Apple mobile mapping software? coming soon!

We mac users are all a-twitter about the news of an impending Apple mapping software. Here is a sample from NPR:

There's been speculation for months that Apple will try to elbow Google's popular Maps app aside on the iPhone and unveil its own map app, and some of the best evidence yet comes from Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.  The paper looked into the reasons for the impending switch and the broader implications it would have for the smartphone market.  The article continues...

The new software is rumored to be leaner, meaner, and packing a rad 3D visualization capability. It will be unveiled as soon as next week at the annual Apple developer conference in San Francisco.

Report on the April 19 Careers in GIS event at UC Berkeley

GIS @ Berkeley

Careers in GIS

On April 19 the College of Natural Resources and the College of Environmental Design held an informative workshop on Careers in GIS.  This workshop covered many aspects of Geographic Information Sciences: resources on the Berkeley campus, options for the new Minor in Geographic Information Science and Technology, and highlighted areas of GIS research.  Over 40 people attended, and we had a lively program, including a welcome from Jennifer Wolch (Dean of CED), Doug Richardson (Executive Director of the AAG), Maggi Kelly (Professor in ESPM); Scott Stephens (Professor in ESPM) talked about his work using GIS and spatial data for forest fire modeling, Mei-Po Kwan (Visiting Professor in Geography) discussed GIS Analysis for transportation and health studies, highlighting some of her fascinating work in spatial-temporal analysis of human movement; and Paul Waddell (Professor in CRP) showed highlights of his GIS and urban mapping, including UrbanSim, a very novel open source approach to city planning and accessibility studies. In addition, Jon Ridener from the Earth Sciences and Map Library discussed the GeoData@UCBerkeley, a GIS data portal and repository created by the UC Berkeley Library. Wow! All great stuff.

The event was brought to you by: College of Natural Resources, College of Environmental Design, Geospatial Innovation Facility. For more information on GIS at Berkeley, please see the GIS @ Berkeley website.

Follow up on Supreme Court gps+privacy case

From the NYTimes. Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool. By ERIC LICHTBLAU, Published: March 31, 2012.

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

A GPS tracker. The Supreme Court recently ruled that such a device placed on a suspect's car was an unreasonable search.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that such a device placed on a suspect's car was an unreasonable search (but sidestepepd the question of how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies). The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

Finding old maps online: new resource now available

David Rumsey, with Humphrey Southall (University of Portsmouth) and Petr Pridal (Moravian Library) led a presentation at AAG introducing a new website: oldmapsonline.org. The website's goal is to provide a clearer way to find old maps, and provide them with a stable digital reference. As David says: hundreds of thousands of historical maps have now been scanned and made available on-line by libraries around the world, and this has been a great boon to anyone interested in the history of cartography. However, those interested in the history of the places shown on maps have been less well served: just because a map is "on the web" does not mean we can find the relevant library web site, and even when we find the site the available catalogues are little help in finding maps covering particular places.  A further problem is that even when digitized historical maps have been made available via geo-spatially aware online systems, the resulting references,i.e. the Uniform Resource Locators for accessing the maps, are generally very technology-dependent and unlikely to work even a few years later. The Old Maps Online project provides a universal search portal for historic maps designed to complement rather than compete with libraries' own search interfaces, and also developing best practices for defining persistent Uniform Resource Identifiers for historic maps - URIs not URLs.

Landsat continues...

Tentatively excited: the Landsat mission will continue (I think). Its new name will be LDCM: Landsat Data Continuity Mission. Tentative launch date in 2013. More information here. The President's recent budget seemed to inlude continued funding for Earth Observation. The news post I read says: Among the other highlights in the White House summary, spending on Earth observation satellites would be maintained at nearly $1.8 billion next year.

That was fast! Supreme Court rules on GPS & privacy

From the NYTimes today. The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and monitored its movements for 28 days.

But the justices divided 5-to-4 on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying that the problem was the placement of the device on private property. That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies.

