On July 26th, Nick Urban and the summer 2011 GIS team conducted a test flight of the Flying Bison. See video to learn more about the Miller Run Restoration Project and to see footage captured by the drone during its flight.
Thanks to Lindsay Coffee and Erin Murphy for their work on shooting & editing the video footage.
Here’s a link to an interesting NYT story, “Phone-call cartography,” on mapping connectedness via data points from mobile phone calls. The accompanying map was produced by M.I.T.’s SENSEable City Lab using the origin and end point locations for cellphone traffic within the U.S. in July of last year.
Phone-call cartography video:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFKZnbIAboI
Phone-call cartography map:
The “Phone-call cartography” map project is just the latest in a long series of projects the SENSEable City Lab has done using cellphone data to explore the idea of connectedness. In 2008, the group produced a map installation called “New York Time Exchange” for the NYC MoMA’s ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’ exhibition. The installation featured wall-sized maps displaying nearly real-time data on cellphone calls with origins and/or destinations in the New York City area. See this Newsweek article or this NYT article for more information about the “New York Time Exchange” exhibit and how SENSEable’s research is informing our understanding of globalization, the digital divide and other measures of connectedness.
Click here to read an article about SENSEable’s use of real-time cell phone data to analyze the economic impact of New York City’s 2008 ‘Waterfalls’ exhibit in New York Harbor.
Thanks to the Mellon grant and a huge number of faculty teaching and research projects it’s been a very busy summer of GIS work at Bucknell. Over the coming weeks I’ll write detailed posts about the work we’re doing on each of the projects. If I’m really ambitious I might try to post some interviews with faculty and students – and some footage of the aerial drone flights that Nick Urban ’12 is doing. But for now here’s a short overview of who’s doing GIS work at Bucknell this summer and what we’re doing:
GIS Student Assistants:
Key Projects:
Joseph Kerski, part of Esri’s education team had some interesting blog posts last week comparing the accuracy of GPS units to his smartphone and implications that might have for using the SmartPhone for academic purposes
Recently I wrote about techniques to use photographs taken on a SmartPhone as hyperlinks to locations where you have collected field data using ArcGIS Online as your mapping platform. These photographs are geotagged with a latitude-longitude coordinate recorded at the time and location that the photograph is taken. But how accurate are those coordinates, and how do they compare to the accuracy of locations recorded by a GPS receiver? In other words, do I really need my GPS receiver any longer, since modern SmartPhones can capture positions using an embedded GPS chip and even supplement the GPS position by triangulating off cell phone towers?
Click here for part 1 of the blog post.
Click here for part 2 of the blog post.
O’Reilly Media published a story yesterday (on the penultimate day of its Where2.0 conference no less…) describing Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden’s discovery of a hidden file on your iPhone and 3G iPad that keeps a running record of your device’s whereabouts. The file, part of the iOS4 release, records both latitude/longitude and timestamps – making it possible to create a detailed map of any and all movements you’ve made while having the iPhone or 3G iPad on your person.
There is a debate underway about both the significance of this finding as well as how new a ”discovery’ it is (see links below). But I’m kinda on the same page as Alexis Madrigal from the Atlantic – as much as I’m a little disturbed by the idea of a secret log of my whereabouts, I’m also fascinated by the idea of playing around with the data my iPhone has recorded and I’m curious to see what kinds of visualizations could be created out of it. If you’re curious about this too, you can visit Pete Warden’s website to download a free, open source app that will map the data from your iPhone or iPad tracking file. See below for some sample ‘heat maps’ that were created using the tracking data from various user’s iPhones. Click here to see a video from Pete Warden’s website showing animation of tracking data from Warden’s iphone mapped by location and timestamp.
Story from O’Reilly Media:
Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves
Story from Alex Levinson’s Blog:
Three Major Issues with the Latest iPhone ‘Discovery’
Story from The Atlantic:
My Life According To The iPhone’s Secret Tracking Log
Story from Gizmodo:
iSpy Conspiracy: Your iPhone is Secretly Tracking Everywhere You’ve Been, All the Time
Story from zdnet.com
Your iPhone is Tracking You (And Has Been for Awhile)
Two O’Reilly media researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, caused quite a stir yesterday when they published an article about a hidden file in iOS 4 that regularly records the position of your device. All iPhones running iOS 4.0 or later log your location to a file called “consolidated.db” (a plain SQL file) which contains latitude-longitude coordinates and a timestamp.
Story from The Guardian:
iPhone Tracking Prompts Privacy Fears
Security researchers have discovered that Apple‘s iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner’s computer when the two are synchronised. The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone’s recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner’s movements using a simple program.For some phones, there could be almost a year’s worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple’s iOS 4 update to the phone’s operating system, released in June 2010.
YouTube Video of Pete Warden and Alastair Allan discussing the iPhone tracker at Where2.0:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GynEFV4hsA0&p=0B2FEB8AACD826BE
Sample ‘heat map’ of Alexis Madrigal’s movements (created from data in the iPhone tracker file):
Sample ‘heat map’ from Sam Biddle’s iPhone:
