JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) False-Color Composite Image Of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Check out the mondo east-west fault scarp on this baby.
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Category Archives: mapping
Haiti Earthquake News & Aid – Updated
JAN 19TH AM UPDATES
Spatial Sustain | A call for a coordinated and conflated mapping effort between OpenStreetMaps and Google MapMaker in light of the Haitian earthquake. “Not surprisingly, the two data sets don’t match, and the question becomes what data is correct and how can the data be conflated to create a unified and accurate map.”
The Rumpus | “No one will ever know an actual death toll because no one is counting the bodies.”
JAN 15TH PM UPDATES
* BBC’s Jonathan Amos | How Satellites Are Being Used In Haiti: How geospatial science and technology can and do help during disasters
* Slashdot | Tech NGO’s Working In Haiti: Please also give to Télécoms Sans Frontières which “brings mobile telecom rigs and satellite phones to disaster sites, making sure that responders on the ground can communicate with each other and that individuals can contact families abroad.” Their donation site is super-slow, so please be patient.
JAN 15TH AM UPDATES
* New York Times Interactive Map: Use the slider to compare before and after satellite imagery of key buildings in Port-Au-Prince. Good job, NYT!
* Servir Maps: Damage assessment (before and after) maps and a good preliminary assessment of erosion/landslide potential.
* John McQuaid | Why Haiti Is Not New Orleans: “Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake are fundamentally different. That many people are lumping them together shows how superficial and ignorant we collectively remain about disasters – and also why we never do an adequate job of preparing for them.” Wonderful essay, I encourage you to read all of it. Haiti needs the spotlight on its disaster in itself, and not for the global media to make wrong and useless comparisons to other disasters when idiot armchair critics far away can do that all by themselves.
Making US Unemployment Maps
If you don’t know already from some of my VizWorld posts, I’m a Flowing Data fangirl. Nathan Yau is the younger, hipper, nerdier Edward Tufte, and one who likes to share his sources and techniques. Understandably, Tufte has his trade secrets, but it was like pulling teeth to get him to share what tools and design methods he uses to make his graphics. Something about Adobe Illustrator and a cadre of assistants is all I got.
Last night, I made a 2009 United States county-specific unemployment map using Flowing Data’s How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools tutorial. All you need is a Python installation, the BeautifulSoup XML parser, a good text editor and some patience to debug. (Another reason I like Nathan: He codes in Python, the best, most intuitive programming language out there!)
These are the results, admittedly without a legend (bad Maitri!), which I will work on in Photoshop. So you know what you’re looking at here, the lightest color is 0% unemployment and steps up from there in 2% increments, with the darkest color denoting 10+% unemployment. This data was downloaded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
1. The Flowing Data original reproduced:
2. Diverging colors (blue=low; red=high)
3. Sequential colors (white=low; orange=high; black=+10%). The darker the hues, the more trouble folks have telling them apart. Black shows the worst hit spots and provides a backdrop with which to differentiate between the other colors
Check out the original Unemployment, 2004 To Present to see how bad things have become just in the last two years. This isn’t news, but just as well when you look at it in a county-by-county color graphic. The nation is indeed bleeding. Let’s make more casinos at home and start more land wars in Asia!
It Can Be Done
General Robert Van Antwerp, chief of the US Army Corps of Engineers, recently stated that “New Orleans can no longer be protected from hurricane storm surges” and that “half of Louisiana will be under water by 2100.”
Back off, man. I’m a scientist. The latest research indicates that sea level will rise at most 1 to 1.3 meters in the next century. At below left is what that ~1 meter of sea level rise looks like on a map. [Source: University of Arizona Environmental Studies Lab Sea Level Rise Viewer] While New Orleans will be affected, I’d hardly call that half of Louisiana.
Now take a close look at the picture on the right. While New Orleans will be affected, so will the entire northeastern seaboard including beloved New York City and our nation’s capital. I dare General van Antwerp to go up to Washington D.C. and say it cannot be protected. A word that comes to mind is “pilloried.”
