Last week Google unveiled a new version of Google Maps, which includes native Google Earth support without the need for a plugin.  One of the other big pieces Google is working to include is a map that is customized specifically for each person.  As TechCrunch shared, the idea was similar to drawing a map on a napkin:

When you draw a map on a napkin, you are automatically filtering out the most important information, and doing it with your specific audience in mind. The result is a simplified map, that involves maybe a few major routes, as well as smaller roads, and a prioritization that doesn’t necessarily reflect how important a road is to the general population.

The way Google is making it happen is quite amazing:

First, for a specific location the new Maps algorithm will analyze the entire set of people looking for directions in that area, and then highlight the routes that come up most often. Then from that subset they’ll focus in even further and weigh more vs. less important routes, based again on aggregated user data. They can see which roads are more popular, and then pop those out vs. the less important ones. Finally the less important ones are cut away, and you’re left with something resembling the hand-written map.

…

That then informs the UI rendering of the Map itself, which still retains the street markers for all surrounding routes. Lines along routes important to getting there are made bold and lines on less important streets are thinned out, but not removed in case some users still require that information. It’s about drawing attention and changing perspective, not eliminating something altogether.

While this approach requires amazing levels of computing power from Google, it keeps the impact on end user’s computers even lower than past versions, since less data needs to be sent out.

It was an impressive and informative talk, and I highly recommend you check out the full article on TechCrunch to learn more.

The post How the new Google Maps redesign came together appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

A VerySpatial Podcast
Shownotes – Episode 409
May 19, 2013

Main Topic: Some thoughts on geofencing

Click for the detailed shownotes

Music



News



Web Corner



Main topic



Tip of the week



Events Corner



This week, A VerySpatial Podcast is sponsored by Esri

google.maps.visualRefresh

document.getElementById('divName').innerHTML

Last September we showed you the first set of amazing underwater Street View images that Google had released.  They were absolutely stunning, as you can see in the example here:

TechCrunch recently spoke with Google about their Ocean Street View program, and came away with some amazing insights, including:

…the cameras his team uses for this project are very different from those used by Google’s other Street View vehicles. The team had to use wider-angle lenses, for example. Google’s underwater Street View camera has three cameras on its front and takes images every three seconds. One of the cameras points downward, because that’s how images during reef surveys have traditionally been taken. The back of the scooter features a tablet that can control the cameras.

During a typical dive, the divers cover about 2km and take 3,000 to 4,000 images per camera, and the team does three dives per day, each of which lasts about an hour. In total, the team has taken about 150,000 images so far, and Vevers expects this number to grow exponentially over the next few months. In the long run, the team hopes to create diver-less systems that can stay underwater for 12 hours or more. The technology is already available, but it needs to be adapted to the kind of camera system needed for Street View.

The systems cost around $50,000 each, and they’re already testing 3D cameras to begin to capture that kind of imagery soon.

It’s quite an amazing article, and it offers some great details into how this system works.  Check out the full article, then explore our previous post on underwater Street View to visit some of these areas for yourself.

The post How underwater Street View works appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting, spatially relevant article on regulation and standardization of place names and the disappearing apostrophe in U.S. signage, “Theres a Question Mark Hanging Over the Apostrophes Future: Its Practically Against the Law to Use the Mark in a Places Name; Sorry, Pikes Peak.”    Read the title again to catch the humor that Barry Newman uses to construct a brief history of place signage.

He states that the U.S. is the only country that standardized out apostrophes because they were seen as conveying private ownership of a public place. The USGS Board on Geographic Names set up in 1890 by President Harrison has eradicated around 250,000 apostrophes from federal maps. In contrast, the Apostrophe Protection Society kept the Mid Devon council in England from banning the use of apostrophes in street signs.  According to an in-depth article on the loss of the apostrophe and the history of Fell’s Point or Fells Point, Maryland, “What’s the Point?” from the Underbelly: From the Deepest Corners of the Maryland Historical Society Library, only five natural features have official license to use the possessive apostrophe in 2013.

The quoted arguments for the apostrophe is that it is part of proper English language usage, that it connotes information about the history of a place, and that not using them can cause confusion and miscommunication. What is most interesting about the WSJ article is who isn’t quoted – cartographers. How do cartographers feel about the vanishing apostrophe in place names?

Yesterday Google announced the new Google Maps, including several significant changes. It's going to be available this summer, and there will finally be an iPad version of the Google Maps app. The Google Geo Dev blog tells you how to use the new look for your maps today via the Maps API. The Google Earth Blog (not from Google) shares an entry on Google Earth integration in Google Maps might mean the demise of the Google Earth Plugin. APB also shares and entry about the Three New Geo APIs for Android: Fuse Location Provider, Geofencing, Active Recognition.

Snippets from the announcement: "

• Every click draws a new map highlighting the things that matter most 
  Like a friend drawing you a map to her favorite restaurant, with only the roads and landmarks you need to get there, the new Google Maps instantly changes to highlight information that matters most.
• Easier to find the best local places
  In addition to a customized map, we’ve also made it easier to uncover the best local gems. Search results are labeled directly on the map with brief place descriptions and icons that highlight business categories and other useful information – like restaurants that are recommended by your Google+ friends.
• Amazing imagery for exploring the world
  Of course, no map would be complete without amazing images for exploring the world. The new carousel gathers all Google Maps imagery in one spot enabling you to fly through cities, walk canyon trails, climb mountains, and even swim the oceans. And on a WebGL-enabled browser, like Google Chrome, the carousel is also where you'll find the Earth view which directly integrates the beautiful 3D experience from Google Earth into the new maps."

The best way to get an overview of what's new is certainly to watch this 2 minutes video:

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The Cassini team has released a global topographic map of Saturn's moon Titan. What makes this map interesting is the fact that, due to its thick atmosphere, Titan can only be mapped by radar during Cassini's close flybys. As a result, only half of its surface has been imaged, and only 11 percent has topography data. For this map, the remainder was, well, extrapolated:

Lorenz's team used a mathematical process called splining -- effectively using smooth, curved surfaces to "join" the areas between grids of existing data. "You can take a spot where there is no data, look how close it is to the nearest data, and use various approaches of averaging and estimating to calculate your best guess," he said. "If you pick a point, and all the nearby points are high altitude, you'd need a special reason for thinking that point would be lower. We're mathematically papering over the gaps in our coverage."

Topo maps of parts of Titan have been released before, but not for the entire moon. See previous posts on The Map Room: Titan in Stereo; Topography of Titan.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/JHUAPL/Cornell/Weizmann.

Google announced a complete redesign of Google Maps at their I/O developer conference yesterday. The new maps are vector-based, take up the entire browser window and change based on the context -- highlighting certain streets, for example, based on a search -- and your usage patterns. It's also apparently quite resource intensive: these are maps designed for fast processors and fast Internet connections. It's just an invite-only preview at the moment. For coverage see Engadget and The Verge.

The Google Earth Plugin has been an amazing tool to help bring Google Earth into the browser, but with the upcoming release of Google Maps you’ll be able to view Google Earth in your web browser without needing a plugin at all!  Here’s a quick video from Google that shows more of what’s coming in the new version of Maps:

There are quite a few enhancements in this new update to Maps, but the Earth integration could be quite compelling.  We’ve seen some amazing uses of the Google Earth Plugin over the years (things like youbeQ, concert seating, Ships and even a great flight simulator), so it’ll be interesting to see if this leads to even better projects.

You can read more about the latest mapping updates on the Google Lat Long Blog or in this long post from TechCrunch. The new version of Maps isn’t available to everyone yet, but you can request an invite to try it for yourself at this link.

What do you think of these latest changes to Google Maps?

The post Google Earth arrives in the browser with no plugin required appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

For nearly eight years, developers around the world have used the Google Maps APIs to build beautiful, powerful, and impactful apps. From the early mashups to today’s on-location mobile apps, these developers have continuously re-imagined the map. In fact, you’ve created more than one million active sites and apps, which now reach one billion unique visitors every week. One billion! That’s nearly half the Internet.

As we celebrate your maps, we’re also introducing the largest visible change in our eight year history: a fresh new look and feel for the JavaScript and Static Maps APIs, in line with the launch of the new Google Maps. The new look is available for opt-in today, and is a simple one line code change: google.maps.visualRefresh=true;.

We’ve carefully designed the change to work seamlessly with all existing sites, and as such all third party customizations such as custom markers, overlays, map types, and the like will continue to function as they did before. Four major changes are involved in the refresh:

• new base map tiles
• new default marker
• new info window style
• style refresh of the controls

Static Maps API base maps and markers have also been refreshed, and can be enabled by adding &visual_refresh=true as a URL parameter.

This new look will become default in our experimental branch (used by most standard Maps API developers) with the next scheduled release on August 15, 2013, and default in the release branch (used by most Maps for Business customers) three months later in November. The Static Maps API will follow the same schedule in both cases.

A complete list of specific changes is available in the documentation, where they’re discussed with examples and in more detail. In the meantime, here’s to the one million that reimagined the map. Enjoy!

Posted by Ken Hoetmer, Product Manager, Google Maps API

P.S. We migrated our Webby-Award-winning morethanamap.com showcase site to the new look. Check it out!

