In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

John Nelson of UXBlog presents a dot map of the 2012 U. S. Presidential election with little blue dots for Obama votes and little red dots for Romney votes. The comments to the article are valuable as they demonstrate typical data-entry troubles and symbology problems that arise from scaling density point data.

Interactive U.S. election 2012 maps were unsurprisingly everywhere. Here's some of them and related content.

• Interesting analysis comes from GeoCurrents, in a set of videos on the geography of U.S. presidential elections, and also in an informative entry named Preliminary Observations on the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election
• MapBox explains how they built USA TODAY's Election Night Maps (example below)
• The GEB provide links and allows you to quickly compare CNN, Huffington Post and Google elections maps
• The New York Times has their own set of interactive maps, and so does CNN
• VerySpatial links to a Smithsonian article named When Republicans Were Blue and Democrats Were Red

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

On the open source / open data front:

• Here's an excellent summary of OpenStreetMap's State Of The Map US - 2012, on Steve Coast's presentation, Dr JTS shared: "He said that the top thing OSM needs to continue to grow is addressing.  He singled out Google Mapmaker as being a clear and present danger to the growth of OSM."
• James shows us how to easily download OpenStreetMap data from WeoGeo
• There's a new Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Lab established at North Carolina State University
• MediaGoblin, an open YouTube, Flickr and the like competitor, now supports 3D models
• If you're interested by the uDig desktop GIS, there's now video tutorials
• You can publish maps direction from ArcGIS to MapBox Publishing with Arc2Earth Sync
• There's even more and updated OpenStreetMap tiles offered by MapQuest
• Here's how to create dynamic contour maps with server-side processing with WPS, GeoServer and PostGIS 2.0
• GeoServer 2.2.1 has been released

On the Esri front:

• Using ArcGIS Online? There's a the ArcGIS Online Health Dashboard, to let you know if any service is down

On the Google front:

• The GEB tells us about Tracking KMZ file usage with Google Analytics
• Here's an entry on Trekking the Grand Canyon for Google Maps, for Street View of course

On the Microsoft front:

• The ridiculous patent war continues, Microsoft Sues Motorola Over Mapping Patents
• A U.S. State identification game for MS MapPoint

Geo-related Slashdot discussions:

• I had to happen, Apple Maps Accidentally Reveals Secret Military Base In Taiwan
• Remote sensing helped monitor a Huge Geoengineering Project Violates UN Rules on Canada's west coast
• An Arctic Investigation Underway Into Solar Storm Sat-Nav Disruption
• We'll probably see this often, Texas Schools Using Electronic Chips To Track Students; Parents In Uproar
• Implementing geospatial isn't always easy, Uber [mobile app] Gives Up On New York Taxi Service
• Privacy is dead right? How Hair Can be Used To Track Where You've Been
• Reusability, NASA Working On Refueling Satellites

In the everything else category:

• Using Verizon? They sell where you are; Verizon Sells App Use, Browsing Habits, Location (via O'R)
• DM shares an article named Prepare to Get That Job: 20 Challenging GIS Interview Questions, and also related to jobs, GeoSearch Tracks U.S. Geospatial Employment in Q3 2012
• Drones for geospatial? Home-made 3D-Printed Drones (via O'R)
• The promise of WebGL, while this article isn't specifically on geospatial uses of WebGL, it's worth taking a look at the WebGL demonstration video (wait at least until colors kick in, after about one minute)
• Fearing supervolcanos? For those in South America, ESA's story on the 'sombrero uplift' seen by remote sensing, the largest active magma body in Earth's continental crust
• Geospatial brings value? A DM article on Location Intelligence unlocks the power of your data

In the maps category:

• Good timing, United Swing States of America: Presidential Election Battle Map
• Several readers might be interested by North American Cartographic Information Society's Atlas of Design, now available
• APB reports on that the UK Met Crime Map is Overwhelming for Users

Here's the recent Directions Magazine articles I found interesting and that I wanted to share:

• Here's an excellent Q&A named Digging into the Open Source Geospatial Software and OpenGeo Suite 3.0, we're getting less and less good reasons not to consider open source geospatial solutions
• You have to deal with Oracle? Read this, Nokia, Oracle Create Tighter Integration between Nokia Location Platform (NLP) and Oracle Fusion Middleware
• Interesting if your into forest fires; Detection and Monitoring of Wildfires by a Constellation of Small Satellites with Infrared Sensor Systems
• An article on CityGML and The Netherlands’ Open 3D Modelling Standard: Building the Open 3D Information Infrastructure
• For US readers (and others), here's A Brief History of Red and Blue on U.S. Elections Maps

Here's the recent geonews that we haven't already mentioned in batch mode.

