GIScience Show

The slide show linked below was shown at the UCGIS 2001 Congressional Breakfast held in the U.S. Capitol Building on February 8, 2001.  The automated PowerPoint presentation was shown both before and after the breakfast. The slide show illustrates the wide variety of real world applications arising from GIScience advancements. We received numerous requests from university professors and agency personnel for a copy of the PowerPoint presentation to show at open houses for high school students and the general public. Those contributing slides are gratiously allowing us to make the slide show available to anyone who wants to use it for educational purposes. In particular we want to thank Environmental Systems Research Institute, GE Smallworld, US Geological Survey and the many professors who contributed their slides. If we missed any credits at the end, please let us know so we can add them.

The PowerPoint presentation is available at http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~onsrud/UCGISmaine/GIScShow.sit 

Please feel free to use it in student recruiting or GIScience public awareness presentations.

Technical Notes on Downloading and Using

1. Downloading over cable/high bandwidth takes about five minutes. To decompress the PowerPoint presentation and two of its accompanying movies, you may need to download a free copy of Stuffit Expander from http://www.aladdinsys.com/expander

2. Because of the numerous graphics, you may need to increase your Memory for the PowerPoint application program. For a larger version of the enclosed presentation I used settings of Minimum size = 10500 and Preferred size = 70000. The software then was able to handle the files without problems.

3. I used a Mac to create the show so some of the text may be a bit off in the PowerPoint presentation if you are using a PC.

4. The show is meant to simply run by itself in kiosk mode. Once started it will continue to loop until 'escape' is pressed.

5. The presentation contains two slides with movies that need to be activated each time before the slide show is run. (I tried converting the movies to alternative formats so they would run without resetting but the loss of resolution led me to leave them as they are.) The movies are on slides #14 and #32. TO ACTIVATE THE MOVIES: Go to each inactive slide, click on the movie graphic and then on the "film strip logo" for the movie (i.e., make certain the slider bar appears and the slider is all the way to the left or the graphic won't activate). Go through the Slide Show tool bar to > Custom Animation > click on the first Media item in the Animation Order window > and then click OK. (The settings in the other windows should be correct. For instance, under Timing the settings should be Animate and Automatically). If you want to run the movies more than once while the PowerPoint slide is showing you will find an identical graphic sitting under the graphic on each slide you just activated. If desired, you can go back and active those underlying graphics by moving the graphic on top, activating the underlying graphic, and then replacing the graphic on top. Remember, movies need to be reactivated each time before you run the Slideshow.

6. I did not include two longer movies from NASA/Space Science shown at the breakfast since permissions could not be acquired.

Best of luck. HJO