Spatial ineptitude

Image above: Meeting  Karen, the GPS girl - we have all heard her!

Related links to Spatialworlds
GeogSplace (a teaching blog for Year 12 geography)
Geogaction (geography professional learning blog)
Spatialworlds website
GeogSpace
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website

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A comical look at human spatial ineptitude when using a GPS in the car

Following on from the last posting related to the unfathomable ability of animals and some humans to have extraordinary spatial cognition, I thought it would be fun to have a look at the ineptitude of many humans to navigate and our increasing reliance on GPS to get us from A to B. As mentioned in a previous posting, such spatial navigation tools could in fact be taking away our ability to use our innate navigation tools. It is a slippery spatial intelligence slope we are embarking upon as we increasingly trust technology instead of our spatial instincts.

GPS comedy video clips

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWFtBbAjbsw

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjlpXCGY73E

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WreaEJDyk7M


GPS prank

A TED Talk on fooling GPS

Todd Humphreys forecasts the near-future of geolocation when millimeter-accurate GPS "dots" will enable you to find pin-point locations, index-search your physical possessions ... or to track people without their knowledge. And the response to the sinister side of this technology may have unintended consequences of its own.

Which way to go? How do they do it?

Image above: The extraordinary navigation skills of the pigeon

Related links to Spatialworlds
GeogSplace (a teaching blog for Year 12 geography)
Geogaction (geography professional learning blog)
Spatialworlds website
GeogSpace
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website

Geographical thinking Scoop.it

Spatial literacy Scoop.it

History and geography Scoop.it

Spatial Education and technology Scoop.it
Just real interesting Scoop.it

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:

manning@chariot.net.au


The mystery of spatial orientation

For years I have been fascinated with the disparity of the spatial intelligence/orientation between individuals and even more amazed by the spatial intelligence of animals such as cats and pigeons that seem to have an in-built GPS to find their way from place to place with uncanny, and unfathomable skills. In a Spatialworlds posting last year I discussed the parts of the brain that have been identified as our spatial control room with GPS capacity.
My thinking on this was particular prodded by my experience with my son when he was younger. I could walk around large cities all day that he had never been to before and then say lets go back to the hotel - and he would negotiate the streets of places like Hong Kong, without a map and take me back to the hotel, whilst I was hopelessly lost and searching for a map to orientate myself. Maybe that is why I became a geographer, because my spatial control centre was so bad that I had to learn to use maps to orientate myself. After this happened time and time again, I realised that my son had a much better spatial orientation than me, despite his limited knowledge and experience - was it just an innate ability? The following posting explores several examples of the extraordinary spatial orientation skills of some people and animals and suggest some reasons why.


The pigeon's spatial ability

 For years, scientists have struggled to explain carrier pigeons' directional challenges in certain areas, known as release-site biases. This "map" issue, or a pigeon's ability to tell where it is in relation to where it wants to go, is different from the bird's compass system, which tells it which direction it's headed in.
 

Pigeons have extraordinary navigational abilities. Take a pigeon from its loft and let it go somewhere it has never been before and it will, after circling in the sky for while, head home. This remarkable capacity extends to places tens even hundreds of kilometres from its home and is all the more remarkable to humans because we are apparently incapable of it ourselves. Humans have long made use of the pigeon’s homing ability, principally for carrying messages in the past -  especially in war.

Out of direct contact with home, and out of the landscape to which birds have become familiar, there must nonetheless be large-scale cues available to the navigating bird with which it can estimate its position relative to home. Many theories have been forwarded to explain the navigational ability of pigeons, from reading the sun’s arc to the detection of long-distance infra-sounds. Both unfounded in science! 

