The Map Room

In my review of National Geographic’s World Atlas app for the iPhone and iPod touch, I said: “It’s also rather limiting to look at a large map on an iPhone’s rather small screen; these maps beg for a larger screen. As such, I’d have no hesitation grabbing the iPad version of this app, which also costs $1.99.” Now that I have an iPad and have grabbed the iPad version of that app, I’m happy to report that yes, National Geographic’s maps do benefit from the extra screen real estate.

We are, after all, dealing with digital versions of wall maps: other things being equal (like pixel density), a larger screen will always be better. On the iPad, you have a far better balance between detail and context: that is to say, you can see the map’s detail without having to sacrifice a view of the surrounding areas. For example, if I look at Ethiopia on the lowest zoom for the regional maps, on the iPod touch I see very little else: Eritrea and Djibouti, and bits of Somalia/Somaliland, Yemen and northern Kenya. On the iPad, I see most of eastern Africa and the southern Arabian peninsula, from Darfur to Oman, and from Cairo to the Seychelles.

The included Bing Maps viewer also benefits from the extra screen real estate. (It’s safe to say that every iPad map viewer will look better than its iPhone/iPod touch counterpart.) Like the iPhone app, it’s GPS-enabled, and it works. (Most iPad map apps I’ve run across have a GPS location button, and they all work: if they don’t, then there’s something seriously wrong with the app’s georeferencing or it’s a system-wide problem.)

The Nations feature, providing data on every country and territory on the planet, is now a pull-down menu; choosing a country highlights it on the map. It’s a nice iPad-specific touch, but the map doesn’t change its zoom, which is problematic if you’re zoomed too far in and look up a large country or vice versa.

Previously: Review: National Geographic World Atlas.

An individual or group calling himself/herself/themselves the Forest Defenders has been removing or destroying geocaches in the name of the environment and posting the results to a blog, the Everett, Washington Herald reports. His/her/their claim is that the geocaches are essentially litter in sensitive ecological spaces, which geocachers trample when they leave the trail. This appears to be happening in the Pacific Northwest. The article notes that caches in state parks are placed with the permission and supervision of park staff (and that, since caches are someone else’s property, what they’re doing is illegal). Via GPS Tracklog: 1, 2.

Here’s an interesting piece on privacy and geolocation services. Some excerpts: “When it comes to geo-privacy there are two extremes. Foursquare makes you explicitly check into each place where you want to share your location. … On the other end of the spectrum is Google Latitude, which constantly broadcasts your location everywhere you go, but only to people you allow to see it and only at the level of detail you are comfortable with. … Somewhere in between the concept of the explicit check-in and constant geo-tracking is the notion of geo-fences. The idea is that you would basically draw fences around neighborhoods or other locations from where you want to broadcast where you are and places where you don’t.” Via Glenn.

I bought an iPad over the weekend. I got the 64-gigabyte model with 3G, which, you may recall, also happens to come with a built-in GPS. (Fun if obvious fact: the GPS works regardless of whether you’re signed up for a 3G data plan. Some people may well ask whether it’s worth $130 for just the GPS, never mind signing up with a mobile phone company.)

The upshot of this is that I’m now able to review GPS and map applications for the iPhone OS, so long as they work on the iPad. (But, to be honest, I’d prefer not to review iPhone apps that work on the iPad, but only in the pixel-doubling-or-tiny-window compatibility mode.)

I’ve already downloaded a bunch of apps and have made note of some others; I won’t object if you point me to an app you think I should be aware of. Depending on how well I organize myself, you may see some reviews shortly.

NASA has produced a time-lapse video of the expanding Gulf of Mexico oil slick: “This short video reveals a space-based view of the burning oil rig and, later, the ensuing oil spill through May 24. The timelapse uses imagery from the MODIS instrument, on board NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. The oil slick appears grayish-beige in the image and changes due to changing weather, currents, and use of oil dispersing chemicals.” Via Universe Today.

