By BoLOBOSE payday loan
[Editor's note: Animated and narrated map provides good summary the China's boundary disputes with it's neighbors. Check out Natural Earth, free GIS world map data where you will find all the mentioned areas.]
Republished from the Economist.
Suspicions between China and its neighbours bedevil its boundaries to the east, south and west.
Watch video China’s territorial claims »
[Editor's note: Plays off catch phrase: "Thought About Saving Darfur?" Saw this paper flier posted at a sandwich place near work in DC last week.]
Republished from SaveDarfur.org.
[Editor's note: I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 1.1 of Natural Earth! Three months after our initial launch, the project reaches a major milestone. The download manager will be updated the next couple weeks. In the meantime, please check out the ZIP and release notes below.]
Continue reading and download the data at NaturalEarthData.com . . .
[Editor's note: Listing of several dozen free web apps and tutorials, including GeoCommons Maker!, Modest Maps, Color Brewer, Open Layers, and Batch GeoCoder.]
Republished from the Sunlight Foundation.
By Kerry Mitchell on 02/19/10
Long ago, putting together a map of data points would be the sole domain of a skilled GIS practitioner employing an application like ArcView. These days, particularly with the advent of Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and OpenStreetMap, et al., there are a multitude of options for an individual to employ in displaying data geographically. Of course, there are, and will always be, technical options that require some level of programming chops. Fortunately, the pool of drop dead easy implementations that anyone can throw together with ease has grown a lot over the last few years. Then, there is the growing middle ground, lying somewhere between easy but rigid and difficult but flexible. Personally, I tend to hover in this netherworld, leveraging existing code, services or tutorials when possible but occasionally finding myself diving into the more technical areas when necessary and learning a lot in the process.
For those of you out there who might be interested in mapping data, I’ve put together a collection of links to a variety of services, code samples, resources and tutorials I’ve found useful in the past. These links range from new services that barely require anything more than a spreadsheet to complicated frameworks that require a great deal of technical knowledge. This is by no means all encompassing and if you happen to have additional links you’d like to share, feel free to leave them in the comments.
[Editor's note: This Flash-based info graphic / report from Periscopic is a delight. They are based in Portland, Oregon and have an impressive client list. The company tag line of "Living in a world of data – and offering a better view" is evident thru the project's sophisticated quantitative analysis tools, accessed thru the Hydrography, Clusters, Historical, and List tabs. Thanks Wilson!]
Republished from Periscopic.
Salmon are a cultural and biological keystone of life around the Pacific Rim, uniquely linking freshwater and marine ecosystems. They form an irreplaceable mosaic of populations across land and water. This assessment, the first in a series on Pacific salmon, focuses on loss of biodiversity in one species – sockeye salmon.
Interact with the original at Periscopic . . .
[Editor's note: When the mode of thinking is interactivity, its nice to see animation used to it's potential. Thanks Jaime!]
During December’s snowstorm, we wrote that the worst December storm since 1982 would (and did) create a Metro system with about the same number of stations as in 1982, as did this weekend’s storm.
This raises the question, what exactly did the rail system look like in 1982? Or other years? To answer that, I created a little slideshow:
Continue reading and see the animation at Greater Greater Washington . . .
Screenshot below:
This conference, organized by the USGS, happened last month here in DC, thanks Martin! Special import for crises like Haiti.
Also check out: O’Reilly’s Rethinking Open Data: Lessons learned from the Open Data front lines. Read more »
Lots of online presentations and notes, some listed here:
The main site has full listing and notes from breakout sessions . . .
I’m still digging out from the big storm this weekend in Washington, DC. I received 24″ at my house, ranged from 14″ to over 30″ in the metro area with heaviest around Columbia, Maryland. I worked during the storm and Laris and I tallied the NWS weather spotter reports of snowfall and used the GIS to krig the a map of average depth from about 50 points (which had to be filtered to remove expired values). Then used Illustrator’s Live Trace functionality to vectorize. Preview above (for the local home page promo which didn’t have room for legend, so directly labeled the contours), full graphic below with explainer of how the storm happened (with Laura and Larry).
[Editor's note: This routing tool considers bike paths and trails and supports drag and drop start and stop icons (rather than just address entree). It's available for several major metro areas across the US and just came to Washington, DC. How can you get it in your town? Yet another reason to contribute to OpenStreetMap.org, the backend behind the tool. Thanks Jaime!]
Republished from Ride the City.
Washington D.C. is a great city for bicycling: its greenway network is extensive and it’s relatively flat. D.C. is also home to Smartbike DC, a public bike rental program.
We’re happy to announce that today bicycling in the nation’s capital just got easier: Welcome Ride the City – DC Metro! This newest addition includes Washington D.C., Arlington, Alexandria, all of Fairfax, and the Maryland suburbs within the Capital Beltway. We’re hopeful that by making it easier to ride bikes around the epicenter of U.S. political power that we may inspire more action to bring about improved bicycle facilities everywhere, especially in cities where biking is a sensible alternative to driving.
Ride the City – DC Metro was probably our biggest challenge to date. It was tricky because of the many jurisdictions (six counties) and various data sources that had to be organized, not to mention the 1,148 square miles of area and over 450 miles of separated (i.e. Class 1) bike ways that had to be manually edited. We’re happy to have had help from many good people in the bicycling world. Among those who helped, we’d like to thank Chantal Buchser (Washington Area Bicyclist Association), Bruce Wright (Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling), and Jeff Hermann (Fairfax County DOT) for helping us with data, troubleshooting, and leveraging volunteers to test routes early on.
(For those of you who are new to Ride the City, keep in mind that the Cloudmade basemap that we use is based on Open Street Map, the volunteer effort to map the world. If you notice discrepancies on the map, you can edit Open Street Map yourself or tell us about it and we’ll edit Open Street Map for you. To learn more about Open Street Map, click here.)
[Editor's note: Op-Art from the New York Times showing who (which states) supports and opposes health care reform grouped by age and income. Data from 2004, so not current but still informative. Thanks Martin!]
Republished from the New York Times. Nov. 18, 2009.