Another theory is that pigeons can use the predictable gradients of intensity and dip-angle in the earth’s magnetic field to map their position relative to known values at home. Again scientifically unsubstantiated. It is true that many birds do have a magnetic compass which gives them a sense of direction when they cannot see the sun. A compass helps make long-distance movement efficient and is central to migration, but it cannot help them navigate if they do not know the direction of the goal. This requires a map. It seems this map turns out almost certainly to be olfactory – pigeons, and perhaps all birds, navigate using smell. Pigeons deprived of the ability to smell cannot navigate. Scientist have fooled them with air from the wrong site and they fly in the wrong direction. However there are still experts who doubt it on reasonable grounds.

Another theory relates to the sense of smell. The case is pretty strong that birds learn the rough composition of atmospheric volatiles characteristic of their home area. Considering that this varies with winds that come from different directions, they are able to extrapolate to unfamiliar places if they are blown off-course or taken there by a human and released. Even over the open oceans, birds may use odours to navigate.It seems that olfactory deprivation has little effect on a pigeon’s orientation, and it seems that they switch to a second mechanism dominated by visual landscape cues. 

Recently, through access to miniature on-board tracking technologies such as GPS, birds can be followed with precision to unravel the mechanisms of their spatial cognition in the wild. Spatial tracking has shown that pigeons repeatedly released from the same site soon learn a habitual route home which they stick to faithfully even if it is not the quickest. Routes often follow linear landscape features, such as roads or field margins, but are learnt most effectively over landscapes of intermediate complexity. So if the pigeon’s brain contains a network of learnt routes, how are these memories acquired and how do they interact? Recently,  Andrea Flack and Dora Biro showed that having to learn three routes in parallel doesn’t cause pigeons any additional confusion. Route-learning is memorised independently, regardless of whether the sites they are released from are encountered sequentially, randomly intermingled or in strict rotation.

Other ideas to explain the power of animal navigation over unknown landscapes

It seems that there are places around the world that seem to confuse birds — areas where they repeatedly vanish in the wrong direction or scatter on random headings rather than fly straight home. Geophysicist Jon Hagstrum proposes an intriguing theory for homing pigeon disorientation—that the birds are following ultralow frequency sounds back towards their lofts and that disruptions in their ability to "hear" home is what screws them up. Called infrasound, these sound waves propagate at frequencies well below the range audible to people, but pigeons can pick them up.

"They're using sound to image the terrain [surrounding] their loft," he said. "It's like us visually recognizing our house using our eyes."

Other research supports the theory that homing pigeons use magnetic field lines to find their way home. What homing pigeons are using as their map probably depends on where they're raised. In some places it may be infrasound, and in other places [a sense of smell] may be the way to go."

The pigeon in war
The story of a WWII hero whose feats of navigation saved hundreds of lives. The hero? A pigeon named G.I. Joe. Homing pigeons can find their way home from more than 500 kilometres away and at speeds of 100 Kilometres per hour, said Mindy Rosewitz, curator at the U.S. Army Communications Electronics Museum in Fort Monmouth, N.J.

The fox! 
The foxes spatial orientation to North when hunting mice is an amazing example to affirm the thinking of the magnetic field capacity of the pigeon - this rather amusing video on the red fox is worth a look and wonder about their spatial ability.

The following summary is from the article about the research of Jaroslav Červený that appeared in the Discovery Magazine blog.

Cerveny found that when red foxes pounce, they mostly jump in a north-easterly direction. He thinks that they’re using the Earth’s magnetic field to hunt. Červený spent over two years studying wild red foxes in the Czech Republic, with the help of a 23-strong team of wildlife biologists and experienced hunters. The team recorded almost 600 mousing jumps, performed by 84 foxes at a wide variety of locations and times. They found that foxes strongly prefer to jump in a north-easterly direction, around 20 degrees off from magnetic north. This fixed heading was important for their success as hunters. They were more likely to make a kill if they jumped along their preferred axis, particularly if their prey was hidden by high cover or snow. If they pounced to the north-east, they killed on 73% of their attacks; if they jumped in the opposite direction, they success rate stayed at 60%. In all other directions, only 18% of their pounces were successful. Could the foxes be taking their direction from the environment? Červený thinks not. He found that the animals leapt in the same direction regardless of the time of day, season of year, cloud cover, or wind direction. Červený thinks that the only remaining explanation is that foxes align their pounces to the Earth’s magnetic field.

