Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
“ePodunk is a site that focuses on place and provides information on 25,000 communities in the U. S. The site also contains a number of interesting maps, including maps of the Katrina diaspora, ethnic origin, fastest growing counties and others. There is also a Canadian version of the site, focusing on Canadian places, but it, sadly, does not seem to have any maps.”
With newspapers — and news magazine — cutting staff on an almost weekly basis, some of us in journalism are going to have to reinvent ourselves. One of our tenents of Analytic Journalism is simulation modeling, a methodology and analytic tool we believe will be to the social sciences in the 21st century (and journalism IS a social science) what quantum physics was to the hard sciences in the 20th. So here's an interesting opportunity for someone.
“> The Department of Mathematics as the University of California, Los > Angeles is soliciting applications for a postdoctoral fellowship > position in Mathematical and Computational Social Science. The > qualified applicant will work in the UC Mathematical and Simulation > Modeling of Crime Group (UCMaSC), a collaboration between the UCLA > Department of Mathematics, UCLA Department of Anthropology, UC > Irvine Department of Criminology, Law and Society and the Los > Angeles Police Department to study the dynamics of crime hot spot > formation. The research will center on (1) development of formal > models applicable to the study of interacting particle systems, or > multi-agent systems, (2) simulation of these systems and (3) > directed empirical testing of models using contemporary crime data > from Los Angeles and other Southern Californian cities. > > The initial appointment is for one year, with possible renewal for > up to three years. For information regarding the UCMaSC Group visit > > http://paleo.sscnet.ucla.edu/ucmasc.htm > > DUTIES: Work closely with an interdisciplinary team of > mathematicians, social scientists and law enforcement officials to > develop new mathematical and computational methodologies for > understanding crime hot spot formation, diffusion and dissipation. > Responsibilities include teaching one course in the Department of > Mathematics per year, publication and presentation of research > results. > > REQUIRED: A recent Ph.D. in Mathematics, Physics or a related > field. The qualified applicant is expected to have research > experience in one or more areas that would be relevant to the study > of interacting particle/multi-agent systems including, but not > limited to, mathematical and statistical physics, complex systems, > and partial differential equations modeling. The applicant is also > required to have advanced competency in one or more programming > languages/environments (e.g., C++, Java, Matlab). > > Qualified candidates should e-mail a cover let, CV and the phone > numbers, e-mail addresses, and postal addresses of three > individuals who can provide recommendation to: > > Dr. P. Jeffrey Brantingham > Department of Anthropology > 341 Haines Hall > University of California, Los Angeles > Los Angeles, CA 90095″
California Attorney General's statistics: availability of new statistics.
Crime in California, 2004 – This publication contains the most comprehensive set of data on California crimes, arrests, and criminal justice actions. Crime in California contains information on crimes, arrests, adult felony arrest dispositions, adult corrections, criminal justice expenditures and personnel, citizens' complaints against peace officers, and domestic violence.
You can view the report at: http://ag.ca.gov/cjsc/publications/candd/cd04/Preface.pdf
View the CJSC Home Page at: http://ag.ca.gov/cjsc
Another nice piece of creativity and innovation comes along in the Google Earth mashup that depicts not just the U.S. military deaths in Iraq, but the age and location of those killed. This, along with a pop-up of the causality's data, is the kind of applied JOURNALISM tool university's — and newsrooms — should be teaching.
In response to All Saints/Veterans Day, someone decided to collect and post a memorial of those who gave their lives so far in the Iraq conflict from the Americans and Coalition Forces. The author is called 'purblind_horus' at the Google Earth Community and he wanted this to be as non-political as possible. He wanted to remember those who gave their lives. He is also working to show the even larger number of innocent Iraqi's who have lost their lives.
Once you download the war casualties file , you will see placemarks showing the locations of the homes of each soldier. The information came from the official icasualties.org web site, and includes the 2212 casualties through 27-October-2005. In addition to the home location of each casualty, if you click on the placemark it may contain a photo, a link to basic background information, and links to other information, if available, such as news stories.
This is a valuable, and sobering, effort. It has been greatly appreciated by many at the GEC, and I hope some find it worthwhile here at the GEB as well. Here's the original post. Good work 'purblind_horus'!
