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 →

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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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Location-based services may be a hard sell.

Posted on September 26, 2010 by John Reiser
Google Latitude logo

Google Latitude, not overwhelmingly adopted

I’m working on a few concepts for integrating GPS locations received from mobile browsers into our mapping applications. One idea has been to employ the location of a student’s smartphone by placing them on the campus map and identifying the quickest route to their on-campus destination. While location-based services have been a hot topic for the past two years now, I’m still unsure of how readily the non-technical public will accept the concept. I still have GIS students that find the amount of data accessible to them intimidating and “scary.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Google, Privacy, Technology, Web Mapping | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

The “Danger” of Creative Commons

Posted on August 30, 2010 by John Reiser

Creative Commons logoBeing that I’m a planning and transit buff, I take a lot of pictures of urban spaces and infrastructure for use in my planning work. I post many of the pictures to Flickr, as the site’s a great service and it supports geotagged photos taken with my GPS camera. With the exception of pictures of family and friends, all of my pictures are public and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike license. This allows anyone to use my photographs for most uses, explicitly non-commercial use, provided they note that I am the source of the image. Well, what happens when someone you disagree with uses that image to promote his or her agenda? What if that person is Senator John McCain?

Continue reading →

Posted in Government, In the News | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Changing Landscapes: Final Thoughts

Posted on August 5, 2010 by John Reiser

After all of the hustling to get, in my opinion, a rather significant web application together in little under a month by myself, I feel that I can offer a few thoughts on managing a project with limited timeframe. Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Technology, Web Mapping | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment