Orthorectifying for the Masses

In a bit of Tom Sawyer-inspired app making, the New York Public Library has created an online application for rectifying their collection of digital maps of New York City. "Finding control points is so much fun! It is truly an honor to allow you, our special internet browser, to assist us in collecting them." The NYPL Map Rectifier allows you to export the rectified maps as KMLs. They've also added a separate section for maps of Haiti to assist in earthquake relief. 

Mapping the arctic tern's amazing pole-to-pole flight

After setting out (yellow line) the birds pause in the North Atlantic (red circle) to feed. Going home (orange line), they follow the winds.We still might not know the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow, but now we know the daily flight distance (up to 500km!) of the tiny arctic tern. Reported in the BBC.

Starting in August and September, the small (3.5oz) bird will head from Greenland and fly to the Weddell Sea, on the shores of Antarctica. It will spend about four or five months in the deep south before heading back to the far north, arriving home in May or June.

A team from Greenland, Denmark, the US, the UK and Iceland attached small (0.05oz) geolocating archival light loggers to the birds' legs to find out exactly where they went on this polar round trip. The devices do not rely on satellite navigation, but record light intensity.  This gives an estimate of the local day length, and the times of sunrise and sunset; and from this information it is possible to work out a geographical position of the birds. They banded 50 birds in July 2007 in Greenland, and one year later collected the devices from 10 birds (more birds with loggers were seen in the colony, but these could not be recaptured). More on these cool devices here.  More info on these amazing birds here.

Google Navigation announced for Android phones

Smart phones featuring Android 2.0 will now support a new Navigation feature developed by Google! 

From their blog:

This new feature comes with everything you'd expect to find in a GPS navigation system, like 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting. But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone's Internet connection.

This application will including turn-by-turn directions, overlayed on Google's satellite and street views, which looks very cool. 

Check out the video:

Now I just need my new Droid...

Fall 2009 GIF workshop schedule posted

The fall 2009 workshop schedule at berkeley's geospatial innovation facility (GIF) is posted! There are several new workshops scheduled, including:

• Intro to Geographic Information Systems (GIS): Social Science Focus;
• Intro to Open Source GIS: Working with Quantum GIS (QGIS);
• Intro to Agent-Based Modeling: Using GIS data with NetLogo; and
• Intro to LIDAR applications in Remote Sensing.

Check out the website!

GPS vs. GPS

There has been some buzz on the blogs about the possibility of smart phones replacing more standard recreational grade GPS devices. This article in the NY Times suggests that the smartphone is beginning to displace the GPS receiver as a convenient way for drivers to get directions to unknown destinations.

Next might be the use of smart phones for non-driving uses of the recreational GPS devices, like geocaching, or science education.  We will be releasing our OakMapper device for the iPhone in September, and will likely be better able to comment on the comparison.

Location, location, location

Two interesting articles from Wired via the Map Room.

1. Wired magazine's tips on getting better GPS reception.
2. Clive Thompson's article Future of the Web: Location, Location, Location asks: How is the return of geography (via location-aware cell phones et al) going to change our lives?

Maps + Compass

In iPhone OS 3.0, a digital compass will be provisioned, which could potentially add more helpful features to the existing Google Map application. Already, the soon-to-released OakMapper Mobile is taking advantage the open API for Google Map in iPhone SDK 3.0beta to create an application that allow iPhone users to view and report SODs on their iPhones. I believe that the future iteration of the OakMapper Mobile application can take advantage the built-in compass to re-trace the reported SODs.

 

Soul of the new machine conference next week

Kevin and I will be presenting at this conference next week. Looks to be a very interesting collection of topics.

Ghost Maps

There are over 35 million geotagged, time-stamped photos on flickr now. That's enough to start doing some pretty interesting analyses, including this one from Crandall, et al., at Cornell (presented at the WWW 2009 conference, "Mapping the World's Photos" [PDF]).  Not only is it possible to map hot spots of world tourism, but by incorporating the time stamps to map the routes people are taking, you can make out individual streets. As suggested by the Information Aesthetics blog, you could even design popular walking tours.

Once GPS-enabled cameras represent a larger share of the market, flickr may provide data for all sorts of important analyses: tracking SOD, the migration of an endangered song bird, or estimating the "desolation" of a place: the world heat map that the Cornell group presents looks shockingly like the lights at night. The machine... it's ALIVE!!!

I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle

Matthew Honan's I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle article in the Wired Magazine details his experiment with geo applications on his location-equipped mobile devices (iPhone and Android):

I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan: Load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible.

From this experience, he highlights some of the social and security issues that confronts a person who is very "geo-online." The article has references to various geo-applications for the web and mobile devices. It's a good reference article in the proliferation of geo-applications.