Many living things can sense magnetic fields. In his New Scientist article Cerveny concluded that other animals have a magnetic sense too, such as sharks and rays, turtles, ants, lobsters, beetles, bats and mole rats. The list also includes cow and deer. In 2008, he found that herds of cow and deer also tend to align in a north-south line like living compass needles. Spying on the animals with Google Earth satellites, it was found that that they tend to face magnetic north regardless of wind strength, time of day, or the position of the sun. A year later, they found more evidence that these animals are influenced by a magnetic sense: their neat lines could be disrupted by high-voltage power lines, which produce strong magnetic fields. The nearer the herds get to the lines, the more chaotic their positions.
In all of these cases – be they cows of birds – it’s not entirely clear what the point of having a magnetic sense is. For example, it’s reasonable to think that magnetic compasses and maps could help migrating animals to find their way, especially when visibility is poor or landmarks aren’t obvious. That makes sense, but there’s little hard data to back it up. Červený’s study is one of the first to demonstrate a clear benefit – red foxes hunt more successfully if they jump in the right direction.

So how do foxes and other animals log into the magnetic fields of the earth? Scientists suggest that animals sense magnetic fields using one of two basic methods. 

The first involves clustered crystals of magnetite, an iron mineral that line up according to magnetic fields. Depending on their direction, the crystals either repel or attract one another, creating tiny forces that could be picked up by proteins. The moving crystals could even open or close molecular gates on the surface of nerve cells. Either way, the crystals convert a magnetic field into a nervous signal.

The second method is used by birds and involves a molecule called cryptochrome, which is found in the retina. When light strikes cryptochrome, it shunts an electron over to a partner molecule called FAD. The result is a pair of ‘radicals’ – molecules with a solo electron. These unpaired electrons have a property called “spin” and they can either spin together, or in opposite directions. The two states can flip from one to another, and they lead to different chemical outcomes. This is where the Earth’s magnetic field comes in: it acts like a switch that influences the flips. In doing so, it can affect the outcome of the radical pair’s chemical reactions. All of this happens in the eyes of common birds, such as robins or warblers. This is why you can deactivate a robin’s internal compass by blindfolding it. In fact, you could make it lose its bearings by blindfolding just its right eye, or covering it with a frosted goggle. Some scientists have suggested that robins and other birds can literally see magnetic fields, as a sort of heads-up display. The fields could appear as light or dark patches (or even colours) that lay on top of what the bird normally sees.

Overall, after reading all this research and trying to piece together a coherent summary of the causes of the amazing spatial orientation of animals, I am more confused than ever!!


Going beyond the spatial skills of animals, here is an interesting human example of unexplainable spatial cognition.

Lera Boroditsky once did a simple experiment: She asked people to close their eyes and point southeast. A room of distinguished professors in the U.S. pointed in almost every possible direction, whereas 5-year-old Australian aboriginal girls always got it right. She says the difference lies in language. Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, says the Australian aboriginal language doesn't use words like left or right. It uses compass points, so they say things like "that girl to the east of you is my sister."

GIS plus! What more can one say! It is important in todays world!

Image above: Circular Quay, a hub of energy.


Related sites to the Spatialworlds project

Spatialworlds website

21st Century Geography Google Group

Australian Geography Teachers' Association website

'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website

Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website

Email contact

manning@chariot.net.au

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Where am I?? 
Melbourne, Australia: S: 37º 47' E: 144º 58'



The Geospatial Industry continues its upwards projectory.

 The following information has been gleaned from a Literature review recently completed by Dr Joel Roache, Faculty of Education, La Trobe University.  Thanks to Professor Margaret Robertson for permission to use some of this work for this posting.

Such work full of statistics and quotes from authorities and academics is always useful fodder for our arguments to include spatial technology in the school curriculum.

