Posts Tagged ‘maps’
New Geographic Data Analysis Gives Historians a Futuristic Window Into the Past
"Spatial humanities," the future of history
Geographic Information Systems, which can analyze information related to a physical location, are helping historians and geographers study past landscapes like Gettysburg, reconstructing what Robert E. Lee would have seen from Seminary Ridge. Researchers are studying the parched farmlands of the 1930s Dust Bowl, and even reconstructing scenes from Shakespeare’s 17th-century London.
But far from simply adding layers of complexity to historical study, GIS-enhanced landscape analysis is leading to new findings, the reports. Historians studying the Battle of Gettysburg have shed light on the tactical decisions that led to the turning point in the Civil War. And others examining records from the Dust Bowl era have found that extensive and irresponsible land use was not necessarily to blame for the disaster.
GIS has long been used by city planners who want to record changes to the landscape over time. And interactive map technology like Google Maps has led to . But by analyzing data that describes the physical attributes of a place, historians are finding answers to new questions.
Anne Kelly Knowles and colleagues at Middlebury College in Vermont culled information from historical maps, military documents explaining troop positions, and even paintings to reconstruct the Gettysburg battlefield. The researchers were able to explain what Robert E. Lee could and could not see from his vantage points at the Lutheran seminary and on Seminary Hill. He probably could not see the Union forces amassing on the eastern side of the battlefield, which helps explain some of his tactical decisions, Knowles said.
Geoff Cunfer at the University of Saskatchewan studied a trove of data from all 208 affected counties in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas — annual precipitation reports, wind direction, agricultural censuses and other data that would have been impossible to sift through without the help of a computer. He learned dust storms were common throughout the 19th century, and that areas that saw nary a tiller blade suffered just as much.
The new data-mapping phenomenon is known as spatial humanities, the Times reports. Check out their to find out how advanced technology is the future of history.
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Starting This Week, You Can Help Build a Better Map of Light Pollution
The program is encouraging the public to look at certain constellations and compare observations with brightness maps on its site. You can enter your data in a new web app, accessible via tablets and mobile phones. The program, in its sixth year, hopes crowd-sourced night-sky observations will yield the most accurate Earth-at-night maps.
Satellite views like the one above can tell the story only so well; ground-based observations are a better gauge of how light from buildings and other infrastructure illuminates most people’s night skies.
By the turn of the millennium, two-thirds of the world no longer saw a virgin night sky, and in some places this may never be reversed. More than half the world’s population lives in cities, the most light-polluted of which prevent even the Big Dipper from being seen. Along with robbing us of our natural heritage, light pollution can be , and it can also harm birds, sea turtles and , among many other creatures who are confused by artificial lighting.
The GLOBE At Night project runs through April 6.
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Vintage Cutaways Show the Nuclear Reactors of Our Past (and Present)
Wall-art-worthy cutaways of European, American, and Asian nuclear reactors
the photo gallery.
These reactors were built between around 1960 and 1980, typically, and they've gone through some pretty amazing stuff. Some of them are still in use today, one of them is responsible for the worst nuclear accident in its nation's history, and some of them were shut down in the ensuing decades. You can check out , if you're so inclined, or check out our gallery.
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This month's is brought to you by Digikey. All posts are purely editorial content, which we are pleased to present with the help of a sponsor; the sponsor has no input in the content itself.
Digital Maps Of Moonscape Could Reveal Safe Landing Spots And Traversable Terrain
With two more years to survey, LOLA’s maps will provide navigational capability for future manned and robotic missions to the moon’s polar surface. Not only can scientists tell exact contours, they can estimate the heights within each sampled point. “If you have rocks of three or four feet,” says planetary geodesist David Smith, the principal investigator for LOLA, “there’s no way a lander can get down there."
National Broadband Map Goes Live, Shows Vast Swathes of Unconnected Country
The map cost about $200 million (provided by the National Recovery Act of 2009), and offers a database of over 25 million documents showing the type, speed, provider, and location of broadband service. The most obvious way to use the map is simply to search for an address or zip code, and then narrow down results by type of broadband. Then you can see the maximum advertised speed of broadband, if it's available, which theoretically could be of use to businesses (they might not want to move to a location without reliable internet access) and consumers (ditto).
