Are geofence warrants unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Geofence warrants require a data provider to provide information on all users and devices within a given area during a given time period. Their constitutionality has been a grey area for some time, with U.S. federal court decisions disagreeing with one another. One of those cases, Chatrie v. United States, is being argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court today (here’s the PDF of the petition), so we may soon have a definitive answer.
In the first edition of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, two leading historians explored details of the 350-year history of African slave traffic to the New World. They showed, with nearly 200 original maps, where the captives came from, how long the journeys lasted, how many died on the voyages, and what the ports and destinations were. They also presented details about the trade itself, including the economics.
In this groundbreaking revised edition, 25 new maps locate the major language groups involved in the traffic and show the movement of Africans from the interior of the continent to the Americas, as well as from one part of the Americas to another. Accompanying the maps, as in the first edition, are revealing illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries.
With up-to-date information drawn from the database Slave Voyages, with its records of more than 36,000 voyages, the atlas provides the fullest possible picture of the extent and inhumanity of one of the largest forced migrations in history.
Claims circulating on social media that Apple erased towns and villages in southern Lebanon from Apple Maps as a kind of support for the Israeli invasion are not true, says Apple. Apple’s coverage of Lebanon has never been that great: the towns and villages were never on the map in the first place. But I suppose the people circulating the claim never bothered to look at Lebanon in Apple Maps before this. [AppleInsider]
Shri Khalpada explains the physics of GPS. “GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance. A satellite sends a signal, your phone catches it, and the delay between those two events tells the phone exactly how far away the satellite is. Everything else is about making that measurement precise enough to be useful: accounting for bad clocks, satellite geometry, and eventually, Einstein’s theories.”
Reuters: “A U.S. mining company backed by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates is in a tangle with Belgium’s AfricaMuseum over who should digitise antique maps of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in the museum’s archive.” The colonial-era records in question take up some 500 metres of shelving and are already being digitized under a separate project with the DRC. The AfricaMuseum says it can’t hand the records over to a private company; the mining startup, KoBold Metals, also has an agreement with the Kinshasa government to digitize the data. [Tara Calishain]
It’s likely that artist Saul Steinberg may be best known for “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” an illustration that appeared as the well-known cover of the 29 March 1976 issue of The New Yorker. But as an essay on the Saul Steinberg Foundation website argues, “Isolating View of the World from the rest of his oeuvre, you miss its larger significance: as one work within a parade of images that harness the graphic device of the map to visualize more than geography. The map for Steinberg is not a system of geographic measurement but a way of thinking.” The post has lots of other examples of Steinberg’s work where he plays with maps and place, providing some context for that famous cover. [Robert Simmon]
Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.
Apple maintains that the ad platform will come with user privacy protections. “A user’s location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user’s Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user’s device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties.”
John Rocque, A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark, with the contiguous buildings, 1746. Map on 24 sheets, 203 × 385 cm. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.
A book reprinting John Rocque’s 1746 map of London, a massive 24-sheet, 1:2,437-scale map originally printed in 24 sheets, has just been published. Or rather, republished: it’s an updated reprint of a 1947 paperback by journalist W. Crawford Snowdon that was published to mark the map’s 200th anniversary. The new edition, out from Atlantic Publishing, is updated with better-quality map reproductions and additional illustrations. The “street-by-street” subtitle kind of pitches it as an 18th-century A to Z map. BBC News, Daily Mail, Londonist.
Moogle Gaps, for when you want to be misdirected. TrendWatching: “Whipped up by two Australian ex-Droga5 creatives, Paul Meates and Henry Kimber, Moogle Gaps is an anti-wayfinder. Users input their navigational query as they normally would, but instead of the most efficient route from A to B, the app offers misdirections — or as its builders put it, ‘a way to get lost, visit a bar that‘s not local, or go to a restaurant where no one knows you.’” [Tara Calishain]
For the Guardian’s “It’s Complicated” feature, Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks at how great restaurants end up being invisible when you search for a place to eat on Google Maps. He talks with data scientist Lauren Leek, whose London Food Map tries to surface restaurants that, according to a machine learning model, should have a higher rating than they do. Lauren points to the Google’s ranking system’s reliance in part on “prominence”—a factor that bestows cumulative advantage on already-visible locations.
Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly, a fact first noticed by Royce.1
Insofar as I follow Edney’s line of argument,2 it’s the question of self-reflexivity—the idea that any ideal map of the territory would include itself, as part of the territory being mapped, on the map, with infinite regressions—that he is trying to grapple with, along with the question of what Korzybski and his general semantics successors were doing when they were talking about the “ideally correct map”—a subject about which Edney has had something to say.
