You're listening to A Very Spatial Podcast, episode 752, December 17th, 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're going to talk about things including World LiDAR Day is coming up on February 12th. Just wanted to let you know. That's it. What is World LiDAR Day? It's the day that we recognize LiDAR all around the world. Is it, but is it just world? LIDAR day as opposed to ground LIDAR, or do we recognize ground LIDAR?
I think it's all kinds of LIDAR being recognized from aerial to terrestrial and all the uses in all of those. The world best recognized LIDAR. Okay, that's cool. That's cool. The WMM, the World Magnetic Model, has been updated. This is what tells us the magnetic north for things like navigation systems.
It's been updated by the UK Defense Geographic Center, the US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the US NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the British Geologic Survey. I think really most importantly brought to you by the poles, the magnetic sphere, that's helping us. You know, not bake from solar radiation. Yeah. And, and equally as importantly, it's been updated because they're slightly different than they were natural, which is just natural. That happens.
Don't freak out. It's goes on. And in fact, at some point, the North pole will be the South pole. The South pole will be the North pole. Nobody knows when it's a little freaky to me. I think one of the things is that I miss about having quads as kind of a normal class thing in the geospatial classes is the, the lack of the declination angle at the bottom of the quad that showed you, okay, well, this was where magnetic north was the year that we made this iteration of the quad. No, just me.
Okay. Well, you know what? I never actually paid attention to that. So now that you're thinking, I was like, oh yeah, that is on there. That is kind of cool. If they update it, it's going to have greater accuracy. It's something that we use all the time without thinking about it. And this makes it better.
So scientists in Hawaii, in conjunction with a Canadian company that works with drones have been using drone technology and they found a rare type of orchid that's actually more common than they thought when they started to use the drones and, you know, Drone to mapping to start to map where it is. And this is part of a larger partnership that they're doing to look into plant extinction prevention.
It's just really interesting because again, it shows you that what you think, you know, and then what you actually find out by using different types of geospatial technology can be vastly different things. I just want to say the really cool thing about that news item to my mind is that you think, well, haven't we seen everything from above?
Well, Actually, the interesting about this plant is in the middle of a 2000 foot cliff and you can't get it from above or below and the rocks are treacherous and crumbly. So even if you try to climb over there, you'd probably fall. So literally until we got drone technology able to do this, which has been around for a while, but they used it for the first time, they couldn't get at it to see that that's pretty cool. I think it goes along with the, the awesome band name.
And I can't remember if it's Zach or somebody from UNCP that, that we came up with the band name. Niches for Finches. There you go. But now that's just the news I just thought that was really cool. Yeah, so niches for orchids wait not orchids. It's actually a new species It says it belongs to the carnation family So niches for carnations. There we go. That actually works better than orchids.
So niches for carnations Yeah Not cliffs for carnations Yeah, but you kind of lose the the the connection to to that guy charles darwin evolution guy Charles Darwin and others, you know, he had a had beagles and. And it may just be the guitarist to me, it makes me think of Cliffs Dover by Eric Johnson, which is a whole different thing. In a web corner that Barb found is the Whatsapp, Whatsapp chat map. Okay, that's just evil for names. Whatsapp chat map.
And so what this is, is humanity, wow, just terrible tonight. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team got a call for, hey, we want to do some some Mapping and they're like, you know, what's a really easy way that we can make this happen.
They're like, hey, you know There's this cool app that everybody uses called WhatsApp, you know in the need for creating Map data very quickly very easily with something that already exists They're like, you know lots of people use WhatsApp and if you use WhatsApp chat it can keep your location history if you want to if you give it the chance to and so folks came along and created the chat map dot H-O-T-O-S-M. So hot osm uh.org page where you can take existing WhatsApp chats.
You can export those from the chat in the app, WhatsApp app, and bring it into the chat map. Hot sm.org page. And it'll give you a map and so yeah, I had a map that we had done a group chat in Japan. Oh, it's gone. And it was interesting to see, you know, what happened whenever you take your data. If you, and we only had a few people who had location enabled in the chat. So it wasn't a bunch of points, but it's.
