Nathan, over at Flowingdata.com, posts this interesting data visualization from the Baylor College of Medicine. No, it probably doesn't give a science writer a story in itself, but the concept of taking a complex data set and illustrating that data with the right tool — in this case, Circos — good generate some interesting reporting vectors. For example, could Circos show us something about traffic patterns? Ambulance or fire department response times? We're not sure, but we hope someone could probe this a bit.

Researchers Map Chaos Inside Cancer Cell

http://flowingdata.com/2008/12/29/researchers-map-chaos-inside-cancer-cell

From O'Reilly's Radar:

GeoData Explorations: Google's Ever-Expanding Geo Investment

Posted: 16 Dec 2008 02:40 PM CST

Google has been investing lots of money in geodata acquisition. Some of the money is being spent externally: they've inked an exclusive satellite imagery deal with GeoEye (Radar post) and a data sharing deal Tele Atlas (Radar post). And some is being spent internally with Mapmaker, Street View and the web. Over the past week Google has been sharing visualizations of their internally gathered geodata. Here's a round-up of them.

The image above was released on December 9th. It shows how much of the US is available via Street View. According to the post Street View imagery increased 22 fold around the world in 2008.

The dark image above was released on December 11th. It highlights the parts of the world that are being mapped on Google's Mapmaker by users (Radar post). Mapmaker is now live in 164 countries. According to the map it has gained the most traction in Africa and the Indian sub-continent. The Google Mapmaker team has released timelapse videos of Mapmaker building cities on the Mapmaker YouTube Channel. I've embedded one after the jump.

This final image shows all the points described by GeoRSS and KML all over the world. It was shown at Where 2.0 2007 by Michael Jones (video). Unsurprisingly, this image and the Mapmaker image show opposite data density concentrations.

In some more GeoData Explorations posts this week I will look at OSM vs Google and some surprising trends in KML.

This timelapse video of Da Lat, Vietnam being created is one of the most impressive. It shows a town and lake emerge from a blank slate.

 Colleague Owen Densmore points us to this page with these comments:

This use of gps may play a role in understanding economic development in any city by watching the flows within the city:

http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2008/12/gps-city-tracks-1-year-in-24-hours-via.html

This gets me to an aspect of ED I'm interested: MicroED.  It comes from the observation that all cities' ED is unique.  Think about every city you've lived in and you'll notice that each was unique.  For me, Rochester NY: Kodak/Xerox company towns; Silicon Valley: A network of startups and established companies with a highly mobile social/skill network.  Here in Santa Fe, we are similarly unique.

I think this is core: discover your unique environment and capitalize on improving it through managing it.  Data farming your city.  Graph its flows.

   — Owen

2008-12-17

GPS City Tracks: 1 Year in 24 Hours via Google Earth

GPS tracks can show the 'life' of a city, which parts of the city are working, areas that are no go zones and sections dedicated to shopping, work, entertainment etc. The possibilities for using GPS data to examine our cities 'health' are intriguing which turns us to the work by Fabian over at http://urbantick.blogspot.com/

See http://urbantick.blogspot.com/ for more movies and examples on visualising GPS tracks in the city.

Another good pointer from Nathan at Flowing Data:

Explore and Analyze Geographic Data with UUorld

UUorld (pronounced “world”) is a 4-dimensional mapping tool that lets you explore geographic data – the fourth dimension being time. The interface will remind you a bit of Google Earth with the map, pan, zoom, etc, however, UUorld isn't trying to replace Google Earth. In fact, it'll probably be better if you use it with Google Earth. Think of it as another tool to add to your box of mapping toys.

UUorld's focus is on finding trends over space and time. Load your own data or import data from UUorld's data portal, and then play it out over time. Spatial boundaries undulate up and down as land masses look a bit like skyscrapers. Color and boundary lines are customizable. When you're satisfied with the results, record it as video or export as KML, and then import into Google Earth or whatever else you want.

How effective is this method of visualization though? There's the usual argument of area perception, but does color-coding and vertical dimension make up for that? Discuss amongst yourselves.

To see the relevant data of the “International Survey of Journalism Educators in the Digital Age,” click here.