Mom who Maps

This is the very typical example why the people in our country should free our data! Shown above is a map of my road data for a hydrologic model. Two unaligned road networks are visible from the image above. The red lines are my initial datasets which are actually "PAID" dataset from a government agency. When I did an overlay with a pan-sharpened satellite image, I got a large shift from the actual road network visible in the image itself. My initial notion is to georeference the image so that it would fit the readily available road data. However, when I tried overlaying the location of my mapped inlets, I noticed that the storm drain network which is aligned with the road coincides with that of my backdrop image. These inlet locations are in-situ observations gathered from a week of fieldwork hence there must've been a BIG problem with my road dataset. My next solution is to look for a free dataset. I have tried using Open Street Map data and alas! OSM data has a

A few weeks ago, I was asked to give a short talk to a few young people about some wisdom on choosing their college course or future career. Since I haven't gone into the industry and had much of my time spent on research, I preferred taking the college course guidance part and leaving the industry and career after graduation part to my husband who has gone farther than me in terms of employment and experience of course.  So for me, I made this analogy: Choosing your college course is almost the same as choosing your next faithful pair of shoes! Your choice of shoes should fit your budget and so is your choice of college course. - Have a reality check. You might be wanting the most expensive shoes and yet you know you can't afford it just yet. You may try your way by working harder while studying to earn your dream degree and yet end up not finishing it because of deeper financial constraints. So you better be real earlier or end up in regret of an unfinished dream. Y

North Korea's much hyped rocket launch has failed today, April 13, 2012. For the past few days, or even weeks, there have been much-a-do-and-say about such "overrated" launch. Most countries, especially the first world, are having debates on such move by NoKor. Reuters reports: "North Korea  said it wanted the Unha-3 rocket to put a weather satellite into orbit, although critics believed it was designed to enhance its capacity to design a ballistic missile to deliver a nuclear warhead capable of hitting the continental United States." So, is that it? Is North Korea already that powerful to wage war against those first world countries? The paranoia has reached countries within the flight-path of such North Korean rocket including the Philippines. And since we are not capable of shooting such debris from the sky, removing it from its trajectory and totally crashing the rocket parts as it enters  the Philippine area of  responsibility, we were just advised to

Last week was one tedious week, part of my primary data gathering is to map all the storm drains within my study area for my thesis. That was about 371 hectare area of land with a mix of residential, commercial and industrial land uses. I have used 2 types of Garmin Handheld receivers for this part, the Garmin Oregon 550 and the Garmin 76CSx for this storm drain inventory and mapping field work. I would say that both are pretty good in terms of accuracy for a handheld receivers with a purpose of mapping  features just for reconnaissance or coarse accuracy requirements. Here are my rants/raves two cents for fieldworks utilizing handheld GPS receivers i.e. GARMIN GPSmap 76CSx and Oregon 550. Do understand the primary purpose or objective of your data gathering and use the right tool for such purpose. -  You can't use a handheld GPS receiver to plot the corners of your lot and use it as an evidence for a land grabbing case. Have a clear understanding of the capabilities of the GP