Geography · Economics · Visualization
How well do you know the town you call home? After twenty-six years in Denver, most of it tucked up in its northwest corner, I suspected my own honest answer would be not very . So when I decided to take a personal sabbatical of sorts this Spring to ponder a mid-career refactoring in the brave [ ]
What gets measured gets managed. I made a pilgrimage to the ruins of the birthplace of what gets measured gets managed. The Midvale Steelworks in North Philadelphia is where Frederick Taylor and his stopwatch laid the foundation for scientific management at the turn of the 20th century. Notable too was his assistant there, Henry Gantt, [ ]
Last year I ran into the always-incisive Will Cadell and we immediately started discussing a favorite hallway-track topic: how to effectively sell Geo. ME: If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn t even bother with the web but just sell PDF maps to the Oil Gas industry with big red arrows that [ ]
I saw some of the most talented Spatial Minds of my generation take non-spatial jobs for better money. Recently LinkedIn brought me tidings that two people in my network took new positions with no obvious link to the Geospatial industry. In their spatial endeavors, these folks were technically adept, innovative, and happy to volunteer to speak [ ]
It s a question as old as capitalism itself: does Supply create its own Demand? With Serious Money flooding the Earth Observation sector Billionaire money, Former Treasury Secretary/ Wall Street money, etc. the industry is SPAC d up and hurling satellites and sensors (optical, radar, hyperspectral, you name it) into orbit at a dizzying rate. But what if the [ ]
Creative destruction is awesome until it comes for your livelihood. Having made a few dollars over the years building custom routing applications, I had two distinct reactions when testing out the Straightaway app recently after reading this Mapbox post. “this is way cool and efficient” “time to look for another way to make [ ]
Study after study shows the negative health impacts of soda. And 7-11 has responded to market demand with a 128oz Mega Gulp. For as fashionable as it is in the data community to feign exasperation with spreadsheets and the chaos they cause mangling numbers and text, crimes against dates and times, relative vs absolute [ ]
Google Earth turns 15 this Sunday. Are you celebrating? If you re a mapping professional, your reaction might be a mix of wistfulness and condescension as you haven t popped open Google Earth in years let alone dealt with a KML file. The urge of the carto-cognoscenti to dismiss Google Earth has been strong from the [ ]
If the global economy were collapsing, how would we know? In mid-February as parts of Asia wrestled with COVID-19, Twitter user @IAMIRONMAN7 had some data to share and he wasn t shy about connecting the dots: As I doom-scrolled through the responses, folks who were familiar with Singapore chimed in that this looked like business-as-usual to [ ]
Confession: my gaming career ended in 1979 when Asteroids was released. Overwhelmed by multi-axis movement and the hyperspace button, I allocated my arcade quarters to analog pinball and turned my back on console gaming. As my mapping career marches into its third decade, I impatiently await the re-energizing of online mapping that can transform the [ ]