08-08-2008

by Ilse Genovese

The world’s ultimate sporting competition, the 29th Summer Olympic Games, opened in Beijing on August 8th with a smoothly choreographed extravaganza of fireworks and pageantry performed before a worldwide television audience of 4 billion. More than 10,500 of the best international athletes competed for the 302 gold medals up for grabs in 28 sports disciplines. Before the closing ceremony brought down the curtains on the 2008 Olympic Games on August 24, the U.S. team earned 36 gold medals—including eight by Michael Phelps, a Baltimore, Maryland, born and raised swimming prodigy—and 38 silver and 36 bronze medals. By all accounts, U.S. sports did extremely well at this year’s Summer Olympics; the success brought to mind another U.S. triumph almost a century ago—the gold medals earned in the decathlon and pentathlon by Jim Thrope at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. Thorpe’s stunning performance in running but also in football at the Carlile Indian School threw the spotlight on American Indian life. Like millions of viewers I was able to appreciate the greatest of all sports pageantries, the opening ceremony, thanks to satellites. Geospatial technology, and the mapped layers of information that this technology gets into the public’s hands, have for some years now been stirring the spirit of competitiveness as well—some might say of Olympian proportions. Ann Deakin, the author of our feature story on pages 14-18 brings the strength of both disciplines to the fore, arguing that “no one understands measurements, datums, and coordinate systems and can maintain the integrity of the coordinate system better than the professional surveyor. Similarly, the power of the GIS database and visualizing information is the unmistakable strength of the GIS professional.” We should be asking ourselves, “What can we learn from each other? not, “How can we marginalize the other side’s input ?”
The other feature in this issue delves into an issue currently eliciting considerable interest from scientists and users alike—what needs to happen in the realm of visualization to enable collaborative exploration of information in virtual environments. Christian Stock, a GIS scientist based at the University of Melbourne, Austria, describes, on pages 12-14, the ingredients of an effective collaboration.
With the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season in full swing, it’s only appropriate that we look in this issue of the ACSM Bulletin at climate and weather issues. To plan for the likely impacts of a hurricane and then to effectively execute an emergency response plan that protects life and property, Applied Science Association, Inc., released an advanced computer modeling and mapping technology which we describe on page 29.
Some scientists contend that the rising ocean temperatures have been fueling stronger than usual hurricanes in the Atlantic. This is a debate we’re all familiar with. It takes us to global warming, whether we should worry about it, and what, if anything, we should do about it. Bjorn Lomborg, the author of the commentary, “Chill out” on pages 30-32 says: “...embracing the best response to global warming is difficult in the midst of bitter fighting that shuts out sensible dialogue. So, first, we really need to cool our debate.”
“Space in history” is for history buffs what “history in space” is to surveyors and mappers. We have in this issue an account that will take you to such a space in Georgia where efforts are currently underway to link Civil War sites through new historical trails (pp. 26-28).
The August issue of the ACSM Bulletin is traditionally the issue in which we bring you biographical sketches of people who have stepped forward to serve their member organizations as board members and in other positions of leadership. And just to remind ourselves that we are Americans first, we have a retrospective on July 4th, America’s birthday, on p. 9.
We also have a number of newsy items—a report from the Government Affairs Committee on FEMA’s partial county-wide mapping procedures, a description of Carlson’s Survey 2009 Embedded AutoCad® software, a report on NGI (Next Generation Identification) computer database, and much more So, whether it’s factual information or viewpoints you want from your professional magazine, the August issue of the ACSM Bulletin has it. Read on.