Previously: The New York Times’s Interactive Oil Spill Map; Mapping the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill; Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Update.

The Washington Post reports on a conference held last Friday at the Library of Congress: Re-Examining the Portolan Chart: History, Navigation and Science explored the mysterious origins of the portolan chart, which apparently appeared from nowhere, with no known antecedents, in the 13th century. Via MapHist.

Bill Warren wrote to me earlier this month:

On May 8th, the California Map Society held a meeting at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. One of the speakers was Joshua Miele, Ph.D., Associate Scientist at the Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute’s Rehabilatation Engineering Researcn Center in San Francisco. His topic was Automated Production of Tactile and Audio/Tactile Maps. In other words — Maps for the Blind.

What sounds like an impossibility is already in production and Dr. Miele, who incidentally is totally blind, held the audience enthralled with the description of his development of a web-based software tool for the rapid production of tactile street maps. The attached photo shows such a map with a centered location grid locating the intersection of 14th and Broadway in Oakland, CA. Around the periphery are three digit Braille street name abbreviations. The raised street grid allows the blind user to quickly understand the street patterns and orient themselves. Even complex intersections can be easily portrayed and understood.

The map is not meant to carried but portions can be quickly memorized by the user. Not all streets are named, but each street is shown so the number of blocks between named streets is obvious to the user. Dr. Miele’s talk was as a self assured scientist putting his life’s work to use for others whose needs he understands. At the end of his presentation the audience gave him a richly deserved ovation.

Links added. Here is the website of Dr. Miele’s tactile map project.

Previously: A View of Prague for the Blind; Virtual 3D Maps for the Blind; Maps for the Visually Impaired; Maps and Directions for the Blind; Online Maps for the Visually Impaired.

John Horrigan recounts his encounter, in a local travel shop, with a hand-drawn “Texas Globe,” which depicts the world as seen by a stereotypical, bigoted Texan. “Half the Earth is filled by a swollen United States, with Texas taking up about one third of that. Canada is squeezed between New York and an Alaska that touches the 49th parallel. Beyond, the geography becomes even more bizarre.”

Lexicalist’s Demographics of Fast Food in America uses mentions on Twitter and other social sites to determine which fast food chains are dominant in which U.S. regions; on the maps, “blue represents a particularly strong presence compared to other states. Giants like McDonald’s are equally popular throughout the U.S., but smaller chains like White Castle and In-N-Out Burger have clear regional presence.” Via Rebecca Blood.

Previously: McDonald’s vs. Other Burger Chains; Mapping McDonald’s.

Burrito Justice imagines San Francisco if its neighbourhoods were islands and its streets canals, in this diagrammatic map of the city.

Last week, Google announced Styled Maps as part of version 3 of the Google Maps API; it allows developers to make changes to the appearance of maps appearing on their websites. Here’s Google’s case for the feature: “No matter which Maps API site you are on, every map looks the same. If you want your map to stand out from the crowd, your options are limited to customizing the markers and controls, and if your brand has a particular colour scheme that is reflected on your site, Google Maps may not sit well with it.” Ed Parsons makes the case for them as well.

The changes can be made in the Javascript code; there’s a wizard to make things easier. At the moment it looks like you can the colour scheme and which geographical features and labels to include; it’ll be interesting to see if more options come later on.

The Geotaggers’ World Atlas is Eric Fischer at work again: this time he’s taken geographical data from Flickr photos, determined the speed at which the photographers were travelling based on their photos’ timestamps and geotags, and plotted them on an OpenStreetMap background layer. He’s done this for 50 cities. The colours are the same as with his map of San Francisco’s Muni: black is less than 7 mph (11 km/h), red is less than 19 mph (30 km/h), blue is less than 43 mph (69 km/h), and green is faster. Via Burrito Justice and Flickr Blog.

Previously: Mapping the Muni.

