California, knows how to censor

Here's an interesting story from Business World Online.
An elected California official wants the state known for Internet technology to blur images of schools, hospitals, government buildings and houses of worship in online maps.
Southern California assemblyman Joel Anderson, a Republican, is backing a bill that would call for Internet mapping services to obscure such images or face daily fines of 250,000 dollars.
"Sensitive areas that could be potential soft targets for terrorists or hate crime perpetrators should not be available on the Internet at a level of detail that poses a serious security risk," Mr. Anderson said in an e-mail to AFP.
He cited reports that pictures of former prime minister Tony Blair’s home in London were recently removed from a Street View feature in Google maps that provides users with 360-degree images of locations.
Mr. Anderson also said that Street View pictures of the House of Commons and other British government buildings were "blacked out".
Google has said publicly that it does not take it on itself to edit images at its free online mapping service but that it does delete or obscure pictures at requests from property owners or officials running government facilities.
"In the United Kingdom, Google blacked out key government buildings from their Street View service," Mr. Anderson said.
"I have proposed a bill, AB 255, that would require all Internet mapping sites to take the same precautions with California government buildings, places of worship, schools and hospitals."
Read the full story on Business World Online, here

Underwater mystery revealed

Here's an interesting story from Florida concerning an innovative idea from the students of the Florida Keys Community College.
Ever wondered what the reef off the Florida Keys might look like on a map? Well, now you'll be able to see it.
Here's the story, from the Miami Herald. Read the full story here.

Equipped with floating GPS units, side scan sonar and waterproof paper, college students dove 25 feet down into an underwater classroom with a pioneering assignment: create a three-dimensional, interactive map of a reef.
When completed, the map will show both the contour and biological life on Looe Key reef, considered one of the most beautiful dive sites in the world.
"It's the first time this type of project has been done in the Keys," said Patrick Rice, director of marine sciences at the Florida Keys Community College.
Just as a tourist map of Key West marks Ernest Hemingway's House and the Southernmost Point, the portion of Looe Key mapped by Rice's class will highlight points of interest such as spectacular coral head formations and known hangouts for Goliath grouper and other territorial sea creatures.
"A lot of divers do underwater photography," said Lucja Jakuvowska, a student from Poland. "So if they come and can do only one dive on a certain dive site, they can just look at the map and go, 'Oh, I want to see this, this, this and this.' "
The 3-D underwater maps also will provide valuable baseline data for marine researchers, Rice said.
For years, federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey, have mapped reefs in 3-D in the Keys.
"We are taking it to the next level by making it interactive and incorporating the biological data," Rice said.
The maps have the potential to work in conjunction with the new Google Ocean technology, in which a person can zoom into a specific location in a body of water and see what it looks like, Rice said.
Each of the 14 students in Rice's class had specific tasks to accomplish during their two approximate 45-minute dives at the east end of Looe Key reef known as the Towers. Some outlined the perimeter. Others took photographs or video of special features or creatures.
Student Nick Corby of Pennsylvania conducted a fish survey, coming up with 50 species that included stingrays. And one student operated the side scan sonar that produced high-resolution bathymetry.
The raw data was collected and combined using a quick grid program, which pumped out a topographical image. Video gaming software will be used to put in the color and points of special interest, and make it interactive with the photographs and video.
"You'll be able to take a simulated dive on Looe Key," Rice said.

Go green, go Google

Here's an interesting claim from green campaign site fairhome.co.uk. Its author, David Masters, suggests that Google is getting greener.
Google’s map service is 500% greener than it was 12 months ago, according to the Internet giant’s blog.
Green improvements include detailed and accurate walking directions (users are no longer directed to swim across rivers) and a 250-500% increase in the number of cities where Google Maps can be used to plan public transport journeys.
“A year ago, we had ‘walking directions’ that simply consisted of an as-the-crow-flies arrow across buildings - and sometimes rivers!” writes Jessica Wei on Google’s official blog.
“Today, people are no longer directed to swim across rivers or fly over impassible areas - detailed turn-by-turn walking directions have now been seamlessly integrated with our transit directions.”
Public transport integration has also seen huge improvements.
In North America, Google Maps now integrates 115 public transport agencies into its journey search, compared to just 20 a year ago.
To read the full article, click here

Google Maps out nuclear base

Here's an interesting story which appeared in the Australian newspaper, The Age, about a storm in a British teacup.
The British military has worked itself into a lather over new high-resolution images on Google Earth showing an aerial view of its top-secret nuclear defence base, which, it says, could help terrorists, pictured above.
The facility, located in Faslane on the River Clyde in Scotland, is the home of Britain's nuclear defence force. It was previously blurred out of Google Earth, along with British bases in Iraq, at the request of the British Government.
But the locations - along with other military sites such as MI6's London offices, Britain's nuclear crisis HQ and the SAS training facility - are now visible following updates to Google Earth, which can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection.
The Sun newspaper, which broke the story, quoted military experts who warned that the online images would make it easy for terrorists to launch accurate mortar or rocket attacks.
"A strike on our nuclear capability would cause untold devastation. Terrorists could have a field day, knowing exactly where to aim strikes to cause the maximum devastation," one anonymous expert told the paper.
...
Reports of terrorists using Google Earth to plot attacks are now commonplace. Hamas militants in Gaza and the terrorists who stormed Mumbai last year are among the groups who reportedly used the online mapping service in their missions.
The Mumbai High Court asked Google to blur images of sensitive areas in December, arguing Google Earth "aids terrorists in plotting attacks".
In January, John Hanke, the director in charge of Google Earth and Google Maps, hit back at the claims, saying terrorists would still carry out their attacks with or without Google's help.
"I don't really think it's tipping the balance in favour of the bad guys," Hanke said.
"The evilness is in the philosophies and the desires of those that want to do evil. They will use the tools at hand to do that, whether it's throwing a Molotov cocktail, or shooting a rifle or using some piece of technology as part of the process."
Read the full story here

