Points of Interest: Feb 7, 2005

New Mapping Policy Forming for India. Map India - 2005 kicked of this week. The Minister of State for Science and Technology and Ocean Development, Shri Kapil Sibal told the conference attendees that a New Mapping Policy is in the final stage of preparation. The new Mapping Policy "would lead to map data being available and accessible to all areas of the country including the Jammu and Kashmir and the North East besides the coastal zones." This, should it happen, will be huge for the country in terms of both using geodata and the growth of the economy.

MotionBased Update. About two weeks after announcing a deal with Garmin relating to its new ForeRunner 301 GPS for runners, bikers and the like, MotionBased has revamped its services. Among the goodies: enhanced reporting functionality, heart rate support through the Garmin Forerunner 301, lap support for the Garmin Forerunner series, International coverage for Canada and Mexico (Europe is coming soon). MotionBased Lite is free, but only supports limited functionality for 10 activities. $7.95/month (and up) subscriptions have access to everything. At least one participant in a discussion group for ForeRunners thought that was a bit high and felt desktop mapping software would do the job. (DeLorme, you listening?)

New List. Why? The COGNET Group, based in Livonia Michigan offers its own list of links to federal and state land base resources. I wonder how many such lists exist across the Web? It would nice if there was a single source that was updated regularly instead of so many that are more often than not, created and forgotten. (I had one at GIS Monitor for a while and took it down.)

The State of Geography Education. A travel (?) article in the Times-Leader of Northeastern Pennsylvania, apparently from the Miami Herald, yet again bemoans the U.S.'s poor knowledge of geography. To its credit, the article explains what geography is and why it's important, and illustrates the role it can play in today's complex issues. It also quotes Assocaiation of American Geographers' (AAG) Executive Director Doug Richardson. ''We would like to see specific geography courses, but absent that, we'd like to see a strong geographic component in other social sciences.'' I'm all for that too. How about making it, well geotechnology, as it's referred to in the article, a component of computer literacy courses, too?

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Source: Material used herein is often supplied by external sources and used as is.