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Thursday, February 23
What in the world are they thinking?
by
JTJ
on Thu 23 Feb 2006 11:30 AM MST
Marylaine Block at Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies. http://marylaine.com/exlibris/ points us to a new and potentially valuable site for "context creation" this week. Though World Public Opinion is rather U.S. centric at the moment, it has promise for including more non-American survey companies and results. Check out:
"World Public Opinion
http://worldpublicopinion.org/
This
brand new site from the Program on International Policy Attitudes
(PIPA) aims to provide "in-depth information and analysis on public
opinion from around the world on international issues." Explore by
world region or by topic. Also includes links to polling organizations
around the world."
Tuesday, February 21
U.S. federal FOIA officers
by
JTJ
on Tue 21 Feb 2006 10:07 AM MST
Scott Hodes, in a recent column on the LLRX site, points us to a potentially helpful Dept. of Justice page listing the chief FOIA officers for federal agencies. That said, he also has some appropriate criticism of some of those appointments.
"FOIA Facts
Chief FOIA Officers
Named
By Scott A. Hodes
Published February 15, 2006
Agencies have now named their Chief FOIA Officers
pursuant to
Executive Order (EO) 13392. This act is
the first milestone of the EO which was issued to increase agency FOIA
performance on December 14, 2005.
The Chief FOIA Officer is supposed to be "a ... more »
Monday, February 20
Mapping the good and the bad, airwise
by
JTJ
on Mon 20 Feb 2006 09:59 PM MST
Friday, February 17
Showing the world in context
by
JTJ
on Fri 17 Feb 2006 05:26 PM MST
And from the creative mind of M. E. J. Newman comes this interesting collection of cartograms. Newman's work, "Images of the social and economic world," shows the national, proportional distrubution of AIDS, energy consumption, total national spending on health care, etc. Also, be sure to scroll to the bottom of Newman's page and then click on the World Mapper site link. Interesting stuff to contemplate.
Thursday, February 16
Mapping "fuzzy" neighborhoods
by
JTJ
on Thu 16 Feb 2006 12:40 PM MST
The good folks at Directions Magazine turned up this interesting mapping report. Be sure to drill down into the explanations for the "fuzzy line" and the "blobby" algorithm concepts.
"The algorithm for drawing neighborhoods is the "blobby"
algorithm, well known in computer graphics. You can think
of each point in a neighborhood as a little magnet, and the
neighborhood is the region where the combined attraction of
all those magnets is above a certain strength. A single
point makes a small circle on the map. The influence of a
number of nearby points will combine to make a curved blob.
Read more about blobbies:
This is one of the first references I've come across using the concepts of the mathematical idea of "fuzzy logic" applied to geography. Perhaps some readers can point us to similar examples.
"The Neighborhood Project
compiled by Nora Parker, Senior Managing Editor
Matt
Chisholm and Ross Cohen are working on a project to define neighborhood
boundaries, so far only in San Francisco, but eventually in other
cities as well. (If you get impatient and want to launch
this project in your city, they suggest you can download the software
and get busy.) Neighborhood boundaries? What does that mean? Generally
neighborhoods are not defined by exact boundaries - they are defined by
what geographers call "fuzzy lines" - lines that are not well-defined.
(An example of "fuzzy line" might be the line between two bioregions.
These are generalized, mappable regions, that might involve factors
such as precipitation, soils, topography, etc., but there is no defined
line
on the ground when you cross from one region to the other - the change
between regions is more gradual. This contrasts with the line between
two countries, for example, where you might literally be able to stand
at a border crossing with one foot in each country, or even closer to
home, the line between my neighbor's property and mine.) The Neighborhood Project
is an excellent illustration of the concept of fuzzy lines - if you go
to the site and look
at the map, you'll note quite a bit of fuzziness to the neighborhood
definitions. You can even begin to perceive it in the very small scale
map included below. People living next door to each other might
consider themselves to be in two different neighborhoods. The site uses housing post data from craigslist, which includes addresses and neighborhoods, as well as a public poll on the site, to
generate address/neighborhood pairs. Open source products (geocoder.us, Python and PostgreSQL) are used to geocode and map the data.
