If you are looking for a school with the best overall Graduate Geography Program for a spatial career, check out this posting on Geographical Perspectives.

The U.S. Geological Survey will host an educational event for the news media focused on earthquakes on Wednesday September 24, 2014. The goal of the event is to provide the press an opportunity to work with USGS staff to build knowledge about and confidence in the information delivery systems and people to create more timely and accurate reporting of earthquakes.

At this event, USGS scientists and public affairs staff will lead sessions in which journalists can refresh knowledge about basic principles about earthquakes, how to improve scientific accuracy when reporting on earthquakes, and about USGS resources to make your job easier. Find out about USGS public domain maps, images, and graphics that can be quickly and freely downloaded and reused following an earthquake.

Who: USGS geologists, geophysicists, and public affairs. See list below.

What: 30-minute plenary session with presentations on reporting on earthquakes and relevant USGS resources, followed by concurrent small group discussions with USGS researchers on various aspects of earthquake science. Subjects will include:

• Earthquake Early Warning vs. Earthquake Prediction, by Doug Given, Geophysicist
• Natural vs. Induced Seismicity, by Justin Rubinstein, Geophysicist
• Emerging New Technology: GPS, InSAR, LiDAR, by Ben Brooks, Geologist
• Shaking Intensity versus Earthquake Magnitude, by Brad Aagaard, Geophysicist
• Liquefaction, Landslides, & Fault Rupture, by Tom Holzer, Engineering Geologist
• USGS Real-time Online Earthquake Products, by David Wald, Geophysicist
• Is the Number of Large Earthquakes Increasing? by Jeanne Hardebeck, Geophysicist
• Earthquake Resources on the Web, by Lisa Wald, Geophysicist/Web Content Manager, Webmaster
• Foreshocks, Main Shocks, and Aftershocks, by Andrea Llenos, Geophysicist and Ruth Harris, Geophysicist
• Who/how/when and where to go for an interview concerning an earthquake, by Leslie Gordon, Public Affairs Specialist and Susan Garcia, Outreach Coordinator

When: Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. PDT

Registration: Please register online to participate in the workshop.

Where: U.S. Geological Survey, Main Auditorium, Bldg. 3, 2nd floor, 345 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, Calif.

Online: The first 30 minutes of the event will be live video-streamed over the web, and archived online for later viewing.

The Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group (HMGSG) invites current undergraduate and graduate students to submit their work to the specialty group’s annual Peter Gould Student Paper Competition. The competition is meant to promote written scholarship by students across the field. Single-authored papers from any medical, health, disability and/or health systems related topic are encouraged.

The deadline for submitting an extended abstract is November 2, 2014.

More information here.

Though the prize is only $100, having your name associated with Peter Gould’s would be a very good thing for an up-and-coming student’s career!

And while you are at it, join the AAG!

If you are a faculty or staff member in a higher education institution that teaches GIS, you might want to take a look the new wiki titled “ArcGIS Online Coaching Points for Higher Education“.  ESRI states:

ArcGIS Online is an evolving cloud-based GIS software as a service. It is updated several times a year. Educators and Esri staff need a dynamic medium to share problems and advice. This wiki supports the ArcGIS Online education community by providing such a medium.

We encourage education users to post the challenges they face as scenarios in the relevant sections of this wiki. Experienced ArcGIS Online users and Esri staff will respond with advice (i.e., “coaching points”) that help users overcome challenges. To add your scenarios and coaching points to the wiki, simply create an account to gain editing privileges. The team that hosts wiki.gis.com provides plenty of online help.

Probably something to check out before you go to the 2014 Education GIS Conference.

SoCal URISA hosts an Open Source Workshop With Jeff Johnson
Palomar College: 1140 W Mission Rd, San Marcos, CA 92069
Date: 28 Jun 2014 8:00 AM PDT

You have probably heard about open source geospatial tools. Here is the chance to experience them under the direction of experts. Bring your laptop and dive into some of the most powerful, widely used and innovative tools in this area.

Open-Source developer, Jeff Johnson, will lead us into a high level look at the ecosystem of Open Source geospatial tools from QGIS on the desktop to GeoServer and PostGIS on the server and the web application frameworks used to deliver applications using these services on the web. We will then dive deeper into raster and vector spatial analysis on the desktop with QGIS and look at the various freely available QGIS extensions and plugins that GIS practitioners can use in their own projects and workflows. The course material will be drawn from the following 2 workshops. http://workshops.boundlessgeo.com/suiteintro/ and http://docs.qgis.org/2.2/en/docs/training_manual/ and users are encouraged to install the tools ahead of time by downloading from http://boundlessgeo.com/solutions/opengeo-suite/download/ and http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html

We will host a light continental style breakfast along with coffee and a sandwich lunch.

Location: Palomar College, San Marcos in the Natural Science Bldg.  NS-127 (GIS Lab)

Directions and parking pass will be emailed out to registrants closer to the date.

Preliminary Schedule:

7:30 am – Registration opens, grab a light breakfast too.
11:30 am – Lunch
5:00 pm – Conclude Workshop

The workshop is Free for SoCal URISA members, otherwise purchase or renew your membership.

$30  Annual Fee
$10 Student Annual Fee

Please don’t forget to save you receipt from this event and use it towards your GISP credit.

Speaker Bio:

Jeffrey is a geospatial software engineer with 15+ years of experience building and delivering applications for the web. Jeff is a developer with a broad range of skills who can work at any level, from writing code and fixing bugs to managing complex projects and making architectural decisions while coordinating technical policy with corporate strategy. He spent the past 3.5 years working for Boundless (formerly OpenGeo) on GeoNode, GeoGit and various related open source projects and has given presentations and workshops on these technologies around the country and the world. Jeff is also deeply involved with the City of San Diego’s Open Data and Civic Technology initiatives. He is a graduate of Humboldt State University where he studied Geography, Cartography, Geology and Geospatial Technology.

Jeff can be reached at ortelius@gmail.com with questions about this workshop or for advice and consulting on projects leveraging open source geospatial tools.

More information and online registration: SoCal URISA hosts an Open Source Workshop With Jeff Johnson

Best regards, Southern California Chapter of URISA

Applications for the next round of AAG Cartography Specialty Group Master’s Thesis Research Grants are due by June 15, 2014.

Masters students enrolled full time are invited to apply for the CSG Master’s Thesis Research Grants. These grants are intended to promote scholarly research in cartography by students enrolled in Geography or a related degree program. Grants are available up to a maximum of $500 and may be used for items necessary and relevant to research, such as travel, materials, equipment, and human subject fees.

Deadlines for application are March 15, June 15, and November 1 of each year. Applications and inquiries should be directed to the CSG Non-Academic Director, Sarah Bell, at sbell@esri.com.

For more information and the application form, please visit http://www.csun.edu/~hfgeg003/csg/master.html. You can also access that page from the Awards and Competitions section of the main CSG Web site, http://www.csun.edu/~hfgeg003/csg.

Please share this announcement with your students or other organizations that may have potential applicants.  Good luck in the competition!