In October 2019, Teacher Advisory Council members Ali Pressel and Kyle Tredinnick hosted a breakout session titled “StoryMaps: Building a GeoHabit” at National Geographic’s Education Summit. ArcGIS StoryMaps is a system that allows users to tell digital stories with text, interactive maps, imagery, and more. The two high school teachers value this skillset and geographic information systems (GIS) in the classroom as they prepare students to see the world beyond maps.
In honor of GIS Day, a celebration of the technology in the field, Ali and Kyle sat down with the National Geographic Society’s Education staff to talk about their journey with geography.
Ali and Kyle didn’t intend to teach GIS, but it quickly became the main focus.
A new survey of business and engineering students and their employer preferences offers vital insights on the next wave of the global labor force. By assessing the survey data country by country, corporate leaders can divine trends that give them a competitive edge in recruiting the best talent in locations around the world.
Article snapshot: In contrast to their Millennial peers, young professionals in Generation Z aren’t so keen to job-hop or work internationally, and their priorities vary by geography.
There are over 300,000 islands in the world and most of these are poorly documented or generally unknown. A new United States Geological Survey (USGS) and Esri project has now mapped 340,691 islands of the Earth’s islands and created a GIS dataset that is publicly available.
World Islands GIS Data
As Charles Darwin noted, islands are incredibly diverse and demonstrate how life can exist in the most isolated locations. They also contain many unique cultures and languages, making them socially important. Islands are also all landmasses on our planet. Increasingly, islands are under threat from climate change and sea level rise in particular. The vast majority of islands are small and many are uninhabited. Documenting them might be the only way some of these islands will be remembered in the future. The USGS and Esri effort has created the Global Islands Explorer (GIE), which provides vectorized Global Shoreline Vector (GSV) data available to the public for download. In this database, every island, including large continental landmasses and very small islands (e.g., Key West), is documented with satellite data, topography, or other raster data as background, and information about the islands, including area, names, coastlines, tectonic plates they belong to, and other information provided.
A decade after Mars and other chocolate makers vowed to stop rampant deforestation, the problem has gotten worse
ELIZABETHTOWN, Pa. — Mars Inc., maker of M&M’s, Milky Way and other stalwarts of the nation’s Halloween candy bag, vowed in 2009 to switch entirely to sustainable cocoa to combat deforestation, a major contributor to climate change.
But as the United States stocks up for trick-or-treating, Mars and other global chocolate makers are far from meeting that ambitious goal. Over the past decade, deforestation has accelerated in West Africa, the source of two-thirds of the world’s cocoa. By one estimate, the loss of tropical rainforests last year sped up more in Ghana and Ivory Coast than anywhere else in the world.
“Anytime someone bites on a chocolate bar in the United States, a tree is being cut down,” said Eric Agnero, an environmental activist in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast. “If we continue like that, in two, three, four years there will be no more forests.”
A new historical map of Arlington allows users to explore what the county looked like 100 years ago.
The digital map depicts a mix of new and old pictures, showing the buildings that were standing in Arlington’s neighborhoods in the 1920s. By clicking pinpoints on a county map, users can check out the homes and businesses that are (or were) located on that site and read caption notes.
“I think that this StoryMap, besides being nifty, allows people to play with it, and also give you a real historical sense of what Arlington used to look like besides these fantastic visions of glamour columns,” said Falls Church News-Press columnist and local historian Charlie Clark, who made the map for the Arlington Historical Society.
Editor’s note: This story was updated Oct. 25, 2019 with a new analysis of air quality data by the Associated Press.
Oct. 8, 2019 — When she turned 62 in 2012, Latifa Moosajee and her husband decided to downsize from their home in small-town Georgia. They moved into a brand-new townhouse in the commercial heart of Atlanta. “It was my dream home … close to my daughter’s family.”
Moosajee was excited to spend more time with her grandchildren and lead an active life in the city. But the very first year in her new home, she began to wheeze and have trouble breathing. At first, she tried allergy pills, thinking it was just a rough ragweed season. Over the next 5 years, she had longer and longer stretches of wheezing with trouble breathing, and she needed more and more medicines. She started short-acting inhalers, then long-acting inhalers, and eventually needed steroids just to keep her airways open.
While staff costs drive upwards of 75 percent of a school budget, your student enrolment numbers drive just about 100 percent of everything in the budget.
In 2016/17 the average total recurrent income per full time equivalent independent school student across Australia exceeded $20,000. [1] With a national average enrolment of 525 students per school, a margin of error of just one percent in projected enrolments translates to $100,000 per year – again on average across Australia. [2] While the average measure has limitations, here it is used to convey context – enrolment projections, if not accurate, carry a big risk.
What priority is given by the school governors to projected enrolments? What are the objective and subjective drivers of enrolment projections? What is the balance between those objective and subjective levers? [3]
Perhaps, as with most things in life, there are no easy answers or solutions. How do we mitigate this risk?
Data from developers and local or state governments might be available. It generally has built in and substantial growth bias. After all, who wants to be last on the league table? The census data is at best, almost two years old when made available and can quickly become dated in areas of rapid population growth. See below for the development of the township of Googong (near Canberra) via the Google Earth timeline feature. How would you accurately forecast enrolments for a 2015 school start-up?
