Marylaine Block, at Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/ tips us to another good blog for analytic journalists.  Click below to see what Charles Franklin has to say about presidential polls.

All of our readers are hip to Google Maps, but the folks at Directions Magazine offer up a concise introduction to GMaps and the component parts.  See:

We tend to comment more on analytic methods than news delivery techniques, but today we offer an interesting example of the latter.  Ifra, the European-based newspaper training — and R&D — organization, publishes something called newspaper techniques ePaper.  It is published IoP (ink-on-paper), but there is also an online version.  Check it out at the link below.  It is easier to read if you have a tablet PC with a vertical/portrait display mode.  (Someday, every screen will have an easy-to-rotate mode, we hope.)  Still, the quality of the delivered package here is better than anything we've seen coming out of the North American media or media association efforts.

This from today's Google Earth Blog:

“Arc2Earth Released

By FrankTaylor on Google Earth News

A new product specifically targeted for Google Earth and GIS professionals was released today called Arc2Earth. Arc2Earth is an application which allows GIS professionals using ESRI's ArcGISbeen blogging about the development of the product and shown us a number of cool screenshots of its capabilities.
products to convert their data for viewing within Google Earth. This
means serious GIS information can more easily be made available to the
many millions of Google Earth users in the world. Unique data and maps
can be overlayed onto the 3D terrain and satellite photos of Google
Earth to enhance visualizations and presentations. For some months now,
Brian Flood (one of the authors of the product) has

Now they have released the product with a new web site documenting the product and its features, screenshots, and a link to purchase two versions
standard ($99) and professional ($299). This looks like a serious
product and I'm sure the GIS folks will be publishing reviews soon.
Here's an example KMZ showing a simple vegetation analysis which illustrates how symbology is maintained for polygons and graphics.

Here's an interview
with the author by Stefan Geens at OgleEarth about Arc2Earth and Google
Earth's ability to handle a variety of data and geospatial formats.

By the way, there is also another product from an outfit in Russia called KMLer which has some of the same types of features for working with ESRI products.”

Marylaine Block at Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies. http://marylaine.com/exlibris/  points us to a new and potentially valuable site for “context creation” this week.  Though World Public Opinion is rather U.S. centric at the moment, it has promise for including more non-American survey companies and results.  Check out:

Scott Hodes, in a recent column on the LLRX site, points us to a potentially helpful Dept. of Justice page listing the chief FOIA officers for federal agencies.  That said, he also has some appropriate criticism of some of those appointments.

“FOIA Facts

Chief FOIA Officers
Named

By Scott A. Hodes

Published February 15, 2006

As this was an EO, there are no remedies for FOIA requesters to challenge
these appointments. This, in and of itself, is one more reason that FOIA
legislation is needed with stronger oversight of certain agency FOIA
practices.

The folks at CCA again point us to a helpful story.  Perhaps some concerned group — Enviromental Journalists? — could fire up a web page like this and make it available to any publication that would want to put it on its front web page.

One
of the challenges in reducing emissions and air pollutants is that
individuals have a hard time seeing how their own behaviour is
affecting the environment. The UK’s National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory takes a step in the direction of focusing the responsibility for emissions to a more local level. The NAEI offers a number of different maps of the UK
showing emission sources for various chemicals as well as providing
rather large Excel files that pinpoint the sources even further.
Emissions levels can also be searched by postal code. Data is mostly
from 2003.

In a related news story, the News Telegraph talks about a UK carbon map developed by the NAEI and the Carbon Trust.
The map(s) reflect emission levels per square kilometre which can be
deceiving as emission levels probably correlate to population density
to an extent.”

And from the creative mind of M. E. J. Newman comes this interesting collection of cartograms.  Newman's work, “Images of the social and economic world,” shows the national, proportional distrubution of AIDS, energy consumption, total national spending on health care, etc.  Also, be sure to scroll to the bottom of Newman's page and then click on the World Mapper site link.  Interesting stuff to contemplate.

The good folks at Directions Magazine  turned up this interesting mapping report.  Be sure to drill down into the explanations for the “fuzzy line” and the “blobby” algorithm concepts. 

“The algorithm for drawing neighborhoods is the “blobby”
algorithm, well known in computer graphics. You can think
of each point in a neighborhood as a little magnet, and the
neighborhood is the region where the combined attraction of
all those magnets is above a certain strength. A single
point makes a small circle on the map. The influence of a
number of nearby points will combine to make a curved blob.
Read more about blobbies:

• Implicit Surfaces
• Metaballs 
• An Overview of Metaballs/Blobby Objects”

This is one of the first references I've come across using the concepts of the mathematical idea of “fuzzy logic” applied to geography.  Perhaps some readers can point us to similar examples.

“The Neighborhood Project
compiled by Nora Parker, Senior Managing Editor 

Matt
Chisholm and Ross Cohen are working on a project to define neighborhood
boundaries, so far only in San Francisco, but eventually in other
cities as well. (If you get impatient and want to launch
this project in your city, they suggest you can download the software
and get busy.) Neighborhood boundaries? What does that mean? Generally
neighborhoods are not defined by exact boundaries – they are defined by
what geographers call “fuzzy lines” – lines that are not well-defined.
(An example of “fuzzy line” might be the line between two bioregions.
These are generalized, mappable regions, that might involve factors
such as precipitation, soils, topography, etc., but there is no defined
line
on the ground when you cross from one region to the other – the change
between regions is more gradual. This contrasts with the line between
two countries, for example, where you might literally be able to stand
at a border crossing with one foot in each country, or even closer to
home, the line between my neighbor's property and mine.)  The Neighborhood Project
is an excellent illustration of the concept of fuzzy lines – if you go
to the site and look
at the map, you'll note quite a bit of fuzziness to the neighborhood
definitions. You can even begin to perceive it in the very small scale
map included below. People living next door to each other might
consider themselves to be in two different neighborhoods.

The site uses housing post data from craigslist, which includes addresses and neighborhoods, as well as a public poll on the site, to
generate address/neighborhood pairs. Open source products (geocoder.us, Python and PostgreSQL) are used to geocode and map the data.

The Neighborhood Project's map of San Francisco. The dots are colored based on what neighborhood residents considered their “home.” Used by permission. (Click for larger view.)

---

Belgium: e-paper test launch

By EditorsWeblog

De
Tijd, the Antwerp based daily with Belgium's highest online readership,
will be the world's first paper to launch a digital version, for a
three month trial period beginning in April 2006. The paper will take
the form of a portable electronic device; a paper thin screen the size
of a newspaper page. Users will connect to the internet with the device
and download their newspaper. Updates will be provided throughout the
day. 200 subscribers to the newspaper will be able to take part in this
initiative. The paper can be read indoors or outside. Based on an
estimated use time of three hours per day, the device's battery would
last for a week. The device has a storage capacity of 244 megabytes;
the equivalent of a month's worth of newspapers, thirty books and
office documents in different formats. E Ink, creators of the
electronic ink technology integral to the initiative, are working on
developing coloured ink; currently 16 different shades of grey are
available. Added video and sound features could take up to 10 years to
develop.Readers will be able to write comments and scribble on the
paper by using a special marker. Interactive advertising will also be
featured. Source: M&C Tech (through the IFRA newsletter)