It also throws into sharp relief the fact that much of the country lacks broadband. Major population centers, like the Northeast Corridor, Chicagoland, Bay Area, Pacific Northwest, and Los Angeles-San Diego are blanketed, but much of the west, and even much of the southeast, are spotty at best. According to released alongside the map (which last June), 68% of American households now have broadband access, up from 63.5% last year, but that leaves a pretty significant number out. This map may help the national broadband effort to spread the gospel of high-speed to more of the country.
You can search for yourself at the itself.
Google Maps 5.0 for Android now available with 3D buildings, offline support
The latest version of , and as we’ve reported previously, like 3D building support, dynamic map drawing and access to maps offline.
Google Maps 5.0 relies on vector graphics, instead of flat 2D maps, to load its map data. Vector files are smaller and more flexible than typical graphics files, both of which make a huge difference on mobile devices. Thanks to vector graphics, the app will now load your maps more quickly than ever before and draw them dynamically. It also supports 3D building models in over 100 cities. A new compass mode automatically orients the map to help you maintain direction.
As we’ve previously mentioned, the app will also be able to cache map data that you use most often to let you view maps offline. It will download map locations overnight when you’re connected with WiFi. Google says this feature will make up for over 90 percent of the times the Maps app fails when there’s a bad connection. The app’s Navigation feature will be able to take advantage of the offline maps and re-route you even if you’re without service.
Google says the new features are just the first step to improving the overall performance of its Maps app. The company figures that viewing maps with the new app now takes 70 percent less mobile data. It remains to be seen if we’ll see similar new features on other platforms. Apple, which is in charge of the Google Maps app on the iPhone, hasn’t been very good about supporting Google’s updates in the past.
Google Maps 5.0 is available on all Android devices running version 1.6 and above, but 3D and offline support is only available to those running Android 2.0 or higher.
Check out a video of the app in action below:
Companies:
You Are Here: How Digital Maps Are Changing the Landscape of the 21st Century
Mapmakers have more power than ever. But who are the mapmakers?
The commander Google Maps, which had erroneously depicted a stretch of the border in Nicaragua’s favor by as much as 1.7 miles. Google quickly moved to amend the faulty border data and sportingly apologized.
The incident raises some interesting issues concerning the future of mapmaking that, thus far, our brave new digital world hasn’t yet been forced to confront. Whereas cartography – particularly the act (or the art) of drawing political lines on geographical charts – used to be the purview of nations and international bodies, commercial entities like Google, Bing, Mapquest, and other digital services are the principal mapmakers of the 21st century.
Orbiting GeoEye satellites and camera-equipped Google sedans are the Magellans of the digital age, dispatched to explore and catalog -- and most importantly make public -- unprecedented amounts of geographical data via the Web. If anyone wants to locate anything – be it a coffee house, a post office, or an international boundary – users log into Google or Bing, not the U.N. or the U.S. Geological Survey. But these commercial maps are compiled from a variety of sources and often blend government-derived mapping data with user-generated content. As such, they are subject to conflicting information, differences of political opinion and – as the Nicaraguan incident shows – outright error.
“With a lot of these web-based tools, the need for formal training in cartography is going away, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing,” says Dr. Brian Tomaszewski, an assistant professor in the Department of Information Sciences & Technologies at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It’s good because it creates rich, centralized data compilations that users constantly update. But before that can happen, someone like Google has to build the underlying map, and there’s no single source or authority for global map data to draw from. That leaves companies in the unenviable position of trying to pick and choose the best data and massage it to fit a single geographical template.
In the case of Nicaragua, it turns out that data was simply incorrect. A post on Google’s explained the error: “Yesterday we became aware of a dispute that referenced the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua as depicted on Google Maps. This morning, after a discussion with the data supplier for this particular border (the U.S. Department of State), we determined that there was indeed an error in the compilation of the source data, by up to 2.7 kilometers.”
