Knowledge Science

Living Labs Global co-founder Sascha Haselmayer addresses the crowd in Rio de Janeiro

submitted by Albert Gomez

good.is - by Zak Stone - May 4, 2012

In a megapolis like Mexico City, any planning initiative that moves citizens from cars to busses will pay off in reductions to traffic and air pollution. A major deterrent to using public transportation in the city? Comfort, according to Dr. Julio Mendoza, director of Mexico City's Institute of Science and Technology. Many would rather drive than experience that particular breed of public transportation-pegged anxiety: waiting helplessly on the street corner for a bus that feels like it won't ever arrive.

After participating in the Living Labs Global Award program, a competition designed to help cities solve planning challenges, the Mexican capital may have found a fix. In February, Mexico City and 20 other LLGA participants around the world put out an open call to companies to pitch solutions to important but fixable problems.

submitted by Samuel Bendett

United Nations Initiative on Global Geospatial Information Management - April 24, 2012

A working group was established to assess the future trends in geospatial information management at the 1st meeting of the UN Committee on GGIM in Seoul, Korea. Chaired by Dr. Vanessa Lawrence, Director General and Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey, the working group has received written inputs from 29 persons or institutions. A summary of the future trends shall be presented during this forum in Amsterdam, followed by discussion among all the participants. Meanwhile, the process of soliciting views on future trends continue and the working group welcomes any additional inputs. A consolidated paper on the future trends shall be discussed in the 2nd Session of the Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management.

http://ggim.un.org/

Background paper:
Future trends in geospatial information management: the five to ten year vision (8 page .PDF file)

submitted by Samuel Bendett

We've saw about 10,000 English tweets in the first hour and 23,000 in the second. Third hour is down, will be about half the rate of the second hour if sustained.

Recurring themes include words like rattle, suffer, long slow roller, hard, saddened, worried, awful, hate, bad.

I'm seeing a fair bit of "help us report" tweets, which is coming from a tweet that said "earthquake preparedness helps us report none to minor damage and no victims so far," from Mexico City.

English-language tweets from Mexico are making up 8 percent of the total. 55 percent are from the U.S.

Spanish tweets - 488 in the first hour, 1,400 in the second and current rate will product about 1,000 in the third hour.

Most common words in the Spanish tweets are disfrutar and malo.

Spanish tweets are coming almost 50/50 from Mexico and the U.S.

Almost 75 percent of the Spanish tweets were from men, v. a close to 50/50 split for English.