It works, and it's, you know, something that lots of people already have on their phone. They're already using it for communication anyway. You don't necessarily have to have multiple people in the chat, but if you have a lot of people working on one data collection, why not? And so then you just bring down one chat. So it's a nice little tool. And WhatsApp is very, very popular around the world.
Yes. And this app is neat because it doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge to, to make it work and get started. Yeah, it's on the back end where you then toss it into the map. You're just chatting and grabbing points as you're going through otherwise. And of course, with the recent intrusion into the RCS and SMS, was, was it RCS as well as SMS that China hacked into? Either way. Countries have been hacking into various non encrypted data technologies.
And so, since this one is encrypted in theory, you're kind of safe, I guess. Does anyone here use WhatsApp besides me? I use it. Really? I use it because when I work with international students and professionals, it's what they use. It's what they're used to. We use it when we're on trips. Yes, sporadically. Hmm. It, literally the only thing I use it for is a group a guitar group that I play with. follow they use it for communication. So. Go out and check it out.
Okay. So this week I just, I was, I just want to bring up some questions and see what people think. Cause they're literally what I titled the topic this week is discussion around questions Jesse had this week. Yes. As we, as we roll towards the end of the year, it's not like a year end thing, but it just so happens. No, no, I have questions that I want other people to, to. Give me their take on Not not a year end type of thing. That's that's for the next episode.
Yes And and so the first one just heard about this today and it's tied to so Tim Johnson the longtime Well many different positions, but eventually director of the North Carolina GIS NCGIA and then maybe even now as he's retiring, the director of all of IT in North Carolina, I can't remember but he's retiring. So congratulations for many, many years decades really on working with GIS, especially within North Carolina. So congrats.
But one of the things he's going to be doing is stepping away to be part of the National Geospatial Collaborative, which I had Not heard of before and this is something that's coming out of the National Geospatial National States Geographic Information Council NISGIC Yeah, but the National Geospatial Collaborative is a non profit. That's just kind of starting up really the only place you find it is In references on the NISGIC webpage so far So has anybody else heard of this?
Know anything about it? No, is the short answer. I was actually just thinking of messaging our state GIS coordinator and saying, because she is the representative for the state of West Virginia to NISJC. Do you know about this? What is this thing? And so it's, it's, it's just kind of curious.
If you go to, and I think right now one of the, the big names in East Coast GIS people, Bill Johnson geography and GIS really is currently, I think, at least a board member, if he's not the person who's kind of chairing it right now and he had a post on LinkedIn. Earlier this year. So really it's only been around for a couple of years. I think they announced it in 22, 23, somewhere in there.
But they came up with a mission statement, vision statement, sorry, of to boldly pursue a more effective geospatial ecosystem. I, it's just a little tantalizing morsel that I want to know more about now and what they're, what they're doing.
And, you know, as a nonprofit, a new nonprofit, It's you know, not like they have a lot of wherewithal to do a lot of stuff So i'm not surprised that there's not a lot of information out there But it just I want to know more and I just wanted to see if anybody else had heard anything about it before Yeah, i'm just excited about it because I was just thinking about this when I was looking for some things for our state association that you know in other
industries that come from like solid waste we have A lot of groups we can go to for information and support That's just more centralized and I felt like, you know, we have all these things that go on, but they're not so centralized. There's not one hub that covers everything for you know, just our whole community, everybody in it.
And I feel like this might be the answer to that, of where do I go to get information on things that affect everybody within the geospatial sphere in the U. S. especially. Yeah, we don't know. We don't know what they're doing yet. Yeah, I mean, I have both. I think both potentially something really good, but also I do have some questions because it seems that, at least initially, it's not going to be one that right, you know, people can join.
It's going to be a collaborative of organizations, and so there's going to be that extra layer in between, and sometimes, you know, you get, you get issues that maybe as a, as a group, somebody really wants to push, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it will trickle down. To sort of individual people. And the idea, right, to boldly pursue a more effective geospatial ecosystem, I think, I guess, broadly, absolutely agree with that.
