I don’t love re-posting some other blog’s posts… but its so impossible for me to avoid. I read so many of them in a day.
So there is a good one called “White African” that has lots of interesting perspective on Africa from someone who grew up in Sudan (I think it was Sudan at least). It’s actually been a helpful blog to me as I have been immersing myself into parts of the continent.
Today White African has a post about UNOSAT’s mapping of East Africa’s Somali Pirate problems.
The former GIS operator in me loves the map and display of information but to do so I have to disregard the awfulness of the problem. Its worth downloading the huge pdf of the map to see for yourself.
Its not all Johnny Depp, facebook games, and “Arrrrgh” in East Africa.
Update: Oddly this story of another hijacking made the AP wire today.
Update: That’s hijacking has finally come to and end with everyone still alive.
Many times I come up with ideas that I have little to no experience or education to take as far as I would like to. Case in point: At work we’ve been thinking quite a bit about GIS in relation to our work. Now I am a formally trained GIS engineer (betcha didn’t know that… betcha also didn’t know that I’m even published in Earth Observation Magazine, did ya?) so that part is fine. However, while in the middle of working on a proposal for something almost totally unrelated, I started thinking about using GIS (and related technologies) to monitor and study environmental factors to either predict or study disease outbreaks. Probably not a revolutionary idea, but it interested me when I thought about it and I started to look around. I found nothing.
What I took for granted was that Professor Climate (I coin that name with love) is so well connected he would find exactly what I was looking for, without even knowing I was looking for it – namely, this article entitled “Remote Sensing and Human Health: New Sensors and New Opportunities”. Um… yeah – that’s exactly it. … what’s that? He loves Muffin Man too? What a great American.
Now comes the brain pain – so people do actually do this sort of thing and that’s cool, but I suspect they are either environment or health experts – I am neither. So how do I make some use of that in our work? I have absolutely no idea yet. I’ll keep thinking about it though.
