My First Earthquake

I've been studying faults and earthquakes for over a year now, but it was not until just now that I felt my first trembler. I'm currently visiting my fiancé's family in Los Altos, CA. We were all sitting around the breakfast table when all the sudden the plates all started rattling. It was very brief, only a couple seconds long, but it was definitely an earthquake.

The USGS has it initially sized at a magnitude (local magnitude, ML) of 3.1

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/nc71498795.html

Donate to charity simply by browsing the web

Google Chrome is now offering an extension that tracks the number of tabs you browse in a day. Google will donate an as-yet-unspecified amount of money per tab viewed, up to 250 tabs a day per user, up to 1 million dollars. The effort started Wednesday and stops today, but I just now learned of it now. Grab it while you can and spend the day helping charities as you browse the web.

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/p/cause/#tnc

CCOM/JHC seminars now offered as webinars!

The CCOM/JHC seminar series, that occurs each fall and spring semester, and pulls in some fantastic speakers, is now offered as a webinar so anyone, anywhere can join in.

Each week, generally by Wednesday (and certainly by Thursday), you will see a headline on CCOM's homepage of their website advertising the coming Friday's seminar, along with a link that allows you to register for the webinar. The webinars will play in almost any browser on a Mac or PC. For a full list of requirements, view here and click on "attending a webinar."

If you attended our very first attempt at this, Friday, Nov. 19th, you know we had some "technical difficulties." Our speaker was using Keynote on her Mac, and we did not realize that by default Keynote is set to not allow screen sharing. As a result, our webinar had audio, but not video. We now have all the kinks worked out and tomorrow's webinar so hopefully go off without a hitch, video, audio, and all. You'll even be able to text in questions!

Tomorrow's seminar: Multi-Source Geospatial Information Integration and Analysis for Coastal Management and Decision Making by Ron Li, Director of the Mapping and GIS Laboratory at Ohio State University. Just click the title to register.

BTW, if you want to know how to make Keynote and GoToWebinar play nicely (in case you're ever giving a webinar), check out the super quick solution here, you just have to change one preference.

Digital Mapping Camp for Kids

This is very, very cool! I hope when I have kids, I'll be able to bring them to conferences as well, and while the adults sit in talks, the kids can learn how to put together bathymetric images of the seafloor!

For Kids Of Cartographers, Digital Mapping Class Is In : NPR

Free Amazon Prime for Students

Amazon Prime is normally 79 bucks a year. For that, you get free two-day shipping on any eligible item without having a required minimum purchase. You can also upgrade to 1-day shipping for only 4 bucks an item.

This sounds great, but not enough that I am willing to fork over the 80 bucks to get it. Well, now I don't have to. Amazon is giving away free 1-year memberships to Amazon Prime to all college students currently enrolled in at least one course (this means waiting until fall semester for me...). In the fine print, it also mentions that this offer may be extended beyond the initial 1-year period. In addition to the free shipping, Amazon will also email out exclusive student-related discounts and promotions, though you can opt out of these emails at any time.

The idea of all this, of course, is to get more students buying things like textbooks from Amazon. Given that Amazon pretty much ALWAYS has the cheapest prices for new textbooks - I'm anal and prefer new to used - I generally always order through them anyway.

Check out this free Amazon Prime offer yourself: Amazon Student.

Holy Guacamole: ArcGIS for iPhone/iPad..Free!

The title pretty much says it all!

You can view maps available from ArcGIS.com, including ones that you upload yourself. This means you can access your own GIS data. They also provide tools to digitize and measure your own routes, right on the iPhone or iPad!

Here a link to a blog post with some more info:
GeoGeek

Here is the iTunes Store link:
iTunes Store

Sea Monster Fossil Unearthed

A 12-million-year-old, 17-m long whale fossil, with huge teeth, unearthed in Peru:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10461066.stm