Computers, Society, and Nature

The hypothesis of MO in the Intro GIS course:

Since we talked in class about GIS as a tool for war, I thought that it would be good to find an application about one of the most controversial wars, the war in Afghanistan. This war implicated the U.S. alone. We know that the Pentagon bought the commercial rights of the images of Afghanistan that can be distributed since 9/11, so we might think of a reason for that: maybe stopping the terrorism is not their ultimate goal. Maybe they target a more ‘in-depth’ objective.

This article explains the technologies, such as maps, sensors and aircrafts, used to cover the country of Afghanistan. The introduction is particularly interesting since I pose a hypothesis of hidden truth as a motive for the U.S. to engage in a war in Afghanistan. The primary source of images for the US to map the Afghanistan are optical satellites, such as the French SPOT, the Indian IRS, the European ERS-2 and the Canadian Radarsat. The advantage of these last two is that they can operate under all weather conditions, as well as during the day or night. Two of the Lacrosse satellites that belong to the U.S. were operational before September 11, 2001. One of these satellite has a resolution of 1 to 2 meters per pixel. Some satellites are comparable to the Hubble telescope in terms of targeting specific points at a very high resolution. This might be considered ‘defective’ because the satellites can observe an area for only 10 to 15 minutes a day. A solution to this problem is the use of aircraft, which can observe a specific area through clouds for a longer period of time. Furthermore, these aircraft, at any altitudes, cannot be reached by Taliban weapons. The most effective of these technologies is the U-2 aircraft, which operates with electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR) imagers and can exchange data in real time with the ground stations.

In this selection from the National Geographic, there are examples of the type of maps the US created on Afghanistan. You can select different views among the cities and attacks, the satellite view, the northern alliance, Taliban and refugees, the ethnic groups and the drought and vegetation. It appears that the US authorities know everything about Afghanistan. With their high surveillance technology, they can observe whomever they want, whenever they want. They know the behaviour of people, they know where the supposed “terrorists” are, they know where the civilians are and they know what those people do each single day of their life. I presume they can even spy these people on their telephone lines. As we can see, the Afghan community is completely checked and watched. The US has the absolute power over them. This power is the ultimate goal of the war in Afghanistan because it is the key to give the US the freedom of their political and especially economical actions, without any restrictions, over this country.

Thanks to MG from the Intro to GIS course.

UNESCO’s Regional Office for Culture in Asia and the Pacific is charged with preserving cultural heritage. UNESCO has completed quite a few interesting projects involving GIS as a tool to analyse the results and to manage the newly obtained information. One of the projects lead by UNESCO Bangkok is called GIS-Linked Social Sentinel Surveillance Project. People in the project have created several interactive maps predominantly with the purpose of establishing the patterns of trafficking routes, the trade in girls and women, the manifestation of AIDS, and the movements and migrations of people. In this mission, GIS makes intervention much more efficient because it enables various trends to be mapped and the information to be stored for future uses.

One example of the problems stated above is the human trafficking of women, which is the main cause for the spread of HIV/AIDS in Thailand. Thailand’s sex industry draws women and girls from China, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. Mostly minority women are targeted for this trade due to their poor monetary situation and ignorance about their rights and the threat of trafficking. UNESCO, government organizations and non-governmental organizations have been gathering data to enable the development of specific objectives through GIS analysis of the data. For example, project members could build an educational plan in a particular region of Thailand if it is what’s needed there. Intervention groups could make linkages between the different maps and aim for a solution that really targets the sex industry and its components. Furthermore, intervention groups and the government could produce maps to continually monitor and thus dismantle networks of girl trafficking.

The UNESCO Bangkok website hosts a GIS Map Collection on issues such as sex data, migration, economics, and highland people. Here is an example animated choropleth map showing the dramatic increases in HIV/AIDS 1989 and 2003.

As we have just observed World AIDS Day, it’s a good time to examine the application of GIS to this global epidemic.