But, but again, I mean, and early on, as, as noted, they don't really have definition for what that means. But the stakeholders, including academia private sector, public agencies, right, so many people who utilize geospatial technologies, I think that there are, as pointed out, lots of, lots of gaps in how things work, and if we wish, you know, different parts could work together.
I, because kind of being selfish and thinking about the academia, academia sector, right, we're often very disconnected, some of us, from what is actually needed and happening in some, say, the private sector. I mean, you know, we keep up and what's not, but sometimes it's like, well, It's not an understanding of how our wheels move timeline wise versus, say, somebody out in the private sector.
So some of those things, it'd be nice to have a sort of broader network feedback loop, I guess, is what I'm thinking. Okay, like this thing called the Geospatial Professional Network. So anyway, so that's my like, you know, just off the cuff initial thoughts, because I also was not familiar. Okay, question number two for this week. OSM went down. What what I mean, it was very quick to get back up in terms of Read only, I think it may still I didn't check right before we did it.
But earlier today it was still read only They were already apparently working to You know steady their their infrastructure and this just happened to happen right when they were about to Do that. So it's just horrible timing, but I don't know thoughts. I mean, to me, OSM is infrastructural.
At this point and yeah when I saw that I was thinking This is why they are considered a digital public good you know to you know to provide support because so many people rely on them to hopefully Steady things like this that might happen because like you when it went down I was like, okay What happens when they go down and so many people rely on on that them for infrastructure now to be fair a lot of people Have cloned Theirs.
And so they're running their own instance for their, their businesses and stuff. So it's not like their site going down, took down most of the mapping applications that exist out there. It could have if people weren't cloning you know, it regularly and keeping their own version of it. But still, it's a, it's a massive impact whenever you think about just how many sites, apps Researchers et cetera, rely on OpenStreetMap for, for a data source.
And also, I think a reminder too, not just for that, right, we've periodically over the many years of various spatial, right, talked about this and gone back and forth is that we forget sometimes that, that there's always like a physical infrastructure, right? Robert used the word infrastructure and you'd use the word infrastructure, but there's a physical structure behind all this stuff and we, we forget it until something goes wrong.
So it isn't, isn't just this and also that somebody has to bear the cost and the time for that. And the maintenance, right? Even, even, you know, think about it, even our podcast, right? Jesse has to maintain a service where we put the podcast. There's physical things we have to do, right, when we connect to chat with everybody.
And, and sometimes we forget those things, but when you writ, when that's writ large, at, you know, something like OpenStreetMap that has been around as long as it has that serves so many places, right, still at the end of the day, Those digital resources are connected to some physical space where they have to live and, and sometimes we forget that and how much it, how much it costs to maintain it, not just in money, but also in all these other things.
And without, sometimes without the support that maybe we knew we wish we had for these things, right, they're going to go away, potentially. All it takes is one ISP's router to go down. Well, and in this case, right, this is a short term thing. But I mean, just long term, there have to be people, and you talked about everybody cloning it, right? There have to be people then who are willing to commit their resources to propagating it, you know, through the clones and then serving that up there.
And it's great, and it's a great community, but it, but it has to have this commitment. And it's just one example, right? Well, but that's the problem, right, is that, that I don't, there clearly is not, there clearly isn't.
A secondary instance that somebody else is running that it's that it's able to fail back over to they they're cloning it for their own purposes, but nobody is supporting a duplicate site somewhere like we would expect to see from lots of, you know, years of open source downloads and those type of things that this open access data gets dealt with a little bit differently. So. This this I'm trying to articulate this so pardon me. So what? That was just, that was my reaction, to be honest with you.
It was, OpenStreetMap is down. So what? Microsoft's been down before, and, and, USGS has been down before, and the National Map used to go down all the damn time. So, But each of those examples have the money to make it happen to come back up. Yeah. Well, but it's it's the it's part of the internet, right? I mean just things go down sometimes so like it didn't it didn't really phase when I heard oh open street maps down. So They'll get back online. It'll happen.
Yeah, that's not the question So it's just part of the modern world these things, you know, just like your power goes out occasionally it just does You so I, this bothered me a lot less than it seemed to bother other people. You know, not just what we've been talking about here, but I saw on the internet, people were freaking out a lot.
