You're listening to A Very Spatial Podcast, episode 740, June 30th, 2024.
Hello, and welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast. I'm Jesse.
I'm Sue.
I'm Barb.
And this is Frank.
And this week we are at the end of fiscal year, I guess, 2023. Is it 2024? I don't know. I, I don't know how to do that. State fiscal years. It's, it's 2024, which is weird, but that's okay. So we're getting ready to start fiscal year 2025.
Has nothing to do with us.
Really?
Halfway through 2024, we start 2025. It's not, and here's why. If you want to know, for those that are going, what? So what happens is the federal fiscal year, this is one of those dumb things I happen to know. Federal fiscal year starts October of 2021. First, right? Yes. And that's 2025, which certainly makes sense because it's a couple of months until actually 2025. So we harmonize our numbers with them. Nevermind the fact that states go six months in the year. So,
so yeah, there you go. In case you were ever wondering about the fiscal year status for most businesses, don't even get me started on the whole quarters thing that businesses Q1 is not start January 1st, whatever. There you go. Now you. Have that information.
Here's one for you. Okay, think this through December the 12th month of the year right DEC most commonly known as precursor for most words as 10 Right. Okay October 10th month in the year OCT 8. Why is October not the 8th month December the 10th month? I feel like this is a Wikipedia
question.
The point is, is that it's, it's all, all of it's wonky. It's just kind of made up.
No, it's, it's because, you know, the takeaway is that time is geography. It's another way that we understand our world and the earth.
That's
right. Yeah, it's cultural geography.
Weird Romans did weird things and then other people did other weird things. And then we all went back to base 12 so that we're all, all the way back to the Babylonians. And. the Syrians and yeah,
and I won't mention daylight savings time.
Oh, he can just Frank will then begin to rail. Do you want to rail Frank?
No, I will not because let's just say Frank's against it and leave it at that.
Okay. So you save your daily until the two times. Got it. Okay.
I'm not, I'm not against daylight savings. I'm against changing the clock arbitrarily at random freaking points during the year. It's dumb. We shouldn't do it.
Sue hasn't said anything yet. So Sue, do you prefer standard time or daylight savings time? If you were going with one or the other, no, no, not the change. If you were to choose one,
you
got to pick one. Only one.
Well, if I would pick one, I'd be fine with standard time. I guess I had to pick one.
That's where I would lean as well,
but I mean, it's like you just pick one people get used to it. That's all
I have. I have no opinion on you pick. don't fight with anybody about that. I don't care. Pick one. It doesn't matter to me. Like you said, you get used to it. It just stop changing it for no reason. And I'm trying not to go on my rant about it. Everything. Maybe just put it this way, everything you know about everyone you, everything you've ever been told about why daylight savings time happens is a hundred percent wrong, a hundred percent wrong. That's not why farmers don't care.
School buses don't care. None of that stuff matters. The only reason we did it is because the Germans thought they could save money and World War I and burn less coal. And it turns out not that, not really. They can't, they didn't and then they thought they could do it again in World War II because of the save oil, and it turns out didn't, not really, but we keep doing it. Which is why I think it's the stupidest things that human people, human beings do, because you could just not do it.
Oh, well, there's way stupider things, but Yeah, there are.
No, but there are stupid things that, that people do, but I mean, like, you just gotta just stop doing it, and it fixes this problem. It's the easiest problem to solve on the planet.
So, yeah. Take that to your . Congress person except for, of course, for those two, two states that already don't participate,
which is the best part, right? There are already places that just don't bother anymore.
So on to the news.
First up for those of you who are into geo visualization reconstruction and all kinds of stuff. There's a new set of free tools for you that are out there. So that this software actually exists and I gotta be honest Eon software. So that's the suite of tools are from Eon software, which was bought by Bentley. Back in 2015 but anyway those tools are now being made free with a perpetual license.
They're not gonna update them anymore, so they're gonna move on to other things Bentley systems are, but but the tools are VIEW which is essentially a landscape generation tool, and I've actually down, I've not used it before, I've used a number of other tools, but not this one. I actually downloaded it this past week when the announcement was made, and it It's actually pretty cool. And it comes as well, you can get to plant factory and plant catalog.
