GIS tutorial

I decided to go on a bike ride around the stanford area and upper Menlo Park on Sunday, unfortunately I didnt take any pictures because... i couldnt be bothered, I know, what an awful excuse, but take my word for it, it was beautiful.  i'll make sure to take pictures the next time I go out on a random outing like that.

On Monday and today I have been getting on with my online GIS introductory course and have already completed 2 out of the 8 modules.  The content of the course is actually quite interesting and well explained but some of it is understandably quite complicated but I've just been powering through and doing my best to be honest.  I'll probably read over the course material again and again to help it sink it, a lot of it is on statistics and software functions.  

I am actually sort of a test guinea pig because the USGS have never had a high school level intern do the GIS training before, so I'm sort of an experiment to see if it can be done.  

Again, the Lumix is not doing me proud, but the picture is basically of my desk in the GIS lab.  On the screen is a map template of Florida and the south east of the USA that I've been working on, my task was to map where the towns with the biggest population of over 50 year olds were.  Another map I worked on earlier was of a tornado path and I had to create a tornado path prediction and calculate the cost of damage caused by the tornado.

Proof that I'm doing GIS! 

The other day I was instructed by my supervisor to create a brief presentation on the missing flight MH370 using BBC news material.  The USGS was thinking of getting involved in the recovery mission as they have some experts on sound wave physics, so my little presentation is going to be used at a future meeting, which I think is quite cool.