And I thought, well, haven't you, you know, lost Tik TOK occasionally or Reddit or whatever, you know, thing it is that your thing is, it just doesn't work for some reason. It's just, you know, part of the, part of the world we live in. It is true. But if we can kind of encourage people to maybe, you know, Give a little to a non profit that A lot of people are utilizing. Why not? Yeah. I mean, definitely do that. Irrespective of the fact that it went down, I mean, do that anyway.
It's, it's an important service that's available, but even if you get money, I guess the flip side of that would be, even if you gave money to help in these types of situations, it's still going to go down eventually. It just will. But if there's a backup server somewhere on the other side of the planet, that there's a failover to then it takes care of it. Well, hopefully, I mean, you know, I've certainly had in my minute example where I had a failover and it was working fine.
And then it didn't whenever I had a crisis. I don't know why. So it's just Give money to this organization, help them make the more resilient, but understand it's never gonna be perfect. So I will move on to, so drone news impact, right? This is based really on, on Barb sending a Reddit.
Well, it was just funny because in, in that post, the it was just, it's a normal forum where they talk about drones for people that are within the profession and they, they shut it down because they were getting so many people that were coming there that didn't understand drone technology based on what was going on in the news. And they basically were like, wait, we can't handle all these questions. And you don't understand what drones are. You don't understand what.
You know, things are in terms of, you know, remote earth observation. So I just thought it was very interesting because again, our profession tends to be very not hidden, but we're an iceberg and what people see are the. Outputs of what we do, but they don't see the technology side. So in this case what you were seeing in this, the news were reports that people were seeing normal drones, very different types of drones than they are used to.
Because some of them might be, you know, industry based or hobbyist. But also in some cases they were aircraft or unmanned aircraft. In some cases, constellations. Not constellations. of drones, which do exist, just star constellations. Again, not understanding, you know, Earth observation. But for me, what was funny is I have a different perspective because being from New Jersey in school, we learn about War of the Worlds. And this felt very similar.
So, for me, the, the thing that it kind of comes from is I, you know, we all saw the news items about this, and every time one popped up, I'm like, okay, so why has nobody just done, one, a check for, cause, Everybody has to tie to part 89 of part 107. Oh wait part 89 isn't part of 107. Never mind, but Part 89 you have to have remote id on your drones now So just get somebody out there who has an appropriate app, which there's only like two apps.
So whatever and and check to see who's there and flying it because They are flying legally. They are lit appropriately. They are at appropriate elevations so They most likely are flying legally and so have remote ID turned on and it's also possible they have a waiver. So just look at the FAA waiver list, which is a public document to see if there's any waivers in those areas.
Now, of course, more recently with all the other ones popping up in various places, I'm assuming those are copycats to take advantage of the fanaticism tied to the New Jersey ones. But it's probably a company that just is flying legally is my expectation. And just. Nobody wants to be that company that's like, yeah, we're the ones who are legally causing this.
These people to freak out, but we don't know why they're freaking out the, the concern I had here was the negative press around drones the presumption that all of this was nefarious by definition, if it's drones, it must be nefarious. That was sort of the tenor of the news coverage. Yeah. It, you know, like Jesse said, we can figure out who was doing it.
And we could probably figure out why they were doing it without too much trouble, but really just that default presumption that thing in sky bad. That was very disheartening for me. Since I think that. This is a technology that we need to get a little more comfortable with as a people that it's it's not always a bad thing it's a useful technology it could actually make your life a lot better as long as everyone follows the rules right and that was a very upsetting.
Turn in the, the conversation, but in the news particularly considering that an awful lot of the people, I don't know, does not get too political, but an awful lot of people that were having issues with it tend to support. Agencies that tend to utilize this technology. That's an over, I'm trying to not say something political, but it just was a really weird thing. And I'm not sure how we as an industry.
Address these technologies that we use in such a way to avoid the surveillance state judgment that goes back to the G. I. S. and society debates, but from a different angle and you know, along with what Frank was saying. I also wondered if because I think the technology is Yeah.