If we are the most awesome country on the planet, why can we not accomplish what the Dutch have? So, don’t say it can’t be done, just admit you are not the one to do it.
And then former New Orleans Recovery Czar Ed Blakely’s pronouncement that New Orleans “isn’t likely” to be around 100 years from now because the Mississippi River and another hurricane/flood would “wipe New Orleans off the map.” I agree with him to a certain extent about some of his other points on New Orleans’s recovery and how it is plagued by racial distrust, corruption, apathy and inertia. Blakely is no climatologist, however, and should have stopped there. Besides, how can you take seriously a man who had a church razed “with the statement that God was angry at [its parishioners] for not repairing the church in a more timely fashion?”
New Orleans can recover and be protected from storm surges. It requires a monumental feat of engineering that can then be applied to other American coastal cities when their time comes. More than that, it requires honest folks who have a clear scientific and sociopolitical understanding of the situation and possess the nuts to ask for help. Not those who blindly and singlehandedly take on monumental projects, make asinine decisions based on shoddy research (or for personal gain) and express sour grapes on their way out. It can be done.
Also read:
Richard | Ed Blakely: so close, and yet …
Cliff | Don’t be mad at Ed Blakely. Be mad at yourself.
“Everywhere You Go, Take The Weather With You”
Randall at VizWorld noticed that Weather Underground has a new 3D weather radar feature. “They overlay the existing 2D terrain & radar map with a 3d isosurface extracted from the data.” It requires a quick install of the Unity Web Player. (By the way, the Unity game/environment development tool is now available for FREE. Go download now.)
Not to be outdone, weather.com has a new feature, too. Mapperz discovered “the new ‘Future’ button starts moving into a predicted mode using [TruPoint Beta] technology at 15 minute intervals up to 6 hours into the future.” Looks like it may warm up this evening.
Splitting Up With Google Maps
In the last six months, Google Maps has four times placed me in the wrong spot in this little Ohio town. Also, their maps are not updated on a timely basis even after numerous requests from MAPPING companies, including the one where I work.
The last straw is this: Run a Google Maps search on Canton, OH. It puts you in Massillon and Canton is now labeled Colesville. Even after the Canton Rep pointed it out to Google yesterday, the mistake still stands. It will take a few days given “a number of programs must be reviewed and fixed.”
There is no excuse for such shoddy mapping when MapQuest and Yahoo do exceptional work in this area the first time around. I read that TeleAtlas no longer provides U.S. maps to Google, so it looks like this is solely on Google.
Then again, this is the company that brought you Google Books Fingers. Please, guys, don’t turn into the new Microsoft. Not when I just got a Wave account.
Mapquest vs. Google Maps
Have been finding lately that Mapquest is more accurate than Google Maps in small towns. Comparisons show erroneous feature collection like roads drawn where there clearly aren’t any on the satellite image, bizarre routing and mislabeled streets. Granted, this part of Ohio is full of little towns with only one or no streets on StreetView, but it doesn’t explain how Mapquest gets it right.
Google lacks in the local search department, too. When you know my zip code, why give me search results in Chicago Park Ridge, IL first and my location sixth never?
Next time, I’ll take screenshots to show you what I’m talking about. Screenshot:
Accomplishments Of Note
Ok, even if I don’t know how to do (see previous post), I’ll start with what I done did.
Work: Submitted a 30-minute speaking proposal to the Where 2.0 2010 conference. I’ll leave worrying about the slide deck and what I’m going to wear until after it’s accepted.
Movies: After not having watched a feature film since Harry Potter And The Half-Blooded Snape earlier in the summer, our two trans-Atlantic flights afforded me the chance to catch Sunshine Cleaning, Transformers 2, I Love You, Man, The Hangover and Watchmen (twice). I know watching a bad Michael Bay film is not an accomplishment, but a) insomnia, b) 3D visual effects and c) giant metal robots making that hella-cool Zing! sound. Hoping to watch Slumdog Millionaire this weekend with the fam.
