has put together a set of libraries that work with US Census data and make it available to view in Google Earth. The project, , looks like a great start and will hopefully lead to greater use of the Census’ already excellent resource.
I couldn’t agree with Imran more about improving access to this data. Now, about displaying raw data with ….
A cultural geographer visited my digital atlas class a while back and shared some excellent maps of cultural phenomena, highlighting the variety of ways to use maps, but also in the variety of ways the people look at place. Some of the maps he shared showed regional nomenclature for things like pop (Soda, Coke, Soda pop, etc) and what people said where. Same with sandwiches (Subs, hoagies, po’ boys, grinders, heros, etc).
He also showed a map of hip-hop. I haven’t been able to find out the author or where it’s from, but it’s a fascinating look at music and culture. There are of course some glaring problems with it, but without knowing the cartographer’s intentions, we can’t really know exactly what his point was; or why certain things are emphasized and others not.
Click on the image to view the full-sized version. What problems do you notice? What would you change?
Pollyanna, a friend from high school, sent me a link to a project she’s been working on with Architecture for Humanity called the . It is going to be a community driven site for sharing building plans and ideas for solving shelter-related problems. is dedicated to solving architectural and design issues that come after various crises; natural or human caused.
The project is quite exciting and will hopefully help address a plethora of shelter-related problems in innovative and affordable ways. Ironically enough, the “about” page starts with a declaration of Le Corbusier’s being wrong. The banner on my site right now is nick-named after the Swiss architect. He made quite a few contributions to modern architecture, including the gigantic utilitarian apartment complex that sought to give each inhabitant a window. These structures were mostly built to house the poor, but many failed horribly. (See Paris riots, 2005) It will be interesting to see how this project manifests, and hopefully there will be a variety of solutions available so we don’t get the uniformity and banality of the banlieues.
Science News Magazine has a store on right now that looks at whether smart urban design could help improve our health. The article suggests that sprawl has caused us to become less healthy, or as puts it, “Fat Lards.”
I mispoke – the ice the forms below the detritus is needle ice, not hoar ice. Hoar ice forms below snow and causes avalanches. Needle ice occurs in soil where water seeps to the surface. The water freezes when it comes into contact with the air, but water below keeps pushing.
Here’s a picture from snowshoeing this past weekend. It was the largest heaving I’ve seen where the ice crystals extruded a good 6″ from the ground.
oh, and here are some cool .
The two chiefs of the U.S. Census bureau have resigned their posts before the ramp-up to the 2010 census. This is slightly old news – from back in November, but it’s still of significant interest. To statisticians, geographers and politicians anyway. From the :
Political insiders have suggested that the officials, both highly regarded statisticians, were targeted by Republicans intent on appointing replacements who would be less likely to favor sampling for the 2010 Census. Sampling is used primarily to estimate the true population size of hard-to-measure localities and tally unaccounted for residents. Its heaviest influence is typically felt in urban communities that tend to vote for Democratic congressional candidates
The irony is that sampling could greatly reduce the cost of taking the census and provide more accurate information than a full census. Yes – a government program that is incredibly useful to the government itself, academia and research, and extensively by businesses in understanding our populace. A little more info here at . What a great beard.
British Army intelligence are reporting that insurgents in Iraq are using Google Earth to pinpoint and attack their bases. From the :
“Anyone with the internet can sign up to Google Earth and by simply typing in the name of a location they can receive very detailed imagery down to identifying types of vehicles.”
Well, not exactly. Assuming you have very detailed data, they can tell where you parked your vehicles 2+ years ago. Google doesn’t provide live data. I suppose if Coalition (there’s still a coalition, right?) would hurry up and bring peace, they wouldn’t have to worry about aerial data catching up.
In all seriousness though, the use of tools like Google Earth are easy to point the fingers at. If GE wasn’t available, there would be plenty of other resources for insurgents to use to help target stationary objects. I would assume that there are still paper maps, and someone that can fire a mortar would probably know enough math to triangulate based on map coordinates. GPS units are dirt cheap now too.
One of the perpetual fears of having geographic and other non-spatial data publicly available is that it will be misused. It is my belief that the benefit usually outweighs the costs, and anyone sufficiently determined will figure things out without the aid of tools like Google Earth. I have trouble believing that someone decides to mortar an army base because the software made it look easier.
I’ve just finished (well, not finished..) . I’ve done the 5 objectives and then some, but there are still a few things I’d like to work on – like querying. Still, I should finish up for a bit and work on my other final since it’s coming up first.
If you notice anything that doesn’t work, or would make it better, let me know. The labeling is a bit crappy, but I’m not sure how to fix that yet. Soon…
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