“The business of looking down is looking up” (Gewin, 2004).

Geospatial technology has been defined as a rapidly growing and changing field. The term geospatial technology (GST) refers to geographical information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), remote sensing (RS), and emerging technologies that assist the user in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of spatial data.

It has been argued that geospatial technologies are to spatial sciences what the microscope was to biology or the telescope to astronomy, they represent a fundamental change in the way we use, imagine and understand spatial information (Phoenix, 2004).

As previosly discussed in Spatialworlds blog, Geospatial technologies, particularly GIS and GPS, have some form of application in and for almost every professional field, every business, industry, government agency, school, and home.  These technologies have become indispensable to almost anybody who needs or wants to explore, evaluate or consider the scope of human activity.

"GIS has transformed the way we describe and study the earth. We strive to understand the surface of the earth as the living environment of human populations and the forces of change that alter the earth’s environments. The environment affects our health and well-being and we, through our activities, reshape the environment. Geographic Information Systems are computer-based systems for integrating and analysing spatial data, and therefore provide a digital lens for exploring the dynamic connections between people, their health and well-being, and changing physical and social environments." (Cromley & McLafferty, 2002, quoted in Kidman & Palmer, 2006, p.290)

Some stats to convince

"In 2004, the U.S. Department of Labor (DoL) identified geotechnology as amongst the three most critical developing technological fields, alongside nanotechnology and biotechnology, with continually growing and diversifying career opportunities." (Gewin, 2004). 

Global sales of geospatial software alone grew 10.3% in 2010 to a level in excess of USD$4.4bn, with an additional 8.3% estimated for 2011 – the USA accounts for almost half this growth, with a compound growth rate of 11% for the period 2002-2010, followed by the Asia-Pacific region on 8.7% and Europe on 7.9% - sustained by a growing worldwide need for geographically correlated information which is estimated to continue growing at a rate of just under 10% until at least 2014 (Spatialsource 1, 2011; Lawrence, 2011).  Satellite remote sensing, another form of geospatial technology, is estimated to have a global market worth USD$16bn by 2019, with an additional 100 satellites ear-marked for launching to help meet this demand, particularly for government and military agencies, but also for private-public partnerships and private business (Spatialsource 2, 2011).

The worldwide market for geospatial technologies rose from an estimated USD$5bn-$30bn between 2002 and 2005 (split 2:1 between RS and GIS) (Gaudet et al., 2003).  The market for geospatial technology in India has been valued at AUD$213m in 2008–09, with an projected growth to AUD$610m by 2013, and is believed to have surpassed AUD$15bn in China in 2011 – with over 300 000 people working in over 10,000 companies and institutes engaged in the industry, produced by an estimated 200 of the country’s universities that offer GIS-related majors (Lawrence, 2011). 

In Australia, the joint Commonwealth and States’ run company PSMA published revenues of AUD$6.5m in their most recent accounts, which combined with the financial results of the four major States, indicates a revenue base of under AUD$20m per year in Australia, well below the potential for this sector, and a by-product of a lack of training and resourcing in geospatial technologies (Lawrence, 2011).  This skills shortage will need to be addressed if Australia is to realise the full potential of geospatial information and technology as we move further into the 21^st century.

The breadth of the geospatial industry around the globe

Over 140,000 organisations use GIS worldwide, mostly governmental agencies, with environmental, civil government, defense and security, and transportation as the most active.  Moreover, and crucially, there are already signs that this rapid industry expansion is unable to be met.  NASA, for example, has had over 26% of its most highly trained geotechnology staff retire in the last decade, whilst the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency sought to expand its GIS workforce by over 7000 in the three years between 2004 and 2007 (Gewin, 2004).  The American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing estimated annual growth rates in the geospatial industry of between 9-14%, with predicted revenues in the U.S. alone topping USD$6bn by the end of 2012, whilst employment trends in industries hiring surveyors and mapping technicians were projected to increase by 23% in the U.S. in the ten years to 2012, and in the same period job openings in cartography and photogrammetry were to increase by 15% (Trautmann, MaKinster & Edelstein, 2007).  In fact the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the ‘architecture and engineering occupations group’, which includes surveyors, cartographers, photogrammetrists and surveying technicians, all key geospatial occupational categories, is an occupational group projected to have the fastest occupational growth rates in the decade leading up to 2012 (United States Department of Labor, 2005).

