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A ' MOOC' report from Peter

As a Project Manager recently exposed to GIS, I decided to undertake a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on 'Maps and the Geospatial Revolution' offered by Pennsylvania State University as a quick introduction to geospatial technology and its terminology. The course covered maps, projections, geospatial data, spatial relationships, basic analysis techniques and map design.

Along with around 25,000 registered students, I embarked upon a 5-week course consisting of lecture videos, written content, assessed discussion, hands-on lab activity, quizzes and a final project

Student participation was encouraged with additional marks available for getting involved in discussion forums, as well penalty marks if a student did not peer review 5 of the submitted final projects!

There were some very interesting discussion threads, including location data and privacy, the use of drones to collect data, and how to handle tectonic plate movement. Although the final 2-hour exam covered the entire course, the questions were straightforward and I completed it in under 30 minutes.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the course was the final mapping assignment. Everyone who submitted an assignment had to peer review 5 other maps or concede a 15% penalty. It was up to the individual student what they wanted to depict, and many maps were of an extremely high quality.

I reviewed maps depicting radiation fallout from Chernobyl, the siting of nuclear power plants in France and areas of seismic activity, the urbanisation of Transylvania, flooding in Serbia, and a holiday tour of Newfoundland.

My project was on poverty in Bangladesh, and interestingly, I received both very good and critical reviews. The comments were subjective, with several comments stating how well the information was depicted, while others were critical of the data and colour schemes used!

Overall, I found the course interesting, but would describe it as one aimed for the 'hobbyist'. It's a great way for someone to obtain an introduction to what geospatial is all about, and I would highly recommend it for this reason. It would appear many people participated in discussion forums and watched video lectures, without necessarily undertaking the quizzes or completing the final assignment, and this was reflected in the number of people completing the course - just 1,352 out of the 15,000 or so registered students who were active at some point in the course.

-Peter Moore

Many organisations use land parcels in their Geographic Information Systems and Web Mapping displays. On the their own, they aren't particularly useful, but they do make for a great backdrop for contextual purposes. Everybody knows where they live, and the extent of ownership is a good surrogate for location in the absence of other data. It is also the basis of lots of other data that is captured relative to it, for example planning zones or buildings.

Land parcels are a data set that is rather taken for granted. It's just there. It's always been there - well, ever since the first spatial data was captured. Surveyors create them for us and LINZ makes them freely available. So far, so good.

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SEISMIC COMPLICATIONS

The trouble is, we've never gotten our heads around the fact that in a tectonically active country, land parcels are constantly on the move, either gradually (a few millimetres per year), or suddenly, such as in a magnitude 7 shunt.

I guess we always knew there was a problem, but imagined it would somehow be at least 10 years away. At 50mm per year, it would take 10 years to accumulate a 0.5m shift, which was the approximate accuracy of a GPS receiver 10 years ago. In the meantime, the accuracy of GPS receivers has increased ten-fold, there are more satellites enabling greater precision, and a huge proliferation of smart phones and tablets to capture data.

This data is being captured, of course, where it occurs relative to the GPS satellites, not where the land parcel was at the time it was surveyed. In addition, the annual rate of land deformation is now close to GPS receiver accuracy.

New Zealand is a long diagonal country halfway between the equator and the South Pole, making it a difficult country to map using conventional projections. NZMG, implemented in 1973, was a great response to this challenge, but by 2000 it was becoming increasingly obvious that it had served its useful purpose and needed to be replaced. NZGD2000 was created in response to the needs of changing technology.

HOW NZGD2000 WORKS

At this year's ALGIM GIS Conference in Auckland, Dr Chris Crooks from LINZ gave great insight into the detail and thinking behind the NZGD2000 coordinate system, and in particular, how the effects of the Canterbury earthquakes have beeb subsequently incorporated.

In selecting NZGD2000, LINZ opted for a semi-static coordinate system that places NZ at a location for the year 2000 with a velocity model included. The theory was that any data collected could be shifted back to where it would have been in 2000 by shifting it in the direction of the annual correction, multiplied by the number of years since 2000.

By taking this approach, LINZ had effectively implemented an untested system, and brought several problems along for the ride.

• The commercial GIS tools weren't (and still aren't) equipped to handle the solution

• The parcels data model didn't support the management of the data using this approach

• There was no plan or process in place to manage the data

LINZ had committed to periodically releasing updated velocity models, but not one release had occurred, signalling that the above issues continued to be a problem.

Additionally, the solution was based on gradual shifts of a uniform nature in a predictable direction, and could not account for the chaotic changes created by the September 2010 earthquake. The 2009 7.8 Fiordland earthquake also caused significant deformation throughout Southland, but this had been tolerated due to the largely rural nature of the area.

Christchurch, being urban and in need of immediate redevelopment, created an urgent need for a solution to be found.

POST-QUAKE UPDATES

LINZ recently adjusted all those land parcels that had been deformed by more than 5 mm. Presumably they were able to exclude the normal drift that applies to the rest of the country, as this is a stepwise correction related to seismic events, rather than a global correction. The net effect is that the land parcels have changed to where they would have been, had the earthquakes happened prior to 2000.

LINZ still hasn't released an adjustment nationally for gradual shift, but the fact that they have successfully dealt with the Canterbury issue, signals that they are prepared to deal with this issue as well. Chris reported that they now have much better data on what the actual velocity is around the country, whereas when the system was implemented, it was much more of a guess.

HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU? WHAT ISSUES SHOULD YOU CONSIDER?

If your data is coincident or relative to data in the South Island, then you need to think about adjusting it soon. You'll also need to think about metadata.

Have you recorded whether your datasets are subject to tectonic shift at a dataset level? You'll also need to think about whether you should be recording tectonic shift at a record level - has this record been adjusted? Which velocity model was it adjusted to? And if you are not in the South Island, you'll need to deal with this issue eventually - do you have a plan to do so?

With LINZ embarking on upgrades to existing or new data sets, including Addresses, ASaTs (Automated Survey and Titles system), the Property Data Management Framework, and 'scaleless' topographic data, it is a timely reminder that you should be providing input and feedback that ensures that sufficient record level metadata exists to effectively manage the sharing of data with a temporal tectonic component.

It's also a reminder that such systems should be tested end-to-end for integration before being put into production. As users of the data you can offer to be involved in the testing.

With the New Zealand Cricket team, the Black Caps, having recently won the Third Test in Barbados, against the West Indies, it reminded me of my own playing days and what goes to making a great team.

One of the things I noticed was that good fielding is infectious. If someone takes responsibility to lift their game, put in 110%, and pull off brilliant saves and catches, suddenly you notice everyone around you lifts their game to the same level.

Of course if people start doing the opposite, everybody's level seems to subconsciously drop accordingly. When I noticed this, I made it my job to be the person who takes the lead and infect the team with good fielding.

The same applies in the workplace. You can be the person that turns up and lifts everybody's performance with your enthusiasm and excellence, or you can be the person who subconsciously allows a gloomy Eeyore to slow you down.

CHAMPION OR EEYORE? YOUR CHOICE!

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Alvin Toffler gained instant fame with the publication of Future Shock in 1970. He described the effects of rapid change on humanity's psychological and physical health, and it's not a pretty picture. In his view, chaos seemed just around the corner.

Given that we're in the midst of an unprecedented information and technology revolution, many would argue we still live with the constant threat of chaos. In other words, Future Shock may be as relevant now as it was 44 years ago.

But how accurate were Toffler's predictions, and how are we meant to cope with the technological maelstrom he describes? Here's a hint:

THE PREDICTIONS

Toffler was well wide of the mark thinking there would be satellites orbiting the earth, with giant mirrors redirecting sunlight to where it would be needed most. The flooding of the interior of Brazil hasn't happened either. The university degree structure hasn't been dismantled, and despite some proposed legislation in Scandinavia, group marriage never took off. Computerised Decision Making (code-named OLIVER) never made it either. But perhaps Google is closer to OLIVER than we think, with its constant nudging of us towards our perceived needs.

Getting it wrong also extends to overlooking what did happen. As one might expect, he missed a lot of the technology revolution. There was no evidence in the book that he considered eftpos an eventuality, nor was there anything remotely resembling the internet and search engines. The possibility of ubiquitous mobile communications wasn't mentioned (even though this was the era of Maxwell Smart and his absurd shoe phone). I tried to consider what his reaction would be if he had known that I would be reading his book on a kindle, having first downloaded it wirelessly. And on the social front, the prospect of gender equality didn't resonate with him, the whole book being written using the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘his’.

But he was on the mark in predicting how people would respond on a human level to the rapid pace of change. He foretold of gay marriages and gay couples being allowed to adopt children, of 'trial marriages', and of increased rates of divorce and remarriage. We must remember that these were times when divorce was considered socially unacceptable and an unmarried couple were said to be ‘living in sin’. And gays weren't gay - they were 'queer'. He also predicted changes to the family, with widening age gaps between spouses, women bearing children later in life, reduced fertility and lower sperm counts, and the next generation of children becoming more ego-centric through his projected abundance of choice.

Toffler also predicted the now ubiquitous phenomenon of 'information overload'. So how do we typically cope with this constant change and impending chaos?

The denier of change decides not to engage in some area of technological change, while the specialist becomes absorbed in one area at the expense of all others. The revisionist resorts to adapting tried and tested solutions from the past, while the super-simplifier enthusiastically embraces technological fads, often without assessing the impact or relevance. Some of us will strongly follow a particular path while others (myself included) will use all of the above strategies to some degree.

What is common to all of us is the recognition that information overload surrounds us daily. Naively, Toffler thought we could plan our way through this problem and 'head it off at the pass'. The reality is that disruptive technologies and the current explosion of information are not capable of being tamed by applying pre-existing solutions onto a changing future.

AGILITY: THE ONLY PLAUSIBLE RESPONSE?

Toffler was extremely critical of the education sector for a curriculum that was based on applying lessons from the past that had no relevance for the future.

I think one of the exciting things we are seeing today is the uptake of the Agile framework as a solution that looks forward rather than back. It has been apparent to most of us that the waterfall technique that was borrowed from the US automotive industry and the heavy-handed bureaucracy of the project management world have not delivered timely and cost effective solutions. In fact, they're more likely to respond to their own failure by adding yet more layers of bureaucracy.

Agile is today's framework developed for today's problems. When implemented as intended, it breaks down bureaucracy just as Toffler advised. Of course, how it is implemented will largely depend on the degree of denial, specialisation, revisionism or super-simplification in play in your organisation. Awareness of our own shortcomings in these areas will help all of us solve today's problems for tomorrow (or is that tomorrow's problems for today?).