Google mashups galore

Over the past few months, I've run into some cool Google Maps mashups. Check and see.

• Berkeley Crime Maps: Take a look at the what, when, and where of crime in Berkeley. Don't look too long, though, or you'll want to move.
• Housing Maps: Now that you've been staring at Berkeley's crime maps for too long, you probably want to move. These guys have you covered. All housing posts on Craigslist for the past few days are geolocated. Click on the pin to preview the post. Very cool.
• Gmap Pedometer: Moved to that new location finally? Not sure how long your running route is? Gmap Pedometer is a slick way to take care of this without the clickety-clack of a real pedometer. I like.

Flow Map Layout

Several researchers at Stanford have written some software for visualizing flow maps. There pictures are very pretty, and, I think, good data vis. The map above shows the top ten states providing migrants to NY and CA. Here's their abstract:

Cartographers have long used flow maps to show the movement of objects from one location to another, such as the number of people in a migration, the amount of goods being traded, or the number of packets in a network. The advantage of flow maps is that they reduce visual clutter by merging edges. Most flow maps are drawn by hand and there are few computer algorithms available. We present a method for generating flow maps using hierarchical clustering given a set of nodes, positions, and flow data between the nodes. Our techniques are inspired by graph layout algorithms that minimize edge crossings and distort node positions while maintaining their relative position to one another. We demonstrate our technique by producing flow maps for network traffic, census data, and trade data.

Reforestation in Niger!!!

I am not sure why the last post came out empty...very strange. This article is great "In Niger, trees and crops turn back to desert" NY Times: 2/11/07 This community planted trees to combat desertification and have shown success... It has a nice figure showing (reforestation) land use and land cover change using aerial photographs and a cool video! http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/world/africa/11niger.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Mapping two-headed invisible jaguars with Google Earth

I thought that you might enjoy this ... http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1114-google_earth-act.html

Read this! Lawsuit: MAPPS v. U.S.

The front page of the AAG.org site has news about an ongoing case in federal court that relates to the GIS industry in the US. MAPPS has sued the federal government to exclude everyone but licensed engineers and surveyors from federal government contracts for “mapping” services of every sort and description – not just those mapping services traditionally performed by surveyors. This is from the AAG legal background paper: "If this claim prevails, it could affect not only GIS but also other mapping activities, potentially including GIS field data collection, internet mapping activities, geospatial data analysis, remote sensing, cartographic services, and map creation of almost any type. This is because the Brooks Act effectively restricts the award of all federal contracts for “architectural and engineering” services to firms licensed to practice either architecture or engineering. In short, the lawsuit threatens to hijack the GIS and related industries by excluding anyone and everyone other than licensed engineers or surveyors from receiving any type of federal mapping contract. " (bold emphasis mine.) Stay tuned on the AAG website.

Yahoo Research Talk: Spatiotemporal Information Dissemination and Beyond

This is on Friday at 3PM down at Y!RB down on University. Here's the Upcoming.org link, and the abstract:

My exploration of spatial and temporal information dissemination started form the observation that a piece of information could have different value at different location and time, and just-in-time information delivery can be essential in achieving information dissemination efficiency. The exploration resulted with a few new information dissemination strategies that gear towards distributed applications that handle location and time sensitive data. A unified theme among the approaches is making space and time the first class citizen in networking and information dissemination. In this talk I will start from discussion of my past work in this direction in mobile and sensor network context, and discuss potential ramifications beyond the networking context (if time permits).

Flash Earth

Flash Earth is a really cool in-browser Flash implementation of, well, basically, Google Earth. I am too lazy to post an image right now, but it's very awesome. You can also choose from a list of imagery sources.

the YouTube of data and graphs, Swivel

Swivel offers free, public and private, data hosting. You can create nice graphs with your data but also search for other people's data. For now this is not entirely geospatial, but when the api is opened up or they update the service, a geospatial component could be added. For now I would seriously question the reliability and accuracy of any data posted there. Below is an example of a graph made with Swivel.

Double quick remote sensing

NASA and the European Space Agency each have websites that provide satellite imagery that's only hours old. Called Rapid Response by NASA and Meris Image Rapid Visualization by the ESA, both systems provide near-real time imagery from moderate resolution sensors (MODIS from NASA and Meris from ESA). Data is free to download.

Google Earth travels through time

Google Earth has added a few historical maps to their featured content. To get there, open the "Featured Content" folder then the "Rumsey Historical Maps" folder and pick your poison. Via CNET and Slashdot

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