Even though Platial is still buggier than, well, something with lots of bugs, it's still lots of fun to play with. I just made my first map, which shows the locations, dates & in some cases plans/photos of every still-standing home or civil structure built by California's two greatest architects, Greene & Greene. Check it out!
I was all excited to learn that Google is now allowing user-created data in custom maps. This is great! However, when I went to go play with it, I learned the current implementation - which in most ways is an alpha release - is missing 90% of what could make it useful. Such as:
Just a few (big) suggestions for the Google Maps folks to think about...
Be careful, and stay away from Sacramento, please.
This is so awesome. Visualization guru Robert Kosara at eagereyes.org has written a script to visualize the relationships between zipcodes and population within state borders. Check it out:
What would happen if you were to connect all the ZIP codes in the US in ascending order? Is there a system behind the assignment of ZIP codes? Are they organized in a grid? The result is surprising and much more interesting than expected.
The idea for the ZIPScribble came from playing with Ben Fry's excellent zipdecode. That little applet allows you to explore the ZIP codes interactively, and reveals some very interesting patterns. What it does not give you, however, is an idea of the overall structure of the ZIP space. Jeffrey Heer has reimplemented zipdecode using his prefuse toolkit, and provides a file containing ZIP codes and coordinates. So off I went on a little programming exercise to see what simply connecting the dots would do.
This guy is so awesome. I could spend a whole day on his site. Go there now.
Via mongrelmedia.com:
"MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ – quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization’s materials and debris, but in a way people describe as “stunning” or “beautiful,” and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.
The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.
Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it."
mysociety.org has produced some very interesting travel-time maps - for Cambridge, London and the nation as a whole. Future additions include relating journey times to housing price; adding travel cost data; incorporating reliability-of-transportation-mode data; and real-time web service, which would be tremendously useful as part of a trip-planning tool. Imagine something like this tied to every airline, bus, train and highway - with real-time construction, weather, and other data piped directly to it! via oblomovka
I can verify that this site is wonderful and good after easily creating my own google map hack. Just in case you are curious where to find feral cats in Sacramento, well, try here. I know you've been curious. Anyway, I'll let them tell you (via their 'about' section) why they're so cool:
Wayfaring hopes to be a great resource for people who want to build personalized maps, and share them publically or privately. When we first started talking about building this site, we just wanted to make it easier to find activities around the globe through this map and destination sharing. What bar should you go to while waiting for a table at your favorite restaurant, for example? Just simple things like that so traveling can be a little easier.
Much like Wikipedia, the value or goodness that will come from this site will come from those who use it. Almost everything can be edited and changed, so be good to each other. The trip you save might be your own.
To see an example of how this site is best used, try checking out the Best of Wayfaring!
Flickr user GISuser.com (who I will go out on a limb and assume is the person behind the always-interesting gisuser.com) has a terrific photo set full of screen shots from an array of Google Earth apps as well as innovating applications of the Google Maps API. Check it.
An excerpt from MIT's SENSEable City Lab project about the Mobile Landscape:
Today the experience, infrastructure and morphology of the city are more closely related than ever before. The profusion of handheld electronic devices with increasingly powerful networking capabilities offers its users new modes of interaction within the urban environment. It also provides designers, artists, and theoreticians a new means for engaging and understanding the city. Therefore, forget old ways to describe cities!
Because it is possible to simultaneously 'ping' the cell phones of thousands of users - thereby establishing their precise location in space at a given moment in time - these devices can be used as a highly dynamic tracking tool that describes how the city is used and transformed by its citizens.
See users duke it out on Metafilter.
While I still haven't decided upon which application to use (SmugMaps or Geoblogger), I can't help being awestruck at how others use these applications. It is amazing to be able to virtually follow along on another's journey through their photos and georeferences. I wish I had been able to use this as an archiving tool on my last roadtrip a few years back. Maybe my mum would have slept better at night (on second thought, maybe not).
ChicagoCrime.org is a free database of criminal activity reported in Chicago. It uses Google's map function to display "where bad things happen."
For example, here's a map of arrests for possession of crack cocaine. You can search for crimes by date, location, type, or more specific criteria, such as misdeeds occurring within bowling alleys. Described as the "Chicago police blotter on crack," the database is available as a customizeable RSS feed, so that you too can be constantly scared out of your wits by things you'd rather not know about.
from the site:
Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory.
Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance.
An RSS feed – which include images, of course, or else it'd be no different from other news feeds – is also available. Aside from the imaging, though, it's a good way to rank news stories and see how much weight different news organizations give different news (or non-news). It is also a pretty clear indicator of which newspapers simply recycle the exact same AP stories, rather than relying on their own critical investigation. For example, here's today's Baghdad report.
A number of good points are brought up in this Metafilter post regarding Buzztracker, as well as a suggestion for weighting articles to eliminate the inherent bias suggested by so many American, British and Canadian news sources. Another news visualization tool, Newsmap, is also mentioned.
In the new issue of Journal of Biogeography, scientists from Bonn University present what is thought to be the most complete tool for plant biodiversity comparisons (press release). What I found interesting was the capacity to reveal places known to be biodiverse yet have been under-researched. World Changing has the goods.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a beautiful world map on your wall that went along with your modern decor? And wouldn't it be better if it told the time in 81 of your favorite cities? Worldclock.2001 is here to satiate those desires. Thank you MocoLoco.
Should you find a point of interest in Manhattan that you would like to share with others, simply folkmap it via cellphone on FoundCity.net:
Using folksonomy tags, people in the city can index what they find interesting about the city, in order to bookmark it for themselves as well as to reveal it to other people. Folkmapping allows you to both keep track of the things you stumble across in your daily adventures, as well as compare notes with other people in your city, to learn more about your surroundings and discover interesting things you may have been missing out on. And as you do it, you contribute to a growing index of space that becomes more interesting with each new entry.
