Great article on the tricks employed in creating today’s best racing games. To date they have been relying on digital photography to capture the track details and conditions, but they say laser scanning is next. This is BIG business.
For all you students out there whose maps are greeted with a “That’s bizarre…”, I’ve got the perfect map challenge for you! Our reader Keith M. sent us a heads up about the Bizarre Map Challenge, a map design competition open to high school, college, and university students (only here in the US). The maps submitted by students are supposed to be “bizarre” in the sense of being out of the ordinary but still using real-world data, so thinking outside the box will pay off!
The deadline to submit your map is March 22nd, and you can find complete contest rules here
First Prize is $5000 and the top ten will all get cash prizes, so start designing those maps!
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Back in the day, when OpenStreetMap was a mere babe-in-arms, the poster child for the geo-industry response to Hurricane Katrina was Google, and more specifically Google Earth.
This was true to such an extent that – showing what was, under the circumstances, a stunning lack of perspective – parts of the NASA WorldWind community bemoaned the fact that the Google Earth team got all the credit, when they had done just as much, perhaps even more, to help the disaster response.
Contrast this to the recent efforts in response to the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Now, big, powerful, rich as Croesus Google is left trailing in the wake of plucky OpenStreetMap and its dedicated band of volunteers.
ITO World’s video of the Haiti OpenStreetMap highlights just how much data was created in such a short space of time:
OpenStreetMap – Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.
Of course, not much of the OpenStreetMap data capture would have been possible without the availability of high resolution imagery from GeoEye, and others, which cannot be guaranteed forever. However, I pity the future GeoEye executive who tries to monopolise, or monetise, the data during a subsequent crisis.
I’m not suggesting that any of the people or organisations were in it for the publicity alone, but there can be no doubt that, with the high profile airings at TED of the OpenStreetMap efforts by none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, there has only been one winner this time around.
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
My earlier blog post on caching requires some follow up. In fact, the utility of httplib2 or any other HTTP cache hinges on whether or not the server hosting the wanted resources provides validating (ETag or Last-Modified) or freshness (Expires or Cache-Control) headers. In other words: the organization running the server has to want to help you save bandwidth. The original blog post says "That function caches the result of WMS requests for layer legends in a dedicated directory, assuming that the images are not changing over time."
WMS, eh? Do Web Map Services work with web caches? Not by design. How about in practice? I've plucked a WMS legend request from the USGS Framework WMS Viewer [1]:
If I read the Linfinti blog post right, this is the kind of image they'd like to avoid fetching unnecessarily. If you look closely at a HTTP request for the legend image (passing the -v option to curl, with [1] standing in for the request in the code below), you see:
krusty-2:~ seang$ curl -v [1] > /tmp/legend.png
* About to connect() to frameworkwfs.usgs.gov port 80 (#0)
* Trying 76.10.128.162... connected
* Connected to frameworkwfs.usgs.gov (76.10.128.162) port 80 (#0)
> GET /framework/wms/wms.cgi?SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.3.2... HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.19.5 (i386-apple-darwin9.8.0) libcurl/7.19.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8k zlib/1.2.3
> Host: frameworkwfs.usgs.gov
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:26:03 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat)
< Connection: close
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
< Content-Type: image/png
No validator headers. No freshness headers. Neither httplib2 nor a HTTP caching proxy is going to be useful here. You're on your own. Hurrah for standards. Let a thousand ad-hoc caching schemes bloom.
Here's a comment that more properly belongs on Saving bandwidth using Python. The requirement to register was (to me) a blocker for leaving it there. Anne writes:
When Internet connection is a limited resource, a well-designed website doesn?t perform multiple times the same request. This little adjustment can significantly reduce the time required to load and refresh a page. First-world programmers should keep this in mind, or better come to South Africa and experience it in person ...
The solution involves a wrapper around urllib.urlretrieve that partially implements HTTP caching. A more robust solution might instead use the almost transparent Last-Modified or ETag validated caching that is built into httplib2. See also Mark Pilgrim's notes on httplib2 in Dive Into Python 3 (httplib2 works fine with Python 2.3+). Saves bandwidth, development time, and bug chasing.
Mark Notingham's thoughts on Resource Packages may be interesting to those who read and commented on Christopher Schmidt's call to ditch KMZ. How does Google Earth deal with ordering of resources? Is it as serious an issue there as Notingham suggests it is in the browser?