So plant factory is for generating trees and other vegetation and plant catalog is a series of species of trees and stuff. So anyway As you're trying to do some of these projects, software can be a rough one to figure out what to do. And often it's pretty expensive. So if you're interested, you can check out Eon software now free for download.
So Bentley is one of those product, one of those companies that I, I, I don't know why, but I always forget exists in this space. And I think it's because. The name to my mind is so synonymous with the, you know, very expensive car manufacturer, you know, that's whenever I think of Bentley, I'm thinking cars and stuff like that. Not some really powerful and impressive software that they've, you know, had for years, but they've acquired over time. So I think it's wonderful.
And I really think that more companies should embrace this notion of you've got a piece of abandoned software. You're like, look, we're just not going to continue with this. Put it out there. Yeah. It does. You're not losing a sale because you're not going to keep it running anyway, and it can be useful for people. And I think that that helps generate a lot of it can help generate a lot of goodwill.
So now I might start thinking about Bentley as a software company and what do they have to offer for my solutions as opposed to, you know,
What I appreciate is that when you go on their page, they go through all the decisions they made in order to make it free. So, you know, if you don't have a license already, they explain, yes, it's free. And do they have plugins and it's free, but then they also explain why they no longer connect to the omniverse. And it's because so that they could make everything else available for free to the public.
So I really appreciate not just them doing it, but how they've thought through how they're going to make it useful.
Yeah, I mean, I have to say again, I, until this free announcement had not used the software, but one of the things that really, I think it's useful is that it was used in the, Entertainment industry, apparently. So again, not something in my stream of work, but it's a chance to especially if you want to do real world terrain and overlay satellite photos, it has some tools to do that, and that's a pretty difficult thing in some of the other software pieces because of licensing.
But an important point is that they did say that they might do critical security patches, but beyond that there will be no additional piece, you know. Versions of the software and multiple versions are available. One of the other things is it's Mac or Windows, I believe. So you get an option there.
Of course they have their CAD systems. It was that. Did the tech center use the, Oh, what was it? Was it Bentley's CAD?
Yeah. It was did Bentley run microstation? No. Is that right? I think so. Yeah. So I've, cause microstation has changed hands like 19 times or something like that.
So I think when the tech center was, was using it, that was still during Bentley days.
Yeah. So they use microstations to do what's called the DLG, which is a digital line conversion. The conversion of digital line graphs, and I think this was still available online, the tech centers site, but they, you know, that was done using basically a combination of automated systems and microstation and then fixing what it messed up, which was noteworthy in many cases. To convert a bunch of paper maps into digital products.
And so it was a pretty powerful and it was used a lot of places for that sort of work. I can remember going to, oh, I can't like Atlas and other places in DC. Whenever we would go with Trevor to visit the, we would take classes to visit these corporations to see what type of work you could do in this industry. And a lot of them were using Bentley products and remote sensing and in imagery analysis and feature extraction. So yeah,
especially rest of the rest of the vector type things. Yeah.
Next up in the news Noah had some good news with the successful launch of the latest in the, and I say go as is it goes or go as you could correct me out there, but I've always had go as I think it sounds cooler, but anyway go as you satellite has lifted off. June 25th. And it's the last in this series of GOES satellites, so it's the fourth one, I think.
And it will, of course, undergo some testing as it reach, and as it has to reach its geostationary orbit, which actually takes a little bit of while to get that synchronized. And then once all that stuff is ready, it will become GOES 19 and observe the Western Hemisphere. It's got some new instruments on it and so always exciting because these satellites, that satellite series has been really Really useful and an incredible tool in weather forecasting and monitoring.
Yeah. A few years ago, whenever they were launching, what became 19, 18, 17, 16, I have to do the numbers. We talked about how the resolution changed, both in terms of the pixel density, but also the brain just broke on that type of resolution, the wavelengths that it was covering. Spectrum. Thank you. Oh, brain broke. I don't have to teach remote sensing for another two months. So that's why it's not there right now. So yeah, it was, you know, this series really amped up.
