Map Hawk

Looking for camaraderie and perhaps quaffing a few brews during the FIFA World Cup matches? You better know which way the local patrons are leaning before sending out a "whoop" and "holler" during a game. Well now the New York Times can help you find just the right establishment with an interactive map that shows you the local allegiances. Jack Dempsey's on West 33rd is obviously a U.S. hang out but Barolo's on West Broadway is going for the Italians. The Time's map shows that  Plein Sud, also on West Broadway, has both French and U.S. leanings. Would you like American or French fries with that burger?

The New York Times has created an interactive map showing the gains or losses in subway ridership over the past year. The maps shows a graduated symbol on each subway stop and provides a tool tip indicating the stop, the increase or decrease in ridership and the number of average daily riders. Most striking, as pointed out in the article, is how you can map the areas hit hardest by the economic recession. It should serve as an invaluable tool for the NYC transportation authority as well as urban planners. But, unfortunately, it displays the tragic effects of a job losses and the potential impact upon the individual local economy around each subway stop.

The New York Times published both a 2D map and 3D topographic perspective map of the coal mine disaster in Montcoal, West Virginia where 25 miners were killed. Maps should provide some context and while the Times does a good job of showing the basic location of the disaster, they ignored a few cartographic principals. First, the 2D map has an inset map to give the reader the general location of the disaster. Unfortunately, the boundary shown in the inset map does not match the boundary of the mine area on the 2D map itself so it's hard to correlate the two maps. Second, the 3D map shows the topography and a satellite image overlay depicting the surface of the mine as well as a map of the subsurface mine layout. However, the mine layout boundary should be projected onto the 3D topographic map so that the reader understands the surface extents. Over on USA Today , their map is solely to locate the mine with a "pin." They do not offer supporting maps of the subsurface a...

The map of aftershocks from the Chilean earthquake last week reveals the incredible number of strong quakes that continue to jolt the region. Unfortunately, maps produced by the USGS and picked up by USA Today are inappropriately thematicized. The map shows the location of aftershocks marked by large circular symbols that are color-coded according to their most recent occurrence. Those that have been felt within the last hour are red; within the last day are orange; and those within the last week are yellow. It is a totally confusing way to map mainly because the idea should be to recognize both the location and severity. As they are portrayed, the symbols are all the same size and completely obscure most of the information. Here's my suggestion: Keep the color-coding but use a graduated symbol to represent the aftershock's magnitude. this would help cut down on what is now a very cluttered map. And it would have been a nice addition if it showed the major fault lines as wel...

Where to start? The New York Times badly bungled the map showing the region devastated by the massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile late last week. The Times shows two maps , side-by-side, as an illustration of the region that felt the most impact of the temblor. The map on the left has region names declared disaster areas and their political boundary. The right hand map shows the region of severe shaking. The map on the right is NOT an inset map but that's the assumption I made. As I look at the map, the shake boundaries are delineated giving the reader the impression that this is an enlarged view of the left hand map. Looking closely, you can see that the shake area does not extend to the country's eastern border with Argentina. However, you would misinterpret the east boundary of the shake area as the border because of the delineation. In fact, a "shake" area should be graphically portrayed as a "heat map" with graduations of severity by col...

The Wall Street Journal has developed an interactive map that shows the locations of military clashes, shootings, and other related violence on a daily basis. Tool tips provide the details of each incident and the viewer can navigate by a calendar. The recent offensive on the city of Marjah begins on February 13th and the reports from that area become more detailed.

Budget cuts in Illinois funding for early childhood education played out geographically in an article published by Catalyst Chicago , an independent publication reporting on school reform. The article mapped the schools that had a waiting list for children wanting to enter the "Preschool for All" program. Budget deficits in Illinois meant that programs like Preschool for All could not be adequately funded. In the same article, a map was used to show schools that were denied funding statewide and displayed information such as the number of students affected and the amount of money requested for the program. It's maps such as these that help both citizens and politicians understand the impact, severity, and repercussions of government policy actions.

Yesterday, in All Points Blog , I surveyed some of the websites offering maps of the Olympic games in Vancouver and the the New York Times came out on top in my opinion in terms of total coverage. But more than the coverage, the Times has embraced 3D visualization technology that is not just fun to play with, but reflects both the hottest topic among geospatial professionals and the needs of the "prosumer." I say "prosumer" because navigating the 3D views of the alpine skiing venues are akin to working with 3D computer aided drafting models and takes a bit of proficiency with the mouse. Nonetheless, the use of digital terrain models and the integration with satellite imagery brings the viewer right into the venue almost as if they were there. My only criticism is that I wanted to get closer to the action. I had hoped to fully zoom into the ski trails themselves so that I could simulate a ski run myself. The use of Intermap's data was a good choice but again I...

