COVID-19 Explorers

 These Explorer Tools are all ArcGIS Online dashboards:

• Europe
• USA
• Global

IPCC Communication Fail

 This is a great example of communication fail in the world of climate change:

• Take a look at the IPCC AR5 WG1 SPM with its 10 figures - can you figure-out what is going on?
• Try ranking them in terms of their visual complexity and ease of comprehension.
• Then compare your thoughts with this recent paper: Communication of IPCC visuals: IPCC authors’ views and assessments of visual complexity (Harold et al. 2020, Climatic Change).

This is a striking demonstration of a real problem: how can we (the scientific experts) anyone to care about what we are saying if we are giving them charts like that?

Jeopardy

https://jeopardylabs.com/ is awesome - a great way to create a simple and quick way to test facts and specific knowledge.

Climate Insights 2020

Climate Insights 2020 is (yet another) survey of the usual: what Americans think about climate change. The report is available as a PDF, but they also offer a cool interactive Data Tool to view the responses to specific questions. It would be great to be able to a) grab the charts as JPGs and b) grab the underlying data.

Texas A&M GeoServices

 I forgot about the Texas A&M GeoServices, but they offer free and excellent geocoding / reverse geocoding services - a great alternative to Esri with their cumbersome credit-charging system.

Hurricanes

 Here are two great geo apps by Esri related to hurricane tracks:

• Hurricane Aware
• Hurricane and Cyclone App

Poop!

 Poop is always a good topic...more specifically: Why Sewers Around the World Keep Overflowing

Glacier Collapse in Switzerland

 I'm not sure I would call this a glacier collapse, but the video is cool:

How to prepare your data for analysis and charting in Excel & Google Sheets

Good stuff: How to prepare your data for analysis and charting in Excel & Google Sheets. Too often I find that students have no sense of basic data formatting in a table and this is a nice and concise tutorial. And that's our problem: our students tend to be incapable of the basics and therefore we never get to the 'advanced' = the dumbing-down on higher education. Thanks K-12!

Add this: How to split and extract text from data columns in Excel & Google Sheets

Smart Cities & ArcGIS Urban

This sounds like a great course to add to any GIS curriculum: Geodesign for Smart Cities. This class covers all the current buzz-words and hot topics.

URCA

Nice post and figure by Laura Guertin on her GeoEd Trek blog: Revisiting the continua of undergraduate research. I remember reading the Beckman and Hensel (2009) paper several years ago when I was more engaged in URCA and I created this figure back then:

The Landsat Explorer Web Mapping Application

The Landsat Explorer Web Mapping Application is not new, but a great tool to explore and analyze satellite data. This would work well with students. First they can try some of these tools 'on-the-fly' and then download the actual data for processing in a specialized software package. Or, in ArcGIS Pro.

Here's a quick summary of the app by Joe Kerski.

DIY Satellite Ground Station

 This looks like a fun project: DIY Satellite Ground Station

Critical Digital Pedagogy

This book looks great: Critical Digital Pedagogy. Yep, online teaching and learning is NOT just Blackboard, Zoom, etc.

Esri BAO, Demographics, and COVID-19

 Esri BAO is a pretty neat tool: simply define a site and then access all kinds of demographic information formatted either as reports or as infographics. You can design your own, or just use the existing templates (e.g. Coronavirus Impact Planning).

Here's the workflow: Creating a Coronavirus Impact Planning Infographic in the ArcGIS Business Analyst Mobile App

USGS Topographic Maps

Still one of the best sources for that: https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/ I especially like the various formats (high-res JPG, GeoTIFF, PDF, and KMZ).

Energy by State

Great chart from the Washington Post: How each state generated electricity in 2019. Show the total consumption as width (see VT vs TX) and then the split renewable vs fossil fuel. It would be interesting to add the coal vs natural split similar to the nuclear vs rest of clean.

Republicans hate science!

Yes, this is a cherry-picked compilation, but the statements at 1:06 and 1:12 really illustrate the fundamental disrespect of science by these people. That being said: this is a general pattern all across every political flavor all across the USA - we have just seen similar attitudes from our administration at Westfield State University.