A lot of the detail that we can get from the satellites. And now with this one, as soon as saying a new instrument on this particular satellite is going to be the compact Corona graph. Sorry for saying that slow. It's just not a word. I say a lot. One, which will You know, do a little bit of playing around with the solar emittance to try to, you know, help better understand what's going on with solar interactions in the atmosphere. So we'll see what's going on.
Well, and also to help predict it should help predict solar flares. And increasingly, this has been a problem of because they can impact. Digital devices and connectivity on the planet. So being able to observe what's going on and better predict that it can be a huge help for all of us. So for the record, I, I pronounce it go as, and the only reason I pronounce it go as, because goes, you sounds like something from a mighty Python skit.
So that's the only reason I actually would pronounce it goes you, but it sounds
when I said, when I said goes, it was like, well, it leaves out the E. And so I've always said go is, I don't know.
Yeah. And that stands for geospatial operational environmental satellite. So it's an acronym and it does make a lot of sense, but goes, you sounds a little 14 year old PG 13 naughty. So.
In related news, you bought a cut in collaboration with open cosmos has started the Cognizant six mission. It's going to use artificial intelligence in real time for earth observation. The idea being that the AI is going to help The spacecraft make decisions about, you know, removing cloud cover or looking more closely at an event that's going on. So it's hope is to make remote space systems more efficient in earth observation and to operate more autonomously. Just another step in.
Increasing the types of things that we can do with viewing the Earth.
Yeah, and this mission actually launched the satellite launched back in March on a SpaceX rocket. And the reason why it's back in the news is because as you know, once you, you launch that, it has to go through a lot of diagnostics and everything before the, the sensors start sending data. And in this case, they released recently some sample images showing ship detection. I think they use the port of Jeddah Saudi Arabia.
But the idea is that this will be happening in, in real time or near real time. And it's a hyperspectral sensor on the spacecraft, on the satellite and what their hope is, is to have with having this on board in the AI on board. So you bought to make the made the computer part of it open cosmos, I think made the the satellite and the idea is that you can speed up that processing time because currently, of course, it has to come down to a ground station.
There has to be people that have to process the data and then it gets released. And that timeframe has really shrunk and remote sensing is increasingly being used in disaster management and, you know, things that are happening. happening. But there's still that, that lag time and so the hope here is with the AI on board that the AI can do some of that processing. And I think one of their, their use case even was direct communication with a device.
So imagine tasking a satellite or seeing the results on your phone, like in this really short time. So yeah. Not a lot known yet in terms of, of how it's going to work commercially but their first test images that, that just got released kind of are showing what they hope that this the Cognizant missions will accomplish.
There are things intimate in this article that I'm, I'm not sure they're actually meaning to be intimated. But yeah,
I, I have, I was going to ask, does anyone have issues with this at all?
So there's a couple of different reporting on if you want to scrap this one. No, no, no.
It's, it's just, it's and again, if I, if I'm, if I'm the messaging person at a company like this, I'm going to intimate these things as well, even if they're not happening exactly as they're saying, cause the AI of course, it's much easier to have a much more robust cloud. Many, many computer access as opposed to doing it actually on the satellite.
So, you know, there's, there's things like that, that I think they're, they're talking about, but the, you know, some of the articles just, and again, just the, the, the branding just kind of isn't wrong. It just leads
optimistic.
It leads to certain ideas that, okay, but the satellite is a satellite. Most likely the AI is taking place whenever the Data hits the ground station.
Yeah, I don't know how they're doing it, but they specifically, you know, kind of highlighted ground stations as the old school way to do it.
This sentence popped up for now. Earth observation satellites are simply data collectors. Hold on. What's wrong with that? Data is what you need to start with. That's a lot more shade thrown towards the way we've done things than I think there's necessary. To make your point, I guess.
So I, I agree that some of the ways that they're, they're communicating this as a little, and to some extent, Sue made a much, what I was going to say what I was thinking, I'm going to say this as Sue's talking and when she's done, I'll say this, but she made the case a lot stronger to me than this article did, or a lot of their press stuff did. I'm like, oh, okay. I sort of understand why you would do AI in this context. It's just a little, it's a little. Weird.
