Joshua Campbell, PhD’s Post

Cipher Brief article reviewing SF recruiting issues and proposed cuts. As a geographer this stood out as a major problem. “[SF Qualifications Course] has plummeted to around 45% and 60% in recent years. It’s unclear what led to that lower pass rate, though failing land navigation accounts for roughly 70% of all failures”

So many good choices, I’m taking the Apache Sedona and Point Cloud / PDAL workshops.

Why is it so hard for the media to say “geography” or “geographer”? Will talk circles around it. Don’t get me wrong, extremely excited about Walz’ understanding of geography and geospatial, but headlining with “map nerd” is not useful. Words matter. https://lnkd.in/ewjYAvwn

Ad astra

My thinking has been heavily influenced by Jerry Dobson’s work, so I’ll paraphrase his work here (https://lnkd.in/eaYaBBbd). What separates a “geographer” from other domains is the way in which scientific theory is constructed. In short, a geographer, when studying a phenomenon, will as a first step make a map of the observations and apply tests of spatial logic (proximity, clusters, etc) in order to understand and ultimately explain the phenomenon. To me, applying this approach to knowledge discovery and theory creation is the core of the discipline of geography, what differentiates from other domains that have spatial elements, and can be described in shorthand as saying “looking at the world through a spatial lens”.

So LinkedIn, I can’t opt out of “catch up” notifications and videos haven’t played for 2 weeks…why?