Update (2010-02-28): 1.2b3 is out. URLs are changed below.
Update (2010-02-19): 1.2b2 is out. URLs are changed below.
This is the first 1.2 release uploaded to PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Shapely/. I hope the new README introduces the package more clearly. The manual lags: it will be the last thing before a 1.2 final.
A consequence for downstream developers is that a package that depends on Shapely in the setuptools sense without specifying a specific version will now begin to pull in 1.2b* releases instead of 1.0.14. 1.2b1 seems to be working with GEOS 3.0 and we didn't intentionally break backwards compatibility, but you should be cautious about this. If you're depending on GEOS 2.2.3 and haven't already pinned your package to Shapely==1.0.14 (updating as you go), you should.
To install and try it out (in a virtualenv):
$ pip install http://gispython.org/dist/Shapely-1.2b3.tar.gz
or
$ easy_install http://gispython.org/dist/Shapely-1.2b3.tar.gz
I've fooled around with Jython, but this, via @erilem, is the first I've seen of it in real live GIS software:
>>> from geoserver import Catalog
>>> cat = Catalog('topp')
>>> print cat.stores()
[]
>>> st = cat['states_shapefile']
>>> print st.layers()
[]
>>> l = st['states']
>>> print l.count()
49
print l.bounds()
...
A little bit of its Java-ness leaks through, but at least one is spared the getters and setters. Cool, but then what's this smell at the end?
The following is the wish list based on feedback from teh community:
- add a new output format
- add a transaction listener
- add a dispatcher callback
- add a WPS process
- add a datastore
- a restful endpoint
Restful endpoint? Oh, for crying out loud. Head. Desk.
I am quite amazed at how rapidly OSGEO continues to grow. The total number of projects is now over 20, eight of which are in incubation. Among the major project additions are PostGIS, GeoServer and MapFish.
There are about two dozen chapters around the world including India, US, UK, Canada, Japan, Korea, Poland, France, China and Italy.
The Ordnance Survey of the UK has just become a Supporting Sponsor. Autodesk, INPE and Ingres are also Supporting Sponsors.
The total lines of code for all OSGEO projects is now over 12 million. The total number of committers has reached 635, of which 298 or almost half have been active in the past 12 months. For comparison, the last time I looked over two years ago Apache had about a thousand committers.
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
Welcome to the Friday's Food for Thought post from got geoint? As always, we hope that you all had a productive work week and are ready to coast into the weekend. Earlier this week, we covered a story about DARPA’s “Transparent Underground," and how Geospatial Corporation has actually been doing the whole underground mapping thing since 2005. So, we wanted to take the concept of "underground" and take it to the next level. For example, why are underground bands soo much cooler than mainstream ones? Why do underground artists and designers seem to have more cred? And, are there any cool underground GEOINT trends happening right now? Well, we try our best to answer these questions in this week's FFT post. And, be sure to check out the funny video at the end of this post.Welcome to the Friday’s Food for Thought post from got geoint? As always, we hope that you all had a productive work week and are ready to coast into the weekend. Earlier this week, we covered a story about DARPA’s “Transparent Underground,” and how Geospatial Corporation has actually been doing the whole underground mapping thing since 2005. So, we wanted to take the concept of “underground” and take it to the next level. For example, why are underground bands soo much cooler than mainstream ones? Why do underground artists and designers seem to have more cred? And, are there any cool underground GEOINT trends happening right now? Well, we try our best to answer these questions in this week’s FFT post. And, be sure to check out the funny video at the end of this post.
Underground GEOINT: Where 2.0 Conference
So, where is all the GEOINT underground action happening? We recommend that you all check out the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference later this month is San Jose. This conference has been instrumental in showcasing some of the latest and greatest (dare we say underground) GEOINT products and services that will shape the future of location-based technologies. Also, we heard from the Where 2.0 planners that they still have space available for any start ups looking to make a splash. Perhaps you are the underground sensation and you need a platform to go mainstream? Well, Where 2.0 is the place to be!
Pitchfork Media: Purveyors of Underground/Indie Music with a Snobby Twist
So, perhaps you have a teenage son who is developing into a true indie music snob. No matter what music you bring up to him, you are just not cool enough. Or perhaps you have that neighbor who went to one Death Cab for Cutie concert and thinks he is an underground/indie music aficionado? Well, fret no more. You too can become an instant underground music snob by simply reading Pitchfork.com. For several years, now Pitchfork has been the purveyor of indie music, and they do not hold back on the snobbery. Some of their reviews can be downright vicious, yet strangely funny at the same time. Check them out the site here and tap into your inner music snob.
