Mapping the Earth’s Gravity

Some places on earth have different gravities.  Gravity roughly decreases with altitude, and many things can affect it.  The linked article explains that the European Space Agency are trying to get a better image of the earth’s gravitational pull.  There is also some talk about how this study can help us understand climate models better.

Probe launches to map Earth’s gravity in best detail yet. (via New Scientist)

They have a disclaimer right on the webpage about copying content, so I used an image from NASA.  Click through to see their video on the subject.

Some more links for you:

• http://spacefellowship.com/News/?p=8453
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6919016.stm

 

USA Today: GPS devices aren’t always right!

It may seem obvious that the maps stored on GPS devices is not always correct.  Not only is the data collection itself prone to error, but they are a static snapshot.  Maps change overtime, new roads are built, natural disasters take out roads, and civil projects can lead many roads and towns to be at the bottom of a lake.

There was an episode of the office where one of the characters drives his car into a lake, because his GPS told him so, a clip can be found here.

The linked article doesn’t take into account error with the GPS itself.  GPS error is very common, especially in areas where the signal can reflect or be distorted.  A popular example of this can happen in an Urban Canyon.  I have seen a GPS estimate its location as being on a major highway, when a vehicle was traveling on a frontage road, as well as some very peculiar effects biking through New York City.

While not as readable as a USA Today article, Wikipedia has a very good article up on errors in GPS reception.

Caution: GPS devices aren’t always right. (via USA Today)

 

Microsoft Single View merging Business Data and Maps

It looks like even Microsoft is picking up on the current momentum of Neogeography.  This product seems to be pretty similar to its already existing MapPoint software, which is targeted at marketing and business uses, as well as some low-end GIS uses.  Microsoft’s Single View Platform is targeted more to goverment applications.  Microsoft has partnered with IDV Solutions to make this application, so I expect some decent results.

According to a write-up about the Single View session, SVP is designed to provide users with “a single, geographic view of complex information and data sets across multiple roles, locations, and user interfaces.”

I’m curious to see how this affects the government GIS applications market.
Maps + business data = Microsoft Single View. (via zdnet microsoft blog)

 

Scribd: A Great Place to Upload and Serve your PDFs

Those of you who talk to me on a regular basis know that I love touting Scribd as the best new document sharing service.  They have a service called iPaper that lets you embed your documents anywhere.

I love Scribd for sharing documents that would otherwise sit on my hard drive unused.  By serving up documents that I created, I am able to share information with people and hopefully reduce the amount of research that people need to do.

On example of a document I uploaded is below.  I created a Powerpoint presentation for GIS day 2008 to help a group of students understand how Google Maps works with external data.  After the presentation, the document would just sit on my hard drive.  So I decided to upload it to Scribd to help out the growing GIS community on Scribd.

View this document on Scribd

Anyway, Scribd was nice enough to send me an Amazon.com gift card, so I feel I should officially promote them.  I don’t work for them or expect to be getting any more money, but I will definitely continue to use their service!

 

Carbon Dioxide Emissions on Google Earth

The Vulcan project brings us a map of the US and the amount of pollution that can be found.  The Vulcan project is a collaboration of a few universities, NASA, and the US D.O.E.  Check out their site for more information, they do a lot of good work.

They have released a CO2 emissions map that looks like a pretty interesting application.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the right plugin for Firefox on my MacBook Pro to run this, but it looks like it is very well done, and I hope to get it up and running on windows at some point soon.  Please comment on this if you are able to get it to work.

Google Earth maps carbon dioxide emissions (via LATimes.com)

UPDATE:

I reinstalled The Google Earth Plugin, and now this works!  I think the problem was that I reinstalled Firefox since the last time I updated Google Earth.  Anyway, it works now, and the information is very impressive.  This is a screenshot from my local area.  Carbon County is one of the worst polluters, and it’s all from industrial uses.  So Carbon county is still aply named even after all these years!  (This is Pennsylvania’s Coal region, as well as the Slate Belt, and home to many Cement Factories.)

