Harvard launched AfricaMap. The map is based on the Harvard University Geospatial Infrastructure (HUG) platform and was developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis.  AfricaMap, a OpenLayers-based app, aims to expand existing initiatives for globally sharing spatial data and technology. 

Google Maps created a fun quiz where you get to test your geographic puzzle solving skills. To play the quiz, you have to rearrange letters in a map, using visual clues in the form of a Panoramio photograph, to spell a world capital or U.S. state capital.

The USGS National Geospatial Program Office launched a new version of The National Map website. Revisions include The National Geospatial Program and The National Map web site.

Discussions about the auto industry bailout have been percolating the blogosphere. How would this affect auto industry workers? CNN created an interactive map showing the number of auto industry jobs in each state.

The Catholicgauze reflects on past Geography Awareness Weeks and discusses the trends of three geography surveys from the years 1988, 2002 and 2006. Overall, the past surveys show little or no change since the first study in 1988. The findings indicate that Americans are lacking in geographic literacy. Those that did well on the surveys include people who took and completed a geography course, recent immigrants, frequent travelers and those that keep up with world events.

Mark Doherty of Integraph presented a detailed overview of where the technology of GIS has been, where it is now, and where it is going at the Rocket City Geospatial Conference in Huntsville, AL. He shared four trends ‘converging to create a potentially unique opportunity’ in regards to the new era of computing. The four include SOA and standards, cloud computing, orchestration and thin clients/rich internet applications.

MyGeo Position, an application to help geo-code a single address, was deemed as ‘very accurate’ by Keir Clarke over at Google Maps Mania. The site offers a number of useful facilities for geo-coding a position, including finetuning using a drag and drop marker, geoposition as a float or in degrees, and an iGoogle gadget for quick geocoding from a personal landing page. MyGeoPosition is available in English, German, Dutch and Bulgarian.

O’Reilly’s Where2.0 2009 Call for Participation is now open. Submit your proposal here before December 2^nd.

Geodata is not available to all – the Farm Bill (H.R. 6126) prevents the FSA from providing geospatial information to the public. Visit Surveying, Mapping and GIS for more details about what Sec. 1619 Information Gathering entails.

Google Maps is still number one. Cowen & Co., an industry analyst firm specializing in covering Web services, found Google Maps as the “de facto leader” in the online mapping solutions space. The analyst firm stated the competitors’ lack of innovation gave Google its success. They also cited Google’s Streetview and public transportation services as main reasons for success.

Geocoding can provide vital information to marketers. Appending demographic census track data to latitude and longitude coordinates is critical for businesses targeting demographics. Many businesses are using Geocoding as a local search tool, a routing tool, and as a store locator.

Florida tries to coordinates a statewide effort for GIS. This is the fourth time the state tried to develop a coordinating body. With the active Atlantic hurricane seasons, and the death of 208 residents, the state realized that coordination of geospatial information during the hurricanes would have saved lives. The Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) is taking the lead in formulating a statewide GIS strategic plan.

Google adds a voting mapplet, offering registered voters polling location information by just entering your address. The developing site will feature voting information in mid-October. Visit your state or location election sites for registration information. Still want more political maps? Check out Electoral College map predictions and John McCain’s geo-biography in Google Earth.

Google Maps isn’t always perfect though. This week, reports on map spamming surfaced, also recent changes to Google Maps (switching from TeleAtlas to NavTeq) is rendering both Google Earth and Google maps incorrectly, according to Chad at Earth is Square.

Nokia 1.5 introduced their new mapping application, Nokia ViNe. The application gives users the ability to add location information to their geo-tagged photos. Nokia Photos uses map data from Navteq through the Maps on Ovi service.

GIS made the front page of the Coloradoan-Fort Collins. The Poudre School District received a small grant to help educate future high school graduates interested in geo technologies. The district will provide two courses for 50+ students to take in either clean energy for companies or GIS technologies.

Blue Marble Geographics plans to answer the need for highly accurate mapping through their products. After combining their Geographic Calculator and Geographic Transformer into one desktop product, users now have control over the use of geodetic datums to ensure accuracy and coordinate control when transforming geospatial data. The company is expanding their products so surveyors, GIS and engineering firms will be able produce highly accurate maps.

GeoEye-1, the world’s highest resolution commercial satellite , launched this past weekend. The satellite will orbit the Earth’s surface taking pictures exclusively for online mapping. The U.S. Government and Google Maps are some of those planning to use the high-resolution satellite camera.

A new interactive map was developed to show the National Hurricane Center’s latest storm advisories. The StormTracker Map shows current center location and forecasted positions. The map has an easy user-friendly layout and all users need to do is click on their desired location to reveal its information.

ArcGIS 9.3 is receiving applause for its error report system. If a crash occurs, users can send an error report to ESRI. The Geodatabase Development Team even posted a video that talks about how ESRI investigates and acts on all error reports.

ERDAS is offering geospatial tools to assist with response during the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season. The company helps organizations harness the information of the changing earth for greater advantage. The ERDAS TITAN GeoHubs will allow organizations to ‘rapidly share imagery and vector data to develop a real-time common operating picture by allowing emergency management planners and responders to dynamically publish and consume geospatial data in a permission-based, collaborative online network.’ ERDAS has even partnered with MCH GeoPoints for more capabilities with medical facilities during these emergencies.

The BBC shared their Olympics map that shows where the 2008 Games’s venues are located in Beijing, Qingdao and Hong Kong. The map was created using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API and MapCruncher. There are over 37 Chinese Olympic venues.

With the rise of GIS’s popularity, it’s no wonder that Radiohead decided to use the concept of the system as basis of their new video House of Cards. Released this past Monday, the band shared ‘data that they used to created the video so people could make their own clips to upload to Radiohead’s YouTube group.’ Google Earth and ArcScene are two of the platforms used to create the video.