PC Advisor recently published an article that discussed the “10 things you didn’t know about Google Maps and Google Earth” and I thought we’d take a look at it.  Some of these won’t be surprises for you, a Google Earth Blog reader, but it’s a list that would be fairly helpful to the typical computer user.

1 – Google Maps isn’t Google’s only mapping product.

You don’t say?

2 – Because it uses software on your own PC, Google Earth offers a more polished interface than Google Maps.

That could be argued either way.  I’d say that Maps is actually a bit more polished, but Earth offers many more features.

3 – No doubt you’ve used Google Maps Street View feature but did you know it works in 3D?

That’s indeed a fun tip. Press “3″ or “T” to enable it (only in Google Maps).

4 – Google Earth includes a flight simulator so that you can view the Earth from a unique perspective.

The flight simulator can be quite a lot of fun.  Try it for yourself by activating it from the [Tools] –> [Enter Flight Simulator] option or check out this post for more.

5 – Thought that Google Maps was just for exploring the surface of the Earth?

Along with locations like the underground Akiyoshi-do caves in Japan, you can also visit other planets on Google Earth such as Mars.

6 – Google Maps can show up-to-the-minute traffic conditions.

Google Earth can as well, under [Layers] –> [More] –> [Traffic].  The Maps versions is great if you use it for GPS navigation, as the traffic data is factored into your estimated travel time.

7 – Don’t think of Google Maps as a universal panacea because there are some places you can’t see.

It’s relatively rare, but some places have their imagery blurred out, such as the example found here.

8 – If you’re an Android user you’ve probably discovered the Google Maps app but you might not have realized that it can be used offline too.

You can read details about the Android offline features, and don’t forget that Google Earth can be used offline as well.

9 – Using Google Maps doesn’t have to be a passive experience.

Google Maps has some great ways to save your points of interest and maps, and Google Earth has a very comprehensive set of layers to enhance your experience.  Over time, I think we’ll see those features begin to merge more and more, which would be a great thing.

10 – You can even create your own 3D models of buildings to view in Google Maps or Google Earth.

Even though they’re discontinuing the excellent Building Maker tool, you can still use SketchUp to create 3D models for use in Google Earth.

What do you think is missing from the list?

The post 10 things you didn’t know about Google Earth appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Hi,

I would like to let you now about Button TrackR. This is a coin-sized wireless device that communicates to your smartphone or tablet to help you keep track of your commonly misplaced items. If the user is about to leave an item behind, the phone and device will notify the user & take a GPS snapshot of where the item was left. If the item goes missing, our new Crowd Sourced Tracking technology can be used to receive live gps updates of where the lost item is. To learn more about how the Button TrackR can help you and your readers, visit our Indiegogo campaign at http://igg.me/at/ButtonTrackR/x/2866976 or check out our latest press release at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10724983.htm.

If you have any questions, please contact me or our CEO at chris@phonehalo.com.

Thanks for the support!

Ariel Rothbard

Phone Halo

M (209) 345-6726

www.PhoneHalo.com

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Chris Holmes shares a pretty insightful and informative letter in an entry named 'Opening Esri'. Esri's closer relationship with open source started with providing code on GitHub last September and even up to last February's official entry named going open source with Esri.

From the Chris Holmes entry: "So I wanted to give to Esri a measurable roadmap of actions to take that would signal to me a real commitment to ‘open’. [...] Each piece of Esri technology ideally could be used stand alone with other pieces. Stated another way, there should be no lock-in of anything that users create – even their cartography rules. [...] it is a business risk, since it opens up more potential competition. But it’s also a big business opportunity if done right. And reaches beyond mere business to being a real force for good in the world, becoming a truly loved company, with lots of friends."

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Thanks to sheer luck, two people in the Denver area captured a photo of the same lightning bolt from very different locations.  Richard Wheeler to decided to try and use those two images to reconstruct the lightning bolt in Google Earth and seems to have done a pretty good job!

Richard went through a number of steps to create the model of the bolt:

• Scaled both images to the same size
• Traced both images and matched up the coordinates of each location in the bolt
• Put the resulting data in a table to calculate the difference in x and y position in each image

After he had done that, he had some work to do:

Now we need to do some maths… except I don’t like doing complicated maths and it turns out there is a big simplification you can make! If both pictures are taken from a long way away from the lightning bolt (i.e. the object has quite a small angular size in the image) then the shift in position between the images is proportional to the distance from the camera. Bigger shifts mean that bit of the bolt is closer to the camera. This approximation is pretty accurate for the majority of cameras, so I used it here.

The other problem is the proportionality factor. If one part of the lightning bolt shifts twice as much between the two images as another part that means it is twice as close. But twice as close as what? Without knowing exactly where the cameras were positioned that means only the relative distance, not absolute distance, can be calculated. Oh well, close enough!

You can view the resulting image in Google Earth by using this KMZ file, or read more about the process of creating the file on his blog.

Great work Richard!

The post Reconstructing a lightning bolt in 3D appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

InfoQ have published a talk by Gary Gale (@vicchi) called "The Ubiquitous Digital Map (Abridged)" giving a half hour potted history of the digital map. Worth a watch (but not as full screen as you'll miss the slides!) as knowing where we came from might help to understand where we are going.

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IEEE GOLD Section Quebec announces a DL event organized in collaboration with Centre de Recherche en Géomatique (CRG) - Université Laval on 23 May 2013 in Laval University, Quebec City. Paul E. Gartz member of the Boeing Technical Fellowship,former president of IEEE AESS, and IEEE global lecturer is the invited speaker. With over forty years of experience in large-scale and multi-billion dollar programs on commercial, defense, and civil project in aerospace and communications industries, Paul will talk about “Systems-of-Systems (SoS) & Systems Engineering” and “How Geomatics Apps are Changing the World through SoS“ in two exclusive sessions (morning and afternoon). The third session (evening) is dedicated to networking among the participants.  

For more info, contact Kyarash Shahriari <kyarash.shahriari@ieee.org> or visit the event page.

When: 23 May 2013

Where: Room #2320, Pavilion Kruger, 2425, rue de la Terrasse, Université Laval, Quebec City

Speaker: Paul E. Gartz, member of Boeing Technical Fellowship, former president of IEEE AESS, IEEE global lecturer

Event Program:

9:00 am – 10:30 am: “Systems-of-Systems (SoS) & Systems Engineering / Educating 21st Century Engineers”

3:00 pm – 4:30 pm: “How Geomatics Apps are Changing the World through SoS”

5:00 pm – 7:00 pm: Networking

GeoNews by Alborz Zamyadi  <alborz.zamyadi.1@ulaval.ca>, Students’ Representative in CRG Board.

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A VerySpatial Podcast
Shownotes – Episode 408
May 12, 2013

Main Topic: Public/private sectors in Geospatial

Click for the detailed shownotes

Music



News



Web Corner



Main topic



Tip of the week



Events Corner



This week, A VerySpatial Podcast is sponsored by Esri

So Waze may be part of Facebook for a cool ”One Billion Dollars”.

After spending $1 billion on Instagram last year to keep pace with the mobile photo explosion, Facebook is now reportedly ready to spend a similar amount on popular social driving app Waze.

Waze is considered the second most popular navigation map in the USA so it’s not too much of a surprise. I do find it interesting though that Facebook would spend this money on the data. They don’t need the users, that’s for sure and they can buy engineers to solve the problem. I can only think it is better to own Waze than use OpenStreetMap data that you have to share. Are we seeing problems with the license? I hope this is a huge discussion at OSM PLUS next month.

UPDATE - Marc Prioleau has some great insight on his blog. His kicker at the end?

Why OSM isn’t a better option is another whole discussion. I suspect it revolves around ownership and data rights.

So there is a ton of talk about Esri’s REST API trying to become an OGC standard on Twitter. We mentioned it on my hangout yesterday and it’s still a hot topic. Here are some bullet points.

• OGC exists to help software vendors, open source projects, contractors market to the federal government. There is no altruistic goal other than to make money.

• OGC standards are standard only in the world of contracts. Just because Esri gets their REST API “blessed” doesn’t make it worth using any more than it was before.

• Esri submitted their REST API to OGC so they could use it in federal contracts instead of existing OGC standards which nobody uses.

• Esri REST API won’t be used outside of Esri software so it really doesn’t matter.

• Esri’s consulting arm is competing with all of us. Beware as they’ll squeeze you out the minute they can.

• OGC standards suck so that’s why people are always proposing new ones. By next year there will be another “standard” coming up that will replace Esri’s.

• The simple fact that there is a proposal for ”OGCJSON” should tell you all you need to know about these standards.

• Esri exists to make money, that’s OK as I work for the same reasons. Just don’t wrap their business model up with saving the world.

• KML is the only OGC Standard people actually use. The rest are check boxes on a form.

Don’t get emotional about OGC standards. That’s what they want, people to actually start caring.

