The USGS National Geospatial Program is again updating the US Interagency Elevation Inventory. They would like to know what elevation data you have and ask to update their site so it is discoverable by others. Click here for more info.
Measure and Map Access to Grocery Stores
SCAG’s Regional Data Platform
Professor Steve Goldsmith of Urban Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School interviews Rex Richardson, the president of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), and Darin Chidsey, SCAG’s chief operating officer. One of Richardson and Chidsey’s biggest projects is the creation of a Regional Data Platform that will serve as a data sharing and visualization platform for all of SCAG’s member cities.
Open Access to Key Federal Geospatial Data
Working with federal agencies, ESRI is opening up access in ArcGIS Online to dozens of high-priority, high-demand national data layers, often referred to as A-16 data. These include cartographic boundary files and demographic data from the US Census Bureau; National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA); and the National Inventory of Dams (NID) database, managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Click below to read more about it!
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What Should City Managers Know About GIS?
I’ll be doing a GIS (and probably census) presentation to a group of city managers in a few weeks. What do you wish city managers knew about GIS? What is on the horizon they should be aware of? I’ve done many of these presentations over the years and would really like to hear others’ ideas. Don’t worry, I won’t tell them who said what! You can email me at cc.waite@lomitacity.com. I’d be happy to share the list.
Barry
Rio Hondo College GIS
Rio Hondo College GIS Courses are scheduled for both online and in the field this fall starting August 23rd. GIS labs on campus are available for use. Fall courses include Introduction to GIS, Intermediate GIS, (Surveying w/) Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Cartography, Crime Mapping and Geospatial Programming (Python). Furthermore, the campus GIS labs are currently available on campus. For more information visit https://gisteacher.wixsite.com/riohondo/fall2021
Imagery MOOC
ESRI has a new massive open online course (MOOC) on Imagery. If you’re interested in test-driving ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online, ESRI’s new cloud-based imagery product, or seeing how to bring drone-captured imagery into ArcGIS Pro for visualization and analysis, this no-cost course is a great opportunity. The course is from August 11 to September 22, 2021 and is free. Check it out and sign up!
/bin/rm -r -f *
Early on in my GIS career I worked for a data conversion company. Our clients were mostly local governments wanting to convert paper maps into digital data for their new GIS software installations (think Arc/Info 7 and ArcView 3). We would work on Sun SPARCstations running SunOS Unix and Arc/Info. We called the Sun workstations “pizzabox” machines because of their shape.
One day while I had a bunch of windows open and working too fast, I decided I was done with my temp data in a directory and decided to delete everything, so at the unix prompt I issued the command “rm -r -f *”, which if you did not know means delete everything without asking with force! So you know when you hit that enter key and then realize you just deleted stuff you should have not deleted? Yes, I happened to be in the window that was in the unix library directory (/lib) and just hosed the unix operating system! Why did I have admin rights again?
Needless to say, our system admin had to spend some precious time bringing my workstation back to life. I told him at least I still had my temp data to delete again! He did not appreciate that one.
So if you cringed when I mentioned that command, check out this story about how the movie Toy Story 2 was almost killed in the same way!
![](https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/c_fill,g_auto,h_1248,w_2220/f_auto,q_auto,w_1100/v1555436258/shape/mentalfloss/toy_story_2_0.jpg)
ArcGIS Pro Data Engineering
Giant Rotating Earth of Drones
During the opening ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympics, there was a drone display, over 1800 drones that formed a rotating Earth. Very impressive.