Thursday, August 7th, 2014
The beautiful blue gem known as planet Earth will look even better thanks to high-tech cameras developed here in Canada. The cameras – mounted on the International Space Station – can shoot high-resolution pictures and capture Ultra HD colour video of Earth from outer space. And the devices are not only about pretty pictures: the
Wednesday, August 6th, 2014
San Diego-based Drones Made Easy is nudging the Kickstarter target of $30,000 it needs to bring “mapping to the masses” with an site allowing people to “upload raw aerial imagery for processing into high quality stitched aerial imagery”. The idea is to take the grunt work out of creating your own stitched imagery “at up
Wednesday, August 6th, 2014
Before residents in southern Oregon overwhelmingly voted to ban genetically modified crops earlier this summer, farmers negotiated for months with a biotech company that grows engineered sugar beets near their fields. Their goal was to set up a system to peacefully coexist, an online mapping database of fields to help growers minimize cross-pollination between engineered
Wednesday, August 6th, 2014
Three of my great fascinations — cartography as art, propaganda design, and antique maps — converge in Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art. The lavish tome collects cartographic curiosities from the golden age of display maps — the period between 1450 and 1800, when maps were as much a practical tool for navigation as they
Tuesday, August 5th, 2014
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will have to notify environmental groups when pollutants pass through the government dams along the Columbia and Snake rivers in Oregon and Washington, in a groundbreaking settlement announced on Monday. As part of the agreement the Army Corps must apply to the federal Environmental Protection Agency for clean water permits
Sunday, August 3rd, 2014
DARPA, whose early investments in geospatial positioning systems led to the explosion of the technology across government, is doing a what-if exercise: What happens if military units are facing a threat, and GPS becomes vulnerable or unstable because of solar storms or jamming? To pursue countermeasures, the research agency is putting its budget into programs
Friday, August 1st, 2014
If the world is to solve the climate change crisis, we will need a new approach. Currently, the major powers view climate change as a negotiation over who will reduce their CO2 emissions (mainly from the use of coal, oil, and gas). Each agrees to small “contributions” of emission reduction, trying to nudge the other countries
Friday, August 1st, 2014
As director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies at Delta State University, Talbot Brooks is a man in demand, logging thousands of miles annually, supporting the adoption and implementation of geospatial information technologies. Read more via MS Business
Friday, August 1st, 2014
The state of Colorado is working on the final paperwork to purchase two multi-mission, high-tech, single-engine, fixed wing aircraft that can be used in a variety of roles for fighting and managing wildfires. The Colorado Firefighting Air Corp, working under the Division of Fire Prevention and Control (DFPC), is buying two Pilatus PC-12 airplanes that will be configured
Friday, August 1st, 2014
MDA Corp. of Canada on July 31 said the Canadian government’s uniquely strong reaction to Russia’s incursion into Ukraine is depriving the company of around 50 million Canadian dollars ($46 million) in annual business building electronics payloads for Russian satellites. In a conference call with investors, MDA Chief Executive Daniel E. Friedmann said Russian satellite