September 2008
- Global Air Traffic Simulation
- A simulation of global air traffic over 24 hours: Cooool. Via Gadling and Infonaut. Previously: Flight Patterns….
- Google Switches to Tele Atlas, Errors Proliferate
- As was widely reported, Google Maps is now exclusively using Tele Atlas as its digital mapping data provider, dropping Navteq, which provided data for Google Maps proper but not for the Mobile or API products (All Points Blog, James Fee,…
- MapTube
- I should have mentioned MapTube long ago; Andrew Hudson-Smith wrote to me about it in May: MapTube, the new mapping site from the guys at Digital Urban and CASA at University College London to view, overlay, mix and match…
- Georgia Damage Assessment Maps
- Maps and satellite images from UNOSAT showing the damage caused by the conflict between Russian and Georgian forces over South Ossetia and Abkhazia last month. Via Catholicgauze….
- OpenStreetMap’s Progress
- If you’d like to see how OpenStreetMap has grown over the years, check out Geofabrik’s gallery of animated maps, which show OSM’s progress in a few locations. Via OpenGeoData….
- GPS Spoofing
- With the number of vehicles using GPS as a form of security — tracking a vehicle’s location and speed — it’s interesting to see whether GPS security can be spoofed, allowing a truck to be hijacked, for example, and whether…
- Modified Mars
- Frans Blok has been imagining maps of a future, terraformed Mars. He writes, “Almost ten years ago I made this map of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars. Recently I created a more sophisticated visualisation of a terraformed Mars, although no…
- ‘A Huge Annual Trawl of Revision’
- The Independent’s “I Want Your Job” feature features a cartographer — namely, Iain MacDonald of Collins Geo. Swoon at the exciting life of a cartographer: tedious painstaking research! No, seriously: after reading this I want to be a cartographer; keep…
- Travis McDade on the Hayes Library Thefts
- Also on MapHist, Tony Campbell points to this scorching blog entry by Travis McDade (a library administration professor and author of The Book Thief; see previous entry). Dade is writing about two thefts of rare books from the Rutherford B….
- Brubaker Sentenced to 30 Months
- 74-year-old map thief James Brubaker was sentenced to 30 months in prison yesterday, the Calgary Herald reports; he had pleaded guilty to two counts in June. (Why the Calgary Herald? Because the Montana-based Brubaker apparently hit both the Universities of…
- The Atlas of the Real World
- It’s not on their website (unless I’ve missed it); I have to find out from this item in a newspaper from the United Arab Emirates (!) that the cartograms from the fantastic Worldmapper team are soon going to be…
- Top Mapping Blogs
- It seems as though every other map blogger has offered their opinion on Sean’s list of top 25 37 blogs in GIS and cartography, so here is my two cents’ worth: Instruments like Alexa and Technorati are blunt, and measure…
- Maps That Matter
- Maps That Matter, a blog by the University of Manchester’s Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins, looks at influential maps and diagrams: classics of design, significant milestones in terms of cartography or information, that sort of thing. Via Catholicgauze….
- Review: Cartography Design Annual #1
- Cartography Design Annual #1 Nick Springer, editor Springer Cartographics, 2008. Softcover, 78 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-6152-2116-8 Based on submissions from the Cartotalk community, this ambitious first iteration of the Cartographic Design Annual, edited by Nick Springer, is intended as a showcase…
- No Geotagging for GE E1050 Camera
- Remember that GE E1050 digital camera with the built-in GPS geotagging? Never mind: Richard found out that development on the GPS model has been suspended….