Viewed on Google Maps, however, an incorrect border looks like any other border, and if the U.S. State Department (and, more importantly, Google) says the border is in one place, who is Costa Rica to say it’s not? In strict cartographic sense, the treaty that originally established the border is the final word. But no one locates a border by reading a 150-year-old treaty; people find borders by looking at maps, and in the 21st century people consult maps by opening their Web browsers.
“We look at the computer and say ‘how can it be wrong, it’s on the computer,’” says Dr. Frank Galgano, professor and chairman of Villanova University’s Geography and the Environment Department. It’s to the computer that the world increasingly turns to find just about everything, lending digital mapmakers incredible power to shape users’ geospatial perceptions.
What’s largely missing is the healthy skepticism that users apply to other piecemeal compendia of information like Wikipedia, Galgano says. Google knows its maps contain errors; it says so in the user agreement (you read that closely, didn’t you?). For those people searching for the nearest Starbucks in Lower Manhattan these errors are largely negligible. But for an American hiking near the Iranian border, they can lead to miscalculations with serious consequences.
“People are forgetting to use common sense and critical thinking,” Tomaszewski says. “Google Maps isn’t an official mapping agency like a government. They buy or acquire data and then assemble it into a map. It’s almost frightening to think that militaries or governments might rely on Google as the final word on boundaries or borders between nations.”
But there are a variety of reasons why a government or military might do so, not least of which is the lack of anything better. In the United States, the USGS maintains an extensive collection of publicly available map data accurate down to about 130 feet. Many other nations treat their official maps as state secrets. Still others don’t have the resources to produce accurate maps at all. That makes commercial, publicly available maps like Google’s very attractive, if not any more authoritative.
Why Nicaragua chose to use a Google Map to justify military actions along a tense border is something for the geopolicy wonks to debate. Regardless, the incident embodies the changing nature and impact of cartography in a rapidly digitizing environment where data – often conflicting – is abundant and clearly defined rules are scarce. After all, borders are nothing more than imaginary lines enforced by mutual agreement. Cartography is inexact enough already, and the blurring line between “official” cartography and commercial maps rich in content but low in complexity further compounds that lack of concreteness.
That’s not to say commercial maps don’t carry tremendous value. Their accessibility has revolutionized the way people use maps, particularly as they pertain to commerce. The economic importance of being “on the map” may not be outwardly apparent, but consider the case of Sunrise, Fla.; the community of 90,000 has inexplicably from Google Maps three times since August of last year. During these “blackouts,” local businesses reported flattening commerce as new customers couldn’t locate them. Online orders ground to a halt for some businesses. After all, how would anyone find a florist or automotive shop that’s not searchable? When Sunrise disappeared from Google Maps, it might as well have disappeared completely.
So what makes a real map in the 21st century? Some would argue that the musty old analog maps tucked into national archives around the world are still the real deal, invested with the authority of governments. But if asked which is more important to their everyday lives, the citizens of Sunrise, Fla., might argue that commercial maps, regardless of inaccuracies or oversimplifications, represent a far greater social and economic utility. To the average person, commercial maps like those compiled by Google, Bing, or Yahoo have become at least as equally important as their “official” counterparts.
The important thing is maintaining a line between the two, and therein lies the problem in a world where data of all kinds is migrating ever more rapidly to the Web and pooling there, waiting for someone to make sense of it.
UTD’s Dr. Dean likens mapmaking’s shift to the commercial, digital realm to the blossoming of user-generated travel sites across the Web. When planning a trip, a user might seek information from established third party reviewers, like magazines or established ratings agencies. But he or she might also troll the Web for social data and customer reviews written by other travelers. Both kinds of data are valuable, he says, but a smart traveler would absorb and use them differently.
“It’s all part of becoming a knowledgeable consumer of maps. The idea that if it’s on a map it’s got to be true is misguided,” Dean says, noting that this is actually a very old problem rather than a new one. As with any data, misuse can lead to debacle, and such mishaps can range in severity from missing an exit on the interstate to interstate warfare. “Someone tried to look at a boundary on Google Maps as if it were a real definitive border and it nearly caused an armed conflict,” Dean says. “That’s as serious as it gets.”