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Podcasts: Directions on the News
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This week the world learned that Garmin will adjust how its devices route users to the famous Hollywood sign, which stands in the Hollywood hills above Los Angeles. The devices will not route to the sign itself, but rather to one of two viewing areas. Is this best practice or a can of worms?
The draft of the Geospatial Management Competency Model is just six pages. It documents both 17 areas of competency and 74 specific skills managers in our profession should have. Do you or your manager have them? Are some missing? You should be curious enough to have a look and fill out URISA's brief questionnaire on this document. It may well impact your future working life!
There have been a handful of organizations that have switched from using the Google Maps API to using OpenStreetMap data in their Web applications over the past few months. This week, one of the biggest location-based services players in the world, Foursquare announced why and how it did so. Is this a huge coup for OpenStreetMap? For Foursquare? For open source?
Analytics and big data are becoming areas that are truly leveraging geospatial technology, and new and not-so-new players are entering the geo arena. We'll look at companies like SpaceCurve, Teradata, Rhiza and Tableau and examine what they are bringing to the table.
This week we go looking for geo innovation in recent product announcements. Do we find any? Yes!
What's ahead for geospatial organizations like GITA and URISA? Are they serving the community? Do they need to change? What do you expect for your membership fee? And, have social networks supplanted one of the biggest benefits of professional societies ... networking?
This past week Spatial Energy and the IEEE became two of the latest organizations to announce competitions aimed at students and users of geospatial technology. Why do these keep popping up? Are they good for the geospatial industry?
The Supreme Court ruled that police must have warrants to attach GPS trackers to suspects' cars. Nokia closed its NAVTEQ developer program. What do these actions say about the state of location-based services in 2012?
Three items in the news in early January are teachable moments in geotechnology, for students and citizens and for the geospatial community. They include satellite imagery from the cruise ship Costa Concordia, Google tangling with OSM and World Bank, and an outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease explained by geography.
Geotechnology appeared in cars, social media "cockpits" and nearfield communication (NFC)-enabled phones at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Is it evolution or revolution?
Journal News Removes Interactive Gun Permit Map
The Lower Hudson Journal News has been under fire for publishing a map of gun permit holders in two counties in New York State before Christma. (APB coverage 1, 2, podcast). On Friday January 18 the paper removed the interactive map. Why? Publisher Janet Hasson gave answers in a media statement and in a letter to readers.
In a statement in response to The Poynter Institute (a journalism school) she argued:
With the passage this week of the NYSAFE gun law, which allows permit holders to request their names and addresses be removed from the public record, we decided to remove the gun permit data from lohud.com at 5 pm today. While the new law does not require us to remove the data, we believe that doing so complies with its spirit. For the past four weeks, there has been vigorous debate over our publication of the permit data, which has been viewed nearly 1.2 million times by readers. One of our core missions as a newspaper is to empower our readers with as much information as possible on the critical issues they face, and guns have certainly become a top issue since the massacre in nearby Newtown, Conn. Sharing as much public information as possible provides our readers with the ability to contribute to the discussion, in any way they wish, on how to make their communities safer. We remain committed to our mission of providing the critical public service of championing free speech and open records.
In a letter to readers published on Friday she wrote:
So intense was the opposition to our publication of the names and addresses that legislation passed earlier this week in Albany included a provision allowing permit holders to request confidentiality and imposing a 120-day moratorium on the release of permit holder data.
She goes on to say that during the 27 days the map was online any one interested would have seen it and that the data would eventually be out of date. She also noted that the paper does not endorse the way the state chose to limit availability of the data.
The original map/article still includes a graphic - but it's a snapshot, a raster image, with no interactivity. Says Hasson in the letter to readers:
And we will keep a snapshot of our map — with all its red dots — on our website to remind the community that guns are a fact of life we should never forget.
I continue to applaud the paper for requesting the data via a Freedom on Informat request, mapping it, keeping the map up despite threats and criticism and now responding to state law. I think the paper did a service to the state, to citizens and to journalism.
- via reader Jim and Poynter
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