Did you pack in the camera? Where’s my toothbrush? Hey, don’t forget the blanket! These are just some of the words of excitement that seem to flow around Civil Engineering students at IIT Kanpur as their 5th semester nears an end. It’s time for the Nainital Survey Camp to start. It is ironical that people think you are going for a vacation, while this is actually classified as a proper course with credit based weightage and is thus mandatory without attaching any of the holiday related ideas to it.

Tsunami in Japan:Shunji Murai; A long way to go:Rajib Shaw; Real time indoor location based service test bed:Li-Ta Hsu, Wen-Ming Tsai, Shau-Shiun Jan; A geo-spatial approach to urban development:Mahavir

I was given the title of this article “How Japan is managing the disaster of this magnitude?” by the Coordinates magazine but I dare to say that Japan is not yet managing the disaster but suffering from the hardships. Though all Japanese people are in mourning the sorrow, I feel it should be my duty as an old scholar to report on the biggest earthquake and Tsunami to the rest of the world. I hope that my report would be useful to prevent the similar misery.

An earthquake of magnitude 9.0 occurred on 11th of March at 14:46 in the east of Japan, causing a tsunami which hit the east coast, and made extensive damages in five prefectures: Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima and Ibaraki, and has made direct and indirect impacts to the other nearby provinces including Saitama, Chiba, Tokyo and Kanagawa prefectures. As of March 21, the confirmed number of death is 8,450 with reported missing 12,931. Thus, the total casualty may be over more than 21,000 people, and therefore making it as the worst disaster Japan has experienced after the World War II.

Today, mobile devices are not only tools for the communications but also personal assistants. People could use the mobile device built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver to search for information based on his/her location, thus called Location Based Service (LBS). However, due to the GPS signal propagation limit, the positioning and navigation services are discontinued when the user enters the indoor environments. When users are in the indoor environments, how to continuously obtain their locations becomes a popular research topic.

Recommendations of the National Commission on Urbanization (NCU), set up in 1985, covered the aspects of emergence of nodal points; special regional characteristics of urban growth; spatial eco-tones of urbanization; spatial distribution of wheat and rice productivity and industrial employment; and spatial planning of settlements . Besides other analysis, it studied the spatial distribution of cities and urban agglomerations in 1971 and 1981 .

April 2011, 6th National GIS Symposium in Saudi Arabia, 24-26 April, Khobar, Saudi Arabia, www.saudigis.org ; Geo- Siberia 2011, 27-29 April, Novosibirsk, Russia, www.geosiberia.sibfair.ru/eng/

Tsunami in ocean, in coasts, in lands, …In our minds too.Throwing new challenges on develpoment models,Raising questions on research, earthquake predictions, etc. Managing disasters of this magnitude,
Trigerring thinking and rethinking. The tsunami continues…

Trimble to acquire OmniSTAR for land applications: Trimble has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire certain assets related to the OmniSTAR Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signal corrections business from Fugro N.V. The acquisition is expected to expand Trimble’s worldwide ability to provide correction services for land-based agriculture, construction, mapping and GIS and survey applications.

Expert blames poor infra for tsunami disaster: More infrastructures spending by Japan could have lessened the impact of this month’s deadly tsunami but the government has become too reliant on low-cost measures such as handing out warning maps, said Professor Fumihiko Imamura, Tohoku University’s Disaster Control Research Center.