So, what more can one say, the geospatial is important in today's world!

The Spatial Catch 22: de-skilled by technology,

Image above: Where are we heading with spatial literacy?

Related sites to the Spatialworlds project

Spatialworlds website

21st Century Geography Google Group

Australian Geography Teachers' Association website

'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website

Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website

Email contact

manning@chariot.net.au

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Where am I??
Sydney: S: 34º 0' E: 151º 0'

Drawing cross-section are dead!  Are they?

The Spatialworlds blog has spent a lot of time advocating the use of spatial technology in the classroom and in particular the need to embrace GIS as part of teaching and learning in the geography classroom. However this posting explores the possibility that there could be a downside of all-pervasive presence and omnipresent use of spatial technology in our society.  Such a proposition is highly relevant to the use of spatial technology in the classroom. The proposition is that the very technology which has popularised and democratised geography in the community may very well be deskilling the population geographically. No longer does one have to read a map or street directory; just use your GPS or Google Map to get there or find a place. Could this be deskilling the population to the extent that people will no longer understand or know how to read a map. Is this a problem? Many of us drive a car and have no idea how the engine works, play a CD and have no idea how the music is created etc etc.  However some would argue that in schools students should have an understanding of how ‘maps work’ and not just use them. They go on to argue that students, to really have spatial understanding, need to know, for example, how a cross section is constructed and how to read a grid reference and that these are necessary spatial literacy skills for a student. So what some say is busy geography lessons; drawing maps by hand, constructing cross sections and plotting reference points may still have a place in a geography class despite the plethora of just a ‘click away’ spatial technology so readily available for the classroom these days.

A recent blog posting by a GPS marketing firm affirmed what I had been thinking on the matter.  The posting asked us "not to eliminate older technologies in our haste to embrace the shiny and new". The posting is naturally pro-technology but suggests that we must keep "an assortment of paper maps readily available" in case the "tracking systems down, natural or terrorist events occur, Sun Spot activities interfere with the satellites, nuclear explosion, civil unrest or roadworks requiring a detour (GPS does not know about that)" - yes, we get the idea; technology is not fool proof but any fool should be able to read a map to get to safety.

"Technology is great but it should never be a replacement for skills but a tool used to assist you."

The danger is that it has become too simple to listen to your GPS or read your IPhone Maps to get to a place and there is no need to use paper maps. We are becoming a society lacking basic mapping skills and the associated  spatial literacy capacities. The very technology built on amazing spatial understanding could be creating a spatially illiterate society with citizens being prepared to be a slave to the voice on their GPS or blue dot on their IPhone and not think for themselves using maps. .

Schools should use spatial technology so that students are aware of the power, functionality and applications of the technology. With caution I am also arguing that students should have the  capacity to use maps in a practical sense to have an understanding of the underlying basics of maps so that they can use the technology judiciously and even be able to survive without the technology if  the need arises.  Both are basic spatial citizenship skills.  We must be careful "not to throw the baby out with the bath water!"

Postscript: Ironically a week after this posting, Apple released IPhone 5 with the subsequent controversy related to the new Apple Maps.  Apple had replaced Google Maps on the IPhone with their new Apple Maps.  That is an interesting industrial story in itself but what was really interesting is that these new maps were found to have significant problems with accuracy and representation. Apple quickly withdrew the new maps with the damage not only done to the IPhone but also to public trust in the accuracy of spatial technology. Maybe this was a good thing! Maybe the public will realise that they should always have some spatial literacy skills and understanding of geography as they use these wonderful technology tools.