Class Date: Thursday, 22nd September, 2011
Mr. Duncan Brooks is an RMIT surveying graduate who has forged a career as an industry leader in spatial data. He is the acting director of Spatial Information Infrastructure (SII) at DSE. His talk covered both the information that his department is custodian of, the relationships with the information providers and the uses and innovations in the industry amongst other things. I found his talk to have the deepest level of content from all of our guest lecturers. In part it was due to all of the projects that SII is involved in. Also because his talk had historical and speculative aspects. He spoke about how he was seen the uptake of spatial information over his career and how he can not guess as to what the spatial information industry will look like in 5 years time. The information is there, it is being collected and anyone at all can view it and manipulate it to the degree that the technology that they have access to allows them too.
This is an area that I find to be overwhelming. The amount of data and rate of innovation leave me boggled. I must admit that all my mobile phone can do is make phone calls and I still draw mud maps to put in my pocket whenever I cycle somewhere new. So there is a bit of the Luddite in me. However the descriptions of the advantages gained from having this information left me thoroughly impressed. The fire response, lidar mapping, the dynamic Vicmap base all impressed upon me the importance of this field, as well as the expectations that we all have that the most up to date info is available for us right now.
The second half of the class looked at emotional intelligence. I really have no idea about what mine is. I think that I perceive and understand emotions well but I am not so good at using or managing them. The clip of Daniel Goleman included a discussion about ability vs ambition and how emotional intelligence is allied with ambition. It reminded me of the characters in a piece on mathematics called Manifold Destiny by Syliva Nasar and David Gruber. In it there are two prominent mathematicians, one who is devoted to the numbers and the other devoted to influence. Both with massive ability but it is obvious that the mathematician who seeks to be a powerful figure has far more emotional intelligence than the one who lives with his mother and solves incredibly difficult problems. In this example both seem to be achieving their personal and career goals. Being severely lacking in the quality of genius it seems that I have something to gain from looking into EI. In fact, this whole series of lectures around personalty traits has offered up a lot for reflection and even though I have not agreed with it all there will be benefits for me from having encountered it.
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