In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode, covering the last few weeks (which have been crazy to me).

From the Esri front:

• Mandown reminds us that ArcGIS 10.1 is coming this June and the ArcGIS 10.0 SP5 is coming in July

• You can access and edit Esri maps even on the Kindle Fire

From the Microsoft front:

• Microsoft announced that Bing Maps is now using Nokia backend services for Traffic and Geocoding
• There's an official entry named Integrating Bing Maps With WPF
• And there's new Bird’s Eye Imagery & Streetside Coverage on Bing Maps

Discussed over Slashdot:

• Russian Satellite Takes Most Detailed 121-Megapixel Image of Earth Yet
• DEA Wants To Install License Plate Scanners and Retain Data for Two Years

• Senator Seeks More Info On DOJ Location Tracking Practices
• Modeling People and Places With Internet Photo Collections

• NASA's Interactive Flood Maps

• LightSquared Files For Bankruptcy

Directions Mag articles:

• Here's about what’s new in both the software and the use of GeoPDF
• Another one named Can Geofeedia Provide Location-based Citizen Input to Journalists?

In the miscellaneous category:

• An interesting Ogle Earth entry named Why do Panasonic, Leica, FujiFilm, Samsung and Nikon censor their GPS cameras?, short answer: China laws

• Learning Geography skills through a Zombie Apocalypse Narrative?, yes, nothing less
• While I found nothing surprising in there, it's still interesting to read the United Nations Five to Ten Year Vision on Geospatial Information Management (via)
• We heard this before, New Report Warns About Decline in U.S. Earth Observation Capabilities
• Meanwhile, India launched its first EO satellite, RISAT-1, with SAR capabilities

In the maps category:

• Strange Maps shares a map of Population by Latitude and Population by Longitude
• TMR shares a map of U.S. Life Expectancy by County

• It was submitted as a press release but deserves more attention, UrbMet.org, interactive web map for the urban metabolism of cities, the same tool was later featured on the O'Reilly Radar

• Here's Climascope, an interactive web map to explore climate change
• The Earth is mostly (70%) covered by water, but there isn't that much in terms of volume
• Mapperz mentions MapofLife.org, mapping geographic distributions for any terrestrial vertebrate species
• At the other end of the spectrum, FearSquare.com, crime around you (UK only)

Ah... it feels good to be current on geonews once again!

Over the past week, I read all the content of National Geographic's '7 Billion' iPad app. I found it of excellent quality and pretty interesting. Interesting enough for me to spend some time sharing my thoughts about it with you. 'Geography' is at the core of the topic and content of the app. The iPad app is free "for a limited time", so I encourage you to download it right away (provided you have an iPad of course).

But first, here's the official description: "National Geographic magazine presents 7 Billion: How your world will change - to coincide with the arrival of the 7 billionth human being to our world. This app explores the challenges of a growing human population in a world of limited resources with informative videos, interactive maps, in-depth articles, and stunning photography. 

Featured content includes….

• How big is 7 Billion? An insightful video of the demographic trends that got us here today and how it will impact us tomorrow.
• Birth of a New Brazil: How big families are out, to the credit of strong-willed women—and the steamy soaps that inspired them.
• The Face of Seven Billion Interactive: Tap on the “typical face” to find out who the most typical human is
• Rift in Paradise: As the global population increases Africa’s Albertine Rift gives us a glimpse of what is at stake in the decades ahead.
• Bangladesh: See how resourceful residents of this country refuse to give in to rising seas
• Food Ark: Explore how preserving heirlooms seeds and breeds are crucial if we hope to feed our hungry world.
• And to be incorporated into the app in December 2011, Cities are the Solution: They may be the best way to lift people from poverty and preserve the environment."

And now my notes:

• The app contains several beautiful photos with captions, quite a few slightly interactive maps, about three short videos, and about a hundred pages of articles to read
• The articles are generally very well written, documented and quite pertinent, well worth the time
• The design is the app is beautiful, and so are the maps, but in both cases, design takes precedence on usability. Ideally, maps must be beautifully designed -and- usable
• The surprise of the first section, is that despite population having increased exponentially in in the past decades, most scenarios indicate we'll stabilize and start to decrease in the middle of this century. In fact, population is even already on a decreasing course in a lot of parts of the world, notable exceptions are India and Africa, so the problem is not population, it's resources, mainly food and energy (both are linked of course (population <=> resources & food <=> energy), everything is related, and as we know in geography, near things are more related than distant things)
• The second section, focusing on Brazil, shows that you don't even need laws to reduce family sizes, you need "modernity"
• The section on Africa is insightful, and shows that we're not safe from additional Rwanda-type wars, since population is not evenly distributed and so are resources. When people starve, they don't care about "national natural reserves" and are willing to pillage anything they can to survive (this reminds me of Collapse, by Jared Diamond)
• The section on Bangladesh is reassuring. When we don't have access to much, we do with what we have and imagination helps, but be ready to move frequently and systematically adapt to new situations. To be bold, I'm not sure we're that flexible in the "modern" world
• There's a section on oceans acidification, dubbed "climate change's lesser-known evil twin". Oceans are degrading at a dramatic rate, mostly because we don't do anything and continue with our unsustainable practices, and we're going to start paying the price real soon 
• There's also a section on food production, but I don't remember reading anything surprising in there
• The last part of the app, titled "Cities are the Solution" is not yet available (next month), I will certainly read it once it becomes available

In short, it's a great informative app that I can only recommend. It's well documented, beautiful and pertinent. Anyone else has comments?

On the same topic and in addition to what we already shared, O'Reilly has an entry on visualizations of 7 billion humans.

Here's the geospatial-related geonews discussed over Slashdot during the last two weeks, in batch mode:

• Here's an "Holographic" Desk Allowing Interaction With Virtual Objects
• A Throwable 36-Camera Ball Takes Spherical Panoramas
• A discussion on the Time Zone Database Has New Home After Lawsuit
• The Origo prototype, 3D Printer For Your Kids
• There's a interactive population map attached to this Earth Officially Home To 7 Billion Humans story
• Google Releases Geothermal Potential Map of the US
• And another Google story named How Google's Autonomous Vehicles Work
• In order to reduce the costs of satellites, DARPA Proposes Ripping Up Dead Satellites To Make New Ones
• A recurring theme, Senator Introduces Bill To Stop Warrantless GPS Tracking
• Sensor Enables 3D Mapping of Rainforests

This is not newly available datasets, but they recently came to my attention and since we never mentioned them before, they might be of interest to some of our users: the Gridded Population of the World, version 3 (GPWv3) and the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) datasets.

From the official page: "GPWv3 depicts the distribution of human population across the globe.  It is the most detailed
version of GPW to date with more than three times the amount of data as version 2, and includes population estimates to 2015. GRUMP builds on GPWv3 by incorporating urban and rural information, allowing new insights into urban population
distribution and the global extents of human settlements."

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