Oscar time is here and several news sources have stories about vacationing in your favorite movie setting. The Telegraph UK article “Oscars 2010: film location holidays” explores locations of this year’s Oscar-nominated films such as Avatar,District 9, Precious, and Crazy Heart. Film induced tourism is a growing tourism draw according to books such as [...]

Spring is a great time to start a new hobby or practice a very old one – walking. A Telegraph UK’s article on old-fashioned map reading skills discusses orienteering versus GPS. The U.S. Orienteering Federation calls orienteering the sport of a lifetime because it is both challenging and a lifetime sport. They believe it isn’t [...]

It’s that time of year again. If you are in North America are you ready to participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count February 12 – 15th? Each year “citizen scientists” helps researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology,the National Audubon Society , and Bird Studies Canada learn more about bird population and migration creating [...]

Before there was Avatar and even before Fisher-Price Viewmaster, there was stereoscopy or stereo photographs that presented scenes in life-like three dimensions similar to a Viewmaster. A recent book on one set of Stereoscopic photos of 1850’s village life titled “A Village Lost and Found”. It is a picture book that evokes the Victorian [...]

It’s hard to believe that Fisher-Price View-Master reels are over 65 years old and kids are still playing with them. Even with the advent of hi-tech toys for kids, the View-Finder still produces inexpensive reels ($4.00) of Dora the Explorer, Sponge Bob, and old Disney Classics. The red classic model is around $15.00. Accoding to [...]

I found an interesting RFP today from NOAA that asks for research into “the effectiveness of current operational products, including graphics and uncertainty information”. Essentially it is asking a geospatial question, do our graphics work and do they tell you what you need to know. The geospatial compenent of weather forecasting is more involved than [...]

I just came out of a very interesting dissertation defense on emergence and the geograpy of religion. One of the most interesting was the Glenmary Research Center data which is one of the only religious data centes in the U.S. The other being the Pew Foundation Forum on Religion & Public Life. His topic was [...]

It’s not THE VATICAN but ruminate on how much geospatial data must be stored in The Vatican Microfilm Library and Pius XII Library in St. Louis that house the largest collection of manuscripts on microfilm outside the Vatican. They have a NEH and Mellon Fellowship for $1,750.00 per five-week period to visit the library but [...]

The Earth and Space Foundation has an awesome but low funded award program to “funds expeditions that either use Earth’s resources and environments to help us understand other worlds and assist in the exploration of space or expeditions that use space technology and data to help us understand and care for the Earth’s environment”. [...]

TreeHugger posted about the 300 Years of global climate change on one map. The best quote is “”In late 2009 the UK Government launched an Open Data initiative, headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, along with a call for innovations challenging the developer community to make this data more accessible. In response, Geo.me Solutions is showcasing [...]