A lot more progressed, you know, than what people normally who don't work in the field, think of it as if they would have thought differently, if they were able to see them in the daylight, like, would this have been different if they were, were flying during the day rather than at night? Well, I think Frank, like Frank was saying during the day, they probably wouldn't even see them. It's just the fact that at night as part of 107, you do have to have lights that are visible within three.
Miles, statute miles. So, you know, they're bright. They're, they're just kind of, you, you have to be able to see them so that planes don't run into them or helicopters and others. So, yeah, it's, I think you're right that, you know, in the daytime, it would have just not been an issue at all. And Frank heard me saying over and over, I'm going to be so irritated if this is a publicity stunt for a company or just a plain old hoax that's gone on too long.
Yeah. Well, and, you know, I think that's where we're getting now because we have other examples and now Southern California, North Carolina somewhere else in the Northeast that have been called out. And of course, then you have all the people who are like you were saying, who are calling out. Stars as well. Is that a drone? No, it's just a star. It's been there a long it's just and it's a that's a plane And that's a helicopter. It's just like calm down.
This has been wrong your entire life Relax Yeah, I think that's that was my initial reaction like calm down We went from news and then to say like the change in media coverage too, right? We went from news articles about drone delivery and all kinds of stuff, you know drones being used to to Things into disaster. I mean, like all of these types of things about using drones and stuff to, to this being, and it's just, it feels like a step backwards. It just really does.
And my final question this, this week, and I think this is the one that is the, the biggest question mark left hanging is, are we nearing the end of the Arab Spring after 14 years as of this month, I think? We're, we're, we're seeing with Syria. Well, it depends on what you mean by end. I think they would think it would be there. It would be their spring, to be honest. That they want, that they would have a separate spring. Yeah. In this case, fall.
In this case, I mean, like it depends what you mean by end. I mean, the end of the. Of the tide that created it. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, everything starts in Tunisia in late 2010. And we talk about how things happen very quickly in places like Yemen and Egypt and other various countries in the region. And things start in Syria in 2011. But they've, because of ISIS and various interactions and all these different things, it has kind of been a simmering pot for the last 14 years.
And so is this, you know, can we, we don't know what's going to happen now, but is this something that is still part of the Arab Spring or is it now a new day that hasn't, that we don't tie to the last 14 years of on again, off again, rebellions. So when I read this question, Jesse, from you, I thought it had to do with social media and location based apps that made the, this possible. And, you know, again, at the time it was more everyone in one place.
And now that everyone worldwide is sort of, you know, You know, there's many different platforms that you could be on that that's what I was taking as your, your ending of, you know, if you don't have one location where people gather then, you know, is, is something like that possible? So, that's how I was reading it when, when I saw that discussion.
Going back to WhatsApp and things like that, it makes it more possible because now we have channels that are harder to be shut down by governments like they did in the Arab Spring movement, especially in places like Egypt and other places where they just shut down the internet. Which, of course, they very quickly turned that off so that business could go back to, so they didn't just cripple their entire economy. But, okay, so I'm the one who kind of thought that.
Well, no, I don't think that that, I just think it's a much more complex question that, that I would think on more before I would comment on just because of the just deep implications of. Well, like I said, whenever I started this one, it's like one that, Is it really answerable? My take is a bit radical, which is, did we ever have an Arab spring? And I know that we think about a particular period of time for a particular set of responses to stimuli as, Oh, this is a change, the Arab spring.
This is a I was going to say radical departure. But I mean, that's a little strong, a significant departure from the past. But if you. You know, follow this history back, certainly 50 years did the modern history post World War II to keep it even, you know, further back, these undulations are not unusual. No, maybe that's not the word they have have happened significantly.
And my feeling is, is that the Arab spring as a construct is a little bit Western derived, we wanted to signify something momentously changing in this region. And I think to Sue's point, it's very complicated and understanding what's going on there is really hard. I studied this as part of one of my degrees, and I would never pretend to even be able to touch the surface of it. Other than to say that there was a lot of exciting things happening, you know, 10 to 12 years ago in that region.
And I think that we got a lot of excitement from the West and the reality has been much more complicated and less clear cut. And I think that maybe it's the end of the Arab spring in the sense of maybe the West is finally understanding that. These things are going to be micro changes over generations, maybe before it's a true evolution of this stuff. So that was my thought about that question.