Other than, you know, if you, it's like automated cars five years ago, it's like, if you can stick AI in anything, everybody's much more interested in it. But I kind of thought I was like, well, what, what's the point in this? It seems like it would be a lot more efficient for processing to do that on the ground, as opposed into, as opposed to into the satellite, not least of all, because if you come up with a new AI algorithm, it's easier to say, well, let's switch to algorithm two instead of.
The default one, then it weren't, it's open space
and you know, so there's like Sue said, there's another article linked. So the actual Ubotica press release is talking about space colon AI. It makes it a little more clear that that data is being processed after the downlink. But there, there was other parts in the other article that talked about right now, of course, we think of remote sensing as data as a service, but one of the things that the onboard AI. Is kind of leaning towards is satellite as a service.
So having potential have direct link through, of course, various network nodes to the satellite so that there's less tasking by you, Monica, and it's kind of more of a people have access to the network. through an app to suggest tasking for the satellite. So that's interesting as well. So it's, it's again, nothing that they say I think is incorrect. It's just some of it kind of leads to certain ways of looking at it that I, I questioned, but not that there anything wrong with it.
So I don't know. And again, this is still, I'm still talking about something I don't need to talk about.
This is still in the testing phase, obviously that's why I said there's no info on what they intend to do in terms of commercial or whatever. But I felt that, that While I think we could sort of see that this would be, these types of things would be inevitable. I mean, I just, this was the first time I actually went, wait a minute. Yeah, they're actually doing this and they do hope again to do, you know, real time, just interaction with, with the users on the other end.
So interesting, interesting. And they've, they've got a satellite up in there. They're testing it, so.
The ShakeAlert earthquake system has added GPS sensors and this is not to predict earthquakes but it is another tool, another way for them to better analyze And to know more about what's going on in these regions of shaking where they have had very large earthquakes this is going to make it possible to do some faster notifications, hopefully so that people in those areas can take protective action.
Yeah. So the really interesting piece here. To my mind is that majority of the way we've done earthquake, earthquake prediction, that's surprisingly hard to say is have sensors all over the planet, which certainly makes sense. Whenever they start shaking, you say, Oh, Hey, there's something going on here. But what this is an attempt to do is to take advantage of, of satellite systems, starting with GNSSs to try to get a more holistic understanding and predictive model for, for What's happening.
So when you combine it with the remote sensing, as we just talked about stuff that's out there, you potentially can have better predictions for specifically for things that are in the future. A category seven and higher or magnitude. I'm sorry. Magnitude seven or higher earthquake, which has massive impacts on humanity and infrastructure and lives and that sort of thing.
So it's kind of interesting to start thinking about these things that exist out there for one purpose and saying, Hey, can we use this productivity productively? Boy, words are hard today to understand a bit by looking from above and on the ground simultaneously.
Keep in mind, we've been doing this by looking at these base stations and things like that that exist around the world after the fact, so there's great visualizations for I can't remember the year of the Chile earthquake, where basically portions of the world, you know, whenever you compare their GNSS. S location from before and after they had moved, you know, meters or centimeters, depending on where you were in the world.
But also if you look at like the, the 2012, I think it was Japanese quake, you can, you know, they have so many base stations set up there that you could actually see the propagation of and direction of the movement from the epicenter in those GNSS signals and base stations. And so that's, you know, we've been looking at it after the fact. You know, we've gotten to the point where we can look at these things real time now that we have an understanding of how the data works, how the systems work.
And as you put more base stations like they are here in the West Coast, so California, Oregon and Washington, in this case it just gives us more to build on and better real time. response information
in the multi scalar partnerships that were needed to bring us to this point are impressive. Because it is a partnership with the U S geological survey, but with state agencies and universities. But then also with the Pacific Northwest seismic network and several universities, including the university of Washington and UC Berkeley. And the Earthscope consortium. So this is something that takes a fairly large concerted effort in order to, to deliver this.
