The politics of London2012 Olympic medal counts

[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this and another example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]

I was curious about the London2012 Olympic medal count - why rank them by gold medals as BBC did, rather than by total medals as perhaps statistically more significant? It kept TeamGB in #3,  ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympic gold medal rank of 4 (rather than ahead of the Russians I'm told). In any case the top two - US and China - stood unchallenged, and every country performed well in what some called the best games ever... even if I hear that at every four years!

More simple maps in current affairs

[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this and another example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]

Geocurrents.info posted an interesting item on UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. I suggested that their otherwise lovely static maps could be augmented via dynamic ones. They're not computer mappers, so I pointed them to Google Fusion Tables as the simplest way to post simple aggregate maps by country. Here is what their maps on World Heritage Site count looks like (note this is still 'beta', as for example Côte d'Ivoire and DR Congo do have sites, and I had to match country names to Google):

Guns & Roses, or: 3D GIS anyone?

[Update 2: layer package can now be found as Teapot Dome Six Pack on PUG Online
Update: RMOTC was sold off in 2015, their ftp site is now gone, ask for available copies]

The Guns part is the colorful history associated with the Teapot Dome. A remote Wyoming oilfield once a sleepy Naval Petroleum Reserve, the Teapot Dome Scandal was, however, the biggest to rock Washington DC until Watergate... or the oil industry until the Enron collapse! Read this introduction to a book excerpt: Marines Invade Wyoming - From the Halls of Motazuma to the Oil Fields of Teapot Dome, for cape-and-sword intrigue from ranchers and oil barons to US senators and the White House...

More beautiful maps in current affairs

As I'm off for two weeks you get next week's posting today! Following last week's blogpost on Esri's beautiful ocean base map, I painted over it (to use their simile) Goddard Earth Sciences' stunning near-real-time global sensor data for:

Arctic Dreams, Part II

As the Arctic comes under more scrutiny in the news, I'm reminded of my visit up there 25 years ago when we actually thought of global cooling! But the issues of access and exploitation are certainly not new... And I posted a few polar maps for fun here and here, though the best rendition can be found here.

What's in a name, Part II

A sure sign of succesful map, is when it blends into the application and serves an unobtrusive yet key role. I noted earlier in What's in a name? two such examples that make a mappliance (map + appliance). I found last week during 13 October English Day a fun project asking the same question - Location Lingo joined the English Project to the Ordnance Survey, and allows the man in the street to enter anecdotal names they know to share with the rest of the world - isn't this yet another form of crowdsourcing?

Trending London petroleum shows

Compiling petroleum shows I attended in London in the last five years, from small data management under 100 attendees to international geoscience over 2000, shows a few things:

The power of context, Part IV

Two anecdotes on remote sensing and environmental monitoring highlight some issues in measuring and predicting the current Gulf of Mexico oil rupture.

bp oil rupture, Part II

Here the latest from bp itself at the current NOC show in London.

bp oil rupture

News swirling around the incident in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) compels me to draw out some salient facts and gather them here to help the uninitiated (I did this yesterday for my in-laws). This blog title is from the last slide of the video in my last blogpost.

The Big Easy button

Building geoinfo from the ground up is patent in this Gov2.0 presentation on citizen-focussed geoweb at the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center toward sustainability in the Big Easy:

The drummer and the dancer

[Update: thanks for the corrected FEMA NIMS web link below from Atlantic Training, who provide "online emergency planning training course [that is ] inexpensive and has helped thousands of businesses train their employees".]

Drums closing the FIFA World Cup kick-off celebration brought back my African drumming days in N Texas and S California:

No such thing as a free lunch

To great press and technocrati fanfare, the UK Ordnance Survey freed up its data... somewhat! This was promptly announced on mapperz and Ernest Maples blogs. And commented on as far away as the US west coast by Ed Parsons and Geoff Zeiss currently in America - does location matter?

Rebranding conferences

Last week I presented at the PPDM London User Group Meeting, and the week prior at Finding Petroleum's (FP) January Conference.

"Who you gonna call?"

"Geo busters!" (apologies Ghost Busters).

Geodata access and availability is the real story behind the flurry of news around UK government freeing up some data, vs. Google collecting it and returning it for free, and many others. And this happens against a backdrop of various SDI (spatial data infrastrucutre) intiatives. I joined a UK government data developers mailing list, to educate myself on the ins-and-outs of data provision at the coal face, so to speak. And RDFa emerges as the way to resolve this - the more metadata one provides within any given dataset, the easier it is to classify and maintain internally, and to discover and distribute externally.