Under a bill passed by the Louisiana state senate, crimes committed with the aid of “virtual street-level maps” — obviously Street View and its ilk — will get additional minimum sentences: an extra year for burglary, an extra 10 years for an act of terrorism. Because the real problem with burglars and terrorists is that they use computers to plan their crimes. Next time buy paper maps and scope out the joint yourselves like real American criminals, punks. Via All Points Blog.

The New York Times had two — count ‘em — two articles on using LIDAR as a mapping tool earlier this month.

This article is about using airplane-based LIDAR to map the topography of New York City: “The data will be used, among other things, to create up-to-date maps of the areas most prone to flooding, the buildings best suited for the installation of solar power and the neighborhoods most in need of trees.”

And this one is about using it to map Mayan archaeological sites despite dense jungle cover: “In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said.” Via Boing Boing.

Previously: Portland LIDAR Survey.

English Russia has a post about local globes, which were apparently all the rage immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union (for example, you could buy a globe of just Ukraine). The post is really about how to make one of your own, but I’m just wigged out by the concept of a globe of just a part of the world. It’s a crime against geometry. Via Make.

The New York Times’s interactive map of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is up to their usual standard; it has a timeline slider and shows currents and sensitive shorelands. Via geoparadigm.

Previously: Mapping the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill; Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Update.

“The crackdown on Internet mapping services in China is real, and starts next month,” Ogle Earth reports, pointing to this article from the Xinhua state news agency, which Stefan helpfully translates from Newspeak. Bottom line: online maps seen inside China must be stored on servers inside China and conform to Chinese law; and online maps that show information the Chinese government doesn’t like — state secrets, “wrong” borders — will be repressed. The availability in China of Google Earth is probably not long for this world.

Not the first time the Chinese government has had an issue with foreign and “incorrect” maps. Previously: Chinese Map Crackdown Names Google; China Cracks Down on Mapmaking.

Garmin has put out so many different models of nüvi, their GPS navigation systems for cars, that it’s very hard to figure out which one’s which. GPS Tracklog makes a game attempt at sorting them all out, but I think that’s a near-impossible task.

Engadget reports Nokia and Yahoo have announced a strategic partnership that includes Yahoo using Nokia’s NAVTEQ for maps and navigation. Of the major online map providers, it’s safe to say that Yahoo has been lagging the furthest behind. Engadget quotes ever-tactful Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz as saying “that Yahoo had ‘lost its focus on maps a couple years ago,’ then correcting herself, saying that they ‘chose to focus on other areas.’ The first merged services should launch in the second half of this year.”

Just noticed that Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, two French islands off the coast of Newfoundland, are missing their land data in Google Maps — the roads and landmarks are there, but the outlines of the islands are not. (It’s abundantly evident when you switch to satellite view.)

It’s important to have a little fun when submitting error reports, I think.

This road map of the U.S. created by a slime mold actually has real-world applications, Popular Science reports. In searching for food, the slime mold Physarum polycephalum settles on the most efficient path to food sources. You can model the most efficient routes between cities by creating an agar gel map with food sources for cities, and letting the slime mold do its work (there’s video at the link). “Because slime mold finds the paths that are most resilient to faults or damage, it could be used to make mobile-communication and transportation networks hardier.” Via MAPS-L.

Richard Marsden also picked up a 3G iPad recently, and has some thoughts about the gadget’s map applications. “Maps are visual things, and the iPad’s large touch screen is really designed for visual applications such as this. The touch user interface generally works well, so it should be an excellent platform for map viewing, and possibly map field field work (cached maps and 3G connectivity allowing).” It has potential, Richard says, but “current geoweb support is limited.”

TechFlash: “Google is hiring an army of 300 temporary workers in Kirkland as part of a yearlong campaign to improve the accuracy of Google Maps. … The workers will be part of a one-year initiative to correct mistakes in Google Maps — errors that have spawned online chatter about missing roads and recommendations for car trips over bodies of water.” Considering the number of errors I’ve spotted in Google’s new map data in my region, good. Via Peter Batty.