Underground Technologies
Did you know that there is a company called Underground Technologies? Neither did we. Located in Troy Michigan, Underground Technologies was incorporated in late 2004 and released product in 2007. Using its background in foam and polyurea composites, UGT thought out of the box to develop a manhole elevation ring that can withstand the enviroment while tackling the current problems. UGT tested for 2 full years before releasing product. UGT’s Product line consist of elevation rings, securing and sealing as well as providing an outer barrier to eliminate INI. Check out their web site here.
Gopher: Underground Technology
Back in 1992, when “yahoo” was something cowboys yelled and “ebay” was just pig Latin, the University of Minnesota developed a new way of looking at data on the Internet. Their protocol, called “gopher” after the UMN mascot, allowed archivists to present the mishmash of information in a standard format, and enabled readers to navigate documents on a world of servers using a simple visual interface. For a while, it seemed as if gopher might open the Internet up to the nontechnical masses and usher in a new era of online communication. It very well might have, if the Web hadn’t come along and done it instead. Read the full Wired article here.
Digital Underground – The Humpty Dance
So here comes the funny music video tie in…remember the rap one-hit wonders the Digital Underground? Well fans of late 80s silly rap in the vein of Kid n’ Play will certainly enjoy the Digital Underground’s classic video “The Humpty Dance.” Here it is for your listening pleasure. Caveat: don’t mention this song when you are trying to impress your neighbor or indie music oriented teenager. You will lose all underground cred. Enjoy.
Broadband connection testing isn’t new, and is freely available online, but this might mark the first time that individual tests help to lead to informed policy making.The FCC has also released mobile apps for iPhone and Android (search for FCC at your App Store) to allow smartphone users to test from where-ever they happen to be.
Downloaded FCC's broadband speed test app for Android. My downtown Boston loc doesn't have 3G. .05 mbps DOWN; 2.54 mbps UP. #nsgicmidyear
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
Google typically releases a city or two with each 3D buildings update, but this week they dropped five on us! The new 3D cities are:
• Barcelona, Spain
• Bloemfontein, South Africa
• Port Elizabeth, South Africa
• Pretoria, South Africa
• Mulhouse, France
Not only is this a larger number of cities, but the quality of some of the buildings is remarkable. For example, look at this building in Mulhouse; the quality of the imagery used on the building is amazing.
At first I thought maybe it was a separate model that was created by hand in SketchUp. However, those buildings are clickable so you can see the details about it, and this one isn't. In fact, much of the city is in this same sharp quality. I then assumed they used StreetView imagery to model the facades, like they did in some California cities late last year. The imagery doesn't quite match up (the StreetView images of the building shows flowers in many of the windows), but that could still be the case. Perhaps they used older StreetView imagery to help create the models? Regardless, they did a superb job and they look great.
The other city you need to take a close look at is Barcelona. The coverage there is quite remarkable as well. You can read about it on the Google Lat Long Blog, or watch this view tour that Google created to help show it off. Enjoy the cities!
Google has posted the story of Fredericton, Canada, and how they became a 3D city in Google Earth.
By using the Cities in 3D program, the City of Fredericton was able to get more than 100 3D buildings added to Google Earth back in January. The building are very well-done and quite detailed, and you can see a fly-through of the city here:
For more information, you can read the full blog entry, visit Google's Cities in 3D page, or fly to Fredericton yourself by using this KML file
.
When using the Python ‘boto’ library for accessing Amazon Web Services, to enable logging to a file at the ‘debug’ level, simply use the logging module’s configuration:
import logging
logging.basicConfig(filename="boto.log", level=logging.DEBUG)
Place this line near the top of your script, and logging will take place to a file in your current directory called “boto.log”.
I’m sure that this is obvious for most people who use the Python logging module, but this is new code to me, and it took me a fair bit of looking to find out how to enable logging; hopefully other people find it more easily now.
I just did a little on line research to see if things had changed at all, but from what I can see Revit is still not very point cloud friendly. What makes this so difficult to understand is the fact that Revit has become the de facto standard for BIM, and with so much interest in the link between laser scanning and BIM one would think this is fertile ground for product development.