Continuing on to some software things.
Yeah. So ArcGIS Online has had, it's never ever heard of before update in June. Oh, wait, nevermind. That's something that happens every three months. It feels like they're done their updates and there's a bazillion little things that they pushed out. Some of them, not so little, but most of them tweaks, enhancements, and additions. Check the link in the show notes for. All of them because there's many of them, but I'm just going to highlight a few that I think are interesting.
Now we have a recycle bin, which I'll be honest was a feature that I thought, wait, we didn't have recycle bin. I guess we didn't have a recycle bin.
Yeah. It was funny whenever I had logged in for the first time after the update and they're like, do you want to, Enable the recycle bin for your organization. Like, huh?
Yeah. And it was like, Oh, what? I, I kind of feel like it's for those who are old enough to remember is when they added copy and paste to IO, iOS and everyone was like, wait, you can do that before, you know, it's just, so anyway, the recycle bin allows you to basically have stuff sit into your, into 14 days or something like that. You can set it. That way, if somebody leads something, you can go, well, let's not. Do that. So that is a very welcome addition.
There's a bunch of other things that, that are engaged now in map viewer and a little tweaks do things for me, oddly enough, one of the ones that I'm more excited about is arcade integration. In some of the cartographic representations, I don't use arcade a lot, but what I typically do is I cheat and I do it in Python and then have it converted to arcade and then I'll copy and then use it somewhere else.
But I'm glad that it's now available in the map viewer online because one of my big frustrations was hitting cartographic walls using the map viewer. When I was trying to do something like, you know, a story map, whatever it may be that I could do in art pro fairly easily.
So The general theme here, I think that people should take away from this is that there's a lot more stuff that you used to only be able to do in pro that's now starting to be very capable in ArcGIS Online, and I think that if you haven't seen it before, I think it's been fairly obvious for a while now, but if you're not seeing it Until now, you should really start seeing the fact that this is where they're going with this as a company, that a lot of the
stuff we're going to be doing is online and only online or predominantly online. So pro's not going away anywhere soon. And you can tell by the sheer hysteria that whenever ArcMap was going away, it came out. But the point is, is a lot of this stuff is moving online.
Other things, analysis, of course, are changing. So there's new. Capabilities and analysis, not, not necessarily new tools, but enhancements and extensions of existing tools, especially scene viewer, map viewer are getting updates. There's better integration of time in both of those now. There's, I don't know, you know, there's just, there's a little bit of everything.
As always, because the June and maybe December, but definitely June is when they do the big push thanks to the you see, and in July, but I think, you know, for me, the March update is usually one that's more administrative and, and data focused June is more everything October is more. Okay, we need to dial these things in from June a little bit better. And December is some, you know, a lot of times there is new stuff in December as well.
So. That just is my feel from past years, but there's a little bit, all of it, every time
there's a bunch of new stuff for the instant apps that are worth delving into if you haven't done that. And there's similarly a bunch of stuff for experience builder, which I'll be a hundred percent honest. I can't figure out how to work yet. But I haven't spent the time in it. I think it's because it's for. If I'm reading it correctly, this is for people who, this is the low code, no code sort of approach that if you don't want to write code, that's what that does.
And I don't mind writing code. So it's not something I gravitate towards and increasingly dashboards for good or bad are being, you know, you know, Accepted or pushed throughout all sorts of facets of our society and ARC is right there with us. So there's a whole bunch of new stuff in dashboards too. So if you're doing anything in that, there's, like Jesse said, this is a big update for the UC primarily, but it's a big update.
But they've also focused on some small things that just make life easier. Like improving and tweaking some of their panning and zooming. And some of the, the extent home extends. So that will be really nice to see.
In addition to all of those updates One of the updates I wanted to pull out because of course often the data, working with data and editing, right, the editing part of this has, has been the domain still of ArcGIS Pro or before that ArcGIS Desktop but now ArcGIS Web Editor. Has been released with the June update and so web editor will be accessed in the little drop down. So when you look at a data layer, well, there's a couple different ways.