Richard Marsden reviews The World of Gerard Mercator by Andrew Taylor: “Taylor does a good job of putting him into both a historic and a cartographic context, and does his best to explain Mercator with the relatively limited information available. My main criticism of the book involves the images. Many of the maps are asking for large full color reproductions — something this small format black & white book cannot provide.”

• Buy The World of Gerard Mercator at Amazon.com

This 1927 map by Paramount apparently was for financial backers; it indicates shooting locations in California that could stand in for more exotic locales. Via Matt.

Uh-oh: “Many of the maps that the federal government depends on to determine which coastal resources are at risk in the event of a nearby oil spill are outdated, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday.” Via MAPS-L.

Meanwhile, GIS Lounge rounds up the mapping resources related to the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Previously: Mapping the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.

Bill Dollins discovered this quilt map of Monongahela National Forest at the Cranberry Mountain Nature Center in West Virginia.

Clearly I missed a few things when the Ordnance Survey freed up its map data last month. The OS OpenSpace API allows developers to create web applications using Ordnance Survey maps; this includes mere mortals embedding maps into web pages. (OS maps are certainly different from the usual online map design. It’s refreshing.) Simon Whitehouse explores how to embed an OS map into a blog running Wordpress. Via Ordnance Survey.

Oliver Moss’s Walk Instead t-shirt, illustrated with a map in the shape of running shoes, is sold out, alas. Via Cartophilia.

The Globe and Mail reports on the Ontario Schools Map-Making Competition, in which students aged 12 to 18 submit digital or hand-drawn maps in several competition categories. The competition lost its university affiliation this year but was able to continue with private donations and support; they’re looking for another institution to affiliate with.

My regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of maps of other worlds, and that, for example, whenever the Cassini Imaging Team team updates a map of one of the moons of Saturn based on new imagery from the Cassini orbiter, I’m usually all over that.

(Last week, the Cassini team released The Enceladus Atlas, a series of map sheets, and maps of Mimas: equatorial, northern polar, and southern polar.)

A chapter published in Saturn from Cassini-Huygens, entitled “Cartographic Mapping of the Icy Satellites Using ISS and VIMS Data” and available online as a PDF, explains what goes into the global maps of Saturn’s icy moons (i.e., Dione, Enceladus, Iapetus, Mimas, Phoebe, Rhea and Tethys). Via The Planetary Society Blog.

Previously on mapping Saturn’s medium-sized moons: Updated Maps of Saturn’s Moon Dione; Polar Maps of Enceladus; New Map of Enceladus; The Dione Atlas; A Map of Dione and a Planetary Gazetteer. (With its thick atmosphere, Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, is a completely different matter.)

• Buy Saturn from Cassini-Huygens at Amazon.com

Via MapHist, news that a followup to Denis Wood’s 1992 book, The Power of Maps, is being published this month. Rethinking the Power of Maps, written by Wood along with John Fels and John Krygier, “takes a fresh look at what maps do, whose interests they serve, and how they can be used in surprising, creative, and radical ways,” says the publisher’s blurb. “Denis Wood describes how cartography facilitated the rise of the modern state and how maps continue to embody and project the interests of their creators. He demystifies the hidden assumptions of mapmaking and explores the promises and limitations of diverse counter-mapping practices today.” I’m familiar with some of Wood’s work but, to be honest, have never read The Power of Maps. I may have more reading ahead of me.

• Buy Rethinking the Power of Maps (paperback) at Amazon.com
• Buy Rethinking the Power of Maps (hardcover) at Amazon.com
• Buy The Power of Maps at Amazon.com

Whose Map Is It? is a map art exhibition taking place at Rivington Place in London from June 2 to July 24, 2010. It features work from nine contemporary artists who “question the underlying structures and hierarchies that inform traditional mapmaking. They provide individual insights that inscribe new, often omitted perspectives onto the map.”