From what I can find it seems that you can import point clouds via DXF or IFC’s, but only in very small quantities or slices, and that people are using multiple software packages to perform each required task. It’s almost “laughable” when you think about it, considering the lost opportunity.
When I spoke with the Revit product managers 18 to 24 months ago about their plans for supporting point clouds the answer was that customers were not requesting it, so it was not a priority. Hopefully there is a secret project underway to change all of this. The annual Autodesk product releases are due any time. Let’s see if support for point clouds has made the list of new Revit features.
Same day, same hemisphere - different fortunes:
German news site golem.de reports Navigon MobileNavigator 2.5 for Android is ready for sale at the Android
Market (can't find it though). Until May 2 a 30-day-trial for DACH is €50, Europe bites €75.
As free Google Maps Navigation destroyed TomTom and Garmin share prices (yet unclear if and when it will be offered in EMEA), and past the introduction of free turn-by-turn navigation to Nokia's Ovi Maps (yet for only a small share of current phones) - Vodafone's Wayfinder is the first prominent victim:
"We could not charge for something that others gave away for free."
Hard times ahead.
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
The Geopublisher 1.4 software allows the creation and publication of multimedia atlases. It has been developed for users like scientists, consultants and institutions that want to communicate their research results to the general public. The primary aim is to deliver a software that reduces the technical obstacles in publishing geo-data to a minimum. Your final product will be a user-friendly atlas which can easily be used by people who are not familiar with GIS.
Besides the possibility of publishing maps with custom styles, labels or HTML as already introduced in former blog entries, Geopublisher 1.4 includes a new charting module.
The charting module enables you to create charts based on the attributes of your geo-datasets. These charts are interactively linked with your maps - for example: if you select a point in a scatter plot, the related geo-object will also be selected in your map and the attribute table. Of course this auto-selection works vice-versa, too.
Currently Geopublisher 1.4 supports two different chart types: bar-charts and scatter plots. More types will follow (Note: If you need any other chart type, feel free to contact Wikisquare and order an extension of Geopublisher.).
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This tutorial will show you how to design bar charts and scatter plots in Geopublisher and how to publish them as a part of you interactive atlas. This tutorial is based on version 1.4 of Geopublisher, which has been officially released as stable on March 10th.
You may join our tutorial session and reproduce all the steps yourself. We offer you to do download the chart demo atlas, which gives you all the data we created the examples with.
Note: As Geopublisher is fully platform independent, you may follow this tutorial on any Windows, Apple or Linux computer.
Note: You may skip to the next section if you don't want to reproduce the steps shown here.
If you would like to reproduce this tutorial by yourself, you can download a working copy of the example atlas as a ZIP file. The example atlas contains two datasets and a few predefined charts. It can be used as a starting point to create your own charts. You can also add your own datasets to the atlas and create charts based on them.
Note: A working copy of a Geopublisher atlas is a version that you can open in Geopublisher and edit - like a .doc file in wordprocessing. Once the atlas is exported and delivered to your target group, it can not be changed anymore - like a PDF compared to a .doc file.
Download the chart demo atlas here. Extract the ChartDemoAtlas.zip contents to a local folder, for example to Desktop\ChartDemoAtlas. (If you are a windows user, and you don't know hot to open a ZIP file, get 7zip or consider switching to Ubuntu Linux).
Start Geopublisher 1.4 by clicking the green start button. Some JavaWebStart dialogs will appear and you will be asked to trust the Geopublisher application to let it run on your computer. If starting Geopublisher via JavaWebStart is not working on your system, please select another method from the download page.
When Geopublisher has started, open the uncompressed demo atlas by choosing Load an atlas from the File menu (or by pressing F3). Browse to the ChartDemoAtlas folder where you uncompressed the demo atlas and select the atlas.gpa file (Note: .gpa stands for GeoPublisherAtlas).
Geopublisher will open the atlas and you will see the default tripartite overview of the chart demo atlas. We see one layer and one PDF in the datapool; one thematic map in the list of maps and both linked to the menu of the demo atlas. The layer world socio-economic data has been created with Quantum-GIS based on freely availabale data from GeoCommons Finder.
Now double click on the "The digital divide" map in the thematic maps area to open it in Geopublisher's MapComposer (The MapComposer component in Geopublisher allows you to create thematic, interactive and contextualized maps based on the entries in the datapool.). A new window opens and shows an editable view of the map. In the exported atlas, the map would look similar, but with fewer options to manipulate it.