Page 60 of the December 14th issue of Time Magazine has a wonderfully useless map of Northern India that focuses on the small city of Leh. I visited Leh in 1979 and it is indeed on the top of the world. The focus of the Time article was climate change and the vanishing glaciers that feed the Indus and Ganges rivers and thus the population of millions of people. Where the map fails is in the type of map it should have displayed.  Time should have contacted the USGS where satellite images of the last 30 years showing comparisons of the region and would have allowed readers to SEE the changes. Just a map isn't cutting it anymore. The public is quite familiar with satellite imagery. Just ask any elementary school-aged student and they would be happy to show their parents how to use Google Earth. The USGS's EarthExplorer will allow the public to download imagery, many for free, such as the November 15, 1972 image of Leh and the Ladakhi Himalaya a...

The U.S. unemployment job statistics, on a state by state basis, are nicely explained in a map published today by the Wall Street Journal . What's particularly noticable, if you watch the animated sequence that shows how unemployment rates have increased across the country, is the story of how the states where manufacturing is most heavily concentrated has taken a beating while the agriculturally-based midwest has remained somewhat stable. The service economies of the east coast have been hit hard but not as bad as the tourism economies of Florida, Nevada, and California. Texas, stabilized by oil, has remained below the national average. The graphs also tell an interesting story as you see how some states have only just recently crept up to the national average.

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 .

The May 11th issue of Time Magazine is dedicated to the 100 most influential people in the world. You may have missed the map of "where they are from" as it is hidden in the double page fold-out section just after page 42. You won't find the map online unfortunately but it is quite a compilation of information because it maps all 553 of its Time 100 from this year as well as past years. I wouldn't say there are any patterns other than the geographic distribution is not a surprise. The state of New York has the most of any followed by California. The UK has more than any other European country; China has the most in Asia/Pacific. So, forget looking for a pattern...just enjoy browsing the fold out map and finding out more about those who touch our world in unique ways.

MSNBC has created an " Adversity Index " map of 381 metro areas in the U. S. In conjunction with Moody's.com , the maps displays a thematic map of whether a state is either in "recession," "at risk," "recovery," or "expansion." By clicking on each state a table will be displayed showing the largest metros and the economic indicators for each such as "employment," "single family housing starts," "housing prices," and "industrial production." Hover the mouse over each state and it will show you the aggregate indicators for each. The map also has a slider bar that will allow you to move along a time line from 1995 to present to thematically display the conditions at any particular time. This is an extremely good representation of the data that is highly useful to any company looking at moving into or expanding existing operations in any given region.

There has been an unprecedented decline in the publishing business as a result of declining advertising sales due to the sluggish US economy. So hard hit has the publishing industry been that such stalwarts of the business like the Rocky Mountain News have closed shop while others cancelled their print editions entirely, slashed staff or moved to an online-only version. This map by the Wall Street Journal chronicles the bad news. This only tells part of the story as the remainder of the publishing business has not been without equal or worse devastation. Entire magazines have been discontinued and publishing companies like Taunton Press have gone so far as to eliminate the job of "publisher" and has reorganized staff into "content," "sales," or "marketing" with everyone reporting to a vice president.

Recently, I posted a link to maps by the Wall Street Journal about how they mapped the unemployment rate by state and they provided some useful metric from past years. However, the New York Times has taken it a step further by mapping the unemployment numbers by county . What the NYT has done exceptionally well is to "tab" through by metro, rural or manufacturing areas plus highlighting those counties where the "housing bubble" burst! A tool tip provides the county name, unemployment rate and one-year change. In looking for some spatial correlation among the data, the most surprising comes by looking at the one-year change map. I would not have expected to see such a high change in the south. The shift in manufacturing jobs southward and the accompanying increase in population density has certainly contributed to the higher unemployment picture of the "new south."

Some of the more recent pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia have been mapped by the Wall Street Journal . The interactive map provides a location and mouse-over tool tip about the details of the pirate's latest escapade.

Last night while viewing a segment on CNN, they displayed the location of an event. In this case is was the lockdown at Radford University in Viriginia due to an off-campus fatal shooting whereby the suspect fled onto the campus grounds. During the report, in order to orient the viewer with a geographic perspective, CNN used Google Earth, as they do on so many occasions. First, of course I appreciate the supporting element of geography to report the story. What is unnecessary is to use a satellite image to identify the location of the incident. Showing the terrain and vegetation is overkill and confusing. A simple map is all that is called for. With today's tools, the map can even be more cartographically pleasing than ever before. However, the use of a satellite image is of no more use to the viewer than it would be if you show an icon of a gun to depict that the event involved a shooting. It's overkill. Moreover, I suspect that CNN seems to think that by showing a satellite i...

USA Today published a map (Google Map-based) highlighting the cities that have seen a growth in construction projects located in or near city centers indicating a shift away from traditional suburban development. Was it the high gas prices of last summer, the economic downturn or something else?