Steve Citron-Pousty joined me to talk about some of the latest trends in the spatial world. We hit on Google Glass, Esri, Frameworks, housing prices, travel, iD and OSM, naming stadiums and of course being in an airport. The IRC log is here

Great panoramic views over Turin from the “Turin Eye”: a massive, tethered hot air balloon http://POSTURLHERE #streetview

OpenStreetMap has launched a new map editing interface that runs, for the first time, in HTML5. (Potlatch, the previous web-based map editor, uses Flash, and JOSM runs in Java, which I always thought was ironic for an open project.) The editor, called iD, is live now, and is designed to make editing the map more accessible to beginning mapmakers. I've given it a quick try this morning. My summary judgment is that if you have any experience using another editor, you should stick with it. iD is far slower than Potlatch at the moment, and does things sufficiently differently that you might have a hard time finding things. I made a mess trying to edit the existing map. But will it lower the barrier to making new contributions, particularly for casual or non-technical contributors? I hope so.

This week’s hangout should be fun. Steve C-P joins me to talk about the latest trends in the spatial world. We’re going to have fun and crowdsource the topics. If there is something you’d like to see talked about tomorrow, just add it to this Gist.

As always, we go live at 11am PDT and the video will stream live here on this blog.

Go to osm.org right now and click the edit tab. Select the “Edit with iD” and check it out.

It’s like nothing you’ve seen before. This is the tool that OSM needs to finish the map as Steve Coast said on my Hangout last week. All this is because of the Knight Foundation grant to MapBox which finally gives users tools they need to edit the map. As I said back then:

I’ve always felt OSM was held back by it’s editing tools. They are designed by nerds for geeks.

Well no longer, the editor is live and it’s gorgeous! Check out how you add a road:

Or add a park:

That’s not some crazy Potlach (now I did love that tool but it isn’t mainstream) method that only OSM users know. These are simple methods that everyone will understand. I do hope that it will also improve OSM’s biggest weakness, addressing. But in the meantime we should see lots of people start improving the map all around the world.

I have to be honest, when I first heard MapBox got a grant to improve OSM editing I thought it was a waste of time. There were already tools available, why not spend that money on something worthwhile. Well seeing iD in action, I feel like I need to take that all back. I no longer have to install Flash to edit OSM, that’s worth it’s weight in gold. I can imagine how this might look if another company did it, probably build in Silverlight with some crazy proprietary APIs. We should all be thankful MapBox took this on.

Update The OSM Blog has much more.

It’s all well and good you can rattle off that most of the worlds population is in Southeast Asia. However, conceptualizing that is sometimes really challenging. It’s almost too abstract. That’s why this graphic is so amazing – more than half the world’s population lives inside this ‘circle’. That’s AMAZING! That tiny little circle encompasses the majority of the human population. The visual is just staggering.

Who says Geography isn’t cool?

Via i09.com

The Netherlands is renowned for being a very flat¹ and windy country. In the western town of Rozenburg the strong sea winds created problems for shipping on an important canal, so a unique² solution was created – a 1.75km long wind wall consisting of around 125 individual concrete slabs.

The Caland Canal allows ships to pass from the North Sea via the Nieuwe Waterweg to the industrial port of Brittaniehaven. As ships increased in size – in particular those used to transport cars – the narrow waterway became more difficult to navigate in strong winds, particularly around the Calandbrug bridge.

In the mid-1980s architect Martin Strujis and artist Frans de Wit were tasked with creating an effective – yet aesthetically pleasing – wind barrier. Using a number of different designs for the slabs, they were able to provide the required protection, allowing only 25% of the wind to pass through, yet be judged pleasing enough to the eye that the windscherm is also considered to be a large-scale landscape art installation.

The southern section uses the largest semi-circular slabs – 25m tall and 18m wide.

These immense barriers shield the harbour, where ships maneuver slowly to and from the dockside.

Around the bridge, the slabs are the same height and still semi-circular to deflect the most wind, but narrower (4m) and spaced much more closely together to provide maximum protection as ships pass through this narrow obstacle with only a small distance to spare on either side. This YouTube video (in Dutch) shows just how tricky this passage is³.

Canal traffic has priority, so as the port became busier, road and rail traffic on the bridge increasingly faced lengthy delays. To ease congestion, a tunnel was built just to the south in 2004.

A bike route also crosses the bridge, and a special portal was created to protect cyclists from swirling air currents created by the barrier.

North of the bridge, the semi-circular slabs are replaced with slabs 10m square, which – placed on top of a 15m embankment – attain the same 25m height as the other sections.

The barrier continues in this form until it ends in a stand of trees near a gas storage facility.

Locations: Netherlands / Categories: Bridges, Street Views, Structures, Watercraft

View in Google Earth

A VerySpatial Podcast
Shownotes – Episode 407
May 5, 2013

Main Topic: Geospatial and online education

Click for the detailed shownotes

Music



News



Web Corner



Main topic



Tip of the week



Events Corner



This week, A VerySpatial Podcast is sponsored by Esri

Lesotho is one of the most unique countries on the planet. It’s the southernmost landlocked country, the largest country that’s entirely surrounded by another country (South Africa), and the highest country on Earth (the lowest elevation in Lesotho is 1,400 m (4,593 ft) above sea level!)¹. Yet, it doesn’t really show up on too many people’s radar. With the arrival of Google Street View imagery this month to Lesotho, it’s time to shed some light on the world’s largest enclave.

The Kingdom of Lesotho (pronounced li-SU-tu) occupies 30,355 km2 (12,727 sq mi) in the middle of South Africa and gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1966. While it’s easily recongisable on a map from being an enclave in the middle of another country, it’s also recognisable from space even without a map due to the large amount of deforestation in Lesotho; two-third’s of the country economy is based in agriculture.

Most visitors to Lesotho enter through the capital, Maseru, a city of a quarter-million people which lies directly on the western border. Maseru is easily the largest and most modern city in the country.

The Lesotho Parliament sits high on a mountaintop in the middle of Maseru.

Lesotho’s only university is the National University of Lesotho in the town of Roma. The entrance to the University has become a hot area for businesses and street vendors in recent years.

Around 75% of Lesotho’s population lives in rural areas, and most of the population is concentrated in the lowlands along the western border. A common sight along the roadside is people gathered around bus shelters made from corrugated steel waiting for the next minibus. Often attached to these are public telephone booths.

Another common sight is the rather staggering amount of billboards and signs along the roadside advertising AIDS prevention services and, even more distressingly, funeral services. Adult prevalence of AIDS in Lesotho is 28.9% according to the UN; the third-highest rate in the world.

Because Lesotho’s population is concentrated in the lowlands, the mountain highlands were largely left alone by Street View. Still, the cameras did capture some of the spectacular scenery, such as at Maletsunyane Falls. At 192 m (630 ft), it’s the highest single-drop waterfall in all of southern Africa.

The highlands are also the source of Lesotho’s major export: electricity. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project exports electricity to South Africa generated from two hydroelectric dams in the centre of the country, Mohale and Katse. The project is scheduled to add three more dams in the coming years. At 145 m (476 ft), Mohale Dam is Africa’s tallest rock-fill dam, while Katse Dam is the second-largest dam in all of Africa, standing 185 m (607 ft).

As seen from the tops of Katse and Mohale, even in the middle of the highlands the forests have long been stripped bare. Soil erosion caused by deforestation has ruined much of the country’s land; a major problem in a place where less than 11 percent of the land is suitable for growing crops.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Thanks to its high altitude, Lesotho is home to one of Africa’s few ski resorts. The cameras came by in the middle of summer, though, so no snow is present.

The Street View cameras managed to capture quite a few slices of bucolic rural life in Lesotho. Here, we see a farmer with his cattle (and associated cattle by-products) in front of his traditional Sotho hut, a group of children who decided to chase after the Street View car down this dead-end road, and a traditional village so remote that it doesn’t even have roads.

Hopefully, we will get to see even more of rural Africa in the coming months. South Africa and Botswana are already on the roster, and Swaziland is scheduled to be added soon.

Locations: Lesotho / Categories: Animals, Buildings, Crowds, Natural Landmarks, Street Views

View in Google Earth

A map-making competition asking participants to submit maps of their fictional worlds? That's precisely the sort of thing I should bring to your attention, now that it's been brought to mine. First announced in February; deadline May 21.

The other day I was speaking to a non-map person about the problems with choropleth mapping on the Mercator projection and went looking for a link to something that could explain it more clearly than my bumbling self. It became a familiar exercise, because I’ve done this before: there’s hardly anything out there on the web that really explains this problem in clear detail. We talk about Mercator choropleth maps often enough, and the idea of them ranges from ill-advised to anathema, but we hardly go beyond simply saying “it’s bad because areas are distorted.”

So, two things. First, we could stand to share knowledge better, cartographers! Everyone is pretty good at sharing code and data these days, but we fall short on sharing the why of things, especially those of us who went to school for this and everything.

Second, an attempt at uncovering the problems with choropleth mapping on the Mercator projection.

Now, perhaps nobody really talks about why small-scale Mercator choropleths are bad because the gist of the reason is intuitive enough: bigger looks like “more,” so any map projection that distorts area (especially as severely as Mercator does) will make some values look exaggerated and will thus be misinterpreted. Size comparison is at the heart of many types of statistical graphics, and obviously relative sizes need to be correct for the whole concept to make any sense at all.

Indeed, this sometimes applies to areal mapping, for example “land-use or similar mapping in which a measure of the area occupied by some distribution is crucial to map interpretation” (Muehrcke and Muehrcke, Map Use 3rd ed.). If you need to compare areas, areas cannot be distorted. (Never mind that humans are terrible at estimating and comparing areas of irregular shapes, from what I hear.)

