Upcoming Domain ChangeDue to launching Geospatial FM, I will change the domain from www.geospatial.money to www.geospatial.fm. This will occur over the next few days. Just a heads up. You will still receive emails as normal.Nelson Roque

Nelson Roque is Assistant Professor, Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University. He studies the brain as it develops and ages. He also lectures in cognition. It was a deliberate choice to kick of Geospatial FM with him. If we are to create foundation models to use artificial intelligence for solving in geospatial then we had better be sure what intelligence is. Nelson started by saying cognition is the preferred term. The word intelligence comes with connotations that are to be avoided by those in a healthcare context serving the vulnerable. From the outset, then, it was a productive session driven by two studies he has conducted about an early version of ChatGPT and our incapacity to detect AI generated imagery. This included a live demo where I failed every single test! The episode concludes with an epilogue prompted by this from Matt White: https://matthewdwhite.medium.com/i-think-therefore-i-am-no-llms-cannot-reason-a89e9b00754f. Here he contends that modern versions of Gemini and ChatGPT leveraging chain of thought functionality do not actually involve reasoning.

The impression from Nelson is that Matt White is right and no reasoning is going on. This is a good accompaniment to Apple's blockbuster paper doing the rounds which carries the same message: "The Illusion of Thinking" (https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking). It was good then to secure commentary from this research psychologist on the implications of the latest versions of these tools.

Nearmap is a name near and dear to our hearts in geospatial. They were a rocketship as a stock before Thoma Bravo took them private end of 2022 (https://www.thomabravo.com/press-releases/thoma-bravo-completes-acquisition-of-nearmap-ltd). Chris Sams is Government Product Solutions Leader at Nearmap. I met him in January at Geospatial Risk Summit. He has some great commentary on how an earth observation company assists government clients to monitor climate hazards, natural disasters and their impact. He also provides insight on what the DOGE cuts mean for industry. Most importantly, however, Chris is the man who won my impromptu GIS HYPE MAN competition on LinkedIn a while back, showing what it takes to get a role at the best aerial imaging company in our industry.

Thanks Chris.

Miles Kauffman, Masters Of City and Regional planning student at Georgia Tech, came on the show to tell us about an Atlanta to Orlando high speed rail study he is conducting.

It was such a privilege to connect with him after attending a Georgia Geospatial Association (https://gageospatial.org/) networking event in Atlanta a few months ago then being referred to him by an attendee there.

At the beginning of the video, a couple of tram/trolley animations were shown. For Adelaide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tFV4WMZUNc. For Los Angeles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH9toJw6-k8. Thanks Miles for coming on and giving us hope that there is a future for high speed rail in the American South beyond Florida's Brightline.