Aug 16, 2007
How I hurt my brain
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.