News, Events, and Announcements for the UD GIS community, Fall 2014

News, Events, and Announcements for the UD GIS community, Fall 2014

News

• New Trade Data (1990-2002) Available at the Morris Library
• Say hello to Farber, UD’s newest research computing cluster named for UD professor and Internet pioneer, David Farber.  We plan to provide ArcGIS on Farber, through arcpy, as we did on Mills.
• The State of Delaware new GIS data system will be called FirstMap.  This replaces the Delaware DataMIL system that was hosted at UD for many years.  OMB/DTI says “The testing phase of the project has been completed successfully.  DTI continues to prepare the historic imagery services for the production phase of the project.  It is anticipated that all current and historic imagery will be available by the full production launch in mid to late September.”
• UCGIS has announced a new series of webinars, “focusing on topics relevant to GIScience in higher education”.  These are free to UD through our UCGIS membership.  Two of these are listed below, under “Events”.
• We’ve removed ERDAS IMAGINE from the selection of geospatial software that we license.

 Collaborations, Publications, and Honors

• UD-IT is teaming up with the Center for Drug and Health Studies (CDHS, fka CDAS) and the State of Delaware’s Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) on a project to reduce prescription drug abuse by identifying hot spots of over-prescription, sales and use.
• UD-IT is working with Dr. Victor Perez (Sociology), through an IT Innovation Grant award, to develop a course on spatial knowledge and geospatial visualization in the Social Sciences

Software Updates

• N/A

Data Updates

• Esri Roads and Highways has been added to the Esri Education Site License Program. With Esri Roads and Highways, users can integrate data from multiple linear referencing systems (LRS) networks to get a comprehensive view of their roadways. Esri Roads and Highways may be of interest to researchers and students in transportation planning, civil engineering, or other disciplines that use highway network data.  You can download this from UDeploy.

Events

• 9/8-9/11/14: GIS-Pro “URISA’s 52nd Annual Conference for GIS Professionals”, New Orleans
• 9/22/14 (M), “New Castle County GIS Viewer” Workshop on Monday, 10a-noon, Library Rm A, SMDC
• 9/29/14 (M), 4p EDT: Dr. Alex Klippel (Department of Geography, Penn State University), speaks about his experiences with “flipping” a class. Blended Learning in a GIScience Course: Lynda and Sketch-based Geo-spatial Learning Objects.
• 10/6-10/8/14: AutoCarto 2014, CaGIS, Pittsburgh, PA
• 10/14-10/16/2014: VISualize 2014, World Wildlife Fund, Washington, DC  (Remote Sensing: UAS; microsatellites; SAR; precision agriculture; drought, flood, and extreme precipitation event monitoring and assessment; wildfire and conservation area monitoring, management, mitigation, and planning; monitoring leaks from natural gas pipelines)
• 10/15/14 (W), 2p EDT: Dr. Trisalyn Nelson (Department of Geography, Univ of Victoria, BC, Canada) shares her expertise with Trends in GIScience Research and Teaching.

Past Events and Webinars

• Summer Faculty Institute: Bringing Maps to Your Teaching and Research … this might be  of interest for those of your considering cloud and open source software for your teaching … how to mix and match to get the feature set you need

Other Opportunities

• Dr. David J. Cowen of U. of South Carolina contacted me to soclicit contributions to “[…] a freely distributed eBook that contains the best examples of how faculty in STEM disciplines are utilizing spatial analysis in their research and instruction. […] The attached call for chapter proposals provides more details about the project.”
• NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) invites NSF-supported university researchers in the atmospheric, climate, and related sciences to submit large allocation requests for the Yellowstone [computing] system by September 15, 2014. 

Area/Forwarded Job Postings (if no link, email me mearns@udel.edu, and I’ll forward the email announcements)

• On behalf of Marlena Gibson at the Delaware State Housing Authority: Planner I (attached and also under About Us / Employment on www.destatehousing.com). The Delaware State Housing Authority, Dover, DE
• USGS post doctoral position: Terrain Feature Modeling and Extraction for Mapping and Earth Resource Applications
• Assistant Professor opening in Geographic Information Science, Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Review begins Sept 1, 2014.

Recent UD GIS Blog posts

• ArcGIS Server on Centos, continued

• Undocumented KML Output Conversion, GDAL

• Disk I/O Error on sqlite/spatialite

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or ideas that you’d like to discuss