Ralph is a world-citizen, a geoinformation specialist by profession, and interested in many topics. Here, he'll confine himself mostly to things geo-visual.
Thenetisabuzz with the news about Google+, Google’s newest attempt to counter Facebook’s dominance in the realm of social networks. Besides India and Brasil, where Google’s Orkut seems popular, the search engine giant has so far failed to successfully enter the social network ground.
"On one hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch!" (by xkcd)
In order to present readable and usable code here on WordPress.com without manually formatting it I searched the intertubes for an elegant solution – and found one here. [sourcecode language=”python” gutter=”false”] import math, string def readFile(file): """Reads a file from disk and returns its content as a string variable :param file: path to a file to be … Continue reading Syntax highlighting on WordPress.com
Boing Boing highlights this map of undersea cables of the Eastern Telegraph Company system printed in 1901. At Boing Boing’s source a person points to a treasure trove for anybody interested in the history of undersea cables or, specifically, related cartography. Above map with its salient red cables clearly highlights the Europe- and US-centric history of … Continue reading Old maps of undersea cables
Living in Switzerland you don’t get to experience many weather phenomena as dramatic as hurricanes and tornados. However, a former colleague of mine investigates the movement patterns of hurricanes to find similarities between individual storms. And in 2004, I was professionally dealing with hurricane Ivan. Ivan was a Category 5 hurricane and is, apparently, the 10th most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. Back then we ordered a Quickbird image (and were lucky enough to get one without too much cloud coverage) and did both a qualitative and quantitative damage assessment of Grand Cayman Island.
These have so far been my only exposures to the study of extreme weather events and, specifically, to the analysis of storm-induced damage captured by means of remote sensing. But some days ago NASA’s Earth Observatory has released a stunning image of a tornado track (of one of the several tornados which have struck Massachusetts in early June 2011) that is well visible from space. Head past the break for the image and more info.
In my last project I used (standalone) Python for geoprocessing. Since ArcGIS or something like that was not there to help with projecting geodata from one coordinate system to another, I wrote a function which converts well-known WGS1984 to Swiss national grid coordinates (Swissgrid, CH1903 LV03). Swisstopo has the formulas of an approximate transformation and also funtions in C#, Javascript … Continue reading Projection from WGS1984 to Swiss national grid (CH1903 LV03)
… in my inbox today: Hi, Thank you for being a long-time contributor to the OpenStreetMap project. We are writing to ask you to login into your account at http://openstreetmap.org/user/terms and accept a new set of contributor terms. Why are we asking this? We need to ask you to explicitly grant permission for us to continue using … Continue reading OSM’s new license arrives…
With the 2010 BP oil spill in the Golf of Mexico and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, environmental disasters have gotten big coverage in the mass media over last months. However, when the biggest shock and public outrage has passed the aftermath of such disasters tends to be less newsworthy to traditional media outlets.
“Big Energy has their communications war room. Counterspill.org is ours.”
This is the claim of Counterspill whose assumed mission is to “promote awareness about the impact of non-renewable energy disasters through a living archive that combines best-in-class reporting, research, social media and community engagement.” Basically, the idea behind Counterspill is to provide on a one-stop portal a counter-narrative to the non-renewable energy industry’s narrative. Counterspill has been launched in April 2011. Its sponsors and partners are primarily philanthropic and environmental organisations as well as NGOs.
The information in the disasters rubric on Counterspill’s website can be accessed directly from the front page. It features an interactive world map and timeline mapping accidents including gas, oil, nuclear and coal in space and time. The timeline can be dragged to select a time window. Using filters one can include only accidents of a certain kind, with a defined size of cleanup costs or involving certain companies. (I assume said cleanup costs also control the size of the circles on the world map, though, this is not explained anywhere)
Several visualization contest deadlines are approaching: Hacking Education Data In Sight Tableau Interactive Viz Contest FlowingData has more information on these. Datavisualization.ch announces a one-day conference called Visualizing Europe, which will take place in Brussels in mid-June. Continue reading Upcoming events
Over on his blog, Bill Dollins muses about the range and ubiquity of the Python language in the geospatial realm. It’s true – if you work with ESRI products on a daily basis (like I do) you almost can’t get away without using Python one way or the other, be it for scripting some workflow, … Continue reading Py all means
(Deutsch weiter unten) Things have been a bit silent around here for the last days. That’s because I have been busy with a private project of mine: doing a spatial analysis of the exposure of the Swiss population to the dangers of nuclear power plants and writing a report about it. The processing was done … Continue reading Gefährdung der Bevölkerung der Schweiz durch Kernkraftwerke: Eine Analyse
From Penn State University and partners comes the fourth instalment in the Geospatial Revolution series [18 mins]. The programme is an “outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact” – and it’s great for any (soon-to-be) geo-enthusiast! The rest of the episodes can be … Continue reading Geospatial Revolution Episode 4 is available!
According to a presentation by two UK researchers at Where 2.0 conference, iOS4 devices constantly track and timestamp their location and dump that data into a file, which is shared with your desktop computer if you choose to backup your iPhone’s content. This presents a major potential for privacy breach. For some phones, there could … Continue reading iOS4 devices track and store their location
