Mapping Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill- From the water up
Jun 4, 2010 @ 4:48 PM by Britta Ricker -- google earth imagery map visualizationHere are some links to mapping initiatives taking place to monitor the disastrous Gulf Oil Spill.
This mashup by Paul Rademacher portrays the size of the spill in relation to major cities. The map aims to give the reader a sense of the scale of this disaster (you will need the Google Earth browser plug-in).
Grassroots Mapping is covering the mapping of the oil spill. MIT students are using balloons and kites to map the disaster.
BP response maps – Static .pdf files
New York Times has a series of animated maps showing oil dispersion, where oil has made landfall, and links to multimedia coverage of the oil spill.
Also, almost every government agency is addressing the oil spill on their websites.
USGS is using satellite imagery. They also have a series of maps (static made with traditional GIS) showing the coastal washup of oil.
USGS data repository - Hazards Data Distribution System (HDDS). You could use this to make your own mashup!
NASA has the latest images of the oil spill here. They have also stitched together this movie. From a Geovisualization standpoint, this is a very simple animation of only satellite imagery but portrays a very powerful message.
EPA uses Google Earth!
This is by no means an exhaustive list of mapping the oil spill but a start.
Here is a picture of me at the Alligator Bayou about four years ago.
Kumiko and I both did work mapping for FEMA in Louisiana post Hurricane Katrina and Rita back in 2005-2006. I spent about two months in the region and I would return in a heartbeat. The Gulf Coast is absolutely an amazing place full of people who are warm and fun loving hard workers.
The wildlife and ecosystem are extremely unique. If you ever get the chance, you have to check this place out! Holy cow! Actually I see that Alligator Bayou is closed and for sale!!! If you love wetlands and have some cash, buy it and preserve this wonderful place!
TED talks worth Watching
Mar 30, 2010 @ 1:17 PM by Britta Ricker -- game geoweb visualization web2.0: mashupsThere were a few TED talks over the past few weeks that were really interesting and informative. Really, what TED talks are not interesting and informative?
First…Tim Berners-Lee talks Mashups. Tim Berners-Lee gets excited about open data and resulting mashups. He shows us amazing visualizations of Volunteered Geographic Content popping up all over the digital globe. He also talks about the role of this resource for disaster management. You can see in our portfolio some of the cool mashups Kumiko has made with open data.
Second… Jane McGonigal tells us about the potential for collective online gaming to save the world…not just the world of war craft.
Third…Bing Maps using augmented reality and photo synth, oh my! Although we do not use Bing Maps here at Mapkist, that may change in the near future. Check out this video to see why.
Enjoy!!
Your Resume is Boring
Mar 10, 2010 @ 12:20 PM by Kumiko Yamazaki -- google maps subway visualization
Ed Hamilton, a copywriter, created his CV in a Google My Map! It helps that he’s had a very diverse career that has taken him from the UK to Vietnam and Trinidad & Tobago. It’s very simple, yet creative and effective, as it should be.
What have you done with your resume lately??
Below are a few other map and visualization-related resumes I enjoyed. I didn’t see many out there - any geographers have a creative resume you want me to post here?
The infographic:
The subway map:
Another Google Lab Experiment: Public Data Explorer
Mar 8, 2010 @ 6:08 PM by Kumiko Yamazaki -- google visualizationGoogle’s latest lab creation is their Public Data Explorer. Similar to GeoCommons Maker! and Gapminder, Google allows you to visualize data as a line graph, bar graph, bubble chart or a map. The visualizations will also dynamically change as the latest data becomes updated and available through their service.
It’s simple and can be useful but is still very limited in the number of data they currently have and is lacking the ability to export and download the data. But as with any Google Lab experiment, their Public Data Explorer is only a prototype and can easily be developed into something more powerful by their many engineers.
The following is an example of seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the US.
One thing I’ve noticed is the increase in services we’re seeing that allows us to visualize data based on cultural geographies. What I’m referring to is data separated by countries, states and cities. Despite this growth, there are still large numbers of datasets that cannot be captured by these cultural boundaries but are equally as important (i.e. climate and deforestation). Knowing how each of these are changing over time is crucial to understanding our planet yet only account for a small percentage of existing data.
Interactive Atlas Goodness
Mar 8, 2010 @ 4:56 PM by Britta Ricker -- geoweb map visualizationThe Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) is an organization that focuses on environmental issues across North America. This secretariat was formed as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to ensure that environmental degradation was being monitored fairly and carefully across the continent. 
One of the many noteworthy CEC initiatives is its new interactive atlas. The CEC works with the environmental ministries from Canada, the United States and Mexico to aggregate environmental data from across North America. They have developed an online atlas to show how environmental phenomenon does not stop at political boundaries. On this atlas you can view conservation areas, species habitats, pollution and waste depositories and other intriguing data sets for the entire continent. Check it out here. http://www.cec.org/atlas/
The CEC also has a featured video. You can see the back of my head around 2:05! Enjoy!
Kumiko is also building a beautiful open source interactive atlas that will be released soon. This atlas will be an exciting way to communicate and visualize a variety of information. The users will be able to navigate through the data at their own pace and hopefully gain new knowledge through this fun geospatial application!
Augmented Reality
Nov 15, 2009 @ 11:00 PM by Britta Ricker -- visualization: ARI’m very excited and honored to be a contributor to this blog now! Thank you Kumiko!
My first post will be about what I have been reading for my PhD research this week. Augmented reality (AR) and mobile gaming with ubiquitous devices! Doesn’t that make you want to jump up and down and run around in circles with excitement?
AR has been getting a lot of press lately. New apps such as Wikitude, Layar, and Yelp have all released apps with text based AR functionality for the iPhone and Android. AR and other forms of mix reality have been in the works and have been studied for over a decade, yet very few users have had the chance to interact with AR. How many of us received head mounted displays for Christmas when we were 12? AR has not been widely accessible. Now suddenly the device we used to call our loved one on to find out if there is milk in the fridge can also be used as a monocle to augment our reality by reading restaurant reviews while looking directly at the front door of the restaurant.
I started looking for links about mobile AR development to see how this stuff is built. When I started poking around on Google for development tips and tricks, I found more job postings for AR developer jobs than websites about how to actually develop an AR app. Crazy! That tells us that there is high demand for these types of applications but we know relatively little about how mobile AR applications help or hurt spatial cognition and decision making in the wild. We do know that AR is snazzy.
More to come regarding gaming with ubiquitous devices. Has anyone checked out Parallel kingdom? Thoughts?
Mining Statistics
Jul 23, 2009 @ 8:49 PM by Kumiko Yamazaki -- manifold map visualization: miningSo what do you do when a friend wonders about mining fatalities and the difficulties of putting into perspective the differences between U.S. and China? You make a map!.. an infographic?
A bit time consuming but I miss the design aspects of mapmaking especially in this age where mashups rule. This is not to say I’m against mashups - in fact, like a good geo-data girl, I’ve uploaded the U.S. mining dataset to Geocommons. Did you know Geocommons already provides 15 pages of ‘mining’ data already?
China’s figure of 3,215 coal mining deaths was provided by their State Administration of Work Safety (which, by the way, had originally mistakenly announced that 91,172 people have perished. Still, 3,215 deaths is 107 TIMES the number of deaths in the U.S. (30). It’s hard to believe China has actually reduced the number of mining accidents over the years. In 2003? 7,200 deaths….
Kumiko Yamazaki: kyamazaki@mapkist.com