Another Delaware Blogger in the News

Justin Kates, who blogs from the University of Delaware and about his avocation -- combining amateur radio and homeland security work -- is a subject of a story in the News Journal this morning.

The story, 19-year-old heads state's ham radio emergency corps, is part of a News Journal investigative series on Delaware's use of federal Homeland Security grants.

I am interested in this series. I do a fair amount of work with the state's Homeland Security agencies. Geospatial data is a key element in the information systems that support crime prevention and investigation, emergency management and Homeland Security. And it is the case that some of the federal grant funding that Delaware receives is helping to support the maintenance of important geospatial data sets.

In my view not enough federal Homeland Security grant funding is being used for geospatial data, of course, but that will be the subject for another day.

I was also interested in the story because I know Justin, not only as a fellow blogger but as a skinny, bright kid several years ahead of my eldest in school. I used to see him at school events and I still see his sister, who is between my two girls in age.

The News Journal questions why we have a 19-year old in charge of the Delaware Communications Corps. That may be a fair question. It is true that Justin Cates is a mature young man, and I have no doubt about his passion and intelligence. But it does seem unusual.

On the other hand, we do have a tradition of organizing ourselves on an ad-hoc basis. Our fire protection is handled (and very well) by a large number of mostly volunteer fire companies who carefully guard their autonomy, but generally work well together to help protect our safety.

My own Delaware Geographic Data Committee owes its existence in part to legislation that enables it, but more to the fact that I say, and a sufficient number of GIS leaders in state and local agencies say, that it exists.

This isn't necessarily a bad way to do some things. An informal, collegial organization can be quite effective. There does come a point, however, where that organization must become more formal in order to continue to be effective.

The question is: what parts of the Homeland Security effort have reached that point?

A Road Runs Through It

There's a new study published in the journal Science that looks at roadless space in the continental United States. It finds the remarkable fact that no point in the continental US is more than 22 miles from some sort of road.

The Science magazine website is by subscription, but the abstract of the study, Roadless Space of the Conterminous United States, notes that the authors have created a new way to measure roadlessness:

We introduce a metric, roadless volume (RV), which is derived from the calculated distance to the nearest road. RV is useful and integrable over scales ranging from local to national. The 2.1 million cubic kilometers of RV in the conterminous United States are distributed with extreme inhomogeneity among its counties.

The map image above shows RV by County. The scale ranges from high RV areas, shown in blue, where there are more areas without roads, to low RV areas, in red, where there are more roads.

Discovery News presents a longer overview of the study (Roadless Space Uneven Across U.S.) which discusses the relationship between this new measure of roadlessness and habitat fragmentation, and notes that the study found that, in some areas, we seem to build roads in the wrong places:

And when the scientists compared the roadless space with the number of people in a given area, they sometimes found a mismatch: that is, too many roads for too few people.

The study's abstract, by the way, offers a lovely example of scientific obfuscation. That poetic phrase "distributed with extreme inhomogeneity" means, I think, "not in any regular way that this highly trained scientist can see."

Tom's Dark Epiphany

Shortly after inventing his Edison Recording Machine, Tom sat listening to a wax cylinder of music.

All of a sudden, the years opened before him. He heard generations of recorded music: symphonic, impressionist, minstrel singers and crooners, blues both country and urban, worksongs, jazz, rock and roll, country pop, jam-bands and hiphop.

He heard and saw a musical future enabled by his own inspiration and work.

Then he saw a singing contest, judged by a strange trio: a clownish bear, a trained seal, and a dyspeptic clergyman. He saw democracy harnessed to this contest; its voter participation outstripping any actual election.

A title appeared in his mind's eye: American Idol. And he wept.

The Title Should Be Ours....

There is a National Chicken Cooking Contest. Delaware's entry is the author of the Wilmington food blog The Shell Pot; she is also a part of the life of Richard Koehler, our own Honest Hypocrite.

Watch Rich's blog for regular updates.

It seems evident to me that, if there is a national contest around the cooking of chicken, Delaware should always win. Otherwise, why am I eating chicken at every statewide event I attend?

Statewide GIS Conference

We are hosting a statewide conference for the users of GIS tools and geospatial data in Delaware this week. It is called Delaware GIS 2007: Serving Communities.

I should probably take a moment to explain GIS. The acronym stands for Geographic Information System, the combination of the map and the database. We use information about where things are to create what we refer to as "geospatially intelligent" information.

My job is to encourage the use and sharing of geospatial information in Delaware. The annual GIS conference is a big part of that.

