Hello, and welcome to GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is V1 Media.
Today’s Top Story is ConnectED, a government education program developed to prepare K-12 students throughout the United States for digital learning opportunities and future employment. To support the initiative, Esri is providing a grant to make its mapping software, running on cloud infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services, available for free to the more than 100,000 elementary, middle and high schools in the country. The grant offers ArcGIS Online accounts, and the potential contribution could exceed $1 billion dollars. In addition, Esri partnered with the GIS Certification Institute to recruit Certified GIS Professionals to serve with GeoMentors, who will work with local schools to help them set up and learn to use their ArcGIS Online accounts. Esri president Jack Dangermond recently discussed the donation on Bloomberg TV.
And that was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this brief message.
Scientists at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, found that canyons under Greenland’s ocean-feeding glaciers are deeper and longer than previously thought, increasing the amount of Greenland’s estimated contribution to future sea-level rise. The subcontinent’s topography has been estimated using soundings from ice-penetrating radar, but wet and fractured ice made this difficult. To overcome that problem, Mathieu Morlighem and colleagues devised a technique that uses several types of data: ice-thickness measurements derived from airborne radar, satellite radar interferometry data on the speed and direction of ice movement, and estimates of snowfall and surface melt to the sea.
In industry headlines, the Space Foundation announced that in 2013 the global space economy grew to $314 billion dollars (that’s billion with a b), a growth of 4 percent from 2012. Commercial space products and services grew 7 percent in that year, and commercial infrastructure and support industries increased by 4.6 percent. The full “Space Report” can be purchased at this Web site.
Raytheon debuted a mobile app based on its Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite imagery. The VIIRS View app combines visible light imagery, low-light nighttime imagery and ocean chlorophyll concentration onto a full Earth globe.
And Blue Marble Geographics released Global Mapper version 15.2, which automates the “New Feature Creation” process and adds new online data sources such as OpenStreetMap vector data links via Web Mapping Services.
And here’s today’s Final Thought: I’m a big fan of the ConnectED initiative and its four goals: providing students with high-speed Internet connectivity, access to affordable mobile devices, high-quality software and relevant teacher training. These goals are achievable and will create immediate results. If you’re not sure, check out this presentation from students at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles. They were given the tools, and see what they were able to accomplish.
That’s it for this broadcast, I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
