June, 2007

This is an newspaper article I came across written 50 years ago about the concept of a home computer. This is what the caption says:

"Scientists from the RAND corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" would look like in the year 2004. However, the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also, the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use."

Simply amazing. 

This is the best eye candy I've seen in a long time. Photosyth is a wonderful Microsoft product that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

In their collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor. It's very cool. You really should check it out. The only bummer is that I couldn't get it working in Firefox (of course).

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

On May 23rd we experience a geographic phenomenon. As of that date, the world's population became more urban than rural. This a major demographic shift and a milestone like no other.

What does that mean to the US Government? Last week I had the great pleasure of attending the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose. This event was especially eye opening, not just in new technology, but also how USGS plays a massive part in the advancements in geospacial science.The conference wow'ed me with plenty of cool product demos. There was Google's new Streetview. And a demo of the camera behind the making of Streetview. We also got to see a neat cell phone trick where you point your phone at a location and information about that local gets sent your phone (currently only available in Japan — lucky guys!).

But more important than all the cool gadgets is how USGS could play a major part in the evolution of geospacial technology and its contribution to our existence. Last week's urbanization tipping point means so much more to the planet. That this is happening at a critical juncture for the planet when we are witnessing the sixth mass extinction of our living resources along with other such ramifications of rapid climate change, should be sufficient to motivate a collective partnership between USGS and other organizations for distributing our data in the most user friendly means possible.

Unfortunately, most I met at the conference are under the illusion that USGS doesn't want to give the public access to the data. Others that know its available have odd ways of accessing it. Either they phone a friend who works here and hope that the friend will find it. Or others I met developed Perl scripts that scan and download USGS data regularly. This lets them store it locally so they can find it easier.

The bottom line of what I learned at Where 2.0 is that USGS needs to focus on collaborating with other organizations to form the genesis of an EOS needed to bridge economic, political, and social domains for our species. The technology is out there, we just need to tap into it.