Ever wonder how globes are made? Well to be honest, I hadn’t…but now that I do know, my entire worldview (pun?) has changed. Check out this video that takes us through the process.
The Chicago History Museum’s “Mapping Chicago: The Past and the Possible” exhibition also looks at Replogle Globes, Inc., which has been turning maps into globes in Chicago for over 77 years. Replogle is the world’s largest globe manufacturer. With their help, you can discover how globes are made.
We’re very big on the iPhone here at Infonaut HQ, so today’s news that Google Earth for the platform has been released piqued our interest. There have been Google Earth-a-like applications, but I found that loading images took forever, so the first thing I did was click the “Where Am I?” button and I was pleased to see that the imagery loaded up quite quickly. Google always seems to do things right.
Currently you can only view geographically appropriate Wikipedia articles and Panoramio photos but I’m sure more layers will be coming. Click here to download Google Earth for the iPhone for free.
Smashing Telly, a website that posts full-length free television programs, has uploaded a fascinating documentary on the London Underground Map, designed by Harry Beck in 1933. From the Wikipedia:
Prior to the Beck diagram, the various underground lines had been laid out geographically, often superimposed on a road map. This had the feature that centrally located stations were very close together, and the out of town stations were spaced apart. From around 1908 a new type of ‘map’ appeared inside the train cars; it was a non-geographic linear diagram, in most cases a simple straight horizontal line, which equalized the distances between stations. By the late 1920s most Underground lines and some mainline (especially LNER) services displayed these, many of which had been drawn by George Dow. Some writers have postulated that these in part inspired Beck.
But it was clearly Beck who had the idea of creating a full system map in colour. He believed that passengers riding the trains weren’t too bothered about the geographical accuracy, but were more interested in how to get from one station to another, and where to change. Thus he drew his famous diagram, looking more like an electrical schematic than a true map, on which all the stations were more or less equally spaced.
The diagram does have a few anomalies. For example, checking the diagram to see how to get from Bank to Mansion House, the casual traveller would take the Central Line to Liverpool Street and change onto the Circle Line to Mansion House (about six stops and one change). A more savvy London Underground user would take the escalator connection to Monument and then the Circle or District Line to Mansion House (two stops and an escalator ride). The really clued-up Londoner would walk the 50 metres (164 ft) between the stations, which could not be figured out from the diagram. In fact, the escalator between Bank and Monument is longer than the distance between Bank and Mansion House.
The future is now! In New York City they are testing out location-aware ads on buses that change as the neighbourhood does. They can even advertise coffee in the morning and beer after work.
Titan Worldwide has a 10-year, $800 million contract to sell ads throughout the city’s bus and commuter-train systems. The company says GPS technology allows it to change the ads based on the buses’ locations.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is testing the system on a Manhattan route, with an eye toward 200 buses in the first quarter of next year.
Foreign Policy magazine has posted an excellent and indepth article regarding measuring globalization, focusing on the 60 cities around the globe which shape our lives.
Foreign Policy teamed up with A.T. Kearney and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs to create the Global Cities Index, a uniquely comprehensive ranking of the ways in which cities are integrating with the rest of the world. In constructing this index of the world’s most global cities, we have collected and analyzed a broad array of data, as well as tapped the brainpower of such renowned cities experts as Saskia Sassen, Witold Rybczynski, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Peter Taylor.
Specifically, the Global Cities Index ranks cities’ metro areas according to 24 metrics across five dimensions. The first is business activity: including the value of its capital markets, the number of Fortune Global 500 firms headquartered there, and the volume of the goods that pass through the city. The second dimension measures human capital, or how well the city acts as a magnet for diverse groups of people and talent. This includes the size of a city’s immigrant population, the number of international schools, and the percentage of residents with university degrees. The third dimension is information exchange—how well news and information is dispersed about and to the rest of the world. The number of international news bureaus, the amount of international news in the leading local papers, and the number of broadband subscribers round out that dimension.
The final two areas of analysis are unusual for most rankings of globalized cities or states. The fourth is cultural experience, or the level of diverse attractions for international residents and travelers. That includes everything from how many major sporting events a city hosts to the number of performing arts venues it boasts. The final dimension— political engagement—measures the degree to which a city influences global policymaking and dialogue. How? By examining the number of embassies and consulates, major think tanks, international organizations, sister city relationships, and political conferences a city hosts. We learned long ago that globalization is much more than the simple lowering of market barriers and economic walls. And because the Global Cities Index pulls in these measures of cultural, social, and policy indicators, it offers a more complete picture of a city’s global standing—not simply economic or financial ties.
