3D technologies and emgency managment in GIS

When people ask me what I want to do with my life next year it always makes me a little nervous because who knows what they want to do with the rest of their lives at 22. Yes I know that there are people out there that said they wanted to be a teacher at the age of 5 and actually become one and that is good for them...I am not like that.

After checking out these two websites: http://placeways.com/index.php?anim=no, http://placeways.com/index.php?anim=no I think I might have a better idea of what I am interested in. The technology is amazing "placeways" has created a virtural world that you can map out perfectly to the real world around you. This includes 3D houses and scenary.

This software does not only simulate houses but also trees and cars making it very life like! The uses for this are endless...almost any career could use this technology.

The ESRI website was very interesting because I got to explore emergency maganment techniques Which I have a strong interest in. They have apps for flooding which will project what areas will become flooded with heavy rains. I have found out that FEMA has its own software that has even greater possiblities when it comes to prediction and this would be awesome to work with. I would love to have a career with them in the future.

Social Explorer

I was messing around on the social explorer website and I thought it was very user friendly and I really enjoyed the slide show option! I am a very visual person and when I got to see the transition over the years one right after another I was fascinated.The most curious thing I noticed was the huge jump in race from 1970....

This clearly shows that the Southeast has the majority of black citizen in the 1970s, this is drastically different in the 1980 just 10 years later ....

In the 1980s there is a massive spread of the black race from the southeast through out the entire country. Seeing this on paper would not be as effective as looking at the pictures next to each other like we can with this social explorer website.

Back to the matter of if this website could be useful for examining the social,ethnic and cultural history of a place I think you can do all those things as long as it fell in the realm of 1790-2007 and was in the categories offered. Which it should be because there are many categories ranging from foreign born residents to veterans, education, even areas with the longest commute to work. The only problem I ran into was when I got the the more recent years (2005-2007) an error appear saying you needed the upgraded version. I have included a picture of the error below.

One other thing that might be an issue is a lot of the results are from the census tract and this is not always accurate. You can only take the data from people who will fill out the census questionnaires and not everyone does it. I am assuming the only truly accurate one is births because most hospitals log those types of things but I am sure there are still unrecorded births in the U.S.