Books: Finished Not Enough Indians. Harry Shearer is the king of the simile and this quick, hilarious read made me think of two things only: Whom will my former neighbor Jennifer Coolidge play when the book is optioned, and isn’t this timely given the casino debate in Ohio?
Election: Continued from above, what is up with the Casino Economy permeating this country? Issue 3 is on the November ballot in Ohio. After having read the arguments of both sides, I have decided to vote No on this issue. Gambling, especially in the absence of a robust bidding process and with only 30% going to the state for education funds, is not economic recovery. Instead, it is poison to our population of under- and unemployed who have very little money as it is. If you don’t believe me, talk to the folks who run Salvation Army, adult literacy and workforce development programs in this area and listen to their stories of people blowing their last $40 at a betting table hoping to make it big.
Anyway, these are Things I’ve Done To Date Worth Noting.
One Small Step
With Respect To
It’s July 1st, so I’ve been back in the Midwest for, what, three months? A quarter of a year.
After fits and starts, travel and more travel and D gone for half of each month, we are beginning to own our home, home-ownership and the giant yard that always needs tending. While D mows, I trim the plethora of plants we inherited and attack the weeds which threaten to take over after every rain. While he puts food on the grill, I sort through the piles of mail addressed to Our New Neighbor or Bamani Venkat (my new name, which I am sure is a result of the following thought process over at Ohio Snail Mail Spam Central: “Maitri Venkat-R … what? Aaaah, new name! *FREAKOUT* Damned furners. *FREAKOUT* I don’t know what to do! Let’s just put it down as Bamani Venkat. Next!“ I am told not to complain as this is a great way to cull the junk mail.)
I had forgotten how beautiful the midwestern countryside is. From atop a western hill, we often lose hours staring at the fields between our house and the county to the south, and the sun setting behind a limestone cliff. Or a wild turkey or ten and deer that invariably spring forth from the same spot in the woods to the southwest. D watches them without a single movement, like an Ent or a patient predator, while the city girl in me moves and tries to get as close as possible without scaring off the critters. I scare off the critters. Apparently, they have great eyesight and like neither bright colors nor sudden movements.
Summertime, and the sun takes forever to wane in these northern latitudes. At 10pm last night, patches of fuchsia and imperial violet sky peeked out from breaks in the trees and rocks. Breathtaking. And that’s when the fireflies and stars come out. As the sun sets, they rise higher and higher, until you cannot tell where the fireflies in the tall trees end and the stars in the sky begin. The stars. Oh, the stars. You can see every last one of them lying in the soft grass. The Big Dipper, Draco, Cassiopeia, the rest of the northern sky, they’re all there. I asked D if this is what it was like for him growing up in the Wisconsin back 40. He nodded. Wow. I grew up in the Kuwaiti desert, where few ventured out at night and the twinkling red lights over the city’s skyscrapers were all the stars you needed. Besides, living in the midst of the merciless urbanization of a coastal desert environment, the only animals we got to see were jack, squat and the occasional feral cat rummaging through the garbage. Now you know why I want to say “Yeah, and one day we put dear old Humpy down and ate him with buns and ketchup” each time someone asks me whether I grew up with a camel in my backyard.
Might I have been a different person raised in a country house surrounded by trees, fresh air and animals? Who knows? Was I envious of kids raised here? Possibly. I remember midwestern farm kids, though, who wanted to trade places with me, bored of shucking corn, scrubbing the horses and other endless chores. I may not consider a city, be it Kuwait City or New York City, an ideal place to raise a kid, but people live every which way and that is how it is, equally legitimate. The way to go then is to enjoy our geographic variety as a species and live alongside, with respect to. When I once asked my Barcelona-dwelling friend Annie if she would ever move back to northern Wisconsin, she replied, “It’s not a great place to be, but a wonderful place to be from.”