Film, installation, print and audio are used to challenge the authority of the map and explore wider social and political issues. Whose Map is it? includes three new commissions by Gayle Chong Kwan, Susan Stockwell and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, alongside recent work by Milena Bonilla, Alexandra Handal, Bouchra Khalili, Otobong Nkanga, Esther Polak and Oraib Toukan.

Free admission. Sample images here. Via Ctrl-N/Journal; thanks also to Sheena Balkwill.

NASA and the European Space Agency have each posted same-day satellite imagery of the ash plume from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano: NASA from the MODIS instrument aboard its Terra satellite, the ESA from Envisat (at right).

Previously: Earth Observatory and Eyjafjallajökull; Eyjafjallajökull and European Airspace; Eyjafjallajökull.

Finally getting around to looking at some online maps of the results of the general election in the U.K. held last week. I’m surprised at how similar the maps produced by different media organizations are to one another. Both the BBC’s and the Telegraph’s election results maps toggle between geographical maps of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and hexagon-based cartograms that give each constituency the same area. Others take one side of the geographic/cartogram divide: the Times’s map is resolutely geographical, the Grauniad’s a square-based cartogram, which though unlovely is at least different from the rest. It’s hard to tell the geographic election maps apart, really; the media orgs’ maps aren’t much different from the public domain map produced for Wikipedia (at right).

See also Cartophilia and The Map Scroll.

Previously: British Election Previews.

In the Daily Mail, Peter Barber presents 10 of the greatest maps that changed the world from the Magnificent Maps exhibition: Waldseemüller’s 1507 map, the Peters projection and Google Earth make appearances.

Another explanatory thingy from GPS Review: the difference between GPS and “assisted” GPS (A-GPS), used by smartphones and the like, which speeds up the process by using cell towers or geolocated Wi-Fi base stations.

To be fair, New Mexico Soap is the name of the company, and among their products is a line of soaps in the shape of various states. Via Cartophilia.

The first episode of This Week in Maps, “a podcast about the latest maptastic geohappenings,” went live yesterday. (Wait — “maptastic geohappenings”? That’s a tagline. Wish I’d thought of it.) It’s hosted by OSM founder Steve Coast. Via GIS Lounge.

GPS Review explains how street-navigation GPS receivers appear more accurate than they actually are by using a “snap-to” feature that aligns the user to the nearest road. I’ve seen this happen with mine on more than one occasion; it’s interesting when it gets confused at interchanges. (It also has to be switched off if you’re recording GPS tracks for OpenStreetMap, or you’ll simply replicate the unit’s copyrighted map data. More on that at some point.)

The GPS system’s real accuracy is apparently about to get better, with the launch of the IIF generation of satellites, says Wired: “A three-signal world will mean always-on GPS that’s accurate to within 3 feet, even indoors and in concrete urban canyons. Forget finding the bar; you’ll be able to geolocate your stool.”

Another look at gender and navigation. “Women may not have discovered Australia or the Americas, but new research by scientists shows they can be better navigators than men if they have visited a place before,” the Times reports. “Men may still be the superior map readers, but women can get there quicker because they remember landmarks.” Via GIS Lounge.

Previously: Review: Map Addict; Navigation, Spatial Reasoning, Gender and Homosexuality.

It’s Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with you), and TomTom is announcing Star Wars voices for its navigation devices (press release). Darth Vader is available now, with others to come later — but who cares about them?

This could explain why my friends who use TomTom devices keep getting turned in circles when they try to find their way to our place. “No, not round, right!” And really, if Darth Vader tells you to drive off a cliff, are you going to say no?!

Via GPS Review and GPS Tracklog.

GPS Review takes a very quick look at how navigation apps for the iPhone work on the 3G-equipped variant of the iPad, which also includes a GPS chip. None of the apps have been customized for the iPad, so they were used in pixel-doubled mode. Most worked without issues (except for TomTom’s), and the GPS chipset worked well.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has posted a number of images of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, taken by the MODIS instruments on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites. The photo above was taken on April 29. (The imagery is also available as a Google Earth overlay, Google Earth Blog reports.)