You can open an app map with in map viewer with editable layers. You can go to the data layer in the drop down. You'll now see, as you can see, open in map viewer, you'll now see open web editor. And so what this is, though, it's online.
Editing and again I have not, I am anxious to, to try this, but this I think is really big push of the what was, you know, the desktop tied workflows in our GIS to web now is to do a lot of those things where before you just had to edit the layer and then push it, publish it out, get it onto the online, but now there's a separate, a separate tool for it. So, I think that, as you said, Frank, more and more of this stuff is going online.
And I think the data was one of the last bastions of data editing. Because you know, who hasn't cut their GIS teeth on the very painful sometimes workflows and performance and editing and all the the different GIS packages and just living through it. But now, now, maybe we'll be doing that on the web.
I did want to call out one more that's closely related to that. There's a new native data integration capability called ArcGIS Data Pipelines, which I think is an awful name, but that's the internet there. But what it allows you to do is it has a drag and drop visual diagramming interface for creating data integration.
So basically what it's saying is that, look, if your data's on the desktop, if your data's on your server, if the data's on the cloud, You've now got a visual tool set to say, this is how I need you to pull the data, and that data could be in a whole lot of different places, including Amazon's S3 or Microsoft Azure storage, or just website somewhere you can have this run on a regular basis, like every night at 2 a. m.
or whatever to make sure you have the most up to date data so you can construct. A data set that pulls from all these different things simultaneously. And it's just always available on ArcGIS online. That's really cool. Despite it's kind of annoying name.
The one tiny issue I might have with it is what does it do? And this is something I can find out later because again, just It's been four days since it updated, and I haven't had a chance to look at is what does it do whenever that data set disappears?
Yeah, that's a good question. And how? And another question, of course, is versioning, right? Does it have if I'm doing an update every night at two a. m. Does it have the last in number of versions? So I can say, Oh That version has bad data in it or or doesn't exist. Like you said, is that capability in there? I don't know until because we haven't got to play with it. That's not fair. We haven't taken the time to play with it.
Well, like I said, I haven't gotten to because I haven't had the time because of, you know, but also just to make it clear, data pipelines have nothing to do with pipelines. So if you thought they did, it's nothing to do with oil and gas pipelines.
Listen, it's, it's, it's like, what are the, so data cloud, data, right? Lakes data. I keep forgetting the names because
data because there's mostly stupid like data lakes. I hate that's neither here nor there.
But but it's it's all part of the data science stack. They love to. And that's not entirely true. Some of his data analyst stack. Some of his data science stack and why they separate themselves out. I understand. But at the same time, I don't. And it's just why why is it so important? Why do we keep creating stacks when we're all working on the same things, just calling ourselves different things, whatever.
So completely different topic UAS in the United States, of course, this is legislated and all of that. Generally at the federal level, to some extent at the state level, there are state level exceptions, not exceptions to the FAA, but exceptions to what you can do where they're more limited. Then it is in other areas, but really it's about the federal one. The FAA reauthorization bill of 2024 was passed like a couple of months ago. So then we'll talk about that within that.
Of course, that is the overarching idea of what's going on for all the FAA. And that includes What might be going on in the future for and just unmanned systems in general that are in the sky. And so if you're curious what that says, go look at the reauthorization. There's different things that are kind of focusing on, but it's, it's less detailed since that is a broad bill. It's set up. You know, things like they do want to see beyond visual line of sight as a possibility.
They want to open up more commercial things. You know, the standard kind of we want this to continue to grow ideas. So there's all that in there won't go into any other details. There's the counter U. S. Bill that is going through now, which kind of links FAA to DHA and Department of Homeland Security. They're not. Is it DOJ or DOD? One of the two.
It's actually just both.
Okay. Some of the three letter names. Yes. that work in that area. And so
the three letter names that you don't want to be you to be on their radar.
I'm okay with FAA having me on the radar. But the other two, yeah, you're right. And so that is more about, you know, what are the situations in which SUAS can be taken over grounded, basically trying to understand how we deal with the wealth of. Devices out there, you know, we talked a decade ago about when people were trying to drop in contraband into prison grounds and things like that using S. U. A. S. And I'm sure those type of things still go on. It's just so commonplace now.
