As someone who has one foot in the ArcGIS world and another in the GoogleEarth/GoogleMaps world, I'm continually annoyed at how cumbersome it is to shuffle data back and forth between the two product lines. I'll skip the diatribe for now and instead just point out a cool new tool that I ran across last week when I was getting ready to talk to a Women's Studies class that will … [Read more...]
Stink bug mapping tool
Penn State and the PA Department of Agriculture have just released a new web-based tool for mapping infestations of stink bugs across the state. The mapping tool collects and displays user-submitted data on stink bug sightings. After creating a login ID and passwords, users specify whether they are a farmer, nursery owner or homeowner and then identify their reporting location … [Read more...]
Go Philly! GIS helps improve access to healthy food in the city
Yesterday's NY Times had an opinion piece praising Philadelphia's efforts in recent years to improve access to healthy food for its most disadvantaged neighborhoods and citizens. In 'Go Philly!', Mark Bittman describes the collaborative efforts of Philadelphia municipal government, the Commonwealth of PA and a whole host of local non-profits (including my former employer, the … [Read more...]
Mapping happiness
New social media mapping sites are popping up all over the place these days - whether it's crisis-mapping sites like Sinsai.info or this new 'happiness' map from PhD student Alex Davies. Davies, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge's Computational and Biological Learning Lab, created a statistical model to analyze the sentiment (happy or sad) of Tweets from around … [Read more...]
Visualizing Japan crisis map inputs
Here's a new visualization that shows the locations worldwide that are submitting reports to the Ushahidi Japan Crisis Map. Click on the map to see full size image. … [Read more...]