- Missoula’s Office of Planning and Grants
- Another profile of the GIS going on in a city planning office, this time from the Missoulian, which looks at the City and County of Missoula’s combined Office of Planning and Grants and its senior GIS specialist and mapmaker, Casey…
- E. G. R. Taylor Collection
- Via MapHist, an announcement that the E. G. R. Taylor Collection of Historic Printed Maps has been catalogued and is now available for consultation in the Special Collections Reading Room of the University of London’s Senate House Library. The Taylor…
- xkcd on Driving Directions
- Earlier (yes, I know I’m late), Web comic xkcd had some fun with driving directions — the printed-out-from-Google-Maps sort. Via Very Spatial and Google Maps Mania. Still earlier (would it kill Randall to use datestamps?), how about this take…
- Google and Censorship Debunked
- This is worth reading: Stefan debunks a number of recent reports alleging that Google caved to government requests to censor imagery; among the articles fact-checked is the well-circulated 51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps, which we…
- The Survey of India Isn’t Helping
- Ravi Vyas is after the Survey of India again; in a piece in the Telegraph of Calcutta, he documents a small change the Survey has made to speed up its approval process: Under existing copyright laws, any map of India,…
- A Programming Note
- I’ve started a new contract where Internet access is limited (especially for non-work purposes); posts will be sporadic over the next few weeks as a result. I’ll do my best to keep up….
- Mapping Obesity
- A map of British obesity has been compiled from statistics collected by general practitioners, the BBC reports. Via Infonaut, which presents a similar obesity map for Ontario, Canada. Can’t be compared: the Canadian map starts at 40.9 percent, whereas…
- Hurricane Season
- With even more hurricanes on the way, Google has added a “Hurricane Season 2008” folder to Google Earth. Previously: Post-Gustav Imagery; Mapping Hurricane Gustav….
- Mapping McCain
- It’s John McCain’s night, so let’s have a little map-related fun at his expense. The Senator had earlier raised eyebrows with some geography- and cartography-related gaffes — referring to Czechoslovakia in the present tense, talking about the Iraq-Pakistan border…
- NFL TV Distribution Maps Redux
- The NFL TV Distribution Maps site, which we’ve seen before, has been publishing maps of TV coverage for each NFL season since 2005. This year, though, they’ve switched to a Google Maps interface, which is actually an improvement, cartographically…
- OnionMap
- OnionMap’s isometric maps of various world cities are somewhat disappointing: they’re essentially tourist maps that depict major landmarks, subway routes and the like. Nice enough — we don’t see very many examples of isometric mapping — but not very…
- Google Maps Updates: Georgia, Israel
- Google also says that new data has been added for Georgian and other countries — but which other countries, they’re not saying. (Argentina is still blank, I see.) For Georgia, it’s limited city and town labels. (Update: here’s a list…
- Post-Gustav Imagery
- Google LatLong points to NOAA aerial imagery taken after the passage of Hurricane Gustav; the imagery has also been processed into a KML file for use in Google Earth, which would allow for some useful before/after comparisons. (The entry also…
- ATP GPS PhotoFinder mini
- Geotagging a photo means adding geographical coordinates to an image’s metadata. There are basically two ways to do it. One, add that data in real-time when the picture is being taken, using a camera’s built-in GPS or an attached GPS…
- The Repopulation of New Orleans
- The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center’s repopulation map shows the extent to which New Orleans’s neighbourhoods have recovered post-Katrina, using the following indicators: mail pickups and Road Home grant recipients (“stay and rebuild” vs. “sell to the State”)….
- More Responses to Mary Spence
- More reactions to British Cartographic Society president Mary Spence’s complaint about satellite navigation and Internet mapping. Ed Parsons, who was quoted in the original coverage, calls this “the annual ‘shock horror — nobody can read maps’ story” and a “desperate…
- Mapping the Chattanooga Campaigns
- The Chattanooga Times Free Press on plans to create online maps of the Chattanooga battles of the U.S. Civil War. Via GeoCarta….
- Josh Dorman: Within Four Miles
- At the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles until January 11, 2009: “”Within Four Miles: The World of Josh Dorman.” The Los Angeles Times on the exhibit: Most of the work in “Within Four Miles: The World of…
- David Adjaye’s Europolis
- David Adjaye’s Europolis is being exhibited in Bolzano for Manifesta 7. “In conceiving Europolis David Adjaye has extracted information from the capital cities of the European Union and condensed it into a single entity. Europolis is not a traditional…
- GIS Lounge Rebuts Spence
- GIS Lounge responds to Mary Spence’s complaint about computer mapping: “What she fails to recognize is that online mapping, particularly efforts such as Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps and other online mapping applications have opened up access to geographic data…