It doesn't even get mentioned in the news, but it's those type of activities that are illegal and others that are, you know, especially with the concerns about how these could be used by bad actors you know, those types of things. So that's what's going on in this. And so there's legislation that could have an impact on day to day usage, but not a huge amount for most people that are flying.
And then the third one is the one that has other names, but you might as well just call it the DJI ban bill. And there's a version of it in the house, a version of it in the Senate. And since DJI is one of the, actually it is the top selling. Company in terms of S U S both in terms of private and commercial. It's like the Esri of drones.
Yeah. The idea here is it's, there's concern that again, that DJI as a Chinese company is either a bad actor or responding to a bad actor and therefore, you know, American data could be provided to a foreign entity. Okay, so it was one thing whenever that was banned at the federal level. So most, I don't think very many federal agencies are still allowed to use them. But they're still being sold massively and the commercial and personal space.
And this would ban it and that would then have kind of a flow over impact. I'm not sure. I, I keep forgetting to look to see if Altel is also included in this and Altel is kind of the. I'm not going to say the second largest, but the kind of next known name in drones, an RC Cola type of name. Yeah. But they're also Chinese. So, you know, are they included in this? Because it's, it's actually kind of an anti CCP type of, or PRC bill.
So, Yeah, it helps other companies, you know, Skydio, who is a U S company. AFI Pero which is a French company that does some construction in the U S helps them, but you know, it's just kind of a question mark of, of what's going to happen. If this does go through, cause it's gonna, it's going to change the economic landscape of those people who are buying drones to do these types of things.
And that'll, of course, have an impact on, you know, Is your local real estate agent going to spend the money to go out and buy a $5,000, 5, 000 drone versus a $1,500 drone? Or, you know, the, the new startup who wants to collect data and build from the ground up, are they going to be able to afford that $10,000 a drone and camera combo versus going out and buying a, a $2,000 Mavic three or whatever they want to. There's other issues that I personally have with DJI because DJI has stopped.
APIs or SDKs, I should say for their personal drones or non commercial drones. And so basically any of the new drones I can't buy for my purposes because I can't do route planning and for, you know, mapping, you kind of need that. So it's, it's catch 22 for me, but
Well, another, another aspect of this, we're not just talking about new drones here because Some of the bill would do things. Basically, what happens is, is that it gives FCC the authorization to put it on what's called a covered list. And I'm not an expert or really even knowledgeable about that. But I do know what that means is that there are communication channels that DGI is currently using that they will no longer be able to use.
So in theory, it could, I don't want to say brick, that's not accurate, but it would strongly curtail what you could do with the drone you've had for Years now, so it's not even just new stuff. It's old stuff would be impacted a negatively impacted by this sort of band. And the thing is, is that it's been tacked with a defense spending bill, which is part of the reason it got voted through the committee 57 to 1. Because that's, you know it's, it's like following behind a ambulance in traffic.
It's going to ease the way for you, which is how it's going to be, you know, whether it actually makes it through the full house of representatives, then into Senate, then if the president signs it and all that stuff like that. So there's a lot of hurdles to go and it's very hilarious. The link in our show notes has I'm just a bill linked but you can watch that if you want to know how all this works.
So it's a lot of steps between now and a real thing that is going to impact you in some form or fashion, but. It's the first important step.
Yeah. Well, the weird part is there's, there's a version that's in the house and that's made it through committee. And there's also another separate one that's in the Senate that isn't attached to the, so it's kind of a standalone, I think there, but there's, there's clearly momentum at the congressional level.
I think this is a classic example where and I don't want to go too much into politics here, but you know, what recently happened in our Supreme Court. Is they've ruled that agencies no longer have the default expertise to make determinations of how to implement laws that Congress writes. So, and that's because of used to be a president called the Chevron president, president, president precedent. There we go. And they just sort of said, no, that's not true anymore.