After the long awaited iPhone 2.0 was released, reviews about the phone’s GPS feature came pouring in. Since the first version of the iPhone lacked this feature and the trends for location based services grew, Apple added Google Maps to the mix. Good idea or not?

Based on a complicated formula a farmer who lost 35% or more of his crop to natural disasters may expect approximately about 25% of the market value of the lost crops. While searching for the detailed farm aid data, the FortiusOne data-team came across this interesting data-set on the FSA website. Its a set of excel spreadsheets, that shows natural disasters by counties between 2005 and 2007, which would help farmers figure out whether they are eligibile for the crop damage assistance. The list of disasters includes drought, wild fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, hail storm, winter storm, excess heat, excess moisture, lightning, insect infestation and (crop & plant) disease.

The only thing not mentioned, but is sure to be covered, is damage due to earthquake and volcanoes. Shown below are the 3d-maps of the results of geocoded natural disaster events by counties in the lower 48 state counties for 2007, 2006 and 2005. Colors indicates total number of natural disasters while the height indicates the count of types of disasters. Thus brighter shades of red mean more number of disasters.

Total and type count of natural disaster events by counties in 2007

Total and type count of natural disaster events by counties in 2006

Total and type count of natural disaster events by counties in 2005

You may download data/shapefiles for these maps from Finder! by clicking on the links below.

After spatially combining the three year data, the FortiusOne data-team found just 10 counties out of 3,111 in the lower 48 states were lucky not to have any natural disasters listed for them. Well, this should be no surprise since many of these jurisdictions are urban areas and rural ones do not have much farming activity. The 10 jurisdictions are Miami-Dade, FL; Shoshone ID; Nantucket, MA; St. Genevieve, MO; Deer Lodge and Silver Bow, MT; Venango, PA; Manassas City and Manassas Park, Poquoson, VA.

Of these 10 jurisdictions, the last three in Virginia have no farms according to 1997 Farm data, Nantucket, MA has 14 farms with density of upto 1 farm/sq mile; Shoshone, MT has less than 1 farm per square mile for a total of 44 farms; Deer Lodge and Silver Bow of MT have 83 and 116 farms with a farm density of up to 1 farm per sq mile, ditto for Venango, PA with total of 351 farms and Miami-Dade with 1,576 farms; much of Miami-Dade is an urban county while Ste. Genevieve of MO has 631 farms with a density of between 1 to 2 farms.

There are 15 jurisdictions that have the dubious distinction of being declared disaster areas with 7 or more natural calamities visiting upon them for 2005, 2006 and 2007. Of these, 7 were in North Dakota (Adams, Bowman, Dickey, Emmons, McCintosh, Sioux); 4 in South Dakota (Brown, Harding, Marshal and Roberts); 2 in Kansas (Cherokee and Greeley), one each in Colorado (Prowers) and Montana (Fallon). Spatilly North and South Dakota jurisdictions lie along the border between the two states, while Greeley (KS) and Prowers (CO) are next to each other. South and North Dakota counties are nearly evenly distributed around 46 N parallel and 100 W meridian. Majority of these had both droughts and excessive moisture.

The map below shows the spatial distribution of the so called “lucky” and “unlucky” jurisdictions.

And why is that? Let’s look at the landscape of state level wins/losses. The 3-d map below shows the share of Obama vote in the lower 48 states. The height of raised polygons in the shape of the states with shades of blue/purple and green represent Obama’s share of votes, while the dark red/brown and beige/wheat hues represent Clinton states.

Considering the map above, Obama campaign would do well to realize the challenges that they now face in the race for the White House, both in the states that Obama lost to Clinton (CA, NY, PA, OH, FL, AR, TN, IN etc.), and the states that he won handily (SC, LA, MS, AL, GA, SC, NC, MT, NC, NE, ND, ID, OR, WA, VA, MD, MO, UT etc.). Obama campaign will have to compete with McCain in all those states that are shown in shades of green. It also does not bode well for him that the states that he won in the primary (blue and purple) traditionally vote for a Republican president.

The difficulties he will encounter become visible when one analyzes the landscape of voting patterns in the primaries at the sub-state level such as counties and congressional districts. The map below was constructed from dozens of data-sets available on the Finder!, while the data for the map was compiled from more than 45 on- and off-line sources.

Much of the county level data came from election divisions of each state’s office of SOS (Secretary of State), while the congressional district level data was scraped from from the mother of all election information sites, TheGreenPapers.Com and a few state Democratic parties and news papers. The map shows share of Obama votes by county and by congressional districts, a hybrid born out of the necessity of geocoding the default data available for different jurisdictions in the lower 48 states.

The sub-state level primaries voting patterns with bluish hues are where Obama did well. The areas with the orange and red hues where Clinton did well are the so called “Guns and Religion strongholds“. With Obama’s 50 state strategy, these are the same places where Obama campaign will have to spend enough time and money for the general election campaign. As is apparent from the map, the the rival campaigns will compete with Obama in blue hued areas, at the same time some of the independent 527s could swift-boat Obama by playing up Obama’s pastor problems in the red/orange hued Clinton country. In brief, what Obama campaign has experienced so far is just a primer to the challenges they will have to face during the General Election campaign.

All of the data for these maps, including county and congressional level data is available on Finder!, except for North Dakota and Wyoming, the really red states that appear blue in these maps, mainly because Obama’s win in the democratic primaries and whose respective SOS (Secretary of State) offices have not posted the primary results data yet. For the rest, you may search/download/map the state/county and congressional district level data on Finder! using tags such as ‘elections’, ‘primary’, ‘presidential primary’, ‘democrats’ and ‘politics’.