The traditional ‘rule of thumb’ approach allows you to ramp up year level occupancy percentages over time, retaining all students as they transition to the next year level, year upon year, until 100 percent occupancy is achieved across the school. This approach requires many assumptions – are the numbers of potential students there; does their age profile match what we need; what will be the enrolment churn rate – and hopefully, with luck, you might get some of these assumptions right.
While this data appears objective, (it is numbers after all), there are many underlying subjective views from developers or local governments, and decisions that potentially degrade its accuracy and more importantly, erode the confidence that can be placed in the data.
Can we overlay these approaches with some science? Of course, we can – the science of math and statistics.
Age profiles of school catchments are based on census data. Annual statistical updating of this core data-set will add objectivity – add certainty – through improved understanding of population growth (or lack of it) in the catchment. This can be driven by actual awareness of student enrolment data for the small SA1 spatial areas in Australia or using tools such as Google Earth Pro to review development ‘on the ground’ and adjust underlying population data accordingly.
Can the updated census data be further refined? Yes, an analysis of school sector enrolments (Independent, Catholic and Government sectors) provides per capita enrolment benchmarks, providing an objective means to define market-share assumptions.
Enrolment projections developed in this manner can be added to other scenarios already prepared by schools to provide a series of projections that can be risk assessed and rated – from low to high risk and likelihood.
How do you prepare enrolment projections for greenfield sites; for catchments with stagnating numbers of school aged children; where your changes in enrolment numbers have drivers that require some discernment via an analysis of market share changes or annual student churn?
Realistically it cannot be left to chance. A school should seek the most objective view – one where the science of statistical math is mixed with the art of common sense, industry knowledge and local awareness – to produce the most relevant and the most meaningful enrolment projections. The alternatives can be anything from a guess, perhaps sometimes a lucky guess, a reverse-engineered solution to answer the question or just hope, backed by prayer. It does not have to be this way.
At EducationGeographics we already assist several client schools (and their leaders and governors) that are grappling with the business risks of getting enrolment projections reasonable and relevant, eliminating chance as much as possible, and getting the correct balance between the science and the art of their student enrolment projections.
Written by: Director – Education Geographics (Dashboard Design)
Footnotes
[1] See Independent Schools Council of Australia (ISCA) website (School Funding and School Statistics) <https://isca.edu.au/>.
[2] See ISCA website (School Statistics)
[3] See John Somerset, Defining a Financially Sustainable Independent School in Australia, Independent Schools Queensland (Research Paper, October 2018). Governors of schools have a statutory and/or fiduciary responsibility to ensure the financial viability and sustainability of their schools (Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission Act 2012 (Cth)). There is also a responsibility under the conditions of Commonwealth Government recurrent funding legislation to ensure financial viability and sustainability. Enrolment projection data is a core issue for School accreditation and the regular review of accreditation compliance, and for BGA capital assistance grants.
Article snapshot: Using AI-based predictive analysis, John Deere helps its dealers spot growth opportunities in markets around the world.
As some companies pull ahead, others fall behind. It’s the essence of competition—and increasingly, data separates the winners from the laggards. Giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google have propelled themselves to the frontline of the global economy thanks largely to the data they absorb and rapidly transform into operational insights, predictions, and new services and products. Today the data arms race has spread well beyond Silicon Valley into industries ranging from entertainment, where Netflix’s algorithms have made it a streaming colossus, to agriculture, where John Deere has revolutionized the agriculture tech space.
According to a 2018 survey of Fortune 1000 companies by NewVantage Partners, 79 percent of C-suite executives fear disruption from data-driven competitors. An overwhelming 97 percent report that their firms are now investing in big data and AI initiatives to become nimbler in this new business climate.
On the occasion of the Half Earth Day, a look at what E.O. Wilson Foundation is doing to save the global biodiversity, and how organizations like Esri are contributing to the cause.
It’s not easy to assess the extent of damage that will be caused by natural calamities in the future. According to a new report by Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), seven million people have been displaced globally due to natural disasters from January to June this year. This number is estimated to more than triple by the end of the year to around 22 million. These numbers suggest that we are staring at a kind of devastation that will be unparalleled and need to take corrective actions to minimize the loss to the humanity. But what do we do? Perhaps the answer lies in saving half of the Earth.
Recreational Research on the local trout at Spatsizi Wilderness Lodge.
Wow! A double rainbow crowns a wet and cold Brisbane CBD this morning as Jack & I head off for a week of fly-fishing in northern Canada #Spatsizi. It was Jack’s turn for the adventure of a lifetime with his old man … which would be me, folks.
My fly-fishing companion #Spatsizi son Jack, chillaxin’ before the Air Canada Vancouver flight this morning. For those who’ve never experienced it, the Brisbane to Vancouver direct flight to Vancouver is one of the best international flights there is. Even better with a pass to the Brisbane Air Canada lounge.
Fortunately, Jack was on hand to help the Air Canada pilots fly big jet across the Pacific. Well, to be honest, we’d already landed.
After a quiet night in lovely downtown Smithers, the next day – Day 1 of the trip – saw Jack and I heading off for a week’s Recreational Research on the local trout at #Spatsizi with Alpine Lakes Air. Not bad runway, eh? as the Canadians would say.
