got geoint?

Welcome to the Friday’s Food for Thought Post on got geoint? Yes, it is Friday and you are merely a few hours away from spending two precious days away with friends and family. Or perhaps you have a weekend date with your DVR to catch up on your favorite TV shows. Eitherway, congratulations. You made it to Friday. Earlier this week, we did a post about situational GEOINT awareness for the average consumer. So, we thought the concept of “situational awareness” and just how “aware” we can be to our surroundings. Oh, and yes, we apologize for the Mike “The Situation” photo – could not help ourselves. Happy Friday!

Situational Awareness – The Definition
Situation awareness, or SA, is the perception of environmental elements within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future. It is also a field of study concerned with perception of the environment critical to decision-makers in complex, dynamic areas from aviation, air traffic control, power plant operations, military command and control, and emergency services such as fire fighting and policing; to more ordinary but nevertheless complex tasks such as driving an automobile or motorcycle. Situation awareness (SA) involves being aware of what is happening around you to understand how information, events, and your own actions will impact your goals and objectives, both now and in the near future. Read the full Wikipedia entry here.

Do You Have Good Situational Awareness?
As a crime scene investigator, one of the strangest things to get used to is people’s lack of situational awareness. One of the best examples I can think of is the bank robbery. There can be five or six police cars parked outside a bank, lights flashing, yellow barrier tape up, and inevitably someone will cross under the tape and start tugging on the locked front door. They may even peer in and ask the uniformed police officer to open the door! We can all laugh at situations like these but it is the lack of situational awareness that oftentimes leads to becoming a victim. Read the full Op-Ed from the Examiner here.

ESRI Situational Awarness
Esri Situational Awareness is a ready-to-operate hardware, software, and data solution that provides a geospatial framework for immediate and long-term situational awareness needs. It includes a powerful data fusion and analysis engine; a set of fully customizable clients for data visualization and analysis; and locally hosted, prerendered data. Because Esri Situational Awareness is based on core Esri server technology, it easily integrates with existing GIS and IT infrastructures to provide a common operational picture (COP) across multiple organizations. Hey, how could we not give Esri a shout out for having a “situational awareness” product? Learn more here.

What is Situational Irony?
Irony comes from an ancient Greek word, ‘eirōneía’, which means hypocrisy or feigned ignorance. Situational and verbal irony is often intentionally used as emphasis in an assertion of a truth. Situational irony is that which results from recognizing the oddness or unfairness of a given situation, irrespective of whether the outcome is positive or negative. Sometimes, the outcome may be very amusing in such unusual circumstances. There are three types of irony – verbal irony, dramatic irony and situational irony. In ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’, Dorothy goes to a wizard to fulfill her wish to go home before discovering that she had the ability to go back home all this while. The Scarecrow longs for intelligence only to discover that he is a genius, just as the Tin man longs to be capable of love only to discover that he has a heart. Similarly, the Lion who at first seems to be a coward, turns out to be very courageous. Has Mike “The Situation” ever experiences situational irony? Well, if he did, we doubt he would have the intellectual capacity to know it.

Can You Pass The Situational Awareness Test?
We decided to skip our usual somewhat-related music video and pass along this situational awareness video test. Do you think you have what it takes to pass it? Check it out and let us know.

Happy Friday!

Tags: ESRI, ESRI Situational Awareness, geospatial intelligence, got geoint?, Jersey Shore, Mike The Situation Jersey Shore, Situational awareness, Situational Awareness and GEOINT, Situational Awareness Test, USGIF