Six Seasons of CORE GIS Holiday Cards

Each holiday season for the past six winters we've produced a custom card to send to colleagues and clients. I thought it might be fun to post each of the designs, especially for more recent acquaintances who may not have seen the earlier editions.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

2006:  Happy Watersheds

2007:  Christmas Island

2008:  Holiday Topo Map

2009:  Map Sledding

2010:  Global Seaturtle

2011:  Holiday Compass Rose

Teaching Geography to 2nd Graders

My son is in second grade, and his teacher was absent for a couple of days this week so I volunteered to teach the geography lesson. I spent about 45 minutes teaching the kids about geographic projections. It was so much fun! The kids were all enthusiastic, attentive, observant, and lots of fun.

We started with a discussion about the shape of the Earth, using a globe as an example, and talked about why it's usually more convenient to have a flat map on paper or on a screen when you need to do something map related. Then we talked about how the transition is made from three dimensions to two, and I passed out a satsuma to every student. I asked them to pretend their orange was the Earth and asked them to transform the orange peel into a flat, rectangular surface. Before they began, I explained that there is no wrong or right solution, and that the task is in fact impossible--but it would be really interesting and fun to try to solve it. They worked cooperatively to complete their 'projections.' After all the kids were finished, they ate the oranges, then took turns table by table looking at the solutions generated by their classmates. I asked them to make observations:  what did the solutions have in common? how were they different? what conclusions could they draw? Then we gathered on the floor and they shared their observations.

This is the part that really blew me away--of course, they all quickly ascertained that it was a very tricky problem, but they also understood that for small areas, it was possible to minimize the distortion of the peel, and that certain patterns seemed easier to work with than others. Many of the kids kept their peels in one piece, some intentionally split them into numerous pieces and re-assembled it, and some did a bit of both. During the discussion, every student made an observation or asked a question, and many did both.

After the discussion I drew a picture illustrating the mechanics of translating the a sphere to a flat surface, then showed them a poster I prepared showing nine different global projections, ranging from Mercator to Sinusoidal to Goode-Homolosine. We didn't spend a ton of time on any particular projection, but we did discuss the various applications for some of them (i.e., Mercator is great for navigation but not so good for wall maps) and they all saw that the projections are just as varied as their orange-peel solutions.

At the very end I passed out a make-your-own-globe paper that I found here. I demonstrated to the class how to make the globe, using these directions:

1. Cut around the 12 segments (gores) that make up the globe. Cut right in between the gores so your scissors almost touch the equator (the line running through the middle) but don't cut all the way through!

2. Roll the cut-out into a cylinder and tape together both ends of the equator where they meet.
3. Take four pieces of tape, cross two, cross the other two, then cross the two sets (so you've created an asterisk of tape) and place it on the pointed end of one of the gores, so the sticky side faces upwards.
4. Bend the other 11 gores into the middle, so the tips meet at the same point.
5. Stick them down firmly on the tape. This end should now be cupped.

6. Do the same with the gores at the other end to create a sphere.


Don't be disappointed if your globe is not a perfect sphere. It is actually impossible to recreate a perfect sphere from a simple template like this! In fact, at the beginning of the lesson, I told the kids we were going to attempt two impossible things. The orange peel projection was the first, and creating a 3D sphere from a 2D sheet of paper is the second!

Have fun making your globes. :)

ESRI UC Day 2--not an auspicious start

Not an auspicious start to the second day at all. My suspicions about the weak showing of the conservation GIS community was confirmed at the first session I had planned on attending:



And at the second:



Hopefully the rest of the day will be better...?