You now see the map "The digital divide". It shows the global distribution of internet bandwidth per capita. Next click the "Legend" tab on the left to access the interactive legend.
In the MapComposer window, you see which layers were used to create your map. The interactive legend always lists all layers, but this map demo map only consists of one layer.
Before we start to create charts, let's have a quick look at the attribute table, so that you know what data is available for our tutorial. Click the layer tool menu (ICON) of the world socio-economic data layer and choose attribute table and the attribute table for this layer opens.
The attribute table shows all the attributes that are available for each country. As you can see, out first column contains information on the internet bandwidth available in every country. The third column shows the geographic region the country is part of.
Idea: Let's create a bar chart, that compares the bandwidth availability of the world's regions!
With Geopublisher it is easy to create a bar-chart comparing regions and publish it as an interactive part of your atlas. First click the layer tool menu of the world socio-economic data layer and choose Manage charts... .
The chart wizard appears. It will guide you through the basic steps needed to create a chart. In the first step you may choose a chart type. Select bar chart and click Next.
In the second step you may choose the attributes that shall be used for the bar chart. You may use up to four variables (which would create three bars for every region). For our simple example we just choose two attributes: The first attribute defines the categories we want to see bars for. We select the Region attribute. For the second attribute we select the Bandwidth attribute.
In the last step you are asked to enter a title and a description for your chart. This information could be entered in multiple languages, if this atlas was configured to support more than one language, but for our basic example we stick with "just" English.
After you pressed Finish, the chart is created and appears in the list of available charts. Also a chart design dialog will open, that allows to design the layout and appearance of the chart in detail. This first view of the chart we get, is a only a generic proposal. Before we publish the chart to the atlas users, we want to make it more beautiful and "smarter".
At first, enable the Automatic preview checkbox. Now any change will automatically be applied to the preview in the upper part. Unless you have very large or slow (=from the Internet) data, you should always enable the automatic preview.
Configuring axis labellingIn the next step, lets correct the domain axis labelling. The labels are obviously too long and thus the texts overwrite each other. They should be positioned in a different angle. To change the label angle select the domain axis tab.
Moving the slider between 0° and 90° automatically changes the label position in the preview. Tune the slider until you are satisfied with the amount of space the labels take.
Next let's go the bars tab and configure their color. When creating a new chart, the color is selected by random. The bars tab allows you to define the color and other features.
Have you wondered, how the height of these bars is calculated? As you have seen in the attribute table, many countries fall into the same region. Hence their attribute values have to be aggregated using a function you may define in Geopublisher. The following list gives a short explanation of all available aggregation methods in Geopublisher 1.4:
For our example of Internet availability in the world regions we have chosen to select the weighted average aggregation method. How does weighted average aggregation work and when should it be used?
To explain the difference between weighted and unweighted average, let's image the following table of imaginary values:
| Country | Region | Population | Yearly beer consumption [l/per capita] |
| Germany | A | 1000 | 50 |
| Luxembourg | A | 100 | 100 |
| France | A | 1000 | 20 |
If unweighted (=normal) average aggregation is selected, the result for region A would be calculated as follows:
mean = ( 1stValue + 2ndValue + 3rdValue ) / number of values
= ( 50 + 100 + 20 ) / 3
= 56,67 l/per capita
This result is not the average beer consumption of region A per capita. The country of Luxembourg is small in comparison to Germany and France and the high beer consumption of its people is overrated in the formula above. To calculate the correct average beer consumption per capita for region A, the population of each country has to be taken into account.
weighted mean = ( 1stValue*1stWeight + 2ndValue*2ndWeight + 3rdValue*3rdWeight ) / sum of weights
= 50*1000 + 100*100 + 20*1000 / 2100
= 80000 / 2100
= 38,1 l/per capita
The result of the weighted average is the correct yearly beer consumption for all 2100 people in region A. Weighted average should always be used if the attribute values are per capita, per area or have a reference basis in general.
For our example of Internet availability in the world regions, the following settings should be applied in Geopublisher, because the bandwidth attribute data is measured in MBps per capita.
These settings made, you have succsessfully created your first bar chart. Please note, that Geopublisher has automatically created the axis descriptions for you based on meta-data entered for the layer. If you don't like Geopublishers automatic labels, you can always adapt the axis descriptions manually. The resulting bar chart looks like this.
