New Progress

I'm feeling very confident with my newly found focus.

Today I contacted Bernadette Chasteen, a GIS expert at RTI International, and asked some general questions about GIS and disaster relief as well as submitted a list of interview questions for her review. I should have the interview completed before the weekend. But here's some very helpful information that I already received from her:

She forwarded me an email from ArcWatch, a monthly newsleter for GIS professionals that she subscribes to. In the email were links to various recent GIS applications, including the recent wild fires in CA. Here's a link to information on that: http://www.esri.com/news/arcwatch/1107/firestorm.html. The technology involved in efforts to track and display elements of dozens of wildfires burning simultaneously is amazing. GIS professionals and technology were used at every command post on the ground and in various FEMA command centers to provide visual data on the current state and size of the fires themselves, the geographic location of each fire, and potential spread based on wind and other weather conditions. They even modeled the potential spread of smoke resulting from the fires. GIS was also used to show coordinates of different personnel working to fight the fires and to aid in coordination of the efforts (They showed closed roads v. those open for evacuations, locations of firefighting teams and equipment in relation to strategic locations around the fires. "...Agency personnel took advantage of the analysis and visualization capabilities to help federal, state, and local agencies collaborate, prioritize, and best utilize manpower and resources as well as monitor events on the ground in near real time." Satellite heat signature data was incorporated into the maps to show the hottest areas of the fires in real time (this could also probably aid efforts to track down the origination point of the fire). “Real-time weather (wind) was incorporated to provide an indication of what direction and at what speed the fire would travel. This information, when coupled with GIS layers that located homes and other developments in harm's way, provided fire officials with better information to make tactical and strategic decisions concerning public safety, resource allocation, evacuation needs, and additional equipment needed.” GIS also aided in identifying critical facilities and infrastructure on which to focus protection efforts, property and community damage assessments, selecting locations for relief centers, planning and carrying out evacuations, and developing recovery plans. “Specialists used GIS to analyze vegetation, slope, and other landscape features to help understand and potentially predict fire behavior in the event weather conditions worsened.” Wow! Imagine how disorganized efforts to fight these fires and protect people and property would have been without this technology!

Mrs. Chasteen also pointed me to a website for an organization which she is involved in that provides volunteer GIS services in disaster situations ( http://giscorps.org/). She elaborated on recent work with the Red Cross to place displaced New Orleans residents into homes immediately following the flooding caused by Katrina. Her efforts were to GeoCode addresses of people in our area who had volunteered to shelter Katrina victims. The addresses were added to a database that housed geographic information of “safe houses” around the country so that the Red Cross could find shelter for the families.

So, I’m getting some interesting stuff…. More later.

New (old) Topic and New Direction

I think I've finally arrived at a direction for my project. I'm planning on exploring the application of GIS in emergency planning. I'll research various situations in the past in which GIS has proven useful and explore some ways that it may be applied in the future. In order to narrow it down some for the actual paper, I will probably pick one area like evacuation planning or something like that and go in depth about how GIS would be applied.

Here are some questions I will be exploring:
What is GIS?
How are maps created using GIS?
Where does the data come from?
What are some common applications of GIS?
How has GIS been used for emergency planning in the past (maybe a focus on natural disasters)?
Is GIS effective in planning/responding to emergencies like natural disasters?
What does the future of GIs look like in respect to emergency planning and response?

My original topic

So, all of the sudden after seeing some posters I'm feeling like I would be better served following through with my old topic, GIS and disease spread... how GIS can aid in minimizing serious disease outbreaks. Or would it even be too broad for my topic to be What is GIS and what are some common applications in the world today? I could see an interesting project from that.

I'm thinking this because of the posters that I viewed and thought were really good. I think the most important thing was focus, which I don't have in my current research. I'm interested in my topic and I'm finding the research interesting, but there's just so much of it from so many different angles that I'm having a difficult time finding a point to focus on and run with. The GOS topic is a little less interesting to me, but I don't have the focus issue. I really had a hard time following a couple of posters because I felt they lacked focus and I don't want people to feel that way about mine.

So, some of my questions would look like this:
What is GIS?
How is GIS commonly used in the world?
What additional problems may be addressed with GIS in the future?
What tools does a GIS specialist use?
Where does the data come from?

If I go the disease route: How can GIS be used to contain disease spread?

What do you think? Am I too late or is this doable?

Working on a Thesis Statement/Question

How about this: Does television viewing by young children affect learning and scholastic performance?

I'm interested in looking at this from different perspectives: How news media presents the issue, How experienced teachers view the question, and then finally what resent research shows.

What do you think? Can you think of any other perspectives I could use? I'm sure I can find a very very seasoned teacher who may be able to recall a time before TV, or at least before it was in every household in the country. Could that work as my professional interview?

Thanks,
Jesse

New Direction in Research

While working on my annotated bibliographies I thought of a good angle on my topic. Initially I wanted to stay away from content, but now I'm thinking that there's more to content than I initially thought. First I was most interested in the idea that the actual act of TV watching is detrimental to early childhood development, but the only support I could find for this position was not backed up by research. A lot of people feel this way but as far as I can tell it hasn't been proven.

So, then I thought about looking into a specific developmental theory (Piaget's on stages of intellectual development) and applying it to television. While I still may be able to do something with this, I'm finding it difficult to find relevant sources without sifting through tons of stuff.

Recently my research led me to differences in perception by age, gender, class, etc... and how that relates to differences in understanding of material presented through TV. One of the more interesting facts I found is that information presented very quickly in short snippets is much more entertaining than information presented coherently and at a slower rate. On the other hand, slow coherent presentations of information lead to much higher rates of absorption and retention of material than the faster, more entertaining version. It occurs to me that this leads to a conflict of interests for providers of television content; Is their goal to entertain or to educate? The content and presentation of the program should be very different based on the goal here. My instinct tells me that no matter how interested programming companies are in educating our youth, they are not interested enough to potentially lose money in the process. But in order to focus on education the shows would need to be made less interesting, less appealing to the audience. I think that the absence today of shows like Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and the prevalence of faster paced shows like Sesame Street or ... whatever else kids are watching these days (Cayden doesn't watch TV... so I don't know :-) backs up my instinctual feeling that education is low on the list of priorities for programmers of children's video material. If that's the case than content is a huge factor. If the content is universally contradictory to what is best for children at any given developmental stage then regardless of the content, it is bad for the child... right? Then maybe I can make an argument that the act of television watching is inherently bad for the child.

Thanks for your comment on my last post. Are you doing your dissertation on educating through video games? This idea would apply to that in the same way... in order to fully allow for optimal learning, the material would need to be presenting slowly and coherently. But that would make for a boring game to play! So if it's not optimal for learning than are children wasting time playing when they could be learning it more productively somewhere else?

Since I got into this topic late, I'm a feeling a little behind in developing a concrete topic and sticking with it, but at least I'm moving forward. The annotated biblio assignment is helping. So, what do you think about my progress and do you think this is a good tree to climb?