Most of the credit for putting on this show, this year and every year, is due to the other folks on the Conference Planning Committee; but I get to play EmCee each year to all the state, local, academic, and private sector GIS folks in Delaware. It's a job I love.

The Conference started today with a series of technical workshops. While those were going on, we were getting ready for the main day of the conference and helping our exhibitors get set up. This evening, we hosted a social as a way of getting our exhibitors a bit more face-time with local GIS users.

Tomorrow we'll have about 200 attendees at the Dover Sheraton Inn. We start with a main session featuring awards and a Keynote address. We'll have workshops and presentations, a big lunch, more workshops and presentations, time with our exhibitors, and a closing session featuring another keynote and door prizes.

It will be exhausting, but during a long, long day I'll have a chance to catch-up with lots of folks doing great work. I'll see some of them honored by their peers. We'll inspire each other. We'll laugh and have fun.

I love my job sometimes.

Watching the Words They Use

I did not watch the debate of Democratic candidates for president the other night. It really does seem too early. But I am interested and was pleased to discover a tag-cloud analysis of what the candidates had to say over at pollster.com.

A tag-cloud is a weighted list of words presented graphically to show frequency of use. I use two on this site (down in the left-hand sidebar), one of tags I've used to categorize my blog posts and one of the tags I use on del.icio.us.

In this case, the tag-cloud is made up of the top 50 words used by each of the candidates (less the common connector words like "and," or, and "the"). They are arranged alphabetically and presented in different sized fonts, depending on the frequency of the use of that word.


I note that our own Joe Biden's tag-cloud shows that many words got similar attention from the Senator. Other candidates showed a marked preference for specific words. Senator Clinton, for example, was clearly focused on the word "president."

Commenters on the pollster.com site have pointed out, correctly, that our focus should be more on the ideas that the candidates espouse than on the words they use to present them. But I am interested in words and language and I find this sort of analysis interesting.

A commenter also pointed, helpfully, to a tag-cloud of Attorney General Gonzales' recent Senate testimony.

And I was interested to find a link from pollster.com to a tool for making this sort of word-visualization: TagCrowd. Perhaps I should use this analyze my own writing from time to time.

"Light Green." Makes a Certain Amount of Sense

John Mayer has an interesting thought on global warming:

It seems to me that when it comes to this issue, we've been given only two sides to pick from: side one says the future of global warming does not present a doomsday scenario, almost chuckling the matter aside. Side two says it is a dire issue (which it is), and then goes on to inundate side one with so many separate nakedly-scientific points that they make naivete' seem cozy by comparison.

Mayer presents another approach. He calls it "Light Green."

Rather than try to change the world all at once -- or waiting for the world to change -- he argues that we should just take small steps, as individuals.

Pick one thing to change this year, and keep the rest of your life the same. After all, the only message the charts with escalating red lines are meant to send is that the red lines have to stop escalating, not that they have to drop to the bottom of the graph by next Tuesday.

Good point. Why not take small, positive, realistic steps?

I am reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Mayer promises to report back on his efforts in this regard over the next few months. I plan to keep an eye on his blog to see where this leads.

Some Things Never Change

Please forgive me for returning one more time to the Lewis Wickes Hine collection of early 20th-century photography, as posted on the photo-blog Shorpy.

I found this picture of girl factory workers in Cleveland in 1910 utterly charming; these could very easily be fourth-grade students at any school in Delaware today.

Little girls will always be little girls.

Please, Tell Me That This is a Joke

A letter to the editor published earlier this month in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette takes a closer look at the concept of global "warming" (though I prefer "climate change"). After an introduction noting that March of this year was a particularly warm one, writer Connie Meskimen continues:

This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they? Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat.

Oh dear. He's onto us.

There's a lively debate on-line about whether this is a genuine letter or a deeply closeted, Onion-like parody. A commenter from Arkansas taking part in the discussion on this letter on MetaFilter, where I picked it up, votes with the "this is satire" crowd, noting:

...this particular newspaper swings pretty far to the right and regularly publishes letters that demonstrate weapons grade ignorance. Something like this letter does not look out of place to the regular readers of the Demizette.

I'm not sure. But I do plan to adopt the phrase "weapons-grade ignorance."

Second Golf Game of 2007

I was back on the golf course at The Rookery this afternoon. Andy and I were paired by the starter with a husband and wife golfing twosome. They were very nice.

We started at a bit past three. The course was crowded and things were moving slowly. We didn't finish until about 7:30. It was a beautiful afternoon; warm, not a lot of wind, plenty of sunshine.

My game is still not great. I had a few good shots, but my putting is still a mess and I had several "blow-up" holes. I shot 116. Again.

But I had fun.