In addition to last Friday's FOSS4G geonews:

• There's a new open source Microsoft Bing Maps Android SDK available
• MapFish 2.1 has been released, and it's now BSD-licensed instead of GPL
• Here's news of what's coming for OpenLayers 2.11
• Shapely 1.2.9 has been released

In the miscellaneous category:

• The FGT blog is excited about Voyager, a tool to catalog and search your local geospatial datasets (free and paid version available)
• Several sources have mentioned that the U.S. data.gov and other open sites are closing
• Kurt offers an entry on the U.S. marine cadastre
• There's a first GLONASS smartphone available in Russia
• I smiled when I read the newly introduced "NoGIS" term, remisnescent of WebGIS and neogeography, James Fee shares what he thinks of it
• Slashdot discusses ESA's GOCE satellite detailed information about the Earth's gravitational shape
• If you're that curious, the last Google imagery update included the set from the upcoming 'The Hobbit' movie shot in New Zealand
• The Geonames blog shares an update on the geolocation of Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia Web Services

In the maps category:

• TMR links to NYT day-by-day situation map of the Libyan uprising
• JF mentions a nice Census map analysis of New York City using Google Fusion Tables
• Here's a map of Canada's ridings for the national election early next month
• TMR also shares a map of the decline of ozone in the Arctic
• The prolefic TMR also mentioned the book "Railway Maps of the World"
• Ok, maybe not newsworthy, but here's 25 Mind-Blowing Aerial Photographs Around the World

The Friday geonews in batch mode, including anything pertinent that we haven't shared yet.

On the Google front:

• Google announced single-click StreetView navigation
• Last March was announced that Google Mapplets were on their way out, their annihilation plan begun
• The GEB shares an entry on animated 3D models in Google Earth
• There will soon be bike directions for many Canadian cities in Google Maps

On the ESRI front:

• An entry on a mosaic image finder addin for ArcMap

In the miscellaneous category:

• MDA released a National Urban Change Indicator for the U.S.
• Here's an interesting entry (it must be since its involves Slartibartfast ;-) on removing complexities of complex polygons
• Here's an entry showing us what happens when you compute circular buffers in geographic coordinates
• If you're looking for geobooks to give at Christmas, The Map Room shares lists of geospatial-related books released this year
• There's also a new book named Preservation in Digital Cartography, co-authored by Tracey P. Lauriault, Peter L. Pulsifer and D.R. Fraser Taylor
• This entry explains why location privacy is different from privacy

In the maps category:

• From numerous sources, here's a one-minute video of the last 88 years of presidential election results in the U.S.
• The Map Room offers a long review the ninth edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World
• The Economist shares an informative and scary interactive map of the global public debt
• In the same vein, GeoCurrents shares an entry named the So-Called Happy Planet Index, which includes a map
• The Strange Maps blog shares a Map of the World's Countries Rearranged by Population

There has been less coverage of the U.S. mid-term elections on the geoblogs than I expected. The Map Room links to New York Times maps of the 2010 U.S. midterm elections.

A chunck of TMR's entry: "The New York Times’s election results maps — House, Senate, gubernatorial — are, as usual, awesome. Pickups are clearly indicated, so you can see at a glance what’s changed. You can drill down to county-level results easily, and a county bubble map feature compensates for the fact that some counties are much, much larger than others [...]"

Some recent Google-related geonews.

From the official Lat Long blog:

• A week ago, Google improved how you explore online photos for Place pages
• You can now view Near Real-time Flights over the U.S. in Google Earth
• Google in now in every new BMW car, integrating local searches, maps, StreetView, and more
• Google Earth for iOS has been updated, now includes the Ocean layer and other improvements such as support for the 'retina' display
• Yesterday the Lat Long blog shared an entry on mapping the midterm elections in the U.S.

From the GEB:

• A round up of commercial offers to get your home or business modeled in Google Earth
• Here's a geo-enabled quiz in Google Earth
• Here's 10 Google Earth myths busted - things you should already know
• There was an imagery update on Google Earth yesterday