Friday, 28 July 2023

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. 


Note: it includes the famous exponential historic Total Carbon emissions (above) and also Carbon emissions reloaded earlier in this blog (here).

Google My Map 1

Now let's see maps created not on Esri platform as above but on Google My Maps. It's a very simple way to create simple maps using data tables of points (1) or entering then by hand (2).


The default map shows the distribution of a WhatsApp Group of friends following my travels and travails. Unselect WhatsApp Group and select Where was Andrew? will restore an old Google Map that is no longer supported: it shows where I've lived color-coded by decade. Unselect that and select Family to see where my sibs and cuz are.

Note: see an update in this Story Map (here), & an animation on YouTube (here). 

Google My Map 2

 I recently was asked to help find bitcoin ATMs, for a friend to send money in that alternate currency. I knew this country wasn't a haven for such ATMs, and I soon found out it's gettign worse. Two that I used before in Bedford and N London are gone, and four I looked for in E London are also gone. That leaves one in NW London and two in the Midlands that may/not be there. Possibly 3 out of nine is not  good either in absolute or in relative terms.


This map shows available ATMs and my travels: I located  two working ones earlier on  (B & D), and  found three not avaialble recently (F - H). Note that I took public transport, but Google My Maps only offers Drive, Cycle and Walk. By road, the first two-way trip was 2 hr. / 130 km. / 80 mi., and the second 3 hr. / 190 km. / 120 mi. ... but public transport easily doubled that!

Thursday, 29 June 2023

AI Prompt Engineering Trial 1

 Local Community Engagement 12345678910111213 & 14


Update: 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.

Wednesday, 28 June 2023

Cottenham Open CIC rebooted

Local Community Engagement 1234567891011, 12 & 13


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 HubPart 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.

Monday, 26 June 2023

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):

Friday, 23 June 2023

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?

Thursday, 22 June 2023

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. 

Tuesday, 20 June 2023

A brief history of mine

Update: 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 am exiting social media by&large, this may be a good time to pause and reflect on my IT journey.