The BBC has an in depth feature that shows the progression of HIV/AIDS in the world. It really helps demonstrate the most affected areas and the progression throughout the years, especially in Africa. I think it is a cool application of GIS because the maps help you see just how big the spread of the virus is. I personally did not know until I saw this, that HIV was a major problem in Russia. I find the BBC uses GIS alot, they have another section helping visualizing the spread of the avian flu.

A specific instance of the BBC’s use of GIS in tracking AIDS is the best case scenario for 2010. The Best case scenario in 2010 is based on a study that estimated the possible effects that preventative action could have on the spread of HIV/AIDS. It contrasts predicted infections with figures from 2002. Even though the disease is still predicted to expand greatly, the estimated 29 million people that could be spared from infection is demonstrated by the grey persons. The areas that would benefit the greatest from these preventative measures are Sub- Saharan Africa and South and South East Asia. The use of a person icon as a symbol–each person represents about 1 million people–helps the viewer see just where the disease is more prevalent. Moreover, after looking at all the maps, one can obtain a full understanding of the future of HIV/AIDS virus. We are so often bombarded with facts about HIV/AIDS, this application brings greater meaning and understanding to all the statistics and predictions about its spread.

The use of GIS when dealing with these topics, I find, helps people see the global ramifications and understand such widely discussed topics better.

Thanks to a student in the Intro GIS course for the post.

Geographic information systems are most often utilized for functional cartographic and spatial analysis purposes. Seldom is it remarked for its aesthetic and artistic capabilities. Whereas GIS is a valuable and functional tool for industries, environmental research, resource management, engineering and the like, seeing GIS displaced from its functional realm as a creative force is surprising. How do these tools for visualizing spatial functions, normally embedded in a language of complex algorithms and numbers, have any relevance to the world of art?

Ingo Ghunter has been making ‘map-art’ for nearly a decade. His globes illustrate the spatial interpretation of some rather mundane statistics on global wealth, environmental issues, and trade. Certainly, the art is appealing on a visual level, but it also serves as a critique of the Western world and the globalizing economy. Many of the globes illustrate the geographical disparity between rich nations and poor nations of the world, where geographical scale and colours assist in illustrating the point in a more profound way than by way of any statistical table or graph. These exaggerations in scale and colour effectively illustrate the capacity that cartography has in revealing a function, and divulging information to its audience beyond the simple purpose of representing space.

Of course, these representations might not be entirely useful for analytical purposes, but beyond their aesthetic appearance, they do illustrate some important observations created through exaggerating and distorting space and scale. There are installations of his work in Bonn, Germany and a recent publication in Wired magazine.

This art could be considered to represent the convergence between GIS and psycho-geography, where GIS is a system for creating awareness in a creative way of the global landscape. As a purposeful device for spatial analysis, and as an innovative and artistic device for social commentary – GIS is a broadly utilized tool that has a great capacity for visualizing many different spatial and aspatial phenomena.

See also

GIS Art
Juan’s Freire’s blog postings on GIS
Radical Cartography

Hat tip to Roy for the post.

Thanks to a student in the Intro GIS course.

Landscape ecology is a field that focuses on understanding processes at the landscape level. Due to the inherent spatiality of this field, GIS is especially well placed to make a contribution in terms of predictive research and thus enhance conservation management and policy-making. The Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO), makes extensive use of GIS. Founded in 1965, PRBO has accomplished many feats in terms of bird ecology research, using partnership with other private and public institutions. It has initiated a division whose goal is to integrate GIS into its research and into monitoring activities of birds and their habitats.

One interesting project launched by PRBO has been to predict how wetland birds in the South San Francisco Bay could be affected by changes in their habitat. Over time, the original salt marshes of the area had been converted to salt ponds. This has diminished habitat space for certain migrating fowl species. There has been a recent push to convert the space back to its original form. The PRBO is working to create a habitat conversion model to plan the optimal means of achieving this goal.

The GIS staff at PRBO combined data from bird surveys, aerial photos, statistical analyses and spatial modeling. They were able to discover useful knowledge concerning the possible effects habitat conversion would have on the wildlife. They quantified preferred variations in terms of size, location, as well as certain physical attributes of salt ponds, channels, and tidal marshes. Analysis of this information has allowed PRBO to create different restoration scenarios. As such, they have contributing to the management of the area.