Is it the end of the Arab spring kind of, but only because maybe it's from a, from a Western perspective, we're realizing, oh, this is not as. Momentous and clear cut as we hoped it would be 15 years ago 12 years ago And those are discussions around the questions that I had this week just raised and chatted about and to think about right? Which you know, I think the interesting thing here.
Is You know the topics, that that you thought about were It's really fascinating Because we went from How do we, you know, organize ourselves as an industry to technology that underpinned us to how do we talk to the general public about the technology we use to actually geography, which is remember rear geospatial, but also geography podcast. So that's really cool. I love this sort of scattershot seemingly, but actually has a bit of thought to it.
The conversation we had, okay, I'm not going to suggest that I had a thought behind it. So. Oh, come on. You did come from my brain. I will say other than SWIP swapping two things. So they'd be in a certain order. There was no thought. Jesse you could just go and go, you know, why did they use the term spring after all, right? Like the Prague spring and all those things. Like, what is the implication of the term spring as if there is some outcome that we are expecting, right?
That it's a spring, a dawning, a new growth of some particular thing that perhaps in Frank with a Western mind, right. The, that we are expecting. But we don't take into account what has come before in the different places. Right. Yeah. I haven't thought about the Prague Spring since I was in graduate school. I know. I was, you brought the Prague Spring. I was like, actually, that's exactly the point. Cause the Prague Spring, we're like, we definitely in the, anyway, sorry.
Yeah. So we had definitely thought sort of what that meant, right. Is throwing off the yoke of, of totalitarianism and the true return rising up of, of democratic institutions. Well we'd have to find the reporter or whoever that coined the Arab Spring moniker. To see what they were kind of writing about because, of course, everybody ran with it in so many different directions that it's a it's a good question. I thought they were all good questions.
I went back to the OSM one just because I was hoping that the people that were working on that issue are getting a chance to take a break because what I've seen in the geospatial industry is people on on call, you know, like you said, we said, keeping that infrastructure growing and they really need to. step back, take a break, take a vacation after a big, you know, problem like this comes up. Yeah. So, okay. This is where it comes from Is a political scientist.
This is in wikipedia, which you know critique it all you want But political scientist mark lynch described arab spring as a term I may have an unintentionally coined on january 6 2011 article for foreign policy magazine. It's that guy's problem fault Yeah, there you go political scientist, man They're always trying to do stuff like that on the events corner as always go out check out events if you can GeoWeek is taking place February 10th through the 12th in Denver, lovely Mile High City.
And GIS Research UK is going to be taking place the 23rd to the 25th of April in Bristol. Of course, if you'd like us to add your event to the podcast, send us an email to podcast at very spatial. com. If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at Sue at very spatial. com. I can be reached at Barb at very spatial. com. You can reach me at Frank at very spatial. com and you can follow me on Blue Sky. I'm on Blue Sky now. And I actually whatever they call blue skying. Occasionally.
I'm calling them tweets. Okay. Apparently other people call them skeets. I don't, I don't know what the actual term is. Yeah, I've heard skeet, which made me laugh. I heard that too, and I was like, I'm not calling it that. I'm just not. Yeah, but I'm not going to do it. No. And I'm still just largely just lurking on Blue Sky. So I'm not going to share my handle yet, because I'm mostly just like reading other people's stuff. I haven't been posting. It's the same as, well, it's shared on the.
Very spatial.com contact, oh, that's, sorry, that's, I don't have to say it. Oh, okay. I'm available. What kindaspatial and of course, you can find all of our contacts over at veryspatial.com/contacts. As always, we're the folks from VerySpatial. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in a couple weeks if you want. I spend some time kicking. He's now sleeping against. I'm sick and if you want to, I'm tired of fighting, fighting the wind. I'm tired of fighting the wind.
I'm tired of fighting the wind. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. I come unglued for you if I wanna. I'm only asking to play out. You can choose to give if you wanna. I'm tired of fighting, fighting the wind. I'm unglued, unglued. I come unglued for you.