Much has been talked and theorised about, and much has been done to, the London Tube Map, the epitome of the intersection of information design and abstract network cartography. From fourthway comes now a handy tool to draw some interesting comparisons: The Real Underground allows you to morph the current London Underground Map into the 1933 Harry … Continue reading London Tube Maps
Yesterday in the late afternoon the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (Swisstopo) declared (German) the exposure of maps via web service and opening up of their API (press release also only in German) through Swisstopo web access (brief description in English) with the following two options: WMTS option (Web Map Tile Service): This service lets you display current geodata (aerial … Continue reading Swiss maps on your website
In cooperation with local partners MIT’s Senseable City Lab has developed six real-time visualizations of the city of Singapore which is on display since April 8 in the exhibition LIVE Singapore!, co-curated with the Singapore Art Museum. Continue reading “Real-time visualizations of Singapore”
A new method developed by Wang et al. claims to be able to geolocate IP addresses much (they claim 50 times) more accurately than has been previously feasible. The new method uses a three-tier approach: 1) sending a data packet and measuring how long it takes to bounce back, indicating an imprecise distance; 2) doing the same with all institutions with known geolocation (for example, universities or businesses) within 200 km distance of the first guess and comparison of bounce-back-times to refine the estimated location; 3) doing a similar refinement to 2) at a finer resolution.
Continue reading “New method locates you within a few hundred metres”
Starting from yesterday the Processing team offers Processing 0195 pre-release for download. Lots of bugs have been fixed and 0195 is considered a stepping stone for a Processing 1.5 stable release in a few days. (via Ben Fry) Continue reading Processing 0195
A rant just arrived in my inbox, by Mikel Maron via the Geowanking mailing list. While I think Mikel has some valid points, I am still (naïvely?) optimistic that the bleak picture he paints will not materialise in really bad outcomes. Hopefully.
But who knows. In two events (about one and about three years ago) I asked two GeoGooglers (Ed Parsons being one of them) about the relationship, and its anticipated development, between Google and OpenStreetMap (OSM). Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), the answers were very vague and suggested that OSM is “not perceived as a competition” by Google and also that cooperation is “not impossible”. Continue reading “GoopenStreetMaple: Information wants to be free”
Recently, I was pointed to Typealyzer, a tool for analysing blog types or, actually, the personality types of the people behind the blog. The information is visualised in a spider chart with eight personality dimensions.
Typealyzer is the doing of Mattias Ostmar and Jon Kågström, the former being a (self-described) media and communication geek and Communication Analyst at Sweden-based PRfekt. Mattias specialises in psychological text analysis. Besides Typealyzer he has several other projects in that field. His website/blog is http://www.mattiasostmar.net and his Typealyzer profile looks like this:
A friend of mine discovered the Seattle Band Map (a.k.a. Cartographic Study of Musical Incest), a project by radio host Rachel Ratner, designer Keith Whiteman and computer scientist Golf Sinteppadon.
As Rachel Rutner describes in the project’s first blog post, she started the map as a nerdy personal project. The goal was to map out the bands she and her friends played in and which were interconnected by shared band members.
In the first draft (on paper) there were about 20 bands of the Seattle region:
As a sort of April fool’s joke (I guess) and a pun on the Open<XY>Map naming scheme somebody (Grant Slater of Firefishy?) set up an OpenWhateverMap: http://openwhatevermap.org It doesn’t quite deliver on the promise though, IMO, since it shows ‘only’ differently rendered OpenStreetMap tiles. It fails to acknowledge the full picture of developments in the … Continue reading OpenWhateverMap
Above picture shows a potato-shaped earth. It’s called a geoid and shows the actual (but highly exaggerated) form of our planet. The surface of potato earth represents the form of an ideal surface which water would adopt if it covered the whole earth and if there would be no currents induced by tides or wind. … Continue reading Potato earth
Today’s Economist‘s Daily Chart features a diagram of scientific citations per country: The diagram has two parts: a donut chart showing the proportion of citations per country for 1999-2003 and one for 2004-2008. The (not terribly surprising) story (or at least the interpretation of the numbers by the Royal Society) is that research has become … Continue reading Citation donuts
By filing a legal suit against Deutsche Telekom German politician Malte Spitz (Green party) was able to obtain data recorded under the German preventive data retention act. He chose to publish the data which was collected in the timespan from August 2009 to February 2010 and encompassed exactly 35.831 individual records (Spitz’s phone checked for … Continue reading Geoprofiling using cellphone data (and some volunteered information)