GIS can thus be quite useful in terms of furthering knowledge of landscape ecology, and on all the impacts this field has on the management of different species worldwide.

[PRBO is also notable for its real-time implementation of GIS during a fire at the park. It’s a great story of what GIS can do in crisis situations as well as the strong support by GIS vendors of conservation efforts. To give you a sense of the short-time horizons of the project, plotters were air-lifted into the newly formed PRBO GIS office while the fire was raging.–Sieber]

From Ariel:

Fashion retailing is a large business in Hong Kong. Due to expensive rents, retailers want to choose store locations where they will earn the highest profit. When retailers choose a good location for the store, it allows for a greater chance of success for the company both in growth and finance. In Hong Kong, GIS is usually applied in areas like construction engineering, environmental science and land development. Recently, there have been more businesses using GIS because it helps promote business decision making capabilities.

One new application of GIS is in fashion retailing. A study was conducted in Hong Kong between two shopping plazas with the aim to model a shopper’s walking pattern through a mutli-storey plaza by identifying “a set of environmental or spatial variables, correlating them with non-spatial ones like frequency of passing-by, degree of familiarity.” The two shopping plazas that were chosen had different characteristics. One of the plazas, the Grand Century Place is modern and 7 – storey high while the second plaza, the Prudential Center is 6 – storey high.

To model walking patterns, nodes represented the facilities and entrances, exits, and escalators; whereas the plaza stores were represented by polygons with their entrances represented by nodes. Line segments represented the paths and feasible walkways between the nodes. Then attribute tables were created to associate the spatial entities such as a store table and a path attribute table.

The study concluded that the stores next to key entrance points, especially next to bus terminals or the transit system, were most advantageous. The study also found that shoppers walked through spacious, open passages more then narrow passages and there were indications that there was a concentration of shoppers on the lower level in the Grand Century Place. The concentration of shoppers may be due to the fact that the plaza is extremely big and it would cause the shoppers fatigue if they walked through the entire plaza.

This application demonstrates that GIS can be valuable to the fashion industry because it can help retailers select a profitable location when deciding where to situate their stores. Choosing a good store location increases the stores’ profits because within a plaza: there are many stores that sell similar products so shoppers have a variety of choices. This creates competition among the stores since shoppers can compare the products sold. With the use of GIS, store retailers can better determine the variables that could affect their profit. It would be inappropriate to rent an expensive location if a profit will not be made and with GIS, retailers can make determinations before they rent the location. By routing the pattern of plaza shoppers, the study also provides the fashion industry with shoppers’ preferences. The shoppers’ preference will give the fashion industry an indication as to which type of store would earn profit if it was situated in that location. Although this study was conducted in Hong Kong, GIS could benefit the fashion industry in other countries as well.

This goes along with a previous post on the application of GIS to tennis. From a student in the Intro to GIS course:

In an attempt to reach Americans as well as the few ashamed Canadian baseball fanatics, I examined Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball”. In this top-selling sports/business hybrid novel, Lewis writes about the elusiveness of an accurate way to measure defense. The typical statistic used to gauge a player’s defensive skill is his number of errors, meaning the mistakes a player makes throughout the season. However, Lewis challenges this simplification of defense, reasoning that a less fleet-footed athlete might not even be afforded the opportunity to make some mistakes due to physical incapability to even get to the ball.

The solution to this conundrum, Lewis says, is a new breakdown of defense, in which the entire field is broken into smaller units of areas, known to GIS people as the implementation of the raster model. With this type of structure, every ball hit to any fielder can be documented with set of geographic coordinates. The fielder’s position prior to the ball being put in play is also noted. Both the velocity with which the ball travels, as well as its trajectory, is also tagged to positional location as attribute data.

The Oakland Athletics, a major league baseball team, have implemented these tactics, along with other scientific methods, and have experienced tremendous success. With one of the smallest budgets in baseball, they have used GIS to efficiently spend their meager funds to acquire players that provide the most production for the amount of money they are willing to pay. Over the past five years, the Oakland Athletics have been among the league leaders in victories per season despite their inescapable “poverty”.

