$45.10 / person: Welcome to the 2010 Census

13.7 Billion dollars. A big number, and also the *conservative* estimate the Census has given for the amount the 2010 census will cost. With an estimated 303 million people living in America (taken, of course, from the Census.gov website) that works out to $45.10 / person.

Really?

I certainly would not dare to understate the importance of the census bureau: the data collection it does is excellent for my own research. Even more astounding is the incredible accessibility they provide on the variety of websites they have developed for end users. But when it takes nearly 9 hours of minimum wage salary to count and catalog a single individual, something is going horrible wrong. We could even be extremely optimistic and say the average census bureau employee is much better paid than myself, making $45 / hour - at this rate, it would still work out to taking at least an hour to count one person. Just one person.

So, here is my call: Geography (and GIS) needs to step it up. Find out whats going on - clearly money is available to be made (at $45 / person, you can get rich quick!). Such incredible resources could be turned to doing very useful things, like creating premade shape files for download, data analysis, or lobbying for more data collection methods to be created.  Through this everyone will benefit - and we can even keep the troops in Iraq for three more days… but thats another topic.

Happy Super Fat Tuesday

Here’s a cool mashup to coincide with today’s primaries. Google & Twitter have teamed up to spatially relate people’s Twitter messages (by using SMS) pertaining to who they voted for, problems with polling stations, and pretty much whatever people had to say about their voting experience. I’ve had the mashup on for a while and it’s been pretty interesting seeing what people had to say. SMS is an interesting way to collect data and I would like to see it used more in the realm of data collection. Cell phones are an untapped market for data submission and this is a great way to get data with spatial variables.

Microsoft, ESRI, Excel, and DBF: Methods for disaster

So, on an average day with average frustrations I would not spend time writing on a topic as nuanced as this, but certainly an issue this important deserves a bit of a note for my fellow GIS users. DBF files, for those who are familiar with them, are key to how data is held in ArcGIS projects - all attributes for spatial entities are held in them. Modifying, manipulating, and otherwise changing data in these attribute tables is as easy as 1, 2, 3 (or so you would believe) if you have a program such as excel installed on your computer - with one … small … caveat. It only works about 25% of the time. The other 75% you will find yourself wondering why your data you just entered into your DBF has magically dissapeared (no matter how many times you save it), your DBF will not load into ArcGIS after you complete your modifications, or any of a thousand other errata than can occur. After beating my head against this issue for months I have finally found a solution (well, 2):

1) Don’t use excel (see Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org) or freeware solution DBF Explorer (http://www.pablosoftwaresolutions.com/html/dbf_explorer.html)

2) If you insist on sticking to Microsoft, puruse this article on how to avoid errors with ArcGIS and Excel when using DBFs. Perhaps it will convince you otherwise: http://www.lib.umich.edu/nsds/spatial_tutorials/excel.html

I appreciate microsoft, I really do. But at some point, the madness has to end.

If I had $10,000 & 3 weeks of leave…

I’d go to a hell of a lot of geography related conferences this year. The first one I’d go to is of course AAG Annual Meeting in Boston this year. Boston is one of my favorite cities and a great city to host a geography conference. I also heard Noam Chomsky is speaking, that in itself is a reason to attend. O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference is great conference and I think this year is going to be their best. This conference focuses on the geospatial web and emerging and innovative techno-related trends in the geospatial realm. If you’re into neogeography, the Where 2.0 conference is for you. And with sponsers like Google, Autodesk, MS Virtual Earth, MapQuest, and DigitalGlobe you could probaly score some really nifty swag, not to mention check out all the new stuff these companies have planned for geospatial realm. The last conference is not really a geo-related conference per se, but c’mon you know how multi-disciplinary geography is and I’m sure you’d be able to find a link to geography in a presentation at TED. It’d actually probably be easier than finding a ticket to attend this outrageously expensive and selective conference. TED was actually invitation only up until 2007 (ticket prices went from $4800 to $6000) Nonetheless, the conference is AWESOME, you can watch a lot of the presentations on the site! They have truly amazing speakers. Check out wiki on TED. Go now, check it out!

A couple of new tools

The first tool is called gCensus. It is designed for Google Earth and lets you query through census data and outputs a .kmz file. Pretty helpful if you want to display census data for counties in the U.S. fast. The next tool is EarthPlot. It’s designed to create post, contour, trajectory, graduated symbol, raster image, and spider plots in Google Earth.

I also found this website. It let’s you map out your RSS feeds and continuously updates them. It let’s you embed the RSS map as an active wallpaper or even embed it into you own blog. However, this app has plenty of bug issues. First, the news is stale, the only news I’ve seen is 10 days or older. Secondly, there is a problem with searching for tags within feeds in the personalize feed directory, you can’t narrow down the search to a particular feed within the entire RSS feed (like Google News - Baseball etc…). There are also problems with importing feeds that the site doesn’t currently monitor (you are supposed to be able to import a feed if  it’s not monitored). They should also allow you to have more than 5 RSS feeds. Who can narrow their RSS feeds down to just 5 feeds? I feel the main problem is that the creator of this app doesn’t seem to be addressing any of these problems and pretty much turning this app into abandonware. Nonetheless it is(was?) a cool idea and would love to see someone come up with working version of something like this.