As geospatial practitioners in the developed world struggle with data management issues, and the challenges of keeping software updated with the latest releases, it’s helpful to see a developing world perspective in order to understand more profound challenges. There’s a story in the Sri Lankan Daily Mirror today that outlines the challenges of students in the geomatics program at Sabaragamuwa University:

• there aren’t enough teachers or space to contain the 180 students, so one group has to always wait outside
• there aren’t sufficient resources for field work or lab work
• the students have been promised computing infrastructure and a dedicated building for four years, but it has yet to materialize

The new digital resource center at the State Library of Queensland envisions the future library as a place for creativity for, “art, design, gaming, engineering, sound, science, craft and architecture.” The idea of the new facility called the Edge is to foster connections for multidisciplinary design work and to foster innovation.

The $7.9 million construction project has created a multipurpose space that includes sound and image recording labs and meeting and function rooms, all equipped with high end digital equipment. The director of the center has an idea for the center to become a hub for urban informatics – the study of how people interact with urban spaces by tapping information and data of our digital lives.

Read more about this cutting-edge facility in this feature in The Australian.

I love the idea of Obscura Day, a day of expeditions, back-room tours and hidden treasures in your own home town. The event planned for March 20, 2010 is organized by Atlas Obscura, a website that aims to compile the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica. The event serves as both a promotion of the site and as a means to compile more locations into this Atlas of curious places as they’re actively recruiting new sites and cities.

There are worldwide events scheduled here that range from the behind-the-scenes museum wonders, to interesting tours of large machinery such as one of the largest pneumatic tube system at the Stanford University Hospital (4 miles of tubes), to a gold-plated home outside of Chicago, to the 3D Center of Art and Photography in Portland, Oregon. The site organizes participation in these events as many of them may fill up on this date. There’s no charge from the organizers, but some venues may have an admission price.

I scrolled through more than a dozen events and locations and found that I’d love to explore each of these places, and will be sure to check out the Atlas Obscura site prior to travels in new cities. I’ll be in Florida at the end of the month, and in a bit of the Everglades, so I may just have to check out the streets of Unit 11 in West Palm Beach that were laid out as a subdivision more than 40 years ago and that are now reclaimed by nature. Sounds like a movie set for an apocalyptic future that would be fascinating to see first hand. And judging from the rest of the list, these site are designed to offer an alternative take on what we know as reality.

Discovered via Twitter from a post by @reidab.

It was 20 years ago today that the first photo of earth from very, very, very far away was received. The image was from the Voyager 1 spacecraft that was nearly 4 billion miles away. The excitement of this moment of discovery wasn’t as great as the first dramatic photos of earth from the moon, but it does put things in greater prespective. With that little spec no more than a few pixels wide in the image, it wouldn’t have required too much more distance for the technology at the time to not even visually detect where it had come from.

Read more about that occasion in this feature from NPR.org.

J.D. Salinger died at the age of 91 on Wednesday. The reclusive author of the wildly popular book, “The Catcher in the Rye,” sparked an appreciation for wandering and discovery through his tale about a young and adventurous teen exploring the streets of Manhattan. The New York Times has printed an interactive map of some the key experiences of Holden Caulfield’s wanderings in the city, complete with short passages that describe his interactions with each location. It’s a fitting tribute to the author and this book, which serves as a standing reminder of what it’s like for a teen to first experience adult-like freedoms and to carve his own path in life.

The GeoTech Center has harnessed virtualization or cloud computing to expand access to GIS and geospatial software to remote schools and colleges. The approach reduces the complexity of installing and maintaining complex desktop software, eliminating the need for specialized administrative technical skill sets in remote areas that likely don’t have the talent. The center can now bring ArcGIS to small schools and colleges by providing remote access to their virtualized servers.

The GeoTech Center got its start in 2008 with funding from the National Science Foundation. The program is a collaboration between two-year geospatial technology training programs to increase the geospatial workforce.

Read more about this offering in this blog post from the director of the GeoTech Center.

Every issue of National Geographic back to 1888 is now available via a 160GB Hard Drive for the low cost of only $199.95. This full collection has been available in digital format via six DVD-ROMs for a while now, but this dedicated device opens up a whole new world of search capabilities that allow you to search on text, articles and photos that span more than a century. The revelations that this volume holds for changes on our planet are mind boggling.

I’m sure my parents den looks like a lot of others throughout the country with a long continuous lineup of yellow spines on a lower shelf. My father has collected copies for years until he ran out of room, and even has back copies into the 1800s. This new medium makes the collection irrelevant in one fell swoop, putting the details of all these issues and more into a searchable and attractive interface.

The digital medium provides a superior experience, with no need to flip through musty and fragile old copies paging through issues and tables of content to find what you’re interested in. Instead, you can just type and filter and compile pictures and words to reveal insights into places, cultures and species on our planet. The continuous high quality of this resource over the years makes it a reference worthy of every desktop, and now it’s attainable for less than a decade’s worth of subscription costs.

The collection takes up just 60GB of the 3″ x 5″ drive’s space, allowing you 100GB of storage room in addition to this wonderful resource. The low price is rather shocking given all that you get with this, and you can even personalize the device with a name engraving at no additional cost.

I had the pleasure of publishing a feature from Steven Branting many years ago in GeoWorld, and I’m now quite pleased that he’s written a feature for V1 Magazine at the urging of Jeff Thurston about passing on the passion for technology and geography.It’s truly inspiring to hear about approaches that work to spread the use of GIS among grade school students. Steven certainly goes above and beyond in his work as a teacher and technology instructor, fostering passion among students with meaningful fieldwork that aids comprehension and for empowers his students to apply technology to complex problem solving.

“We have found success using GIS to give 7^th grade social studies students a grasp of geographic relationships, projections and spatial analysis.  United States history students mine census data to better understand the demographics of our population.  Earth science students explore planetary dynamism through volcanology, seismology, climatology and oceanography.  Life sciences students have extensive libraries of wildlife habitats, both current and historic, on every continent.  We have supplemented our data libraries to include local county layers, paths of exploration, minerals and aquifers, among others. Student enrollment in GIS seminars now exceeds 500 each semester.”

Read the full feature here.

Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation’s global operations yesterday. This foundation is an international project to advance the use of the Web as a means to empower people to bring about positive change. One of the initial projects of the Foundation is the Web Alliance for Regreening Africa (W4RA).

W4RA will work to create a Web-based platform for farmers to share local information about growing plants and food in harsh African environments. The initial project will take place in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali, with three full years of funding. The intent is to add other countries and even other continents. Central to the plan is the thought that significant acceleration of the sharing of information will lead to agricultural success.

This is just one of many project for the new World Wide Web Foundation that is motivated by three challenges:

• the Content Gap
• the Research Gap
• the Technology Gap