In the typical choropleth map, however, area is not directly the visual variable of interest, and we are not trying to measure it. Still we assume that relative sizes need to be true in order for the map to work. How do we know that? Well, I’m not sure. I flipped through all my cartography textbooks and to my surprise it’s not that I forgot the evidence for this—it’s that they really don’t cite anything on the subject. We accept it on faith and common sense, apparently, although I’d bet a shiny nickel that someone somewhere has done empirical studies to confirm it, or that somewhere buried in How Maps Work is an explanation. Please, if anybody can point me to some of the research behind all this, it would be appreciated!

It turns out, then, that this is not just an internet problem. A textbook education in cartography will not teach you, in scientific terms, why a choropleth Mercator map is worse than a choropleth sinusoidal map or a proportional symbol map. Interpretation of area in quantitative maps gets no quantitative explanation; instead it gets basically the same treatment as propaganda maps and the whole Peters thing, which paraphrased boils down to “bigger things totally look more prominent and important because they’re bigger.” Semiology of Graphics is the only book I have that really addresses size directly and as matter of fact—noting among other things that “it is not possible to disregard it visually” and “in any map representing areas of unequal size, what is seen is [quantity] multiplied by the size of the area”—but even if he was correct, Bertin was pretty much making things up.

Mentioned more commonly but no more deeply explained is the need to normalize data to account for area in choropleth maps, i.e., not mapping counts. Considering this rule, the projection requirement, and a host of “ideal” enumeration unit characteristics, choropleth mapping just starts to sound like a terrible idea for anything at all. Size variation that is not directly related to numerical variation seems to cause nothing but problems. Danny Dorling’s arguments for cartograms and mapping human phenomena in human space, not geographic space, start to sound appealing.

Too bad cartograms are also kind of awful.

There are ways in which I think cartography is an under-appreciated and poorly understood field, some of which are enumerated in occasional rants on the Axis Maps blog and elsewhere. But these are usually philosophical or academic matters, and as someone who is making a career of cartography, increasingly I’ve been trying to offer this piece of advice (which isn’t as obvious as it should be) to aspiring map people: cartography skills are valuable, as in dollar bills.

Hence my—and some peers’—disappointment in the most recent “challenge” from the MBTA, Greater Boston’s transit agency. To summarize a somewhat lengthy description page, they are essentially seeking new design ideas for their standard subway map—in the space of three weeks, for free, and with no rights retained by the cartographer. And if you win this contest? You get… um, fleeting glory, apparently.

I want to like the idea. The MBTA carries crippling debt, and as a somewhat regular user of the system I don’t want to see its service diminished or my fares increased, so I applaud any other funding or savings. But—and I’m looking for some kind of “third rail” wordplay here—this time they strike a nerve with those of us who have mapping jobs.

The T has run contests before. The most successful was a few years ago at the dawn of its open data age, resulting in some cool visualizations and interesting apps using schedule data, which shortly thereafter was supplanted by real-time tracking. These previous contests, though, were very much about openness. Yes, the clever angle was to get the community to create products at no cost to the agency, but at least these products were not owned by the agency. And there totally were prizes.

From the outside it’s easy to mistake modern cartography for a free endeavor driven by some desire to improve the world. Indeed, we do have a few altruistic motives, and the latest trends are all about openness: open data, open source code, etc. But even these things are not always free. Free to use, yes, but often enough someone has paid for them to be made in the first place. And this model doesn’t really apply to design. Good design is a part of any project, open or not, but when the job itself is design, we don’t jump at the chance to do it for someone else without compensation just because it’s fun. Like everyone else in the world, we do this to earn a living.

In short, if you can design a subway map that’s good enough for millions of people to use on a daily basis, you are very good at this. Maps are easy. Good maps are not. Your skills are valuable. Make maps for fun when it’s for your own satisfaction or for the causes you champion, but recognize your worth when it’s for others’ satisfaction. And make them recognize your worth, too.

In any case, while we’re on the subject, do enjoy Cameron Booth’s MBTA map redesign—which the MBTA can’t have for free—and Peter Dunn’s time-based map.

In 2007 Eddie Jabbour released the KickMap, a map of the New York subway system that tried to square the circle of various competing and controversial New York subway map designs. The KickMap later became an iOS app; I reviewed the iPad version in 2010. Now Eddie reports that he's released a KickMap for the London Underground -- not satisfied with updating Massimo Vignelli, he's going after Harry Beck.

[W]hile the Tube Map's updates over the decades have attempted to follow Beck's design, a glance at the current iteration reveals that his design heirs have failed to retain his core credo of clarity and ease of use. Ongoing expansion of the Underground, the addition of the new Overground system, and essential disability access information have made most modern Tube Maps, both official and independent, overly complex and difficult to read. ... [I]nstead of redesigning the entire map vocabulary as we did for KickMap NYC, we embarked on a fresh new effort to recapture Beck's clarity and ease of use.

A regular Underground user would be able to evaluate whether the map succeeds in its goal to improve the Tube map's clarity; I haven't even so much as been to London, much less taken the Tube. But I've downloaded the app (disclosure: I received a promo code) and have played around with it a bit.

What I can say is that the map is gorgeous and scrolls fluidly (at least on an iPhone 5). In a nice touch, it adds detail like neighbourhoods and landmarks only when zoomed in, preserving a simpler, less cluttered map when zoomed out.

Those of you who've used the New York KickMap will find much that is familiar. While it can use your iPhone's GPS to locate the nearest station -- a nice touch on a non-geographic map -- it does lack the New York app's Directions function, which can route you between two stations on the network. Something to ask for, I think, in an update.

It costs only £0.69/$0.99 and is a universal iPhone/iPad app. iTunes link.

• Locate your AutoCAD design in the real-world using Bing Maps geocoding service
• View your AutoCAD design in the real-world high resolution aerial and satellite imagery
• Aggregate and overlay 2D and 3D geolocated data with your AutoCAD designs
• Locate yourself on your AutoCAD design in the field using GPS and Bing Maps

Evan Osnos in the New Yorker today:

… [T]he official Korean Central News Agency released an unusually showy photo of Kim huddled with generals over what the caption described as “plans to strike the mainland U.S.,” complete with a chart in the background depicting trajectories of North Korean missiles hitting American cities.

I’m on the road so this will be brief: The paper map visible in that photo shows the Pacific on the left and the continental US on the right, with missile trajectories drawn from North Korea to a number of locations in the US, including Hawaii. The only problem: Missile trajectories from North Korea to the continental US fly over Kamchatka and Alaska… because the Earth is not flat.

North Korea’s military probably knows about great circles, but its propaganda department obviously failed geography. Or perhaps the photo above depicts Kim Jong-un providing on-the-spot cartographic guidance to his aerospace engineering team, and the problem will by now have fixed itself.

[April 5: Help scientists to more accurately calculate the trajectory. Visit www.russianmeteor2013.org to contribute videos or help with the analysis.]

I now have three trajectory models of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid to share in Google Earth, from the three teams I am aware of who have published detailed results. The resulting KMZ file comes with a useful new feature: I’ve added geopositioned screenshots of the most useful videos, so you can now “fly” into each vantage point to check how the computed trajectories compare to the view in each video from the location it was taken. Here’s a quick tour on YouTube of the KMZ file:

Briefly, here’s what I’ve done: Initially, Google Earth allowed us to locate and measure YouTube videos to determine the angles of shadows, which enabled trajectory calculations, which have now been visualized in Google Earth. These trajectories can in turn be inspected visually from the vantage point of any number of geopositioned videos, resulting in an interesting additional method for verifying the accuracy of diverging trajectory calculations, short of going to these locations and making measurements in situ.

Before I do a walk-through of the trajectories and the videos, an exciting piece of news: A week or two ago, Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrín — the duo calculating the trajectory of the meteoroid at the Physics Institute at the Univeristy of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia — got in touch to discuss my original blog post on the use of Google Earth and YouTube as an ad-hoc sensor network for raw data on the meteoroid. They had taken my method and given it a rigorous mathematical make-over, aggregating information from four especially useful videos, including those contributed by commenters on Ogle Earth in the days after the event. From this trajectory, they calculated an orbit, concluding that the Chelyabinsk meteoroid was an Apollo-class Near Earth Asteroid.

In a classy move, Jorge and Ignacio asked me to co-author the paper they were writing, for having originally come up with the method which they then greatly improved upon. In the ensuing collaboration we identified additional useful videos, worked on the included Google Earth visualizations, and honed the prose. The paper, The orbit of the Chelyabinsk event impactor as reconstructed from amateur and public footage, has just been published to arxiv.org (here’s the PDF). The KMZ file discussed in this post (download and open in Google Earth) is the one attached to the paper. Note that the paper makes a point of thanking several commenters by name for their contributions to the original blog post. Citizen science FTW!