Gurney, K.R., D. Mendoza, Y. Zhou, B. Seib, M Fischer, S. de la Rue du Can, S. Geethakumar, C. Miller (2009) “The Vulcan Project: High resolution fossil fuel combustion CO₂ emissions fluxes for the United States”, http://www.purdue.edu/eas/carbon/vulcan/research.html.

 

Pantagraph.com is having a Google Maps Scavenger Hunt

It looks like the Google Street View car took a detour through Bloomington, IL, and it has caught the attention of the local media

Although Google only covered a few major roads, the local newspaper is encouraging readers to go out and look for people they know, and try to figure out when the car came through.

It’s kind of a cool idea to use Google Maps as a town-wide Scavenger Hunt.  I’d like to see how this turns out!

Pantagraph.com | News | Mysteries abound as Bloomington finally shows up on Google Street View. (via Pantagraph.com)

 

Universal Phone Chargers may exist in my lifetime!

CNET reports that by 2012:

All the major handset makers, including, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, have agreed to use the Micro-USB technology as the common universal charging interface

Also from the article:

All in all, it’s huge win for the planet and for me–the consumer. It’s such a no-brainer. It makes you wonder why no one thought of this sooner.

I believe this is because the companies could make tons of money by selling us a new $30 charger everytime we found ourselves away from home with no way to charge our phones.

Now if there was only a green way to get rid of my excess of old phone chargers.  Any ideas?

Universal cell phone chargers coming soon (via CNET)

 

GPS Support Added To Google Earth Free Version

I’ve been wanting to hook my GPS up to Google Maps for a while, and have always needed to boot into Windows to run MS Streets to track my position.  It appears that Google is finally allowing the free version of Google Earth to use a GPS.

This news has been overshadowed by bigger news, such as the Ocean Floor Mapping, and Historic Satellite Imagery, but it may be something I’m more likely to use on a regular basis!

GPS Support Added To Free Version Of Google Earth. (via FreeGeographyTools.com)

 

OpenFlights Airport and Airline databases released

I’m always on the lookout for new GeoTagged data, and it made my day I came across this database.  It contains almost all of the airports in the world, along with their positions in WGS84.

I’ve gone through their data a little bit, and it’s not 100% perfect.  There are no parameters to specify the type of airport (General Av., Heliport, Seaplane, etc) and some of the airports have ceased to exist since. (ie. Denver Stapleton Airport)

Despite its shortcomings, this is still a great chunk of geographic data.

Recently, a buddy of mine put together a map of the Major US airports on Google Maps, which can be found here.  A lot of work was put into it to only include commercial airports and to specify the larger airports.  Its main intent is to aid travelers in finding the commercial airport nearest their destination.

It has inspired me to use the data from OpenFlights to create a maps of the World’s airports.  The resulting file was over 5mb, so I decided to create a subset of United States airports. So check out the OpenFlights Airport Database – United States Airports on Google Maps.

Airport and airline databases released (via OpenFlights)

As always, there is a song attached.  The flash player was giving me trouble, so here’s the mp3 straight up.

Guster – Airport Song

 

Google to Launch Service to Track Friends: Google Latitude

Google must be getting tired of just tracking your searches and your emails and you calendar and you bookmarks and you documents and your….  anyway now they’re also tracking your friends, in real time!  It uses your phone’s GPS or cell phone tower triangulation to track your every step and store it indefinitely on Google’s massive servers for further market research.

I might want to upgrade my phone, because Sony Ericssons and Apple iPhones are still only marked as “coming soon”.  Here’s a list of support phones that I copied and pasted from Google’s site:

• Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1
• iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon)
• most color BlackBerry devices
• most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices
• most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones)
• many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such as Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon)

Google Latitude (via Google.com)
Google Launches Latitude To Track Friends On Mobile Maps (via washingtonpost.com)

I have a song in mind for this post, but I can seem to find a link to it, and god forbid I upload copyrighted music, so here’s an iTunes link to it:

The Pietasters – Ocean 

Just on a note, this is the second song I’ ve linked called Ocean, and I am aware of other songs about stalking and Latitude, but this is the one I picked for this post.  Enjoy!