So the implications of this is that typically the way Congress would work is it would say, Give you a broad spectrum of what you're supposed to do and leave it to the experts in this particular case, say FAA or the FCC or the DOJ or whoever it may be to say, well, this, this company is a bad actor or no, it's not. It's okay. Now, there's specifically is a requirement of this act by Supreme Court. Congress has to get has to get a lot more involved.
So I think that what the implication here is that DGI had momentum long before that Supreme Court court case came to. To the Supreme court, but this sort of thing is going to continue to be in at least the short to medium term, more predominant. We're going to see specific bits of technology approaches that Congress has to act on for all the messy sausage making that entails.
So yeah, if you're a drone person go, there's three different things there that we just kind of threw out. And, and check out the various bits and pieces of them
in the U S
in the United States. And, let's not end on A sour note of politics,
the library of Congress has a fellowship open, inviting scholars to use their resources at the geography and map divisions collection to spend two months in a fellowship using the resources of their collection. It's the John W. Kluge center and the Philip Lee Phillips society fellowship and applications are due by September.
So it's an $11,500 fellowship, and you can get an extra 2000 honorarium for lecture and publication is possible. So, you know, it's not nothing.
And it's a residency. So you would be actually there in the map collect collection in DC. Which I think is pretty exciting.
It's collection has over 5 million maps, a hundred thousand atlases, which is. Weirdly more mind boggling to me than the 5 million maps, 8, 000 reference works and 5, 000 globes and globe gores. What's a globe gore. I don't know that. Anybody know?
I do not, but I think it's really interesting too, is that, that they also specifically mentioned that if you do your work in cartography and digital humanities or in GI science that, you know, they're kind of thinking of these things too. So I like, I like that inclusion of scholars that are working in that area.
Keep in mind that they're. Data is kind of linked to the United States because it is the U. S. Library of Congress, but there's international data there. There's historic data there. There's modern data there. It's a, a massive amount of, of information across time, space, and ethnographies, populations, economics, just anything you can think of a cross section. There is some of that.
Yes, and associated I mean, you, you, your focus would be the, the geography and map division, but you know, they also note they have the manuscript and archival collections that include, and this is what I wanted to highlight, is that their photographic collection is amazing. And although, you know, it is. Essentially driven by, you know, how they arrived at the Library of Congress, especially for photographs of places outside the United States, but some of them are really amazing.
And so I would definitely take a look at their, their holdings so that their, you know, online indexing and stuff is great. Their search functions to see if there's collections that might be of use. Cause I think it's actually a pretty cool fellowship. I mean, eight weeks is not, It's not nothing to get stuff done. And so yeah, definitely pretty cool.
Yeah. And that's it for the news this week. Don't really have anything for you in the events corner. Just remember, go out, check out events. You know, we've mentioned already, the Esri UC is coming up. Most of the other big companies have conferences coming up. Autodesk, Hexagon. geospatial,
GISPro, I think.
And yeah, getting into some of the organizational ones. You have all of the. Regional or I think almost all the regional or maybe all the regional conferences from the AAG are in the fall. And a lot of those have abstracts that were already due or getting ready to be due. Yeah. I mean, there's just a lot out there for you to take advantage of. And we are, we are well enough past the before times and the during times to call ourselves in the post times.
And other than the fact that if you fly, you will get sick on the way back. Yeah. You should go.
Yeah. And that was always true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It
to some extent. So,
and also keep in mind that the big events like the UC and AAG and any other ones you want to name their call for information and stuff is not that far away. So you can start thinking about what it is you may want to do next year. So,
of course, if you'd like us to add your events to the podcast and it's an email to podcast at very spatial. com.
If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at suet, very spatial. com.
I can be reached at Barb at very spatial. com.
You can reach me at Frank at very spatial. com.
I don't know. I might be available at kindaspatial. Yeah. The
Bay
area, oddly
enough, was more available. What kindaspatial in Japan than he is in the United States?
Well, on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. I I've, I've kind of let go of social media.
Yeah.
I haven't. So feel free to hit me up.
Of course. If you'd like to find any of our contact information, have it referred to very spatial. com slash contacts.
As always,
we're the folks. at very spatial.
Thanks for listening,
and we'll see you in a couple weeks.
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