Now for some notes on the different trajectories:

Accuracy I: The NASA trajectory (in red) is derived from coordinates courtesy of Sebastien Pauleau, who calculated them from a close study of the trajectory map NASA released here, modeling the result on a WGS84 datum globe. He reports that while the accuracy of his model is calculated to 4 decimal points (an error of within 10m around Chelyabinsk, the limit of Google Earth’s accuracy with respect to the positioning of its imagery), it’s not possible right now to know how accurately NASA plotted its map. The Colombian trajectories (pink, green, black, orange), are also plotted to 4 decimal points, while the Czech results (blue) are plotted to 3 decimal points (within 100m), though of course the real error bars are a lot larger in at least all-but-one case (or else all the calculated trajectories would all have to lie within 100m of each other). The Colombian coordinates were shared directly; the Czech coordinates were published here.

Landing sites: We know that a good-sized chunk landed in Lake Chebarkul, and in the original coarse calculation I used that information as an input, fixing the lake as an endpoint for the trajectory. None of these more accurate “pro” trajectories make this assumption, and it is clear from subsequent news articles that the landing area extends beyond and around the lake. As a result, all calculated trajectories overshoot Lake Chebarkul, intersecting Earth just past the town of Miass.

Accuracy II: Because all these calculated trajectories are straight lines, there is an important caveat: From having looked closely at many geopositioned photos and videos, it seems clear that the real trajectory of the meteoroid changes as a result of the main explosion just south of Chelyabinsk. The post-explosion path seems to aim at bit more steeply at Earth, and may even have changed its azimuth (direction). Also, as the meteoroid slows down through atmospheric friction, it will begin to “fall” in a more classic arc. No one straight line can model such a more complex path with complete accuracy.

Miass, near Chimney

As a result, I think all current calculated trajectories overshoot the real landing site. I suspect most of the meteor mass landed between Lake Chebarkul and Miass, not beyond Miass. There are no videos from Miass showing a path flying overhead, though the calculated trajectories do assume such a path. One Miass video in particular (“Miass, near chimney” shows the contrail almost perfectly head-on, suggesting the the main part of the meteoroid landed in front of the viewpoint (towards Chebarkul).

Miass, near plant

Other viewpoints in Miass (“Miass, near plant” especially) suggest that some of the calculated trajectories do a better job of modeling the pre-explosion path, while others are more accurate for the latter part of the path. It’s important to note that around Miass, because the meteoroid was so close to Earth, very small differences in the calculated path can have a very large perceived effect, with changes of just a few hundred meters radically altering the perceived view.

From what I understand, it’s possible to construct even more accurate trajectory models that do not assume a single straight line, and I think this is where astronomers’ efforts will lie in the future.

Road near Miass

Accuracy III: One word of caution about the geopositioned screenshots in the KMZ file: It’s not possible to accurately compensate for fish-eye effects and other distortions in Google Earth beyond basic field-of-view adjustments, and the videos do not always contain sufficient environmental references to precisely measure the heading, tilt and roll of the camera viewpoint. So these videos cannot be used for detail work, though they do work well when trajectories diverge greatly, as is the case near Miass.

Interact: The KMZ file is fully editable, so feel free to edit the embedded screenshots (Right-click an item in the Places sidebar, select Get Info) to see if you can get a better fit against the calculated trajectories. Although it is tempting, I tried not to align the meteoroid path in the video capture with the calculated trajectories in Google Earth, relying instead on clues from the surrounding environment. It’s possible to infer quite a lot from aligning the placement and angles of objects in the geopositioned video capture with imagery on the ground.

Interact II: Do play with the opacity slider at the bottom of the Places sidebar (click the gradient button, if you need to); this makes it much easier to make comparisons (watch the video above to see how). Finally, if you’re wondering how I managed to fly around so smoothly in Google Earth — I use this to navigate 3D space.

[April 5: Help scientists to more accurately calculate the trajectory. Visit www.russianmeteor2013.org to contribute videos or help with the analysis.]

[March 9: Read the follow-up article, Three trajectory models of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid compared]

[April 5: Help scientists to more accurately calculate the trajectory. Visit www.russianmeteor2013.org to contribute videos or help with the analysis.]

Two weeks on, Ogle Earth’s Chelyabinsk meteoroid story has led a interesting life. In the first hours after it went live in the early hours CET of Feb 16, it was first tweeted by Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait and then more broadly by the astronomically minded community. After a day, the wider tech and science crowd found it. Two days later, mainstream media discovered it. A week later, it saw a second wind as a meta-story about citizen science. It’s received a respectable 100,000 visits so far, not quite making it Ogle Earth’s most popular story ever (that honor still goes to Finding Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottabad mansion with Google Earth from May 2, 2011).

However, it is by far the most commented story in the blog’s history, with around 340 comments to date, many making real contributions improving on the initial approximations. Thanks especially to early work by Sean Mac, SebastienP, Robin Whittle, liilliil and the other Russians who provided help with language and localization. If this article is an example of citizen science, it’s important not to overlook the collaboration that went on in the comments section. I was actually traveling in Africa for most of the past two weeks, not able to do more than moderating the comments passively.

I now know of four scientific teams that are in the process of homing in on a more precise trajectory for the meteor, some of whom have gotten in touch with me and who are now in touch with each other:

• There is a team at the Physics Institute of the Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia doing a more rigorous application of the idea of calculating from YouTube videos and Google Earth, posting initial results to ArXiv.org and using the trajectory to reconstruct the meteoroid’s orbit, placing it in the Apollo class of Earth-crossing asteroids. (Thanks, Jorge and Ignacio, for the reference to Ogle Earth in your paper.)
• There is also a team at the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Ondrejov, Czech Republic, that used the same or similar viral videos and Google Maps to calculate a trajectory for the meteoroid. Their results were posted as an Astronomical Telegram by the International Astronomical Union. They give a set of 6 position fixes so I’ve visualized these data points in this KMZ file for Google Earth.
• A team at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University is calculating the trajectory from a totally different perspective — from space, using the vantage point of two different weather satellites. It will be interesting to see how closely their results correspond to those from the ground.
• And finally, on March 1 NASA released its own calculations, based on “U.S. Government sensors” that for the moment shall apparently remain nameless.

NASA’s data fixes a position for when the meteoroid reached its maximum brightness, given as “54.8°N, 61.1°E” at a height of “23.3 km”. These figures are given to three significant digits, or to the first decimal place; I don’t know if these are at the limits of the instrumentation used or artificially downgraded measurements, but assuming that these are natural bounds for error, I visualized this location in Google Earth as a rectangle at a height of 23,300 meters, delimiting the area between 54.75°-54.85°N and 61.05°-61.15°E. You can download the resulting KMZ file for Google Earth and use it together with the two (one and two) existing KMZ files from the original article.

As you can see from the resulting interaction with the original KMZ files, NASA’s calculated rectangle neatly intersects with the calculated inclined plane along which the meteoroid was observed from Revolution Square in Chelyabinsk. The red line was my most likely trajectory, with the green line as an upper bound. That is a good match indeed! If anything, I think NASA’s results could be nudged a little northwards, considering how the very accurately geopositioned video from Yemanzhelinsk resolutely places the trajectory slightly north of the zenith there.

If you add the Czech results (linked to above), you find a ground path that is practically identical to the red line (they have the same azimuth) but with an angle of attack that is shallower than the one I calculated from the vantage point in Revolution Square. As a result, their trajectory appears at first blush to overshoot the main (or a major) crash site at lake Chebarkul, though of course it is also plausible that meteoroids at the end slow down and start falling to Earth. The shallower trajectory does place their path further away from NASA’s calculated rectangular “window”.

I’ll continue to update this post with improved scientific results as they arrive. Stay tuned!

[March 9: Read the follow-up article, Three trajectory models of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid compared]

[April 5: Help scientists to more accurately calculate the trajectory. Visit www.russianmeteor2013.org to contribute videos or help with the analysis.]

[March 2: Read the follow-up article, Comparing paths with the pros in Google Earth]

[March 9: Read the follow-up article, Three trajectory models of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid compared]

[April 5: Help scientists to more accurately calculate the trajectory. Visit www.russianmeteor2013.org to contribute videos or help with the analysis.]

Like many others, I was absolutely astounded by the meteor strike over Chelyabinsk when I woke on Friday morning. One silver lining to our self-surveilling society is that an event of this magnitude is certain to get caught on the myriad of always-on dash- and webcams. I for one could not get enough of the videos.

Might it be possible to use this viral footage with Google Earth to have an initial go at mapping the meteorite’s trajectory? I was pondering this question some 2,500km away from Chelyabinsk when I chanced upon this video:

That place is easy to find — it’s Revolution Square at the absolute center of Chelyabinsk, looking almost directly south. It is also easy to measure — the distance between the two central light poles is 32 meters, as per a quick measurement in Google Earth, while the five lanes of traffic going right to left (west to east) measure 19 meters. From this it is easy to estimate the height of the light poles to be around 12 meters — an estimate corroborated by numerous panoramas in Google Earth showing people next to these lamp posts, giving us added data points.

Using all this information, I was able to do some image analysis in Photoshop on the lengths and angles of the shadows as the meteor streaked across the sky. Here’s an animated gif showing the result of that:

The ensuing grade-school mathematics (SOHCAHTOA!) resulted in three lines of sight at three instants a few seconds apart. (For the sake of the record, I roughly calculated them to be towards 122 degrees at an inclination of 33 degrees at 9:20:28.7, towards 187 degrees at an inclination of 40 degrees at 9:20:32.2, and towards 222 degrees at an inclination of 32 degrees at 9:20:33.4. These times are the video’s own timeline, though they appear to correlate closely with the timelines of other videos.)

