The Cartography of generative AI

This is pretty cool: Cartography of generative AI

Skiing & GHG Emissions

The glaciers are melting. Are ski resorts digging their own graves? is focused on Europe, but the same story is likely playing out across the USA. Of course, nobody who can afford to go skiing would have a train/bus from London to Annecy or Boston to North Conway - that's just going to happen.

Drowning Cities in 3D

Via Maps Mania: Sea Level Rise 3D Map is cool, but takes forever to load on a normal PC with a normal Internet connection.

Sora: When Tik Tok Meets AI

From the App Store: Turn your ideas into videos and drop yourself into the action. Sora is a new kind of creative app that turns text prompts and images into hyperreal videos with sound using the latest advancements from OpenAI. A single sentence can unfold into a cinematic scene, an anime short, or remix of a friend's video. If you can write it, you can see it, remix it, and share it. Turn your words into worlds with Sora.

Sounds great? Sounds horrifying? Try Sora 2 here: https://openai.com/index/sora-2/

Is this the end of 'creativity' on Tik Tok? Well, maybe? But: could you use something like that for teaching & learning: maybe as a new way to 'write' as opposed to a traditional paper or slidedeck presentation?

AI vs Art? AI & Art?

Great take from the The Oatmeal: A cartoonist's review of AI art.

Reimaging The University

No lectures, exams, essays: inside a twenty-first-century university is a terrible article about NMITE, a super-elite engineering college in the UK. Nothing of what they are doing is innovative at all - they can pull it of because they have 110 students and 50 staff and one degree: engineering. Good for them & their private funding, but none of this is scalable to public higher education. This article would have benefited from more context & nucance: as-is it reads like a NMITE press release or advert.

The Backsliders

This looks like a timely book: The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies.

'Backsliding' refers to a strategy to erode democracy gradually by using some of its existing systems and structures. Complementary to that is 'trash-talking democracy' where a leader erodes the trust in democratic institutions by claiming over & over that they are corrupt & incompetent.

Google Alpha Earth

Google Alpha Earth is a new geospatial AI model that acts as a virtual satellite: it assimilates all kinds of geospatial data & does the processing for you. Then, you just ask & get ready-to-use AI-generated 'maps' of whatever you want. No more working with dozens of raw datasets!

Example: glacier mapping. In thed old days you would have spent considerable time finding useful cloud-free images, do some kind of processing, and then run some kind of index or band-ratio calculations. Now you can just ask: give me the size of the Humboldt Glacier over the last 10 years.

For now the focus seems to be on physical data collected by sensors, but I would assume that human data from will be included in the future.

More here: AlphaEarth Foundations helps map our planet in unprecedented detail

The End of GIS: AI!

The AI Revolution is Coming for GIS: What You Need to Know About Microsoft’s Latest Warning is a pretty dire read...but you probably should add 5-10 years to this timeline. Here are a few take-home messages for me:

• The impact will be most-significant on the entry-level jobs.
• But, field work and basic project management will still be around for a while.
• Coding is still a key skill, but it will be all about AI-assisted coding in the very near future. But, you will need to have a good understanding of coding and how AI 'thinks' in-order to effectively prompt the AI.
• Take an online class in maschine learning for geospatial applications.
• Combine GIS expertise with complementary skills such as urban planning, environmental science, and more.

PaintMyMap

From the website: PaintMyMap.com is an online custom map maker that lets you create, style, and export beautiful maps in minutes. Choose a world, continent, or country map—or upload your own data (GeoJSON, TopoJSON, Shapefiles, KML, CSV)—then paint regions, add labels and a legend, and export a high‑quality image or PDF.

Might be useful?