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A new take on old maps

Move over Google Maps, it's time to get medieval on your pixels. Well, perhaps not that ancient, but Charles R Carpenter has cornered the market in historical property maps, known as cadastral maps.
Cadastral maps recorded property ownership at every address in the US and Carpenter’s company, Historic MapWorks LLC of Scarborough, Maine, now owns the rights to some 1.2 million of them, covering the entire country.
Seven employees are scanning the map library and linking them street by street to current maps, using latitude and longitude points where old streets have disappeared and old neighborhoods are paved over. “We have produced a digital, historic Google Earth,” said Carpenter.
Earlier this month, Google announced in a blog post that its Google Earth product would begin offering historical images. All this is free, but Carpenter believes subscribers will pay $30 a month for unfettered access to many times more and deeper historical data in an online map collection that is expanding daily.
So if you want to take a (limited) look at old Florida, and Manatee County in particular, click on the Historic MapWorks site

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Maps are what divide us

Hi there map lovers!
Now we don't like to get too controversial over here at Florida Map and Travel Information, but this issue is just too big for us to ignore.
Picture the scene. You're in a car, travelling somewhere you've never been before. In the driver's seat is a man, in the passenger's seat is a woman. With a map. There is an argument waiting to happen.
But maybe you should just chill, accept your differences and agree that men are good at some things, women at others. And while you're at it you can cite some recent scientific findings to back up your argument.
According to the Telegraph newspaper in England, scientists believe the reason the sexes differ is due to their different roles in evolution.
It says: Men had to hunt and stalk their prey, so became skilled at navigation, while women foraged for food and so became good at spotting fruits and nuts close by.
The theory emerged from a study which looked at the different ways in which men and women appreciate art.
Researchers discovered that a brain region called the parietal lobe, which governs spatial awareness, is active in both men and women when they admire a "beautiful" picture or photograph.
But while neurons on both sides of the brain were stimulated in women, only those in the right hemisphere were activated in men.
The left side deals with closer range objects while the right is better at co-ordinates.
The scientists, led by Dr Francisco Ayala from the University of California, and reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, believe differences in the way men and women appreciate beauty probably arose early in the evolution of early modern humans, say the researchers.
Hunting, traditionally done by men, required a "co-ordinating" ability to track animals accurately while on the move. Closer spatial awareness was better suited to foraging for fruit, roots or berries, a job mainly carried out by women.
"Women tend to be more aware than men of objects around them, including those that seem irrelevant to the current task, whereas men out-perform women in navigation tasks," the scientists wrote.
"Men tend to solve navigation tasks by using orientation-based strategies involving distance concepts and cardinal directions, whereas women tend to base their activities on remembering the location of landmarks and relative directions, such as "left from", or "to the right of"."
So there you have it. Evolution is to blame. Not men, nor women. Glad to have cleared that up.

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Carbon data shows disturbing detail

Hi map lovers!
Today we're going to look at a new scientific discovery which has used Google Maps to chart the carbon dioxide emissions across America. Those scientists, always up to something!
Here's the story as reported by AFP.
A team of US scientists led by Purdue University unveiled an interactive Google Earth map on Thursday showing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels across the United States.
The high-resolution map, available at here, shows carbon dioxide emissions in metric tons in residential and commercial areas by state, county or per capita.
Called "Vulcan" after the Roman god of fire, the project, which took three years to complete, quantifies carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline.
It breaks down emissions by the sectors responsible including aircraft, commercial, electricity production, industrial, residential and transport.
"This will bring emissions information into everyone's living room as a recognizable, accessible online experience," said Kevin Gurney, the project leader and an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue.
"We hope to eventually turn it into an interactive space where the public will feed information into the system to create an even finer picture of emissions down to the street and individual building level," he added.
The United States accounts for some 25 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide, which scientists have identified as the most important human-produced gas contributing to global climate change.
Simon Ilyushchenko, an engineer at Internet search giant Google who worked on the project, said "integrating the data with Google Earth was a way to advance public understanding of fossil fuel energy usage.
"Dynamic maps of the data, broken down by the different sources of emissions, easily show where people burn more gasoline from driving or where they use more fuel for heating and cooling homes and businesses," he said.
Vulcan integrates carbon dioxide emissions data from the US Environmental Protection Agency and US Department of Energy. The current data is from 2002, but the scientists said they plan to incorporate more recent data.
Besides Purdue, the project also involved researchers from Colorado State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
It was funded by NASA, the US Department of Energy, the Purdue Showalter Trust and Indianapolis-based Knauf Insulation.