Walter Dellinger, a lawyer for the defendant in the case and a former acting United States solicitor general, said the decision “is a signal event in Fourth Amendment history.” “Law enforcement is now on notice,” he said, “that almost any use of G.P.S. electronic surveillance of a citizen’s movement will be legally questionable unless a warrant is obtained in advance.”

Previous wrap-up post on the case.

TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X cover the globe

TanDEM's view of Iceland: The country was beyond the sight of the shuttle topography mission in 2000We talked about TanDEM before, after launch. The German satellite radar twins - TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X - are a year through their quest to make the most precise, seamless map of varying height on Earth.

They've now acquired data across the entire globe at least once. However, some tricky sampling areas, such as tall mountains and thick forests, will require several passes and so we don't expect to see a fully finished product before 2014.

As compared with the Shuttle product at best spatial resolution of 30m by 30m, and a vertical resolution that varies from 16m to 10m, the intention of the TanDEM mission is to go down to a spatial resolution of 12m by 12m and a vertical resolution of 2m. Airbone lidars can achieve much better precision, but these maps are necessarily regional in extent - they will cover only relatively small areas. The purpose of TanDEM is to build a world DEM that is single-source and has "no joins".

Report from the BBC here.

The TanDEM Digital Elevation Model of Mount Etna, Sicily, Italy

The new CA district map challenged in court: maps matter

From KQED, reported this morning. The California Supreme Court today is hearing oral arguments in the case of Vandermost v. Bowen, a rather complicated case related to the redistricting lines that the California Citizens Redistricting Commission drew last year, and which the state Republican Party is none too happy about.

Because the supporters of this referendum (and a lawsuit challenging the maps as well) contend that the law now says the disputed state senate maps drawn by the independent commission cannot be used in 2012 if they're being challenged with a ballot referendum. They say the state Supreme Court would have to step in and draw their own maps.

The defendants in the case are the CA Secretary of State through the attorney general's office. Their case is that the court does not have to step in and draw new temporary maps for the state senate.

This is really a fight over who draws political districts in California: the independent citizens commission, or temporary districts drawn by the California Supreme Court, or possibly even use the old districts, which have existed for the last 10 years.

cesaria evora: 1941-2011

cape verde islands from ENVISATSinger Cesaria Evora, dubbed the "Barefoot Diva" for often performing without shoes, has died in her native Cape Verde at the age of 70.

I was able to see her on two separate occasions at the Zellerbach here on the Berkeley campus. She was truly amazing: commanding our undivided attention as she worked the stage with a large tight band and horn section, and the legendary bare feet and cigarettes.

This Envisat image captures her home, the Republic of Cape Verde, a group of volcanic islands located in the North Atlantic Ocean some 600 km off Africa’s west coast.
 
The archipelago comprises 10 islands and several islets and has a total land area of about 4000 sq km. Islands visible from top left to right are Santo Antão, São Vicente, Santa Luzia, São Nicolau, Sal, Boa Vista, Maio, Santiago, Fogo and Brava.

Wetland restoration reduces sea level rise impacts over next 100 years in the SF Bay

sun setting on bay marshA new study led by Diana Stralberg at PRBO Conservation Science and including work done by our own Lisa Schile, projects a bleak future for San Francisco Bay’s tidal marshes under high-end sea-level rise scenarios that are increasingly likely. PRBO and colleagues found that in the worst case scenario 93% of San Francisco Bay's tidal marsh could be lost in the next 50-100 years (with 5.4 feet or 1.65 meters of sea-level rise, low sediment availability and no significant restoration). Not all marshes will be lost and restoration currently underway can keep more marshes intact as sea levels rise.

"Tidal marshes are incredibly resilient to changes in sea level, depending on how fast seas rise and how much sediment is available.  Unfortunately, marshes cannot keep up with the high-end sea-level rise predictions on their own.  They will need our help.” said Diana Stralberg, the study lead author of PRBO and the University of Alberta.

Our study was published this week in the high-impact journal PLoS ONE. To view maps of where the marshes will be under various scenarios over the next 100 years, visit www.prbo.org/sfbayslr. News coverage from SF Chronicle here. CNR coverage here.