This allowed me to draw an inclined plane in Google Earth that should include the meteor’s path, though it does not allow me to know the distance of the meteor from central Chelyabinsk, nor its speed.

However, we have more clues. We know a fragment of the meteor landed in Lake Chebarkul, roughly 70km WSW of Chelyabinsk. Gratifyingly, the inclined plane generated from the above video intersects with the crash site. Also useful was the estimate by the Russian Academy of Sciences that the meteorite hit the Earth’s atmosphere at around 50,000 km/h, shattering at an altitude of 30-50km. If that was the rough speed of the meteor as it burned up in the video, then the 4.7 seconds between the first and last shadow measurements would have seen it travel 65 km. Fitting a 65km line between these two lines of sight allows us to draw a straight line path for the meteor towards the crash site, with the first measured time yielding a height of 29km, which is the moment the meteor first brightened enough to give a clear shadow.

Download the visualizations for this as a KMZ file to open in Google Earth. Do play with the opacity slider of the overlay to check the alignments yourself — it’s most of the fun.

How does this data square with the Meteosat 9 image that has being doing the rounds? At first glance, not well: Overlaying the image in Google Earth and aligning the border with Kazakhstan shows a 240km contrail that appears to end some 75km to the ENE of Chelyabinsk, even though the path when traced on the ground also leads directly to Lake Chebarkul.

At first, I thought the image might have been taken 5 minutes earlier, before the meteor streaked straight across Chelyabinsk proper, because the image’s metadata gives us a time of 3:15:00Z, or UTC, which is 6 hours behind Chelyabinsk time. But no meteor is going to take 5 minutes to traverse 75km, so we’ll just have to live with the time discrepancy. Webcams are not atomic clocks.

Much more interesting is the fact that if you look at the position of Meteosat 9, which is in a geostationary orbit, you see that Chelyabinsk is near the horizon of its view of Earth. This leads to extreme foreshortening in the snapshot of the meteor’s contrail:

(Notice the outline of the Sea of Azov in the foreground. Here is another version showing the thermal impact (source).)

The version used in the overlay is an enhanced view of this image, taken from the same angle. (The blacked-out upper right-hand corner of the overlay is behind the horizon as seen from Meteosat 9.). If you simulate this view of Chelyabinsk in Google Earth, you see that in fact, the contrail aligns quite nicely over Chelyabinsk considering that it would be 30km high and at such an extreme angle over the horizon. So the 4.7 seconds of maximal brightness (with contrail) do get to happen just south of Chelyabinsk proper, as per the above video, and without contradiction by Meteosat 9.

I feel this post would not be complete without some big caveats: I am not a trained scientist; I don’t know if meteors travel through the atmosphere in straight lines or at constant speeds (I assume they don’t, but that it doesn’t matter for back-of-the-envelope type calculations). Still, it is satisfying to know that with judicious use of Google Earth, YouTube and Photoshop you can get quite far in the meteor simulation game. I can’t wait to see what the professionals come up with.

UPDATE 2013-02-16: Via SebastienP in the comments comes another triangulation, comparing the calculated path from the KMZ file with the view from another dash cam. It holds up pretty well!

(Source)

UPDATE 2013-02-17: In this comment, some smart calculations by Sean Mac are confirmed by a video he’s found showing the contrail crossing almost exactly above the southern suburb of Yemanzhelinsk. I found the exact vantage point of the video he references in Google Earth by connecting this Panoramio photo to this view in the video.

This suggests the meteor’s trajectory towards Earth was higher and steeper along the inclined plane of sight derived from the central Chelyabinsk vantage point than the initial calculation suggested. That’s not surprising, as that calculation was based on an initial estimate of the velocity by the Russian Academy of Sciences, which now appears to have been on the low side.

I’ve now added a second path for the meteor in Google Earth, together with the location of the vantage point in Yemanzhelinsk, in this KMZ file. Open it as a complement to the first KMZ file to see what I would consider to be an upper bound (green) for the trajectory along the same inclined plane, with a new likeliest path (red).

“Looking up” in Google Earth from the vantage point in Yemanzhelinsk (I can because I have a 3D mouse from 3DConnexion), I get a very similar angle of view of the contrail when framed by the NNW axis of the buildings on that square.

A further video showing the perspective from the town of Korkino further north (included in the new KMZ file) shows that the meteor passed a little to the south of there, allowing for a pretty accurate triangulation. (Thanks to Robin Whittle and liilliil in the comments for the heads up.)

UPDATE 2013-02-22: OK, so this is kind of special: An astrophysics paper has just been submitted to ArXiv.org that models the orbit of the Chelyabinsk meteor, referencing this blog post as a starting point: A preliminary reconstruction of the orbit of the Chelyabinsk Meteoroid by Jorge I. Zuluagaa and Ignacio Ferrin. Details are here, and here comes the resulting animation:

[March 2: Read the follow-up article, Comparing paths with the pros in Google Earth]

[March 9: Read the follow-up article, Three trajectory models of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid compared]

[April 5: Help scientists to more accurately calculate the trajectory. Visit www.russianmeteor2013.org to contribute videos or help with the analysis.]

Yesterday, Wired’s usually reputable Danger Room blog posted an article on “China’s mystery complex”, titled “What Did Google Earth Spot in the Chinese Desert? Even an Ex-CIA Analyst Isn’t Sure”.

But even this old analyst is having trouble ID’ing the objects he found in the overhead images of Kashgar. “I haven’t the faintest clue what it might be — but it’s extensive, the structures are pretty big and funny-looking, and it went up in what I’d call an incredible hurry,” he emails.

So he’d like your help in solving this little mystery.

As a Google Earth user and blogger, and having traveled to Kashgar and written about the city and its surroundings, I was certainly intrigued, so I decided to take a look.

View Kashgar in a larger map, with explanations.

I had no trouble finding the location, and immediately surmised it is just another huge industrial park being constructed, one of many propelling China’s development at breakneck speed. Here’s what a little context can tell you:

1. In May 2010, Kashgar was selected as a special economic zone by the Chinese government, which means that, just like Shenzhen and other places before it, it is in for a wild ride on a scale not often seen outside China. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t anything massive being built in Kashgar right now. Kashgar’s economy is growing at around 15-20% per year, and it is perfectly placed for cross-border trade with the central Asian republics.
2. The complex in question is conveniently being built just to the northeast of the very modern Kashgar airport, very close to a reservoir which I drove by on an excursion to nearby ruins (also marked on the map). The railway from Urumuqi to Kashgar veers into Kashgar just south of the reservoir, and would be perfectly positioned for an offshoot into the industrial zone. This complex is not at the far edge of some small desert town; it is located on prime real estate near transportation hubs in a rapidly expanding trading and manufacturing center that was once a major waypoint on the Silk Road. It would be the absolutely worst place to build a secret base.
3. Anybody with a visa for China can fly, drive or train it to Kashgar. There are no restrictions to travelers into the region, unlike in Tibet. In fact, landing at the airport, I had a wonderful view of the slopes on which this complex is now being built. Fly into Kashgar on one of many daily scheduled flights and you’d know right away how work is progressing.

In sum, I was disappointed. Not with the Chinese for failing to construct a mystery complex, but with the gullible reporter, who should at the very least have gotten a second opinion before letting loose on the Internet a retired analyst with an overactive imagination and no on-the-ground knowledge of the area. I left a comment to that effect.

That, of course, did not nip this meme in the bud. My RSS reader started filling up with rewrites, soon enough including from mainstream news outlets such as Salon, Australia’s Telegraph and even Sweden’s Nyheter24. The rewrite-industrial complex was going gangbusters. All that was missing was the Huffington Post version. [Update: Here it is.]

This story thus reveals more about us than about China. It is above all a story about technology racing ahead of our ability to put it into context. We are overawed by the notion that we can observe any place on Earth in high resolution, but we lack the tools to understand this power and the limits of this power. Into this cognitive vacuum we pile on conspiracy theories. Any absence of information suddenly requires a cover-up. Comments to the original Danger Room article betray an amazing appetite for conspiratorial beliefs that are incompatible with even a passing knowledge of how satellite imagery is collected.

And the story also reveals how many in the West continue to see China as an oriental mystery opaque to westerners, fair game for wild conjecture. But it’s not. Those days are long gone. Here be no more dragons. China is knowable. Just not from Google Earth alone.

I don’t use this blog much at all these days. As far as blogs go, more of my efforts have gone toward the Axis Maps blog and Bostonography. But in the interest of this site having any purpose at all, I figured I’d jot down some of the things I’ve been up to lately.