Modelling air pollution in changing climates is a difficult science, but maybe unnecessary, as some think it will all just blow away:
Recently the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) released Heat Advisory, a report warning that surface air quality could suffer greatly as a result of climate change. In response, a group called the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), together with another group called United for Jobs, published Air Quality False Alarm, a detailed criticism of the NRDC forecast. PRI argues, among other things, that anthropogenic emissions in the US will drop sharply in coming decades. In their view, air pollution will become a thing of the past, no matter what happens to climate.
As the total amount of data on the web increases (Google is currently
searching more than 8 billion web pages) regular search engines are
going to become increasingly useless. The number of results for the
small Texas town of Lufkin is 902,000.
In order to cope with the overwhelming amount of data available it is inevitable that the web will become more spatially-oriented. Associating location with data isn’t a difficult leap. It is not only currently happening but there is a growing amount of evidence to show that information with a spatial component is more desirable.
Make your own multimedia Google Map using Engadget's tutorial. [via Metafilter]
House or apartment hunting can be so deliciously simple when using this hack, which places house and apartment listings from Craigslist onto Google Maps.
If Google could attack world hunger with the kind of ferocity that they've invested in their mapping technology, the entire world would be buried in at least a kagillion bazillion acre-feet of food. Congrats to Google for their new satellite image maps.
Go from URL to real-world location with the launch of GeoURL 2.0 beta. To ease its use, try the Firefox extension. Yes, this was originally created by Joshua Schachter. Maybe you've heard of him.
With paraSITE, Michael Rakowitz advances the odd phenomenon of urban parasitism. I have never seen anything like this in my entire life, but seriously, if someone had the chutzpah to set up an igloo-shaped vent attachment to my living or working space, I would have to allow them to stay, because, well, look at it! It is just amazing.
Still in beta, Constructor is a web based application - a sort of dadaist online Sim City - that allows you to "build" a small city. It's still under development and somewhat limited, but it is a lot of fun - and the gallery is a wonderful and weird tour of the imaginations of many people who I wish were working as urban planners.
Regarding the post below: apparently Ed Ruscha trumped Amazon by several years; I wonder if they'll be paying him royalties for his intellectual property?
We now have technology that allows us to walk the streets without walking the streets. Amazon's yellow page service slash search engine, A9.com, lets us virtually wander around a few major cities to find the business for which we are looking. Here's a quicktime video where the creators quickly describe the experience. From a data steward's view, I'd have to think that it would be a severely money draining exercise to link real photos to an ever-changing landscape. But try it before they go under, because it is a little fun to play with. For instance, I just took a virtual stroll to an Apple Store in San Francisco. Rad. Thanks to waxy.org for the tip.
new new new. faster and faster. more and different and lighter and faster must be better, right? does anyone else ever get tired of the acceleration of just about everything? postmodern times are so...exhausting. the berkeley institute of design is pushing the envelope of design and technology in reference to just about everything from architecture and planning to gadgets to make your life, eh hm, easier. of particular interest is the mobster database that collects aggregated location information from large amounts of people over long periods of time so as to graphically show social connections and movement patterns. really, we'll protect your privacy. trust us. meanwhile down under, the house of the future has been designed and is ready for your examination, critique, and perhaps you might make an order! nothing hewn and hammered here, baby. nope. we're talkin houses made of steel, concrete, or glass, but my favorite is the house made of cardboard. speaking of the future, writing a brief for the brookings institute (PDF), Arthur Nelson argues that half of the built environment needed by 2030 is still yet to be built. this, he argues, offers us an oppotunity to build newer, better, and smarter. Though his claim that a "new metropolis" in the form of a sustainable city is "within grasp" seems a bit of a reach, at least he argues that we need public input, metro- and region-wide planning, and sustainable cities that offer real benefits to dwellers. now, if only we could convince those who actually make the decisions...
The International Journal of Health Geographics is an fascinating online journal that harbors articles on the myriad ways the health profession uses GIS and geographic data to illustrate patterns of disease and illness around the globe.
David Goldwasser has written a brief introduction to GPS photo linking, including sections on technology, both GPS receivers and camera, potential uses, workflow, and a bit more. His instructions for processing the data are specific to the Macintosh platform but seem to be extensible to most computing platforms.
Many parts of the world use wind power to provide energy for homes and businesses. The top producers include Germany, the United States, Spain, Denmark and India. In the US, 1.6 million households are powered annually by wind turbines. However, even smaller countries like the UK use wind turbines to power approximately 495,000 homes annually.
While wind turbine farms are generally located in rural areas, planners and architects are finding ways to incorporate them into the infrastructure of large cities. One great example of this idea is the plan for the Freedom Tower in New York City, which would include turbines to help power the new building. Above, at right, take a look at Toronto's urban wind turbine. Combining beauty and utility, it sends juice to 250 homes annually. See also urbanturbines.com for more projects.
[Graphic via]
Heat Island Effect is a calamity where urban areas experience temperatures up to ten degrees hotter than their neighboring rural areas. According to research being conducted by the EPA, this phenomenon poses serious health risks to urban dwellers. Not only is excessive heat bad for a person, but the ground-level ozone that forms as a result of this heat can be particularly damaging. Riffle through the EPA's Heat Island Effect website to find out what can be done about this heinous happening.
Also check out the pilot project that Sacramento, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Baton Rouge and Houston are taking part in to reduce Heat Island Effects in their cities.
The Equator Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration creates the Drift Table.
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