The 60 cities included in this first Global Cities Index run the gamut of the modern urban experience. There’s thriving, wealthy London, with its firmly entrenched global networks built on the city’s history as capital of an empire. But there are also Chongqing, Dhaka, and Lagos, cities whose recent surges tell us a great deal about the direction globalization is heading and whose experiences offer lessons to other aspiring global cities. The cities we highlight are world leaders in important areas such as finance, policymaking, and culture. A few are megacities in the developing world whose demand for resources means they must nurture close ties with their neighbors and provide services to large numbers of immigrants. Some are gateways to their region. Others host important international institutions. In other words, they represent a broad cross section of the world’s centers of commerce, culture, and communication.
Big shout-out to Toronto for making the top ten! Read more @ Foreign Policy magazine. Thanks to Shane for the link.
I thought these “cheat sheets” to living in New York City were a cute idea. Aritst Christoph Niemann has created a series of visualizations that communicate his tips & tricks to surviving in the big apple.
Shopping at the crowded Fairway supermarket in Red Hook with an impatient toddler in your cart is not easy. (The first section — fruits and vegetables — is especially treacherous as quick, little hands can threaten the large pyramid of Fuji apples.)
The solution: try to make it to the olive-oil-tasting station (opposite the cheese counter) and stock up on sliced baguette. This will keep the young shoppers happy, at least for a while. The only downside: going against the stream in the narrow soup aisle on your way back to the produce.
My favorite breakfast spot in New York is a little coffee shop on Eighth Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets. It has a lemon poppy muffin that is absolutely divine when fresh — and tastes like drywall when not. The easiest way to test for freshness, of course, is to poke the crust, which would be wrong. Fortunately, you can ethically conduct the freshness test by poking the paper muffin cup at one specific point, at about two-thirds of the height of the base. Lower or higher poking doesn’t yield reliable results.
The Big Picture is the Boston Globe’s photo blog, providing stunning photo essays every few days on a variety of subjects. One of the latest group of photos comes from photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth From Above photo exhibit.
By looking at satellite imagery, University of Maryland scientists hope to predict cholera epidemics four to six weeks before they actually happen.
The research could help save lives worldwide, and could be used to develop other models to predict other seasonal or climate-driven infectious diseases.
“Predicting the conditions that trigger cholera outbreaks in coastal regions could be very valuable for public health,” said Rita Colwell, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied cholera for decades. “If we see this coming we could go into these areas with bottled water and medication to save lives.”
Cholera, a disease that gives victims diarrhea so severe they can die 18 hours after their first liquid stool, is caused by a bacterium, Vibrio cholerae. Humans become infected after eating contaminated food or water. Cholera outbreaks usually occur in developing countries, such as India, Bangladesh and in Afica, although Colwell says that she’s found the bacterium in Eastern U.S. coastal waters as well.
Vibrio cholerae is associated with a type of crustacean called a copepod that appears naturally in many areas of the world. The copepods feed on zooplankton, which in turn feed on phytoplankton. Phytoplankton use photosynthesis to harvest energy from the sun to create their food.
Colwell and her colleagues use this food ladder to their advantage. Higher sea temperatures encourages photosynthesis. Higher sea levels brings that phytoplankton, and later cholera, closer to humans.
Satellites can currently measure sea temperature, sea height and chlorophyll concentrations. Colwell hopes that future satellite data will also include information on salinity, oxygen saturation and other variables, which could help increase the accuracy of their models.
Colwell and her colleagues correlated the environmental data with infection statistics in several countries to create a model that can predict the severity of cholera outbreaks four to six weeks before the first individual is infected.
At one point during their analysis the scientists had environmental data from a province in Bangladesh, a country with seasonal cholera outbreaks, but didn’t know how many people had been infected with cholera.
The scientists decided to conduct a mini experiment. Using their model, the scientists predicted that out of every 1,000 people who walked into a particular hospital, 24 of them would be infected with cholera.
To test their result, the scientists e-mailed doctors in Bangladesh and asked for the actual number of infected individuals for the months between April and June, one of two times each year the number of cholera infections spike. Twenty-five out of every 1,000 individuals at the hospital had been infected with cholera.
‘Unique’ disease tracking system developed in the Sault catches government eye
New technology with the potential to be the only system on the market that can track disease outbreaks has been developed in Sault Ste. Marie.
The Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre, with Infonaut Inc., is developing a GIS system that will, in real time, track disease outbreak, hospital equipment, patients and staff, enabling faster and better patient safety decisions.
The work is catching the eye of the Ontario government.
It is providing the Innovation Centre with a $142,900 grant through the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp. for the development of the first 3-D hospital GIS system in Northern Ontario.
Sault MPP David Orazietti, who made the announcement Friday, said “we recognize the importance of supporting the development of this unique system that could help staff manage the spread of infectious diseases in a hospital setting.”
The Telegraph has posted some cool maps where countries are distorted according to a variety of information. For example:
In this map, the size of each territory represents exactly its land area in proportion to that of the others, giving a strikingly different perspective from the Mercator projection most commonly used.
Or this:
This map shows the eight countries, as of 2002, that are known or suspected to have strategic nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Israel, India and Pakistan.
There are 18 maps to look at, and you can see them by clicking here.