• Hubway trip explorer map: An exploratory tool to see where trips occur in Boston’s bike sharing system. It’s a fairly simple map done in Leaflet that connects to a database of some 550,000 trips and allows the user to filter by a variety of factors of time, demographics, and weather. This was for a contest run by Hubway and MAPC and it won the “Best Data Exploration Tool” award. (Be sure to see the other winners and all the rest!) Finally actually used one of the bikes the other day; pretty convenient!
• Hubway infographics: For the same contest I also put together a few infographics. There are some pretty bogus charts in there, but I wanted to try my hand and infographicky things, and it was kind of fun.
• “Why Not The Best” map: We (Axis Maps) completely rebuilt a map we had done with IPRO in Flash a year or two before. Kind of an enjoyable project because I learned a lot of JavaScript mapping techniques; it was only my second real js map project. It’s done with Leaflet and does a bunch of canvas and tile stuff: read all about it.
• New typographic maps: I didn’t really work on these except for proofreading, but we put out four new typographic map posters this summer: London, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Minneapolis. One that I did work on is a letterpress print of the Boston typographic map.
• Crowdsourced neighborhood boundaries: A pretty fascinating project looking at the ill-defined boundaries of Boston’s neighborhoods. We made a simple online survey tool in which people can draw neighborhood boundaries as they see them. I mapped some of the data earlier this year, finding where there is consensus (and how much) in each neighborhood.
• NACIS Practical Cartography Day: At the NACIS conference in Portland in October, I gave a Practical Cartography Day presentation with some tips and thoughts on user interface design for interactive maps, a topic not often addressed there for some reason. The link here goes to the accompanying examples and also has the presentation slides. (Also, I’ll be a co-chair of PCD next year; looking forward to working on that!)
• “The Aesthetician and the Cartographer”: A rant, sort of, about the superficial view of cartography, and an encouragement to speak more about the why of our maps, not just the how.
• Newspaper: I had one essay sort of thing for the Boston Globe this summer. Tim Wallace and I occasionally do little features for the Ideas section, but usually one of us has made a map. This time it was about some old-timey satire. That link may require a subscription; I’m not sure. Here’s the blog post that it’s based on.
• On the nature of web cartography: This link is already a year old, but it’s a recurring topic. Last year I spoke to cartography students at Middlebury College about the processes and philosophies we have at Axis Maps, along with a few practical tidbits. This spring I spoke about similar things to cartography students back in good old Science Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• Send me your high-tech mapping tutorials! I am the section editor for “On the Horizon” in Cartographic Perspectives. We’re still looking for tutorial submissions to this section, so hook us up!
• Atlas of Design plug: This is not my work, but it deserves many plugs! The Atlas of Design, edited by Daniel Huffman and Tim Wallace, came together quite nicely and was launched at the NACIS conference. It features 27 awesome maps selected from the many submissions they received. Actually, you can’t get it now because it’s sold out, but put yourself on a waitlist to encourage a second printing.

Looking dusty here. Tap, tap. Is this blog still on? Here’s an anecdote and a thought.

As much as a decade ago, I remember running into amazingly high resolution aerial imagery of Cambridge, Massachusetts. You could see people in this imagery, which was not so common on the web at the time. I explored Cambridge a bit via the map, as I am wont to do with any map in front of me. I found what looked like some busy spots, identified the famous Harvard University, and so on. It was a strange, unknown place—a city I only knew in person as a collection of buildings glimpsed from highways or from across the river in Boston, where I had been a number of times. It was mostly only a place on a map, and it was up to my imagination to picture what it was like to be there.

Aerial image of Harvard Square, dated 2001 in Google Earth.

Then, some years later, circumstances brought me to Cambridge as a resident. Now a further four years after that, I obviously have a much different image of the city. I love this place, and I’m glad I’ve come to know it well, but there’s no longer any mystique. I kind of miss imaginary Cambridge.

Part of maps’ broad appeal is that they are captivating as canvases for imagination. They can represent lands we’ve never seen, offering a simple lattice of information but requiring us to fill in the gaps in our minds. We can explore maps and “know” places to be as fantastic as our minds will allow. Ultimately, I think, it leads us to explore the places in reality, and it can be shocking when reality doesn’t match our imagined expectations. The shock is not necessarily bad and may even be pleasant (except when, say, imaginary beauty turns out to be a trash-strewn real world); but if you’re like me, you lament the demise of the place your mind invented, even if the reality that supplanted it is better.

As web reference maps move toward less and less abstracted representations of the world, some observers have begun to wonder whether people are losing the interest or need to go to explore real places and experience them in real life, because Street View can show you exactly what a place looks like, or Twitter maps can tell you exactly what people are talking about there, and so forth. I remain optimistic that modern maps will not be a substitute for reality, but rather will draw people in to experience what they know is happening in different places. The maps of old may have tantalized people with their sea monsters and blank spaces, but people didn’t stop climbing mountains when someone else had mapped their slopes with precision, and I didn’t avoid walking around town because I had already seen people-level aerial photos. Knowing what’s out there is as much of a draw as not knowing.

No, the victim in the march toward realistic maps is not real-world experience; the victim is imagination and a bit of the fun of reading maps. I don’t cease to imagine places when looking at a map. It’s just that my imagination is increasingly accurate. It used to be that for every place in the world there were actually two places: one in my mind and one on the ground. Soon, perhaps, there will be only one.

RIP, the last imaginary place on Earth.

ゴルフに親しんでいる人達にとっては、常にゴルフ用品にも熱い視線が注がれています。美しいドライバーやアイアンは、ひとつの芸術品のような仕上がりとなっているものも多い現代ですから、既に既存のゴルフクラブセットを一揃え所持している人であっても、趣味であるゴルフに対しては、ゴルフに付随する品にも、糸目をつけたくないと願っている方々も、非常に多いことも事実です。ゴルフーボールを、より遠くへ飛ばす事の出来る良い新製品のドライバーなどは、まさに喉から手の出そうな一品なのです。


しかし、住まいの近くにゴルフ用品の専門店がなかったり、多忙を極める日常の中で、ゴルフ用品店まで足を運ぶ時間が見つからないゴルファーにとっては、そこは悩ましいところとなりますので、そんな時にこそ、ゴルフ用品の通販ショップが、とても役に立ってくれる筈です。ゴルフ用品全般を全て扱っている通販を利用すれば、コースで必要となるあらゆる品々が、自宅に居ながらにして自由の選択出来て、しかも安価で購入することも可能なのです。


インターネットを活用した場合でも、ゴルフ用品の通販ショップが無数に紹介されていることは、直ぐに確認できるでしょうし、商品と価格を比較検討しながら、お得なショッピングを楽しむことが出来ますから、新しいクラブや、それと付随して必要となるゴルフ関連のアイテムを探している方には、本当にゴルフ用品の通販は、有り難い存在となると思います。もちろんゴルフ好きの人々にとっては、そうした通販商品を、眺めるだけでも、きっと愉しいはずです。

ゴルフは単なるスポーツではない部分があります。社会にでると、男の付き合い、男のたしなみのようにゴルフとは単なるスポーツとは違う部分が存在します。お付き合いから始まることの多いゴルフですが、一度経験すると奥の深さにとりこになる方もいます。ゴルフを始めるにはまずゴルフ用品をそろえることになります。ゴルフ用品は、安いものから高いものいろいろあります。通販サイトもたくさんありまして直接購入するよりお得な通販サイトもたくさんあります。ゴルフ用品は通販サイトでの購入がお得です。


ゴルフ用品は、以外にそろえるものが多いものです。通販サイトなら種類も豊富で家にいながらチェックできます。シューズ、バッグなどからクラブまで一度にゴルフ用品をチェックするなら通販が便利です。インターネットでのゴルフ用品通販サイトは数多くあります。価格比較サイトなどもありますからショップの選択も幅ひろく行えます。他の商品でもそうですが、店舗を持っている店より通販店のほうが諸経費がかかりませんから、価格もお得なことが多いのです。


ゴルフ用品を通販サイトでそろえるとお得なのは値段だけではありません。ゴルファーが必要とする情報がゴルフ用品の販売以外にももりだくさんにゴルフ用品の通販サイトには用意されています。ゴルフ用品の通販サイトでは、ゴルフ場予約情報もたくさんあります。また、本格的なゴルファーの方には会員権の情報もあります。ゴルフレッスンについても、いろいろな情報がありますから、ゴルフ用品の購入以外でも、ゴルファーには非常に役に立つサイトが多く存在します。ゴルフ用品は通販サイトでも購入がお得です。

半年前からゴルフに熱中しています。10年前にもゴルフに熱中していた時期がありその時にゴルフ用品は一通りそろえていたのですがゴルフウェアにしてもゴルフクラブにしても10年も経てばゴルフ用品はかなり様変わりしていましたので、今は通販を使ってゴルフ用品を買いそろえているところです。例えばゴルフは紳士淑女のスポーツとしてゴルフウェアにも気を使いますが、ゴルフパンツは以前はタック付きが主流でした。しかし今ではほとんどのメーカーがノータックしか販売していません。


それで私の住んでいるところでは大型のゴルフショップはなく、またおしゃれなゴルフウェアもありませんのでゴルフウェアを手に入れるのは通販ばかりです。通販だとゴルフウェアはサイズが心配なのですが、サイズが大きい分には問題ないと割り切って少し大きめのウェアを買って着用しています。ゴルフシューズもおしゃれなブランドのシューズはやはり通販で購入しています。しかしゴルフシューズに関しては実際に履いてみないといけなかったと後悔しています。


ゴルフクラブに関してはインターネットオークションで手に入れることが多いです。どうしても最新のゴルフクラブが欲しくなった時も地元のゴルフショップで購入するよりは通販で購入した方が値段が安いので通販を利用しています。毎日いろいろなゴルフショップのウェブサイトでゴルフ用品の値段が安くなっていないか、最新のモデルが出ていないかをチェックしており、しばらくはプレー費よりもゴルフ用品にお金がかかると思っています。