| The
Neighborhood Project's map of San Francisco. The dots are colored based
on what neighborhood residents considered their "home." Used by
permission. (Click for larger view.) |
Friday, February 10
More on e-paper
by
JTJ
on Fri 10 Feb 2006 11:45 PM MST
By EditorsWeblog De
Tijd, the Antwerp based daily with Belgium's highest online readership,
will be the world's first paper to launch a digital version, for a
three month trial period beginning in April 2006. The paper will take
the form of a portable electronic device; a paper thin screen the size
of a newspaper page. Users will connect to the internet with the device
and download their newspaper. Updates will be provided throughout the
day. 200 subscribers to the newspaper will be able to take part in this
initiative. The paper can be read indoors or outside. Based on an
estimated use time of three hours per day, the device's battery would
last for a week. The device has a storage capacity of 244 megabytes;
the equivalent of a month's worth of newspapers, thirty books and
office documents in different formats. E Ink, creators of the
electronic ink technology integral to the initiative, are working on
developing coloured ink; currently 16 different shades of grey are
available. Added video and sound features could take up to 10 years to
develop.Readers will be able to write comments and scribble on the
paper by using a special marker. Interactive advertising will also be
featured. Source: M&C Tech (through the IFRA newsletter)
Thursday, February 9
The Coroner's Blog
by
JTJ
on Thu 09 Feb 2006 10:56 AM MST
Ubiquitous Suicide
I
am convinced that there are more than one kind of knowing/knowledge,
e.g. intellectual knowing, emotional knowing, visceral knowing.
Intellectually I knew that many people have been touched and will be
touched by suicide. I even put in a recent letter: “For every Suicide,
an estimated 8 to 10 lives are severely impacted”. I know that my life
has been impacted by suicide of a close relative, but until I started
getting notes back from people I have invited to take part in a Suicide
Prevention Work Group (another one today) I don’t think I really knew.
Many, many individuals have been touched. People I have had contact
with without ever knowing. It has been eye opening.
Also I knew
that deaths from suicide occurred in all areas of our county, in every
socioeconomic group, but when I started mapping them out I could see
and really know.
There are 40 to 60 deaths by suicide throughout the
county every year. While in the grand scheme of things maybe not huge
numbers, but when you think about it and know it, it is staggering. All
socioeconomic groups, all areas, all ages, more deaths than by homicide
and acts of violence, but those prompt out-cry and calls to action.
Should suicide be any different?"
Finally, a newspaper's future could be assured
by
JTJ
on Thu 09 Feb 2006 12:44 AM MST
From WIRED:
"Monetize Your Roof
By Joanna Glasner
Click on the aerial view of a cityscape on Google Earth or Microsoft's Live Local, and most of us don't discern much more than a cluttered expanse of buildings and car-lined streets.
But where others see a sprawl of empty rooftops, Colin Fitz-Gerald sees a cornucopia of unused advertising space. more »
Wednesday, February 8
Mapping the Media
by
JTJ
on Wed 08 Feb 2006 09:25 PM MST
The Canadian Cartographic Association tells us....
"Mapping the Media in the Americas
It's not that information wants to be free but it does want to be found
by
JTJ
on Wed 08 Feb 2006 08:49 PM MST
Danny Sullivan, a long-time search engine maven, has this to say. (Newspapers? Clueless? Gasp! How can it be?)
"World Association Of Newspapers Dislikes Search Engine Exploitation, Clueless About Robots.txt Banning
Newspapers want search
engines to pay over at News.com covers the
World Association Of Newspapers planning
to challenge the "exploitation of content" by search engines. Apparently search
engines are taking newspaper content for free and repacking it up within things
like Google News and Yahoo News. A task force to study the isssue is being
formed, DMNews reports in
Newspaper Group Questions Aggregation of News Content. Reuters also has
coverage
here.
Hey WAN. Don't like being in search engines? Tell your members to put up a
robots.txt file to block
the search engines, and they'll be happy to drop them. When they do, then blogs
and other news sources can have the traffic the search engines were previously
sending to your members.
FYI, I'm trying to finishing a rundown on what the New York Times has been
doing recently to gain search engine traffic. Watch for that soon. In the
meantime, see this past
post about
what Marshall Simmonds did for About.com and is now doing for the NYT.
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) reflect emission levels per square kilometre which can be
deceiving as emission levels probably correlate to population density
to an extent."