Posted by FrankTaylor at November 15, 2005 08:16 AM”
A nice bit of AJ done by the folks at the Louisville [Kentucky] Courier-Journal, who analyzed the jury pool and composition in the C-J's home county. Some good thinking and moderate statistical-lifting drives the series.
See http://tinyurl.com/cr98h
People who live in mainly African-American areas are less likely to serve than those from mostly white areas, a Courier-Journal analysis found.
A piece on calling the elections in Detroit:
BY CHRIS CHRISTOFF FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF
November 10, 2005
What was a viewer to believe?
As polls closed Tuesday, WDIV-TV (Channel 4) declared Freman Hendrix winner of Detroit's mayoral race by 10 percentage points.
WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) showed Hendrix ahead by 4 percentage points, statistically too close to call.
But WJBK-TV (Channel 2) got it right, declaring just after 9 p.m. that Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was ahead, 52% to 48%, which turned out to be almost exactly the final 53%-47% outcome declared many hours later.
And it was vote analyst Tim Kiska who nailed it for WJBK, and for WWJ-AM radio, using counts from 28 of 620 Detroit precincts.
Kiska did it with help from Detroit City Clerk Jackie Currie. She allowed a crew that Kiska assembled to collect the precinct tallies shortly after the polls closed at 8 p.m.
Using what he calls a secret formula, Kiska calculated how those 28 precincts would predict the result citywide.
His formula also assumed that absentee voters chose Hendrix over Kilpatrick by a 2-1 ratio.
That's different from the methods of pollsters who got it wrong Tuesday, Steve Mitchell for WDIV and EPIC/MRA's Ed Sarpolus for WXYZ and the Free Press. Both men used telephone polls, calling people at home during the day and evening and asking how they voted.
It's a more standard method of election-day polling, but Tuesday proved treacherous.
Kiska, a former reporter for the Free Press and Detroit News, has done such election-day predictions since 1974, but said he was nervous Tuesday.
“Every time I go into one of these, my nightmare is I might get it wrong,” said Kiska, a WWJ producer. “I had a bad feeling about this going in. I thought there was going to be a Titanic hitting an iceberg and hoping it wouldn't be me.”
Kiska said he especially felt sorry for his friend Mitchell.
Mitchell said he's been one of the state's most accurate political pollsters over 20 years, but said his Tuesday survey of 800 voters turned out to be a bad sample.
He said polling is inherently risky, and that even well-conducted polls can be wrong one out of 20 times. “I hit number 20 this time.”
For Sarpolus, it's the second Detroit mayoral race that confounded his polls. He was the only major pollster in 2001 who indicated Gil Hill would defeat Kilpatrick.
Sarpolus said the pressure to get poll results on the air quickly made it impossible to adjust his results as real vote totals were made public during the late evening.
Of Kiska, Sarpolus said: “You have to give him credit. … But you have to assume all city clerks are willing to cooperate.”
Contact CHRIS CHRISTOFF at 517-372-8660 or christoff@freepress.com.
An interesting piece today from CNN on the value of geographers in the hurricane rescuse and recovery business. See http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/11/10/gis.technology/
By Marsha Walton CNN
(CNN) — Police, firefighters, and Coast Guard crews may be the first to come to mind when naming the lifesavers during disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
It might be time to add geographers to that list.
In the sometimes desperate hours following Katrina's landfall, experts in geographic information services — GIS — helped search and rescue crews reach more than 75 stranded survivors in Mississippi.
One of their most valuable tools was a process called “geocoding,” the conversion of street addresses into global positioning system (GPS) coordinates.
With streets flooded, street signs missing, and rescue crews unfamiliar with the Gulf Coast area, street addresses were not very useful.
“They would get phone calls, or the Coast Guard would come in with addresses in their hands and say, 'I need a latitude and longitude for this address.' So the GIS professionals would do a geocoding, give it to the Coast Guard who got on helicopters and saved lives,” said Shoreh Elhami, director of GISCorps.
Elhami, co-founder of GISCorps, said that since 2004, the organization's volunteers have responded to disasters such as the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, as well as efforts to provide humanitarian relief, sustainable development, economic development, health, and education in all parts of the world.
The Corps had 20 volunteers on the ground in Mississippi less than 48 hours after Katrina's landfall.