Geopublisher 1.4 has a feature called selection synchronization. It means, that whenever a chart or an attribute table are visible for a map, the user may make selections in each one of them, and Geopublisher automatically synchronizes the selections. For example this allows you to select outlier points in a chart, and see which country/geometry corresponds to this datapoint.
Note: For aggregated bar charts, this functionality is not yet implemented. But for unaggregated bar charts (where one bar corresponds to exactly one geometry) selection synchronization works.
The following two screenshots show the selection synchronization between a scatter plot and a map. In the first image, a selection is made in the scatter plot, and the corresponding countries are highlighted in the map:
The second screenshot shows how a selection is made in the map around South America, and the corresponding data points are highlighted in the chart.
This tutorial showed you how a bar chart based on automatically aggregated attribute values can be created. We did not go into detail about how to create a scatter plot, but the procedure is mainly the same.
Charts are bound to the layer where their data comes from. If a layer is used in multiple maps, Geopublisher allows you to define exactly which charts are available in which maps.
Of course, Geopublisher charts - as all parts of a Geopublisher atlas - can also be translated into multiple languages.
If you have any questions or ideas about the chart functionality, please give us feedback on the AtlasStyler and Geopublisher user mailinglist.
Happy charting!
Adrià Mercader has just announced the first public release of WMS Inspector - an add-on for Firefox that allows a developer to view, and debug WMS (Web Map Services) requests and responses.
The main features are described as:
It is noted that it will be especially useful when working with JavaScript map libraries such as OpenLayers and MapBender, or when setting up WMS Services; and I agree. This should be a useful utility when trying to match an OpenLayers client with a MapServer WMS server when non-default projections and map coordinates are in use.
WMS Inspector can be download from Mozilla here; and the announcement can be found on the OSGeo-Discuss listserver, here.
What if we could start over, with all of the technology that we have today – the PC, Internet, laser scanners, BIM, GPS, machine control – all of it? What if we had the luxury of creating the next generation of software and hardware, with the prior commitment of the major stakeholders of the AEC industry to support it, and without the legacy of what we have invested in today? What if the technology was like it is in the music or telecommunications industry?
What I am thinking about is a unified, holistic 3D system that supports the entire built environment project lifecycle in a sustainable, energy efficient manner. Are the components all there today, but they just lack the systems integration? I believe that most of them are, but I think we would be further ahead if we started over with a common, standards-based system architecture that had the power of a mandate.
If that were to somehow happen, I have to believe that laser scanning would be one of the core technologies. The new ASTM E57 data interoperability standard, along with the work being done by the buildingSmartalliance on a National BIM standard could be key elements in the new architecture.
A highly trusted computer programmer friend of mine tells me that he could create the equivalent of AutoCAD 11 with Flex in a very short amount of time. What if we put a couple hundred smart people to work on it?
Maybe the concept is not that crazy after all.
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
As our loyal got geoint? readers know, we like to start the week off with our Monday Morning News Kick Off post, which highlights all the actionable news you need to get your week started on the right foot. Well, every so often we like to break out of the mold and do a news round up post in the middle of the week. And, since our research department just found a whole slew of very cool location, imagery and science stories, we had to do a "Thursday News Round Up" post. All the news you need to get through the last leg of the week. Read on and enjoy.As our loyal got geoint? readers know, we like to start the week off with our Monday Morning News Kick Off post, which highlights all the actionable news you need to get your week started on the right foot. Well, every so often we like to break out of the mold and do a news round up post in the middle of the week. And, since our research department just found a whole slew of very cool location, imagery and science stories, we had to do a “Thursday News Round Up” post. All the news you need to get through the last leg of the week. Read on and enjoy.
Facebook Will Allow Users to Share Location
Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends. Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services. Check out the full NY Times story here.
Foursquare Introduces New Tools for Businesses
Foursquare, a location-based social network, plans to distribute a free analytics tool and dashboard in the coming weeks that will give business owners access to a range of information and statistics about visitors to their establishments. Tristan Walker, director of business development at Foursquare, said that the latest features were intended to help local merchants run their stores by giving them more information about their customers. “We’re trying to give businesses more retention with current customers and the ability to add new customers with specials,” said Mr. Walker. Read the full NY Timess BITS post here.
