GIS and Remote Sensing Tools, Tips and more ..

For my recent project, I have to display county wise time series data of disease pattern in web map for the conterminous United States for 20 years. In addition, I have to use Google maps as base layer and should overlay images on the top of it.  The concept sounds easy, and it was also similar with choropleth or thematic mapping . However, it should be in the Web 2.0. I tried to figure out what are the possible ways to achieve this, I tried and few of them. Here I am going to share the pros and cons of these methods in a real quick and dirty style. Choropleth with GFT 1) Google Fusion Tables Pros: Easy, No understanding of computer programming needed. Upload small or large data sets from spreadsheets or CSV files. Visualize your data on maps, timelines and charts. Pick who can access your data; hide parts of your data if needed. Merge data from multiple tables. Cons: Not much flexible and you can’t tweaks easily according to your needs.  Choropleth with Car...

In the early Friday morning of mid May, I got an email from one of my team member about raster misalignment problem in ArcGIS10. I also tried to overlay couples of previously working Tiff and Grid raster files in ArcMap9.3 and ArcMap10 . The ArcMap9.3 overlay raster files perfectly aligned as we all desired, but ArcMap10 did not. Unaligned Aligned From the ESRI website, I got to know that the issue of misalignment of Tiff in ArcMap10 is a bug in ArcGIS 10. The ESRI team announced two solutions to solve Tiff shift into wrong geographic locations:

Getting to know ArcGIS Desktop is one of the book kept in my collections ever. I started GIS from this book in 2009. It is easy, simple, and step by step tutorials with lots of real time beginner's project. This book has very useful basics for using ArcGIS 10 , especially ArcMap 10 . It is primarily targeted for beginners with lots of hand on exercises, which are easy to follow with plenty of screen shots that made it easy to find the necessary buttons/menus/lists on my screen. However, the major drawback of this book is the ArcGIS software comes with book has 180 days license.   Most of the universities uses this book for GIS beginners. .In amazon.com this book is come up with special discount. Don't forget to catch the deal. I have lots of GIS books in my bookshelf,  I will write about them later. Hope this helps for you. Cheers !! Grab a coffee and enjoy your work..

Today, Nature published a good research about malaria prevention using Malaria against Malaria.  The research was successfully accomplished in  rats. Here is the abstract from www.medicalxpress.com   "  A team of researchers have found that pre-existing malaria prevents secondary infection by another Plasmodium strain, the parasite responsible for malaria, by restricting iron availability in the liver of the host. This discovery will be published this Sunday, May 15, in  Nature Medicine  and has important implications for the management and prevention of malaria, a condition which affects millions of individuals worldwide. " more

The above video about the uses of cell phone for mapping to help disaster victims world wide. This method was initially built for Haiti earthquake disaster, then used by Japan, and currently this technology is using in Alabama.  Today, there are hundreds of volunteers in more than 50 countries creating maps of crises around the world via their cell phones Watch the full episode . See more Need To Know.

Faculty listing, Department of Geography, SDSU As a quixotic geographer exploring and trying new things in everyday in life really matters to me.  However, I would not forget our great people who spent their lifes in geography and inspire me to be a good geographer. I got a chance to know about the history of old geographers and their geography practice then in "Geographic Evolution of Thought". I used to get boared in my history class, but I very much enjoyed the class geographic evolution of thought by Dr. George White at South Dakota Sate University .  To memorize all great people who contributed in the geography department so far, I made a visual list of them.

Today morning, I saw couples of fascinating pictures; highway in the Kali Gandaki gorge, Nepal. This 93km long highway connects the Himalayan district Mustang's capital Jomsom with Lo Mangthang, Mustang . Typically a carrier takes 9 hours to accomplish the journey in this dangerous road. Pictures are taken by Chandra S. Kari, the photo journalist of Nagariknews.com .

Here, I am going to share the styles found on internet to rotate Div. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in IE. Any ideas? style="-webkit-transform: rotate(90deg); -moz-transform: rotate(90deg); filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3);"

Think, how powerful in geospatial technology? Finding Bin Laden using GIS?..........Are you kidding me? .......Take a look on this article from G ood politics  share the UCLA students' research on finding Bin Laden's possible hideouts using geographical theories and  GIS software. The students were work under Prof. Thomas Gillespie and John Agnew, UCLA, were published their findings in MIT International Review (Pdf ).

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Quick and Dirty method to Combine MS Search Service, Indexing Service and SQL Server to provide a unified search engine for your ASP.NET website Recently I was developing a site for a company and as usual they needed me to write a search engine. They had the contents in .aspx pages, not a problem, but they also had forums whose contents were collated in a database table, in a column to be precise. They wanted me to display the results from these two sources through a common search engine. Since I had little time to write a search engine of my own, I put the power of MS Search Service, Indexing Service and SQL Server together to do the task for me. There is a lot of scope for enhancement but here is how you can implement a very basic yet powerful search engine of your own. STEP I: Create a Web Catalog in Indexing Service By default, the indexing service has two catalogs, one for the file system (System) and one for the default web site (Web). If Web catalog is not present, you can easil...

Here, I am trying to show how to project/re-project US shape file into AEA conic USGS projection using ArcMap. Follow the following steps: 1. Right click on Layer -> click on Coordinate System 2. Unfold Predefined -> Unfold GCS -> Unfold North America 3. Select North American Datum 1983 4. Click Apply and Click OK 5. Add Feature Data (Points/Lines/Polygons) 6. A warning may appears but ignore it. 7. Find Data Management Tools -> Select Project (feature) Tool 8. Input Dataset or Feature Class (Enter the name of layer needed to be projected.) 9. Input Coordinate System -> Click on Hand icon -> Click Select -> Unfold GCS -> Unfold North America -> Select North American Datum 1983 10. Click Add 11. Click Apply and Click OK 12. Output Dataset or Feature Class (Enter the location of output file and location name: *.shp) 13. Output Coordinate Systemè Click on Hand icon -> Click Select -> Unfold PCS -> Unfold Continental -> Se...

NOAA releases the "before" and "after" shots for the damage caused by last week's F5 tornado in McFarland Boulevard in Tuscaloosa. Those images are captured from 5,000 ft high using special remote sensing equipment.