Taken in the Quantocks here.
Archive for the 'miscellaneous' Category
Today (1st December) is world AIDS day.
The AidsInAfrica.net site has an interesting animated map here which shows an interesting time animation of the increase in HIV infections. It is sobering stuff and a nice example of the power of simple maps.
Today (1st December) is world AIDS day.
The AidsInAfrica.net site has an interesting animated map here which shows an interesting time animation of the increase in HIV infections. It is sobering stuff and a nice example of the power of simple maps.
Here in Austria smoking is still alive and well as well as a favourite pastime. Bars still have that wonderful fug of smoke and smoking in offices is still fairly common. So far anti-smoking legislation has been resisted (apart from the odd token gesture).
Seeing this Cincinnati Enquirer (Gannett) web mapping application made me realise how different ’smoking culture’ is between Austria and the USA. In the column on the right hand side you can choose to see ’smoking complaints’ and display incidents, like ‘ashtray present’ and ‘Infiltration of Smoke’, on a map.
If you are a more health conscious society, serious about a smoking ban, making information like this easily accessible must be one way to have impact.
Oh, and BTW, this site just happens to be a very cool implementation of Virtual Earth. More details on this here.
A few people pointed out that in my resent post MapCruncher and the Stubaitalbahn my demo page did not work in IE8 beta 2. It does work in IE8, but you need to use compatibility mode. However I have discovered that many new IE8 users have not discovered compatibility mode yet! As I have not yet had time to fix the page properly, I wanted to force the page to always use compatibility mode in IE8.
Luckily I went to an excellent presentation on IE8 (by Travis Leithead) at ReMix in Brighton recently and I learnt that all you needed to do is to add this tag to the html:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
You can of course see this action on my MapCruncher demo page
Tom Taylor has done a great post of “Eight ways to orientate yourself anywhere” . There are some unusual ones there. I love the satellite dish one, I had never really thought about that.
The Telegraph newspaper has a good story suggesting traditional map reading is a dying skill due to the increasing use of web mapping and sat navs. I was impressed with how well researched it was.
I spend a lot of time walking in the mountains and still feel that paper maps and magnetic compass are still the best ‘interface’ for hiking (and I have shunned GPS so far). OK so call me a Luddite… But, navigation in urban areas is a different story where I want to use more current technologies as the environment changes faster and I want to search rich data. For example an Ordnance Survey Landranger map is not much use for finding deep crust pizza in London, but a mapping client on my mobile is. So perhaps we are entering a new urban/rural divide with new mapping/navigation technologies?
But web mapping can still cover traditional cartography too. What this story (and the similar bbc story) missed, was the fact that you can access ‘traditional’ cartography on Web Mapping. For example on multimap.com you can use Ordnance Survey mapping (see this example) and Bartholomew’s mapping (see). These will show: “…landmarks such as the Science Museum, Royal Albert Hall and the Natural History Museum, which could not be found on Google Maps.”
It also worth looking at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7587415.stm for a good debate on this where Adrian Miles puts up a spirited defence of web mapping (and even touches on the Free Our Data debate!)
Update
A good forum debate on the BBC site has started here
Ed Parsons has leapt to the defence of web mapping against those old school cartographers here.
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