One Sensor To Do The Work of Many
More than a year before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates began pushing the Air Force to buy more UAVs for surveillance missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon scientists were working on a different solution: build sensors so sophisticated that one aircraft can do the work of many. In February, such a sensor took flight. The ARGUS-IS – the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System – can spot and track “65-plus” targets simultaneously from altitudes higher than 20,000 feet, according to the sensor’s inventor, BAE Systems. Check out the full Defense News article here.
Fill in the Blanks: Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets Into Hi-Res Samples
In the early spring of 2009, a team of doctors at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University lifted a 2-year-old into an MRI scanner. The boy, whom I’ll call Bryce, looked tiny and forlorn inside the cavernous metal device. The stuffed monkey dangling from the entrance to the scanner did little to cheer up the scene. Bryce couldn’t see it, in any case; he was under general anesthesia, with a tube snaking from his throat to a ventilator beside the scanner. Ten months earlier, Bryce had received a portion of a donor’s liver to replace his own failing organ. For a while, he did well. But his latest lab tests were alarming. Something was going wrong — there was a chance that one or both of the liver’s bile ducts were blocked. Read the full Wired Magazine story here.
Take a Step Closer for an Invitation to Shop
LIKE many retailers, the North Face has been having trouble luring shoppers into its stores. The company, which sells outdoor apparel and gear, is about to try a new tactic: sending people text messages as soon as they get near a store. Advertisers have long been intrigued by the promise of cellphones, because they live in people’s pockets and send signals about shoppers’ locations. The dream has been to send people ads tailored to their location, like a coupon for a cappuccino when passing a coffee shop. Read the full NY Times story here.
Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-Shifting Net
In a dimly lit chamber festooned with wires and hidden in one of California’s largest data centers, Tim Pozar is changing the shape of the Internet. He is using what Internet engineers refer to as a “meet-me room.” The room itself is enclosed in a building full of computers and routers. What Mr. Pozar does there is to informally wire together the networks of different businesses that want to freely share their Internet traffic. Check out the full NY Times article here.
Happy Thursday!
The Conference Board of Canada estimates that the global market for water and wastewater is in excess of $450 billion (2008), with annual growth of 8% to 15%.
Water consumption in Canada is excessive because of the lack of widespread water conservation practices and because of water pricing that does not promote efficiency.
Over a decade ago, Environment Canada warned that without increasing the price of water consumption, delivery infrastructure was at risk of deteriorating beyond usability. Water revenues are not sufficient to cover operational, repair, upgrading, or expansion costs. The cost of maintaining municipal water supply and sewage systems is estimated at $23 billion over the next 10 years.
In 2000 Canadians used over 300 litres of water per person per day. Canada’s water consumption per capita was over nine times greater than the U.K.. Only the U.S. consumed more water per person.
Industry is Canada’s largest water user, using 68 per cent of the total water used in Canada in 2000. Of the industrial water users, thermal-electric power producers withdraw almost 80 per cent. Manufacturing industries use just over 19 per cent. Domestic water use accounted for 20 per cent of total water use in Canada. Agricultural water use accounted for 12 per cent of total water consumption in Canada. While many countries in the OECD have decreased water consumption, Canada’s water usage has increased considerably. Between 1980 and 1997, overall water use in Canada increased by 26 per cent, five times more than the overall OECD increase of 5 per cent.
Only 57 per cent of Canada’s urban population was metered in 1999. Furthermore, municipal water rates in Canada are a fraction of those in other countries and among the lowest in the OECD. Consequently, a significant proportion of Canadians have little economic incentive to use water efficiently. Kenneth Skovhede has announced the release of MapGuide Maestro 2.0 after over a year of development. Maestro is an open source MapGuide authoring tool. Jason Birch has been using the pre-release for several months and has identified his top 10 new features in Maestro 2.0.
It's not often that you see a familiar face staring back at you on the television screen. So, we were very excited to see Jeff Jonas, USGIF board member featured in the IBM "Why Data Matters" national advertisement. Mr. Jonas is chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group and is a highly regarded member of the GEOINT community -- so much so, he was featured in a national TV commercial! Very exciting. Check out the actual video in this post.It’s not often that you see a familiar face staring back at you on the television screen. So, we were very excited to see Jeff Jonas, USGIF board member featured in the IBM “Why Data Matters” national advertisement. Mr. Jonas is chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group and is a highly regarded member of the GEOINT community — so much so, he was featured in a national TV commercial! Very exciting. Check out the actual video in this post.