Data Anxiety

Some lakes are black in Google Maps

Why do some lakes appear black in Google Maps?

It isn’t due to extreme cold, nor latitude, I don’t believe. The body of water in the embedded Google Map here is in a very cold area, e.g. -20 F average winter temperatures, in the northern part of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Yet even chillier bodies of water are blue e.g. in the Arctic Ocean, some distance due north.

Possibilites

Incomplete data Remote bodies of water such as Great Bear Lake, are probably not supplemented by additional data beyond satellite images. Counter argument The same might be true for the Arctic Ocean, yet it is not black! Response Google might have decided to just color that in, in shades of blue, as the information isn’t going to be relied upon by Google Maps users to navigate the Arctic Ocean. In contrast, there is a possibility that Google Maps coverage of Great Bear Lake could be used by hikers, which probably isn’t advisable. When seeing it in black, casual hikers might be more likely to check with local Canadian civil authorities for weather conditions and suitability for visiting, precautions advised etc. which is a good idea, and safer for that locale!
Water depth? Maybe, but the Arctic Ocean should be as deep or more so than Great Bear Lake, I think.
Censorship or sensitive information pertaining to Canadian (and U.S.) national security Unlikely, for many reasons. It is a big, cold, remote region.
Something else entirely? Probably… but what?

The North Pole

With thanks to the National Geophysical Data Center’s Marine Geology & Geophysics Division (NGDC) and National Ocean and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA).

Google Maps: Foreign affairs and social skirmishes

This is a follow-up, written by me (full disclosure) to the recent New York Times Borderlines Opinionator post, The First Google Maps War.

On the hazards of crowd-sourced reference tools

This is problematic, whether open data e.g. OpenStreetMap, or not e.g. Google Maps with new commercial rate charge for high API usage.

Either OpenStreetMap or Google Maps is probably just fine for FourSquare users. But the same isn’t true for setting territorial boundaries in Asia, or South America. Nor for disputed street names in a small Vermont town, either.

Earthquakes and nuclear power

Seismic activity and U.S. nuclear power plants, data visualization app is Insight by Rhiza Labs

I don’t know if this reveals anything or not. The first (and only) thought that occurred to me was that it was a good idea that no one decided to build any nuclear power plants along the San Andreas Fault. Other than the two reactors in California, there are hardly any nuclear power plants within 1000 miles of any high seismic activity areas.

I just had a silly thought

What if I interpreted this data visualization to mean that nuclear power plants dramatically reduce or even stop earthquakes? After all, who is to say in what direction the “causally correlated” data should point? Just think of the action item that would suggest to policy makers!

Ignore the fact that seismic activity was already well-known and recorded by the time nuclear power plants were built. Presumably, it was taken into consideration as a risk factor by those who were making decisions about where to build them.

Google Economic Impact Maps

View Google’s Economic Impact Map - 2009 in a larger map

Mapping the geospatial domain

This site is awesome fun!

via roomthily:

Spatial Humanities

from the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship -

“a community-driven resource for place-based digital scholarship”

roomthily:

OpenWhateverMap

This is a lighter-weight, more fun version of OpenMap. Well, it was fun for me.

If you ARE interested in opensource data for geo-spatial applications, this is the kind of thing that one can do with OpenMap.

Openmap samplle

You can also go on their site and label the name of the street where you live and other geodata points if no one else got there first.

Most of Phoenix, Arizona is virgin territory, ready and waiting to be mapped.

Why Not The Best

Patient satisfaction chart via whynotthebest dot org

WhyNotTheBest.org was created and is maintained by The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation working toward a better health system.

It is a free resource for tracking performance on measures of health care quality. It offers the ability to compare hospitals and facilities with peers, on a range of benchmarks, and over time.

The site includes publicly reported measures of hospital quality, the same as those reported on by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Data is updated four times per year, includes nearly all U.S. hospitals, over 4,500.

See Methodology for specific details.