Fun with puzzle maps, part II

 Having moved from Cambridge to my family home in SW FR, I found the historic map puzzle i described here on a previous visit. 

Community Interest Company blog recap

Community Engagement 1,... 20, 21, 22, 23 & 24

As I move away from Cambridge to SW FR in my family home, I will also exit socials and rethink my online engagement, where I lost all my pensions! I have also moved my domain to a new provider, which preserves this blog, Mind the Map and My Year in Kuwait above, but loses the superseded web page and my email now on Yahoo. I do, however, stay engaged with my Community Interest Company Cambridgeshire.ai at right. See following post here.

AI Prompt Engineering Trial 2

Community Engagement 1,... 20, 21, 22 & 23

Update 2: next blog installment is here.

Update1: Medium prof channel reflects this here.

My post here, starting my experiment to convert my CIC (non profit) from Cottenham.info to Cottenham.ai, showed how can we use AI (Wikipedia) for good. My CIC started to address rural isolation in East Anglia in light of climate change and the pandemic (here and here). After a COVID hiatus forced this reassessment, the advent of AI piqued our interest beyond the hype in the press - see my companion Medium series on this topic, following four posts from The future is digital… only it’s not what you think! here - this lead into a curious interaction and my partner finding a new direction.

"So long and thanks for the maps", Part IV

 Over 1½ yrs. ago Part I said that I left socials and geo work... well not quite! I did quit all activism and will soon return to my family home in France left almost 50 yrs. ago.

I left now by entering the 2023 Story Map competition with "a story about conserving Earth’s lands and waters": East Anglia Fenlands: Peatlands Restoration to mitigate Climate Change sums up my work in East Anglia under Cottenham Open - introduced here 4½ years ago as Local community engagement - you can follow my professional portfolio either at top right of my blog home in desktop mode, or my story map direct. 

A tale of two maps, Part 2

A tale of two maps on my personal Medium channel (here) was the start of a series Speaking truth to power, to challenge prevailing myths in current affairs (end-of-series full index here).The undeniable truth of carbon emissions is illustrated by CO2 emissions by country and by CO2 emissions over time as well as Other fuels emissions. 

AI Prompt Engineering Trial 1

Community Engagement 1,... 20, 21 & 22

Update 2: See the next step here in experimenting with AI for good via this CIC

Update 1: See companion Medium article Stop AI scraping your internet data.

The previous post (blog) introduced how our CIC will attempt to find government source data of interest to East Anglia Parishes, in order to assist in creating web pages for all 254 of them. AI is used here to assist the task of seeking information then creating website templates over large numbers of sources to a large number of pages. This is in order to bridge the digital divide of rural citizens and their administrations, which are not plugged into centralised corporate or government ecosystems. We acknowledge the assistance of local Wikimedians (here), who are transforming voluminous IPCC (Wikipedia) reports into text the general public can grasp, retain and take action on.

Cottenham Open CIC rebooted

Community Engagement  1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 & 21

Update: the next post (here) will show how a blog post on creating maps, is created by generating prompts  using Bing AI in a Udemy course on prompt engineering following STAR (style-task-audience-role).

Re-engaging après-COVID what is in LinkedIn, below & Esri Hub: Part 1 outlined Community Engagement. Part 2 built a story introducing the community. Part 3 tied together community maps and climate mapping. Part 4 introduced a process framework for this community engagement. Part 5 expanded on our aim toward a community engagement.  Part 6 added our own Wikipedia Gazetteer as we build up the local landscape. Part 7 showed a draft Press Release introducing our social enterprise. Part 8 on coastal inundation scenarios adds some parameters in the debate. Part 9 on temperature anomaly scenarios further constrains the debate. Part 10 followed up village engagement process via recent Parish Council update. Part 11 added flood risks to coastal inundation and temperature regime models. Part 12 described Cambridgeshire Parishes affected by sea level rise. And finally here we introduce AI with a local twist.

Sea Level Rise update

The last post before peatlands (recent update here) was the East Anglia flood protection infrastructure here - both used extensive Environment Agency data, publicly available if needing some (at time extensive) work as described therein. Here are further DIY resources to create maps like this fun pirate map of East Anglia under 12 m. water est. around 2150AD (from here updated here):

Community, climate and maps - an update

Update: see a follow-on post to sea level rise in East Anglia here.

 This is a follow on to this post: lets address one of the update items, Fire & Ice, in the light of an early and vicious start  to the Canadian fire season. The question is: notwithstanding this year's events, is there an increase in fires and if so, can they be related to climate change as, say, in California?

Rewater peatlands to mitigate climate change update

Update: see a follow-on post to fire maps in the news here.

In my Story Map Portfolio, step past the first five on climate issues, and the next seven on East Anglia environs affected by climate emergency, to my last and most comprehensive one: Fenlands Challenge - below and fully here - was submitted to a UN Sustainable Development Goals call for story maps; it lays out opportunities and challenges in rewatering peatlands as the most effective way to counter greenhouse gas effects on climate warming. 

A brief history of mine

Update 2: see my journey on the web here.

Update 1: a duo of posts on my Medium professional channel here relates my early computing.

As I go through a 'hard reset' in my life and plan to exit social media, this may be a good time to pause and reflect on my IT journey.

Calgary 1986 see here

Although I started on mainframes at Univ. of Calgary 1979 (here), I transitioned to desktop at Queen's Univ. (here). That post's intro lists articles illustrating the progression from geology to computer mapping and GIS. The reason I was able to do that, is that my eight years of high-school Latin allowed me to read, fix and re-run Unix scripts running petrodata management software in the oil industry, where I spent the bulk of my career.  

