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Showing posts from May, 2012

Location technology saving lives? Possibly not.

This week I glimpsed fist-hand the rather disconcerting evidence that the use of location still has a long way to go in our emergency services. As you may or may not know, I'm a fairly keen runner and hence when I'm away from home working I endeavour to get out for a few miles each day. Now earlier in the week my run along the canal towpath in Leeds took a rather eventful turn as I came across a chap who had apparently suffered from some sort of seizure and was lying prostrate on the ground. Now I wasn't first on the scene, but it had clearly happened moments before, and along with the chap's friend a number of cyclists and runners had stopped. His friend told us that the young man had a similar episode about 3 weeks ago and was having some checks, so after the man was placed into the recovery position his friend was told to call 999 as he clearly needed help. Now the problem was, although we were only a couple of miles from Leeds city centre, we were at a rather

2012: A Spatial Odyssey

So here it is; my blog and my inaugural post in my latest sortie into the world of social media and communication. Why am I doing this? Well to be honest I'm not really sure, other than 140 characters in Twitter is almost always too succinct for my thoughts and having a blog seems like a good way for me conjecture, capture, shape and share my thinking (not that I'm expecting many people will probably ever read this!). I'm way behind the curve on all of this social-media, but like the ethos behind the original garage-punk scene I am loving the DIY 'anyone can do this' spirit behind all of this.  Hopefully the blog title is relatively self-explanatory and I'm fully expecting all things spatial and GIS will be the primary topic covered (apologies now to any misguided Clarke or Kubrik fans). However in the truest sense of an odyssey I would not bet against the journey getting lost, diverted and heading down many a dark-street as we go. If I can figure out w