January 2012
1 post
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December 2011
2 posts
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Books of 2011
A list of books I read in 2011:
Soccernomics, Simon Kuper
Count Zero, William Gibson
Debt of Honor, Tom Clancy
The Wise Man’s Fear, Patrick Rothfuss
In the Plex, Steven Levy
Connected, Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert A. Pape
Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson
How Soccer Explains the World, Franklin Foer
A Dance With...
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GIS in education →
I wrote a blog entry for the spatial networks blog with my thoughts on the current state of GIS and geospatial technology in education. There’s been some great feedback to the post so far, from both students and educators alike.
As one who went through a university program for geography not too many years back, I know the kinds of things I was exposed to during that time — and even...
November 2011
3 posts
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October 2011
1 post
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“Gentle reader, thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters...”
– Robert Cawdrey, explaining how to use his Table Alphabeticall, one of the first English dictionaries.
September 2011
1 post
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Mapping the Intangible →
My latest post on the @spatialnetworks blog — on the challenges of mapping socio-cultural fabrics.
August 2011
14 posts
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Why Arabic is terrific →
Maciej Cegłowski on his summer studying the language.
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An unbreakable record →
Wow:
He is the only player to have scored a hat-trick in the English Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two (or the divisions under their previous names), the League Cup, the FA Cup and for his country at International level.
That’s unlikely to be broken…
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Colorful Maps: The Military's Costly Weapon in the... →
Josh Foust on the military and USAID’s misuse of mapping technology for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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The Pitfalls of 'Splitting the Middle' in the... →
Shadi Hamid nails it:
When both sides are equally right (or wrong), seeking compromise may be both appropriate and effective. But when one side is in the right - in this case, that of the courageous Arab protesters fighting for their freedom - the middle ground can be a dangerous place to be.
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China Installed More Than 10,000,000 Surveillance... →
Talk about a stream of “big data”…
In May, Shanghai announced that a team of 4,000 monitor its surveillance feeds to ensure round-the-clock coverage. The south-western municipality of Chongqing has announced plans to add 200,000 cameras by 2014 because “310,000 digital eyes are not enough”.
Urumqi, which saw vicious ethnic violence in 2009, installed 17,000...
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The Mission to Get Osama Bin Laden →
They observed that residents of the compound burned their trash, instead of putting it out for collection, and concluded that the compound lacked a phone or an Internet connection. Kuwaiti and his brother came and went, but another man, living on the third floor, never left. When this third individual did venture outside, he stayed behind the compound’s walls. Some analysts speculated that the...
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“India has world-class information technology exporters, but imports lots of...”
– The Economist
July 2011
3 posts
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The Value of Local Knowledge
Here are the slides from my talk at the first ever Ignite Tampa Bay. It was a blast to watch all the great talks from such a varied set of interests and passions. Great turnout, too — we drew a sellout crowd out to watch.
As difficult as it is to prepare for Ignite (20 slides, 15 seconds each, autoadvancing), I would do it again in a heartbeat. I’ve essentially done...
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Change →
Eddie Smith:
“I don’t care who you work for, stop thinking of them as a boss or a company. Think of them as a client. Think of yourself as a business. And start thinking like that right now.
“One day—maybe soon—your client will tell you they no longer need your services. When that happens, the business of you had better be ready. Businesses usually need more than one client...
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June 2011
2 posts
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My summary of WhereCampDC →
We had a great time at the WhereCampDC event a couple weeks ago. Read my summary on our blog.
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"Tyler on Time" transit mapping →
Cool example of what’s possible with open data and specs - like GTFS and TileMill.
May 2011
2 posts
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Behind the Hunt for bin Laden →
The commandos found Bin Laden on the third floor, wearing the local loose-fitting tunic and pants known as a shalwar kameez, and officials said he resisted before he was shot above the left eye near the end of the 40-minute raid. The American government gave few details about his final moments. “Whether or not he got off any rounds, I frankly don’t know,” said Mr. Brennan, the White House...
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“My biggest challenge isn’t winning over converts from my competitors: it’s...”
– Marco Arment on Safari’s “Reading List” feature, and what it means for Instapaper.
April 2011
1 post
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TileMill
The folks over at Development Seed have been building awesome open source tools for mapping and GIS for a couple of years now. Their bread and butter products are really their Drupal tools and extensions, but the stuff I get the most out of, personally, are the mapping toolkits produced under the Mapbox brand: Maps on a Stick, MBTiles, and of particular note, TileMill.
If you’ve ever...
March 2011
1 post
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“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives....”
– G.K. Chesterton
January 2011
2 posts
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Undisciplined spending in the name of defense →
A Reuters op-ed piece critical of NGA.
It’s ridiculous to claim that Google creates the same product as NGA for a fraction of the cost and then “gives it away for free”… A flagrant misunderstanding of geospatial data and how it’s produced.
I only call attention to this article for these insane stats on NGA:
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has...
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December 2010
3 posts
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“You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”
– Richard Holbrooke’s last words. (via cajunboy)
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November 2010
3 posts
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WatchSatellite imagery as a snapshot of the American economy’s health on Black Friday.
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“There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money...”
– Milton Friedman
October 2010
3 posts
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Critical Reference Material
Make sure to file this away as Critical Reference For The Future:
Arrested Development Wikiquote
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September 2010
4 posts
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The 72-hour Expert →
P.J. O’Rourke on his time in Afghanistan:
“…Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand. We Americans have so many traditions. For instance our political traditions date back to the 12th-century English Parliament if not to the Roman Senate. Afghans, on the other hand, have had the representative democracy kind of politics...
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A High-Tech Titan Plagued by Potholes →
India’s economic reliance on the tech outsourcing industry is making it difficult for them to keep up with their own internal infrastructure:
In 1990, civil engineering programs had the capacity to enroll 13,500 students, while computer science and information technology departments could accept but 12,100. Yet by 2007, after a period of incredible growth in India’s software outsourcing...
August 2010
3 posts
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Is Geography the New History? →
“BBC News still maintains a rather 19th-century perspective on what’s happening in the world, seeing politics as a clash between opposing views that might be resolved through elections, summits and peace processes. With this approach, the environment gets sectioned off as a subject of its own, when in fact history shows that the resilience of a civilisation often depends on the way it...
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July 2010
2 posts
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