Being from New York, I constantly have it drilled into my head that the Yankees are the team to beat and that rooting for anyone else is futile. I despise the Yankees. Where is the fun in rooting for a team that’s expected to win because of the throngs of hundred million dollar contracts they hand out on a yearly basis? The Oakland A’s, however, have successfully shown that money can’t buy everything. The Yankees are Goliath, and the A’s are David, with their heads buried in science books. The Yankees continue to chase their own tails, failing to win a World Series since their payroll ballooned to over $200 million, compared to Oakland’s $40 million. Baseball may not look like a battle of intellect, but behind the scenes brilliant minds (many of whom are experts in GIS) are quickly gaining respect and snatching up all the jobs previously bestowed upon those who were said to have an immeasurable “baseball sense”. It appears that what you need to win at baseball is not the biggest muscles, but rather some thick coke-bottle glasses, a McGill diploma, and a computer loaded with ArcGIS 9.

So, to all my Canadian friends: before you write baseball off as a useless “American Pastime”, you should realize that there is a growing market demand in this sport for those who have skills in GIS. Major League Baseball is accepting applications now.

References: Lewis, Michael. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. W.W.
Norton and Company, Inc., New York, 2003.

Thanks to Mongoose girl for this post:

The study of the spread of diseases has tended to focus primarily on human suffering and mortality. In many cases, animals were the vectors of transmission for the virus or bacteria to humans. However, a study from the journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases is attempting to assess human’s negative impact on animals’ health. This study utilized GIS to research the spread of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in free-ranging mongooses in Botswana and suricats in South Africa (also known as meercats).

In these areas of Africa eco-tourism has emerged as a profitable way to support local economies. It has many positive attributes such as encouraging local communities’ autonomy, preserving wildlife habitat, and encouraging responsible resource use. However, increased human presence in what used to be remote and fairly undisturbed areas has resulted in disease transmission to animal populations. This is one of the first studies to consider the transmission of a primarily human pathogen into free-ranging wildlife.

Researchers required a tool to assist them in tracking the geographic locations infected animals as they roamed throughout the day. Researchers also needed to map all of the human infrastructures in the animal’s range, which included national parks and multi-purpose lands. GIS was an ideal solution as it allowed them to overlay multiple layers and look for geographic similarities between human presence and sites of disease transmission. Point layers were used to depict tourist facilities, garbage dumps, and locations of mongoose TB cases. Lines and polygons were used to portray roads and land use. To monitor the disease outbreak, mongoose troops were followed by patrollers in both the morning and evening. They collected and then georeferenced information such as animal sightings, important geographic locations and individual TB cases. This created enough graphical and non-graphical attribute data to determine the rate of infection spread, by calculating the time and distance between new outbreaks. The GIS output was also useful in visualizing the extent of TB’s spread within the mongoose populations and the humans’ role in transmission.

GIS technology has allowed for the domains of epidemiology, geography and wildlife biology to be incorporated into one analysis. Future emphasis can be placed on protecting wild species, either by limiting visitors contact or by simply ensuring that garbage is hygienically disposed of. Ecotourism plays an important role in supporting rural communities. However, animal health cannot be neglected. After all, there needs to be something wild left to encourage visitors to come!

For more information see: Alexander, K., Pleydell, E., Williams, M., Lane, E., Nyange, J. and Michel, A. 2002. Mycobacterium tuberculosis: An Emerging Disease of Free-Ranging Wildlife. Emerging Infectious Diseases. 8: 598-601. Accessed November 25th, 2005.

A post from Solizma in the Intro GIS course.

Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA uses GIS applications to treat illnesses, address medical issues, and analyze health abnormalities. The only hospital with a full-time GIS staff, Baystate initiated its health geographics program in 1998. Since then they have been awarded the ESRI “Special Achievement in GIS” Award in 2002 and ESRI “Vision” Award in 2004 at ESRI’s International Health GIS Conference. (The latest conference proceedings are here.)