通常、ゴルフ用品を揃えるときはゴルフ専門店へ行き、そこで買い揃えます。しかし、今はインターネットの通販で、ゴルフ用品をほとんど揃えることが出来るようになっています。さらに、通販でゴルフ用品を取り扱っている業者は多く、すぐに自分が欲しいゴルフ用品を見つけることが可能です。インターネットでは、自宅から短時間で様々な通販サイトへ行くことが出来るので、ゴルフ専門店に行く時間がない人も利用できるという利点もあります。


通販では様々なゴルフ用品を買うことが出来ます。新品のゴルフクラブ、中古のゴルフクラブからゴルフボール、ゴルフシューズやゴルフクラブを入れるゴルフバッグ、ゴルフウェアまで売っています。アクセサリーとして、サングラスにゴルフグローブまで通販で揃えることが出来ます。その他にもゴルフ用品として距離測定器というものも通販では売られています。また、通販でゴルフウェアを購入する際には、服のサイズを選ぶことも出来ます。


今はゴルフ用品をインターネットの通販で揃えることが出来る時代です。自宅で商品を見ることができ、しかも色々な通販ショップサイトを短時間で回れるというところが通販の利点です。家からゴルフショップまでが遠く、なかなか直接買いに行くことが難しいという方も、この通販ならば家まで届けてくれるので利用してみてはいかがでしょうか。通販サイトによっては、定価より安く売られているものもあります。また、購入するとポイントが付くところもあるので、通販で買うと得することもあるのです。

主人とゴルフを始めたいねと言っていたのはもうかれこれ数年前の話になるのですが、私が妊娠をしてしまったので、ゴルフ用品の準備はお店やインターネットの通販で見たり少しずつそろえたりしていたのですが、練習にいったり、ゴルフ場のデビューをするのは一歩出遅れているような状況です。　インターネットでのゴルフ用品の通販というのはお店で見ているよりもより細かい説明が書いてあったり、レビューなどもあったりしてまだまだゴルフの分からない私にはとても　役に立っています。

ゴルフ用品ひとつにしても通販を利用することによって、お店の方からは得られないような情報もたくさんに知れたりするので私はこのゴルフ用品の通販のみならず、こういった方法での購入は普段からよく利用させていただいています。　主人のゴルフクラブを入れるケースもゴルフ用品の通販を利用して購入しました。　とても丁寧に梱包をされて配達されてきました。そして大きなものなのでお店で購入して持ってくる手間を考えると大変便利だと思いました。

こういうゴルフ用品の通販のいいところは意外にも衣料や小物を除くと大きなものや壊れやすいデリケートなものも多いので大切にきれいに梱包をして自宅まで配達していただけるという点も含め非常に効率的で大変便利なお買い物の方法だと思います。　私も出産を終えたらゴルフクラブの練習へ通うつもりでいるので今からそれが楽しみです。　たまに休日などに主人とゆっくりゴルフを楽しめるときを目指して子育てを頑張りたいと思います。

This is a quick plug for a new publication being put together by NACIS (the North American Cartographic Information Society, also known as the most awesome bunch of cartographers anywhere): the Atlas of Design, which will feature “cartography at its most beautiful, its cleverest, its sharpest, and its most intriguing.” It’ll be the best coffee table book ever!

A couple of our favorite cartographers are out there now rounding up work from all of our other favorite cartographers. If you’ve got a map to show off, submit it for consideration! If you know people who have maps to show off, encourage them to submit! The deadline is February 24; see all the instructions on the Atlas site.

Do it!

function createCanvas(image){
// create a new canvas element
var myCanvas = document.createElement("canvas");
var myCanvasContext = myCanvas.getContext("2d");
var imgWidth=image.width;
var imgHeight=image.height;
myCanvas.width= imgWidth;
myCanvas.height = imgHeight;
myCanvasContext.drawImage(image,0,0);
var imageData = myCanvasContext.getImageData(0,0, imgWidth, imgHeight);
var data = imageData.data;
for (j=0; j<imageData.width; j++)
{
for (i=0; i<imageData.height; i++)
{
// index: red, green, blue, alpha, red, green, blue, alpha..etc.
var index=(i*4)*imageData.width+(j*4);
var gray = 0.33 * data[index] + 0.5 * data[index+1] + 0.16 * data[index+2] ;
data[index] = data[index+1] = data[index+2] = gray;
}
}
myCanvasContext.putImageData(imageData,0,0,0,0, imageData.width, imageData.height);
document.getElementById("canvas_target").appendChild(myCanvas);
};

function createFilter(image){
image.style.filter = 'progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(grayScale=1)';
document.getElementById("canvas_target").appendChild(image);
};
//Main
var img = new Image();
img.onload = function (){
if(navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("msie") != -1){
createFilter(img);
}else{
createCanvas(img);
}
}
img.src = "images/canvas.png";

//IE
image.style.filter = 'progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(invert=1)';
//Other browsers
data[index] = 255 - data[index];
data[index+1] = 255 - data[index];
data[index+2] =  255 - data[index];

Street View Pegman

Integration of Street View with Google Maps

Understanding Street View

A panorama with yaw = 0°


The same panorama with yaw = 180°

Zoom level 0 is made of only one tile


Zoom level 1 is made of 2 tiles


Zoom level 2 is made of 8 tiles


Zoom level 3 is made with 28 tiles

Windshield viewports

Getting directions

// This function is from Google's polyline utility.
function fDecodeLine($encoded){
$len = strlen($encoded);
$index = 0;
$lat = 0;
$lng = 0;

while ($index < $len) {
$shift = 0;
$result = 0;
do {
$b = ord(substr($encoded,$index++,1)) - 63;
$result |= ($b & 0x1f) << $shift;
$shift += 5;
} while ($b >= 0x20);
$dlat = (($result & 1) ? ~($result >> 1) : ($result >> 1));
$lat += $dlat;

$shift = 0;
$result = 0;
do {
$b = ord(substr($encoded,$index++,1)) - 63;
$result |= ($b & 0x1f) << $shift;
$shift += 5;
} while ($b >= 0x20);
$dlng = (($result & 1) ? ~($result >> 1) : ($result >> 1));
$lng += $dlng;
$points[] = new Point($lng * 1e-5, $lat * 1e-5);//lng -> x and lat -> y
}
return $points;
}//fDecodeLine

Gluing routes and panoramas

From Milano,IT to Torino,IT (141Km): allmost all vertices have a related panorama


From Strasbourg,FR to Karlsruhe,DE (88Km): there are no Street View coverage in Germany yet

$makeMovieFfmpeg = 'ffmpeg -r '.VIDEO_FPS.' -f image2 -i '.TEMP_FOLDER.'/'.$video_name.'_%d.jpg '.$video_name.'.'.VIDEO_FORMAT.' 2>&1';
exec($makeMovieFfmpeg,$ret,$err);

'ffmpeg -qscale 10 -mbd rd -flags +mv4+aic -trellis 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -g 300 -pass 1/2 -r '.$this->video_fps.' -i '.TEMP_FOLDER.'/'.$this->video_name.'_%d.jpg '.$this->video_name.'.mp4'

Features that could be added

Prerequisites

ANT_HOME=D:\xampp\htdocs\apache-ant-1.8.1
JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_21
PHP_HOME=D:\xampp\php
Path=...;%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%ANT_HOME%\bin;%PHP_HOME%

Setting up the tool chain

The Ant build file

The test generator

Executing tests

my_sevice1.{format}?param1=XXX&param2=yyy=>mystructure1;->items->item[0]->id=xxx

Configuring Hudson

Conclusion

Open Layers

Offline dynamic map viewer

Yeouido as seen in the tileset selector

Google Maps Yeouido tileset loaded offline inside Open Layers

Google Maps Tileset selector. Current selection is Miami from zoom level 12 to 16 so about 1.100 tiles.

The code

if( (!isset($_GET['distant_area'])) && (!isset($_GET['local_area']))){
if(!empty(Localrepository){
//Display all stored tilesets in local repository.
(...)
}else{
$_GET['local_area'] = NEW_AREA;
}
}else if(isset($_GET['distant_area'])){
//Download a distant tileset
(...)
$_GET['local_area'] = $_GET['distant_area'];
}
if(isset($_GET['local_area'])){
if(0 == strcmp($_GET['local_area'], NEW_AREA)){
//Loads distant tileset selector
(...)
}else{
//Loads local tileset viewer
(...)
}
}

location.href = 'http://' + location.hostname + location.pathname  + "?distant_area=" + base64_encode(params + '_' + googleMap.getCurrentMapType().getName() + '_' + tag)

var TILE_PATH_ROOT="<?php echo TILE_DIR.'/'.$_GET['local_area'].'/';?>";
(...)
layer = new OpenLayers.Layer.XYZ( "GoogleMaps Local Tiles",
TILE_PATH_ROOT + "x=${x}&y=${y}&z=${z}",
{'sphericalMercator': true, 'layername':'localTiles'});
map.addLayer(layer);

Next article: Creating Google Street View videos from itineraries