GISCorps is part of URISA, the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association. Elhami said more than 900 qualified volunteers have GIS experience, and range from from city and state government officials to academics to people in private industry.
Volunteer Beth McMillan, a field geologist and professor at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, worked in Pearl River County, Mississippi, a couple of weeks after the storm.
“A couple of days after the hurricane hit, I felt so down, and wondered what I could do. I could give a little bit of money, but that doesn't seem very satisfying. To be able to have a skill that can be used is much more empowering, it doesn't make you feel so helpless,” said McMillan, back in Little Rock.
Although rescue efforts were over by the time she arrived, there were scores of other tasks she and her colleagues completed.
“We had laptops and map plotters, and a database that the group from the first week had put together. One map we produced showed cell phone towers in the county, and the estimated coverage of those towers. Everybody was communicating with cell phones and they needed to figure out where to go within the county to talk to one another,” McMillan said.
McMillan described the volunteer efforts as a sort of “Maps to Go” for a wide range of people needing immediate information.
Their maps detailed road conditions, power outages, underground gas storage, and facilities with hazardous materials. Agencies from FEMA to the Red Cross to local utilities relied on the information that they constantly updated.
“This is how technology can make a difference,” said David Shaw, director of the GeoResources Institute at Mississippi State University.
“It was a great team effort,” said Shaw, for a crisis that he said had deteriorated into a Third World situation.
Shaw said he was amazed at the talent and the creativity of, basically, a roomful of strangers at these county Emergency Operations Centers. While eventually satellite links and Internet connections made the tasks easier, in some cases large amounts of data had to be driven several hours from one site to another.
Volunteers are never sure of the conditions they might face when deployed to disaster sites or developing countries. Assignments usually last between two weeks and two months. McMillan said her many experiences “roughing it” as a field geologist helped her deal with the living conditions in Mississippi.
“They said be prepared for really hot weather, and bring a sleeping bag,” she said. “I slept in an empty U.S. Department of Agriculture building on a cot, with probably several hundred other people. But it did have power, bathrooms, and showers, so conditions were not as bad as they could have been,” she said.
She and her colleagues ate MREs (military meals ready to eat) and worked 12-plus hour days every day.
“We did get a chance to tag along one afternoon with a couple of National Guardsmen from Mississippi on a trip to the coast. That was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I've never seen such destruction, and the only way to really understand it is to see it in person,” she said.
Our friend Sree Sreenivasan, on the J-school faculty at Columbia, posts an interesting column on the Poynter site today on social networking. Remember, “social networks” is/are not quite the same as Social Network Analysis, but they are close conceptual relatives.
Sree has linked to some valuable sites we didn't know about, so check out “Social Networking for Journalists” at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=91496
A city never sleeps? Well, some do, at least according to a fairly recent report from the Census Bureau.
Company: U.S. Census Bureau Industry: Demographic Data Location: Washington, DC, United States of America
If it seems a little crowded on weekdays in cities like Washington, D.C.; Irvine, Calif.; Salt Lake City, Utah; or Orlando, Fla.; it's not your imagination. Among cities with 100,000 or more people, these four show the highest percentage increases in population during the day as opposed to their resident population.
The findings come from the first-ever U.S. Census Bureau estimates of the daytime population for all counties and more than 6,400 places across the country, based on Census 2000 data.
The concept of the daytime population refers to the number of people, including workers, who are present in an area during normal business hours, in contrast to the resident population present during the evening and nighttime hours.
“Information on the expansion or contraction experienced by different communities between nighttime and daytime is important for many planning purposes, including those dealing with transportation and disaster relief operations,” said Census Bureau Director Louis Kincannon. “By providing information on the number of people not living in the area, but nevertheless greatly affected by the event, the data can provide a clearer picture of the effects of disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”
The places where the largest percent increases in daytime over nighttime populations occur tend to be those with small resident populations. For example, among medium-sized cities, Greenville, S.C., has a daytime population that is 97 percent higher than its nighttime population. Palo Alto, Calif., increases by about 81 percent, and Troy, Mich., by 79 percent. Among very small places, gains approached 300 percent in Tysons Corner, Va. (292 percent); and El Segundo, Calif. (288 percent).
