mapping and GIS, which is more mixed, but often filled with freshmen. I know most of my GIS II students by now; all of the Intro to Mapping students are brand new faces. One big change this semester is that I’m in the Pilot Group for the University’s move to the newest version of Blackboard. I’ve been rewriting my materials so that more of the course is available through the web. In doing so, I’m putting more of my materials out there on the web for anyone to use, provided they comply with the Creative Commons license. While most of my presentations have been available online for anyone to view, the class materials have been a somewhat different story; if I’ve put them online, it was only on my university web page and not a service like SlideShare. I feel more reserved about posting classroom materials online for two main reasons. Continue reading →

Posted in Teaching, Technology | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

2cm Photography of the Ongoing Flooding in Queensland

Posted on January 16, 2011 by John Reiser

NearMap has released an interactive map showing the imagery acquired this week of the flooding around Brisbane. 2cm imagery, less than a week old, available around the world through the internet. Pretty soon, laughing about how some fools think the images on Google Maps are real-time will be a thing of the past.

More on NearMap from Slashgeo.

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Dangerous Cartography

Posted on January 8, 2011 by John Reiser

Palin's target mapBack in March of 2010, Sarah Palin’s PAC released a map of “democratic targets” she would like to see out of office. The map, depicted at right, used gunsights to highlight where the representatives she wants gone are located.

Sadly, today someone shot one of the representatives on Palin’s map. CNN is reporting that Representative Gabrielle Giffords is in surgery; Fox News already listed her as deceased. (Perhaps it was wishful thinking on their part.)

While politics in the US has a long history of unpleasantness, from childish chanting over impropriety to fights and even severe beatings on the floor of the Capitol, I’m still shocked that one party would go so far to imply assassination as part of political fundraising.

I hope Rep. Giffords makes a speedy, complete recovery.

Update: Video of Giffords commenting on the map above and the vandalism and threats it brought. “Sarah Palin has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action.”

Posted in Government, In the News | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Repetitive tasks are what computers do best.

Posted on January 6, 2011 by John Reiser

James Fee recently noted that 2011 will be the year of scripting GIS tasks using Python. I’d like to share a few thoughts I had while reading his writeup.

Back in 2003, when I was learning GIS using ArcGIS 8, I wanted to put together a map of lottery winners in New Jersey by ZIP code. (I’ve since recreated the map as a set of interactive web maps.) I wrote a quick and dirty script in Perl that hit the State Lottery’s website and downloaded the number of winners in each ZIP code. After I came out of “the zone” and watched the script work away, I thought, “why can’t I do that with ArcGIS?” I wasn’t going to manually type in each ZIP code and insert my findings into a table. Considering it was a “let’s see if I can do it” project, I would have likely lost interest before getting all of my data. I knew better than to go the data-entry route and wrote a script to do it for me. Repetitive, mindless tasks are what computers do best – I was able to have it gather data (tedious, but necessary) to allow me to make the maps (the fun part) in an afternoon. Being able to automate some of the tedious aspects of GIS would be a blessing.

Continue reading →

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High Expectations for Barnes & Nobles in Glassboro

Posted on December 3, 2010 by John Reiser

It’s only the third day and Barnes and Nobles is starting to disappoint me. I understand that they just opened, but I feel that the disappointments are only going to continue. The selection of books is minimal; on par with or less than the regular selection at the Deptford store. Being “faculty,” I will be able to request that they stock a few extra copies of books I “recommend” (not require) but these books will not be in the general circulation; they will be upstairs with the rest of the textbooks. The Art (and thus Architecture) section is undersized, as well as the Social Sciences/Cultural Studies. This means that Geography and Planning books have a very small, blink-and-miss-it section of shelf in the general circulation.

Currently, the wifi in the Cafe section does not work, so when this is posted, it will be later, from on campus. This should, I hope, only be a temporary inconvenience. Last night, on their second day open, I stopped by at 9:30 after grocery shopping. They were closed. The Cafe, while able to be open for a longer period than the main store, is not. Both the bookstore and the cafe are going to close at the same time, 9pm. This is an incredible disappointment. I also found from the Cafe staff this morning that there are no currently no plans to change the arrangement, even though I heard B&N staff inform the police (during a walkthrough on opening day) that the cafe can be open later. I know “can” and “will” are two very different words, but my hopes are diminishing.

Maybe I have to wait for more of the Rowan Boulevard project to be completed. After all, this B&N is the only commercial building on the street. From where I sit, I can see work proceed on the mixed use “A-1″ building, which will hopefully generate more of a street life on Rowan Boulevard. I still have high hopes for the project overall, but even after it is complete, if Glassboro’s going to roll up the streets at 9pm, the only incentive I have to live in the ‘Boro is that I’m within biking distance of Rowan.

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MAC URISA and posts from the conference

Posted on October 4, 2010 by John Reiser

I’ll be at MAC URISA in Atlantic City from the 4th until the 6th. On the 4th, I’ll be conducting a introductory-level workshop on Distributed GIS. On Tuesday the 5th, John Hasse and I will be at the Interactive Expo presenting our “Changing Landscapes” report and interactive maps. Wednesday the 6th, I’ll just be enjoying the conference. The materials from the conference will be available on my presentations page.

I decided to finally hop on the Tumblr bandwagon. I’ll be using it to post pictures and short notes while on-the-go. To me, Tumblr seems like a good middle ground between blogging and tweeting, and that’s how I’ll be using it. My Tumblr blog is at notes.njgeo.org or njgeo.tumblr.com. My most recent posts (tumbls?) will also show up in the sidebar of this blog. Look for updates from the conference and if you’re planning on attending, make sure to say hello!

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Unmoderated communities aren’t communities.

Posted on September 29, 2010 by John Reiser

Without a fear of social repercussions for anti-social behavior, online communities without moderation often devolve into a cesspool. Take for instance InsiderPages, a hybrid yellow pages with reviews. There are countless sites like this out there, all suffering from the fact that bizarre and often inflammatory comments may include keywords that bump the site higher in search rankings. There’s no real incentive to police the comments, which gives us gems like this:

InsiderPages users’ thoughts on the Cowtown Rodeo Flea Market.

Despite the term “flea market” the Cowtown Rodeo’s market isn’t a low place. It’s an outdoor swap meet that caters to the agrarian marketplace of Salem County. However, the first few comments on the listing are an argument over our current president’s stance on immigration. Completely irrelevant discussion, yet it remains there. NJ.com is perhaps one of the biggest offenders; leaving downright profane comments on race at the bottom of many articles. Without moderation, the comments become something else entirely; anti-social outlets for the individuals and a bump in SEO rankings for the site. A losing situation for anyone looking for unbiased information.

I’m sure not all of the sites are gaming SEO through comments; some may be simply understaffed. On the other hand, when you consider the time individuals waste in the innumerable echo chambers like this one, the mind boggles. God bless America.

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