OK I've been trying to avoid getting dragged into this debate - I
don't like the paleo/neo divide as I have enough of a problem with the
critical/real geography dispute that I left the UK to get away from. I
did my PhD in Paleomagnetism so I'm not sure where that puts me :-) My
other problem is that a lot of what the so called neogeographers are
doing is what the computational geographers were doing in the 1990's
but with more compute power on their desk tops and mobile phones than
we had on our servers in those days.

Back in 1998 the Centre for Computational Geography at Leeds produced
Virtual Slaithwaite (http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/papers/99-8/) as a
public participation planning exercise, we did it using java and perl,
this was one of GeoTools' first public outings and it still works
http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/projects/slaithwaite/ppgis.html.

The CCG did a lot of work like this some of which is being recreated,
some of which has been ignored and some of which was so off the wall
that I shudder to think of it now. But if you want a system to site
super markets then I recommend
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.43.2753 to
you. The math is easy enough and we included pseudo code (possibly
even FORTRAN).

Finally my preferred Geography quote is:
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
    Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

The CCG didn't hire very many geographers as we could find lots of
academics around the department to teach geography but we had no local
experts in computing.

Ian




-- 

Ian Turton
http://www.geotools.org
http://pennspace.blogspot.com/

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