Philippine president unveils 3-D mapping project
President Benigno Aquino III of Philippines announced that the Government allocated PHP 1 billion for three-dimensional mapping of the entire country. According to Aquino III, it is designed to minimise damage during natural disasters. Aquino made this announcement during the inauguration of the new PHP 243-million Agno River Basin Flood Forecasting and Warning System.

Russia invites Sweden to join GLONASS
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin invited Sweden to increase its cooperation on GLONASS satellite navigation system, during his visit to Stockholm, Sweden. Both countries agreed to strengthen cooperation in the space industry, including their intention to launch Swedish satellites using Russian carrier rockets.

TomTom apologises for giving users’ data to cops
TomTom apologized for supplying driving data collected from customers to police to use in catching speeding motorists. The data, including historical speed, has been sold to local and regional governments in the Netherlands to help police set speed traps. As more smartphones offer GPS navigation service, TomTom has been forced to compensate for declining profit by increasing sales in other areas, including the selling of traffic data, Dutch newspaper AD reported.

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/