NOAA is also tracking the spill, and is producing trajectory maps like this one:

Scroll down to the bottom of the NOAA page for the most recent trajectory map. Via GIS Lounge.

The New York Times has an interactive map that tracks the spread of the oil spill; it’s awfully small, though. Via Geospatial News.

Update, May 4:

Via Gizmodo, DigitalGlobe has made available a number of high-resolution images. I mean really high-resolution — 50 cm/pixel.

Via AnyGeo, ESRI’s gulf oil spill response page, containing a number of maps and applications.

Virgil Zetterlind writes to say that he’s put together an animated view of the aforementioned MODIS imagery using the Google Earth API; the Google Earth plugin will be required to view it on this web page. (It also takes a while to load.)

Update, May 5:

Google on mapping the oil spill in Google Earth.

Update, May 8:

Using the Google Earth plugin, Paul Rademacher illustrates the size of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill by overlaying it on large, familiar cities (Google LatLong, Ogle Earth).

Update, May 11:

Via James, Matthew Baker’s map (above) shows both the spill and the oil infrastructure (platforms, pipelines) in the Gulf.

Google Maps Mania has an updated roundup of maps of the spill.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the end of Selective Availability. Until it was turned off on May 1, 2000, GPS signals available to the public were only accurate to within 100 metres. In hindsight, especially when you consider how pervasive GPS is in electronics today, it may have been one of the most significant acts of the Clinton administration. Just imagine what we couldn’t do if SA was still in effect. AnyGeo, GPS Tracklog.

PCMag has a roundup of navigation apps for GPS-equipped mobile phones, reviewing seven examples of the genre. They include iPhone apps as well as Nokia, Android and Verizon phones. Via All Points Blog.

Via MapHist, news of Mark Monmonier’s latest book, coming out this month: No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control.

Some maps help us find our way; others restrict where we go and what we do. These maps control behavior, regulating activities from flying to fishing, prohibiting students from one part of town from being schooled on the other, and banishing certain individuals and industries to the periphery. This restrictive cartography has boomed in recent decades as governments seek regulate activities as diverse as hiking, building a residence, opening a store, locating a chemical plant, or painting your house anything but regulation colors. It is this aspect of mapping — its power to prohibit — that celebrated geographer Mark Monmonier tackles in No Dig, No Fly, No Go.

Dr. Monmonier is a favourite here on The Map Room: I reviewed How to Lie with Maps in May 2006, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow in July 2006, and Rhumb Lines and Map Wars in July 2008.

• Buy No Dig, No Fly, No Go (paperback) at Amazon.com
• Buy No Dig, No Fly, No Go (hardcover) at Amazon.com

Liz Gannes reports on Michael Liebhold’s argument that you can get better-than-GPS accuracy by using photographs:

He said the most promising technique is to build [a] model of the world using photographs, some of them geo-coded automatically, and the rest of them mapped using an understanding of where they are by comparing them to other images. So a photograph of vacationers in front of the Golden Gate bridge could be pinpointed in position using the precise angle of the orange arches in the background.

Liebhold goes on to say that Google’s up to something in this very space. Via geoparadigm.

Bill Dollins reviews PostGIS in Action by Regina Obe and Leo Hsu (see previous entry). “This book addresses a problem I have run into repeatedly in my consulting work: educating database professionals (DBAs, developers, etc.) on working with spatial data in a manner that they are familiar with,” Dollins writes; PostGIS in Action “provides a solid foundation for an experienced database professional who needs to begin working with spatial data using PostGIS and PostgreSQL.”

• Buy PostGIS in Action at Amazon.com

More coverage of the British Library’s Magnificent Maps exhibition, which (finally!) opened yesterday, from BBC News: “Picked from a “long shortlist” of 26,000 maps from the library’s 4.5 million-strong collection, curators Peter Barber and Tom Harper carefully selected 80 impressive wall maps, some of which have never been displayed in public.” Via Geospatial News.