Earlier this month, Geolexa was on the scene at the Esri Canada 2012 User Conference in Victoria to learn about the latest (ArcGIS 10.1) and greatest developments from this industry leader; happily, the two-day event proved to be both educational and entertaining (check out a few snaps here on the official Facebook page).

What did we learn? A few highlights:

(1) ArcGIS Online is awesome. 

(“…ArcGIS Online has recently been updated with the following important new features and enhancements. This is a major release, with a focus on capabilities that enable ArcGIS Online to be used as a cloud-based, collaborative content management system for maps, apps, data, and other geospatial information in your organization…”)

(2) The Esri Canada Community Maps Program: sharing is caring.

(“...a cost-effective and efficient framework for organizations to share their geographic information with the online public…” )

(3) CityEngine. Do you want to generate a 3D city really, really fast in a game-like environment? CityEngine allows you to do just that. It looks like an absolute dream; however, its strength at this point in time seems to lie in cool visualization tricks rather than actual analysis capabilities – we can’t WAIT to see where CityEngine goes from here!

(“…The next planned release of CityEngine will allow ArcGIS users in urban planning, urban design, defense, simulation, and entertainment to use their existing GIS data to create high-quality 3D content…”)

CityEngine demo time! (*don’t panic, your speakers are not broken: the clip is silent)

Miss out on the UC action? Check out the 2012 Conference Proceedings.

Thanks to Esri Canada for putting on such a great event, and a special thanks to the presenters for delivering their best. See you next year!

Our Victoria group recently met up to combine creative powers and hash out some fab entries for Spacing Magazine’s Creative Mapping Contest. Hoorah! Here’s what we came up with:

(1) Fragmented Orientations: Life Among the Grids in Victoria, BC

Fragmented Orientations is a comment on the diverse directionality of greater Victoria’s component street grids. 

(2) Layers

Layers is a personal recognition of the physical and cultural aspects of Cadboro Bay (Victoria), the neighbourhood I grew up in. In this map, each of the area’s individual features is isolated to highlight its unique characteristics, while simultaneously stressing interconnectivity. -Maximilian von Aderkas, Geolexa

Solid advice from GIS Lounge:

“The starting point in building a successful career in GIS is a solid education. This involves taking classes in cartography, GIS, spatial analysis, database management, web technologies, and programming…”

In the past decade, environmental discourse in America has been wholly dominated by climate change. Americans are natural born world police – we cannot help looking for another West, another frontier. At the same time environmental theorists have struggled to define sociology or economics in their work, preferring to make natural resources the unit of analysis. Yet it is agreed that nature is invaluable, without a good justification.

As we have advanced towards urban life, we Americans have craved rural life and frontier life in our own – organic food and flannel shirts, however trendy, are call-backs to that world. But we are not the first urbanites to idealize and romanticize the outdoors. Manifest destiny was colored by a portrait of a grand landscape. For who and what has always been split between the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian vision of economic society. The latter camp would see the forest for sawing trees to make houses, clearing land for agriculture and pasture, setting up new postal bureaus; the former would see the same, only much greener and less pavement.

Today in the New York times an op-ed piece pointed out neither Romney nor Santorum have even the slightest idea of either notion, completely lacking a sense of land in American history. In Romney’s case, having grown up in Michigan, the irony of singing ‘America the Beautiful’ at every chance is only too ironic. And Santorum follows the standard of his conservative base by promising to sell off all public land to the private sector, in a race to out-do anyone else’s plan for expansion.

Does this heinous proposal mirror the will of the American people? It is unclear. We are mostly an urban and suburban population now, and our concept of forests, open-space, and frontier are mostly dominated by forgotten ideals on one side, and polemical economic debates about labor and industry on the other. These have very little to do with the economic, developmental, or social reality of rural-urban geography. It is rarely in a company’s interest to build far away from cities and in uncleared land unless it is an extractive or polluting industry with no barriers to land use. Santorum’s ugly, thoughtless plan would certainly decimate the remaining pristine land we have left.

In the past several years, civil society in America has reawakened. There has been a massive shift in possibilities for renewal since the last major dip in our economy in the 1980s. While our global outlook is commendable, we must return to protecting our own backyard. It is folly to think that our greatest virtues are in protecting people elsewhere in the world without first taking stock of our own. As Egan points out in the article,

Gifford Pinchot, was the founder of the modern Forest Service. Pinchot was a rich man who spent his life advocating for places where “the little man,” in his parlance, would be king.

From a point of view where society’s merit is measured by how it treats its poor and vulnerable, protecting the environment is inherently not a matter of reducing pollution and protecting species in every which way possible, but negotiating development’s windy road to preserve what is possible to preserve for future generations of people, so that people have space to return to and seek out in times of need, not simply to fuel the middle class dream of owning land.

Today, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, President Obama cautiously declared, “we have overcome slavery and civil war, bread lines and fascism, recessions and riots, communism, and yes, we will survive terrorism.” Yet the psychological scars left from that day continue to split the country. Here I argue that beyond political malfeasance, understanding the realities of war can help us transcend this challenge.

Hinduism offers the oldest definition of just versus unjust war, one fought in the open, the other in secrete. The road to Iraq was paved with far more duplicity, conspiracy, and manipulation than Afghanistan. This is further emphasized by the military differences between the two wars: in Iraq, the major oversight of ignoring social relations in the country may have cost America a swift victory. Afghanistan, by comparison, was never an easy target because of its geography.

Yet the tangled intrigue of the Iraq invasion makes this kind of comparison difficult to the average person. For one thing it is too easy to focus attention on fantastic aspects – like WMDs – and ignore a simple interpretation.

George Tenet, then director of the CIA, has been criticized heavily for his famous remark to President Bush that the case for the existence of WMDs in Iraq was a “grandslam”. From the beginning the CIA and Pentagon fully denied the existence of any connections between Saddam Hussien and Al Qaeda, which was the original motive offered for invading Iraq. Rumsfeld and Cheney ignored this and ordered their own private investigation; they cherry picked allegations from tortured prisoners; at the time of invasion, 70 percent of Americans believed there in fact was a connection. Only in this climate of fear could the American public have been led into a fallacious war.

Fog of war, fear and uncertainty have immense effects on our well being and cohesion. Consider the opportunity costs of Iraq – what if that money and attention were spent domestically, would we have slipped into the current depression and unprecedented political bickering in Congress we now have? The failure to bring public figures to justice, despite such incredible evidence of their malfeasance, has likely reduced our sense of connection and trust in ourselves. Significantly, many schools have recanted from teaching civics course since 9/11. It is now essential to rediscover the virtuous image of America lost in past years. Some might shy away from discussing our role in war both just and unjust. But as the invasion of Mexico led Henry Thoreau to say, in 1940, “I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, neat at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”