Other highlights:
Mike Bergmann (pio@census.go)
Susan Smith, editor of GISWeekly Review, reviews a new book from ESRI Press on GIS portals. See review below or check out Spatial Portals: Gateways to Geographic Information ============================== Spatial Portals Book Review By Susan Smith
A new book out from ESRI Press called Spatial Portals: Gateways to Geographic Information by Winnie Tang, founder and CEO of ESRI China (Hong Kong) and Japan-based independent consultant Jan Selwood, offers a comprehensive look at spatial portals from an ESRI point of view, using as examples spatial portals developed with ArcExplorer Web Services, Geography Network software, ArcIMS for internet mapping, and ArcSDE for data management.
Spatial portals are described in this book as Web sites that either “assemble many online resources and links into a single location to form easy-to-use products or provide search tools that help users find information on the Web.” Of course, portals such as America Online and CompuServe have provided this type of single source for resources for a long time; Google and Yahoo! and MSN have provided search tools that are now in direct competition with ESRI in some areas.
Three types of spatial portals are currently in use: application portals, catalog portals and enterprise portals.
Catalog portals maintain indexes or catalogs of available information services. Generally service providers can add metadata to the portal and it is then organized into a catalog that allows users to access information.
Application portals are for the well-defined audience or those with specific requirements and generally combine information services into a Web-based mapping package that is task-specific. They usually include dedicated application and data servers and provide services that are more complex than catalog servers.
The enterprise spatial portal is designed to integrate spatial data with business enterprise solutions. Initially they were originated by Oracle and SAP, and their focus was on enterprise wide resource planning, office automation and document management. Now they also encompass spatial information.
Spatial portals are often the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) front end to a network of information, and although SDI has been used by organizations and governments since the 90s to organize, access and search information, spatial portals allow faster access to information than ever before.
What we've seen repeatedly in the past couple of years has been the proliferation of spatial portals after a natural or other type of disaster, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami or Hurricane Katrina. An example is the Pacific Disaster Center's portal launched within hours of the news of the tsunami, providing news, data and links to mapping services related to the disaster. Also the PDC launched a Map Viewer and an underlying map service.
Besides this portal, the PDC hosts a number of permanent portals to help improve coordination of efforts and access to information. Disaster and resource managers and others can register services such as online or downloadable datasets with the Asia Pacific Natural Hazards Information Network (APNHIN) so that governments, planners and non-governmental organizations can search for and access information pertinent to hazard evaluation and response planning.
Hurricane Katrina occurred after this book's publication so the myriad of spatial portals developed to aid in response and recovery for that disaster are not covered here.
Some time is spent on Geospatial One-Stop, whose mantra is “two clicks to content.” The One Stop program, launched in December 2002, is an intergovernmental project managed by the Department of the Interior in support of the President's Initiative for E-government. Geospatial One Stop builds upon its partnership with the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) to provide easy to use geospatial information access to the public and government, drawing from databases and directories across the nation.
In 2003, the Norwegian government endorsed Norway Digital, a plan to develop a spatial data infrastructure with spatial portals at its heart. Norway is a land of contrasts – 11 percent of the total population live in Oslo, the nation's capital, while 45 percent live in provinces located in 100 kilometers of the city, concentrating population in the southeast. There are fewer than six people per square kilometer in some municipalities.
While national mapping programs all have their own challenges, Norway has addressed its problem of mapping remote regions by building partnerships between public agencies and private industry. Although it is focused on government agencies, Norway Digital embodies the building of a national geospatial framework that is composed of multiple spatial portals that can be used by participating members to build their own sites and services. A new NMA portal is geoNorge, which adds search functionality and indexing as well as hosts topographic map services across the whole framework.
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environment Control (DHEC) has developed a portal called the South Carolina Community Assessment Network (SCAN) South Carolina Community Assessment Network (SCAN) that provides a real -time, interactive gateway to DHEC's databases. Users can use it to integrate and analyze health data with other data from state, local and federal agencies and provides efficient access to public health information.
Each of the case studies found in the book are interesting examples of what has been accomplished using spatial portals. The book is described by one reader as a “true portal on spatial portals.” Whether or not this is the case, the book is a valuable resource showing just what spatial portals are capable of and how they are changing the way we view, manage, sort, find, share and use geographic information. Spatial Portals: Gateways to Geographic Information, by Winnie Tang and Jan Selwood, 176 pages ESRI Press ISBN 1-58948-131-3