ESRI UC Day 1

The first day of the UC was informative, fun, and at times a little overwhelming. Jack and his colleagues were doing their thing at the plenary, and made a few announcements about 10.1 and ArcGIS Online that I found particularly noteworthy:

• Dynamic legneds will be supported (finally!!)
• Automatic image enhancement
• Dynamic viewing of LAS files (LiDAR)
• Right-click within an MXD to package and/or convert map into a service
• ArcGIS online now supports a wide range of data import options, including drag-and-drop of CSV for point data (that was one of the coolest demos of the plenary)
• ESRI is in the process of building a global, multi-resolution topographic mosaic that will also include user-contributed hi-res LiDAR. Not clear about when that will launch, but the data will be accessible as WMS *and* as points and rasters.

BEST NEWS OF ALL: ESRI is releasing 'ArcGIS Home' desktop + extensions for $100. The idea is to enable neophytes to get started, veterans to develop new skills, and anyone to use their software for volunteer projects.

Unfortunately, I felt like the message from ESRI at the plenary was WEB WEB WEB WEB and there was very little emphasis on any of the cool new analytical tools they are developing in the desktop, much less on how they're dealing with the huge list of bugs at 10.0 (for example, I still can't get dissolve to work, which is why I'm still about 90% in 9.3.1). I understand where they're coming from, but it would sure be great if they'd get the core functionality of their software working before they push us all into the bright shiny cloud-computing future.

Jack doing his thing at the plenary

After the morning plenary we had a two hour break, and after a great lunch with my former colleague (and current Cascade Land Conservancy GIS Manage)r Christopher Walter, I took in some of the sights of the waterfront, including the San Diego Maritime Museum. It was really great to finally explore the Surprise, a ship I've read so much about in Patrick O'Brian's novels.

The HMS Surprise!

The map gallery reception that afternoon was superb as usual, but it sure seems like there is far, far less representation of the non-profit world in general and the conservation GIS community in particular.

One of the many cool maps on display in the Map Gallery. How the heck did they create that symbology?!

At the 2011 ESRI International User Conference

I'm here in sunny San Diego attending the 2011 ESRI International User Conference. After arriving and registering, I posted four CORE GIS maps in the Map Gallery: Lopez Island Potential Trail Corridors (created for San Juan County and the Trust for Public Land), California Coast Reslient Habitats, Greater Everglades Resilient Habitats, and Pacific Northwest Resilient Habitats (all created for the Sierra Club's Resilient Habitats Campaign).

I'm presenting on Thursday morning at 10:15 in Room 30E on the work CORE GIS did for San Juan County. My co-presenter is Breece Roberts of the Trust for Public Land. If you're here at the conference, please stop by and check it out.

I'll be posting throughout the conference and will include many more photos. I'll also post the occasional tweet, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/COREGIS.

CORE GIS posters all mounted in the Map Gallery

My ride during the conference

Friday Harbor Data Development Video

I just got the link to the PPI Group Friday Harbor video I mentioned in the last post (thanks to Greg Sutherland at San Juan County) and you can watch it here.

NW WA GIS User Group Presentation

The NWWAGIS User Group meeting in Bellingham on Friday was really great. There were lots of interesting people to meet and talk with (including a client I had not yet met in person!), some excellent presentations, and lots of good discussion.

An impromptu presentation by Greg Sutherland of San Juan County was particularly noteworthy--he showed a YouTube clip of a demo the PPI Group did for San Juan County Public Works. They showed up on the 10:00 am boat, drove their special data collection vehicle around Friday Harbor for a couple of hours, and prepared a demo by 1:00. They collected multi-angle high-resolution photos (similar to the Google StreetView photos) and a very dense LiDAR point cloud. The end result? Engineers are able to take measurements of rights-of-way, cross walks, stop signs, utility poles, you name it, all from a street-level photo. I think the video might be 'invite only' since PPI is courting San Juan county as a client, but once I find the link I'll post here.





My talk seemed to go fairly well, and I received some positive feedback afterwards and lots of helpful suggestions about some of the trickier analytical questions. Here is a PDF if you would like to check it out. Many thanks to Dan Siemann and all of the folks at the National Wildlife Federation for asking me to work on this interesting project, and the Mountaineers Foundation for providing some of the funding.