geomantic

With the frenzy of the elections past, I’m gradually returning to normal life. Here are some things that have recently caught my attention.

Fuzzy Tolerance calls attention to a slew of recent open source software releases. Shiny new toys!

From the Google Geo Developers Blog comes word of a snazzy new KML Manual. (Must add this to my book list, since I much prefer to obtain knowledge by looking at pigment on sheets of cellulose-based material.)

Via Andrew Turner comes word of Apps for Democracy. Although it’s too late to enter (entries closed yesterday), I want to call attention to it because it’s a good example of how the web makes it possible and affordable to do something at a micro (i.e. neighborhood) level. There are very few local governments that can afford to organize and stand up programs that meet the same needs that some of these mashups. Examples appeal to the enlightened self-interest of a dispersed group to take collective action in the social realm.

To put the magnitude of Obama’s victory in perspective, here are links to two interesting maps of election results. Both of these resources provide a much better explanation of the outcome than do the state-level maps, which look pretty evenly divided. The county-level maps are overwhelmingly red, but when adjusted for population the margin of victory is abundantly clear.

First, the Washington Post shows the election results in 3D here:

Map: Presidential Election Winners by County | Election 2008 | washingtonpost.com

Second, be sure to see the cartograms produced by Mark Newman at University of Michigan. If you just look at the results at the state level you would miss the real story, which occurs at the county level. And, you would miss the impact of highly populated urban areas versus the vast, thinly populated areas of the country.

Studs Terkel, -the Chicagoan’s Chicagoan, has passed away. My first introduction to Studs was through “Working” but I think it was “Division Street” that really made his mark. The obituary from the Chicago Tribune called his books “written radio”, which had never occurred to me, but it’s quite an apt description.

Obit from the Chicago Tribune

Studs Terkel, Author and Activist, Dies at 96 - Obituary Obit - NYTimes.com

Via Slashdot, this article suggests that the public would be better served by exposing government data through a simple standards-compliant data infrastructure.

In his Computerworld post, Patrick Thibodeau cites the example of JDLand blog in how the public (bloggers, in this case) might make use of a standardized public data infrastructure. More here: Let’s turn the federal government over to bloggers | Computerworld Blogs

Slashdot | Princeton Researchers Say Feds Need Data Standard

Here’s another sign (as if we needed one) that geospatial information is rapidly merging with mainstream IT. Linux.com published a nice article on getting started with Geoserver.

Linux.com :: Serving and styling maps with Geoserver

The current economic malaise will mark the end of the 20th Century. James Grant puts it in historical perspective in an opinion piece in today’s NYT.

Fascinating first hand views of bedrock geology under lower Manhattan.

At Ground Zero, Scenes From the Ice Age - NYTimes.com

Returning from my summertime hiatus. Hints of changing seasons all around. I can see it in the angle of the sun, length of day, and moderating temperatures. It’s good to be back.

Welcome back. Sure, it’s been a while since I’ve had the time to post, so I thought I’d mark it with a few recent items of note.

The first item I want to call attention to is the GeoNetwork OpenSource project, which recently graduated from OSGeo incubation. I’ve felt for some time that GeoNetwork is an important addition to the stack on the strength of its metadata editing capabilities. As Sean Gorman pointed out a while ago, the existing specs for geospatial metadata are rather unwieldy for use on the geoweb. So, tools like GeoNetwork play an important part in lowering the resource cost for creating and maintaining metadata.

James Hansen also returned to Capitol Hill today, -exactly twenty years after first raising warnings about global climate change. You can read the Washington Post’s coverage here. In the long run, Dr. Hansen is going to emerge as a real hero for his ceaseless devotion to this issue as well as his bravery in standing up to ideologues who have ruined the careers of others who dared to contradict political orthodoxy.

Finally, two posts from early this month that touch on the intersection of neogeography and old-school GIS. The first is a great post by Andrew Turner on whether GoogleMaps constitutes GIS. Some of the same themes are touched on Sean Gorman’s interview of James Fee. Both articulate a role for GIS as an analytical tool, as well as acknowledge the role neogeography has played in making geospatial information available to a wider audience. My sense is that the neogeo-vs.-GIS dispute that emerged last year will quickly become irrelevant because, as both of these posts imply, is that the discussion will be re-focused on the nature of the emerging technical ecology.

For the last 18 months, more and more of my work is getting done on the Ubuntu platform. And as a self-described geospatial propeller head, I’m always quite interested in using the Ubuntu platform for GIS and other geospatial applications. Just in the nick of time, Matt Perry has updated his Ubuntu GIS how-to for the recent Hardy Heron release. He’s included some nice python libraries that I’d overlooked last week when I built my Ubuntu-based GIS workstation.

If you use Ubuntu, have a look at Matt’s post here.