Map Hawk

The Wall Street Journal published a map this weekend of the growth in the Hipanic population of the United States by state. The map was part of a related article on how the 2010 Census will demonstrate how large the population of hispanics has risen. The Flash map allows the user to review the statics by state for each year from 2001 and shows a related graph by percent growth by year. [There may be a bug in the map as swapping years caused a new browser window to open which showed nothing; going back to the original window then showed the selected year.] The decennial census is bound to be a boom for new maps depicting many geodemographic trends with basic population shifts being on the first allow law makers to begin haggling over how much money their district should receive. But there is a concerted effort by the Census Bureau to count every citizen and they are well on their way to doing just that.

On this anniversary of Apollo 11, perhaps it's my expectations that the images of the lunar landing sites would have imagery good enough to see the actual lunar module but I did not find that the maps provided by Google and published online by CNN very exciting; informative, yes, but fairly mundane. The images had rather course resolution and when you zoomed into the landing sites, the image for Apollo 11, for example, changed to a map that was embedded over the actual site. I was looking to be moonstruck by the imagery my expectations might be clouded by the finer resolution we find from earth orbiting satellites. And the fact that the budgets for lunar exploration were drastically cut after the Apollo program have really not provided the means to do further lunar imaging. Some NASA budget have now only been modestly restored when President Bush said we were headed back to the moon. Check out some of the other Apollo landing sites (like 16 & 14) which have better resolution ...

If you Google for a map of The Tour de France you'll find the same map issued by the tour itself...a basic route for the race. The mainstream media has essentially replicated that map without much enhancement. USAToday took the route and posted it to Google Maps but the interactivity is minimal. However, the Tour's own website is very cool. Each stage has the day's segment in a small map but the most nifty part is the " real-time " update of the riders portrayed against a topographic profile map. Lead riders and the peleton are shown in a "cartoon-like" portrait of the race along a road segment and the map is updated every minute or so. The map is updated with the leader's speed, the position along the post (in Km) and the remaining distance. Riders can be individually idenitified by their avatar in the cartoon. Nicely done.

Clem Henricksen at ESRI helped point me toward some maps published in some of the recent editions of Crain's New York . The publication is using ESRI technology to create basic demographic information for the city. What's impressive is that they've devoted several pages to demographics and maps. Pictorially aethetic in a tabloid format, Crain's has done a nice job of displaying geospatial information. The information can also be found online .