That then prepared me for HTML coding in the early pre-Internet days... This was 1986, 3 yrs. before Tim Berners-Lee ushered in the World Wide Web! The City of Calgary in W CAN was optically wired by the then government telephone co. AGT (now Telus) for free, betting on the fact they'd recoup the money - and they did so handsomely - via the traffic of all the oil companies jammed downtown. This was against a backdrop of the Province of Alberta having forward-looking Land Information System based in the capital Edmonton a couple hours drive north (here), but that was the heyday of early data transmission protocols (rpc)  and open binary data (EBCDIC) that opened the data flow cross province on said optical network.

Anecdote 1: as an undergrad at University of Calgary, I learned of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project (here), to catalog the world's information via what later became Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) - few people realise Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent anything, he built on exisiting systems... as we all do - but Nelson was a propeller-head who couldn't  market his idea (here). John Walker, co-founder of Autodesk, reportedly bought the technolgy but it never got anywhere... I heard of this as I was cooling my heels awaiting to meet him, with Carol Bartz his then PA - the same who eventually lead Autodesk then Yahoo, a true pioneering woman in IT - when a surveyor friend and I tried to sell them the idea of a mapping front-end to AutoCAD ... in 1986! Remember MS Windows was launched just the year before (see Side Story here and illustration here incl. photo above). Did you know I received a copy of  Windows v.1.O as part of a hardware upgrade to boost my computer's memory from 640Kb to 1Mb?! Sidebar: Was Bill Gates not famously quoted that no personal computer would ever need over 640Kb RAM  (here)?

CD-ROMs

Note that was the early to mid eighties and the web had yet ot be invented! In fact I helped launch a CD-ROM publishing firm, that put all of the Alberta well data on one CD and petroleum production info on another... using a Texas school board hashing algorithm. CDs were so rare in fact, that we leased the CD readers together with the discs themselves. Aside from the hashing algorithm, CD-ROM publishing conferences at the USGS with Gerry McFaul encouraged us to publish CD data. Another effect of pioneering CDs was that we shipped data to Dublin OH to have the CDs pressed... and US customs did not know what Exabyte data tapes were, so we shipped data as videos!

Anecdote 2: Microsoft was largely credited with popularizing CD for software distribution. While that is true, the real initiative was the US Dept. of Defense - the same people whose DARPA developed the precursor to the internet linking US military to government contractors, chiefly universities in the beginning - the reason? In the Cold War era, it was feared the Soviets might detonate an atom bomb at 5-10 mi. altitude that would fry the entire electronic infrastructure of mainland US, thus disabling the military - oh! and the rest of the country is collateral - I learned via the USGS mentioned above, that CDs were immune to resulting electromagnetic pulses.

Anecdote 3: as I had been on contract to the Geological Survey of Canada Calgary office across from the university, we visited the geological library and offered to scan the index cards to electronically catalog them on CD-ROM - after all our software came from a school library application - do you know what the librarian said then? "If we made the catalog that easily accessible, can you imagine the amount of work that might create?" We obviously had work to do, convincing a traditional business of the advantages of electronic access, taken for granted now!

 

Pre-WWW

Notwithstanding work on CD-ROMs, we benefited form the optical network to start building HTTP networks as we called them, as internet never mind intranet or the WWW hadn't been invented yet, not outside DARPA. My blog posts the first screenshot of an early 'website' (term as yet n/a) under 1986 at top left of the banner menu:

Progressively larger firms in the petroleum service sector took me to Texas, where we did lots of things on the nascent internet. That's when I built my first website, playing with HTML formats on my life and work stories by year, patterned after a glossary I co-authored with another counsellor. You'll recognise the website structure inherited or inspired by my first site a decade earlier:

Standards & Metadata

Parallel to this, I got involved in standards and metadata via CNC/CODATA to try and rationalize semantics of geological terms, which are quite complex. At the time the mining geological community and the USGS made some inroads, and the North American Geological Data Model emerged from that. But that was a long and arduous process that didn't come to fruition until after I switched to GIS in California in 2000. That is in turn written up in the manuscript splitting data into concepts (data taxonomy that evolve over time) and occurrence (geographic location that are fixed). In fact I took one of the geological map sheets and formatted it accordingly as an example: 

There followed a series of standards&metadata papers given at Esri and followed up on my blog and Medium channel (here, here, here, here, here, here and here) as I moved from US to UK. That put me in touch with AGI and eventually the Geospatial Commission, who have big plans supporting digital twins to enhance and enable UK infrastructure.

Volunteered Geographic Information

After I left "da awl bidness" (the oil business Texas-style) in the economic downturn, I became full time Volunteered Geographic Information as this blog is titled. I started a Community Interest Company to address East Anglia rural isolation affected by climate change and the pandemic via local community engagement. I also bird-dogged COVID polling NHS and ONS data. This is on the back of using Ordnance Survey parish data released in public domain with HC Derby Medieval Fendlands and Drainage of the Fens data to build up  a series of agro-history maps here... since Domesday in 1067! Sharing that was followed by a series on interacting with data agencies and improving their data ending here. My highlight was running a YouTube livestream on dsiplaying & tracking COVID data here.

Building from that I drew a series of sea level rise maps and training materials branching into environmental issues for East Anglia re: climate change ending here. I also engaged in the new medium of story maps key along the top level menu, a professional portfolio through the Community Interest Company as well as some of personal interest. In order to help others build the same, I shared here a series of "build your own" resources. This topographic map has sea level rise calculated  from NOAA:

I also posted atop the blog my professional Medium channel on various geodata topics here. Feel free also to peruse my YouTube channel and other resources along the top level menu bar of this blog: It is only visible on the desktop version, so on mobile make sure you scroll to the bottom and select "View web version".