Baystate’s GIS staff have experience in demographics; cancer, cardiovascular disease, and injury epidemiology; hospital facilities; non-hospital facility siting; healthcare marketing; bioterrorism; and emergency preparedness, planning and support. Current applications vary in scale from single human organs to the whole hospital to multiple states.

The medical center staff are developing a “four-tiered conceptual model for hospital surge capacity planning and response” which they have named the “Healthcare Preparedness Infosphere (HPI).” This GIS-based model is made up of four “health information systems” that provide hospital healthcare, situational awareness, incident management, and decision support at multiple levels ranging from the individual hospital to multiple states. The model allows tracking of patients, resources, and assets, and it can be used to support improved
healthcare and quality. It is applicable to both routine situations or emergencies and disasters.

Another current initiative of the GIS unit at the medical center is flu tracking: staff are mapping the historic geographic distribution of flu and pneumonia patients to identify areas of higher incidence. Staff will use this information to plan vaccination clinics and educational activities accordingly.

The “Rays of Hope” breast cancer program used US Census data to determine areas of breast cancer screening nocompliance by looking at geographic areas with a high advanced-stage-to-case ratio (ASCR). That is, they looked for areas with a high proportion of advanced stage breast cancer cases out of the total number of cases, which indicates that the cases are not getting detected as early as they could or should. The screening noncompliance areas were identified by spatial analysis and their demographic characterisics were evaluated. Based on these results, researchers were able to design screening programs to target high-risk areas, allowing optimal allocation of resources and a maximization of screening yield.

[Of course, the assumption above is that this is a geographic phenomenon when instead it may be more strongly correlated to poverty or availability of health insurance–Sieber]

At a much finer scale, Baystate staff are using GIS to analyze results of Transanal Endoscopic Microsurgery (TEM). This surgical procedure requires parallel positioning of instruments in a 4 by 20 cm long rectoscope. Researchers want to determine whether location of the polyp requiring operation in the rectum correlates with difficulty in performing the surgery. A cylindrical coordinate system and topology is being used as a basis for both 2-D and 3-D visualization and analysis. Findings indicate that polyp location may be relevant to the
limitations of the surgery.

Other initiatives and applications at Baystate include hospital mapping, route optimization management for delivery trucks and drivers serving home-bound patients, trauma surveillance, and development of a regional geodatabase to provide basemap support for regional emergency preparedness, planning, response, recovery, and hazard vulnerability assessment. See the links below for more information.

Overview of Baystate’s Health Geographics Program

Baystate Health

ESRI: Medical Center Improves Community Programs with GIS

Thanks to Simon in the Intro GIS course.

The term gerrymander was coined in 1812 after the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry. The term applies to the process by which political districts are reorganized to weigh voting in favor of the dominant political party. In this way the opposition is concentrated into few districts or the minority strength is reduced and diluted over many districts. Gerrymandering is a commonly used legal practice in U.S. states to influence the voting outcome.

The spatial and attribute data supplied by users of GIS now makes the process of gerrymandering easier than ever. With a click of a mouse district boundaries can be remapped according to racial, household income or polling statistics, to name a few. Whereas GIS can be used to ensure fair redistricting, it also facilitates redistricting on a basis of political power.

Of particular concern to me as an environmentalist are the effects of gerrymandering on environmental policies. Gerrymandering not only redistributes voter opinion in unwieldy patterns over counties, but stretches districts over multiple distinct bioregions. How can voters adequately express their opinions on key environmental issues when they are clumped into the same district as other regions that have completely separate environmental concerns?

Without a formal template to assign districts, GIS provides politicians with a tool to perform increasingly sophisticated analyses on voting behavior and assign districts based on a desired outcome. One solution to this problem is to assign districts to watersheds or ecoregions. In this way GIS could be used to define districts based on bioregions rather than voting behavior. The outcome would be a reasonable redistricting system, where the inhabitants of each bioregion could express their opinions on related environmental issues.

For more information of gerrymandering, visit Fair Vote: Program for Representative Government.