"Where in the world is Andrew?", updated

I posted a decade ago here re: creating dynamic maps where my travels can show on video. I have since improved on the original Mercator maps that smear out the poles and make N Hemisphere land mass look a lot bigger than it really is. 

Mercator projection (Wikipedia) started with mariners, whose maps allowed to plot sailings in straight lines. It was later kept by Colonialist Europe and Cold War North America, because it increased the size of colonizers and reduced that of the colonies, or conversely made the Soviet Union look bigger & more threatening.

Global harmonization of climate & temperature data since 1850

Update: a post in SciTech Daily shows that ocean  atmospheric science - shown in this and previous post - is alive and may help with assessing climate change: it's about the doldrums driven by downdrafts not updrafts; at a localized scale, downdrafts  were dramatically reported in passenger flight incidents here or the sinking off Sicily of a superyacht here, and updrafts in increasing mid-Atlantic hurricane generation here. 

CLIWOC tall ships sailings from captains logs

Update: global harmonization of climate data since 1850 follows next.

"CLImatological database of World OCeans" was my first outing using Esri tools as personal project. I found this fabulous dataset with ¼ M points! Detailed here, it came from a 5 yr. EU project to scan captains ships logs for climate data in the 17-19th c. before weather data were recorded. Tall ships were mainly British, Dutch & French, Portuguese notably absent due to Lisbon archive destruction in the 1755 "Great Earthquake" (Wikipedia). 

A return to my roots

Updates: mapping climate data from historic ships & global harmonization follow respectively here & here.

 "You can get Andrew outa maps, but you can't get maps outa Andrew" quipped a GIS map friend when I left Kuwait a dozen years ago... Well after quitting socials, Esri(UK) graciously helped me recover my desktop app. While I lost my story maps and web maps content, I maintained a free dev account - story maps and maps&data - this was chiefly to preserve my Living Atlas content inspired by John Nelson. 

"AI for the rest of us", Part V

Update 1: go to the bottom for a positive aspect of what AI can automatically generate, and how a test for AGI (artificial general intelligence) has been designed

Update 2: see next part here of this series for an uktra-simple use of AI

While I described opportunities AI gave in prompt engineering and text processing (ending at previous post here), I tried for fun to create a billboard from an advert I saw in TX or CA 20 or 30 yrs ago: it was Home Depot's "got wood?", after the wildly famous "got milk?" campaign from the Milk Board. 

Showing folks  sporting white 'mustaches' from drinking milk too eagerly, it was the dawn of the photoshop era: milk was traced into mustaches or smiles... "and no milk was spilled in the production of the advert".

Web maps for the rest of us

 The previous post on Community Engagement updated the rebranding of cambridgeshire.ai, with accompanying use of "AI for the rest of us" (work backward from here) this blogpost title came from. One of the mentioned changes were working with Wikimedia, OpenStreetMap and Climate Central - my Esri Developper or Non-Profit stacks are free and frozen, respectively - I had a whole lot of work put on ice, the same time I relinquished my original website www.zolnai.ca. This blog is OK however.

"AI for the rest of us", Part IV

Update: follow on Part V.

 The previous post (here) recapped our purpose to use current lessons-learned in new tech to help our community engagement. Here is another way to use AI, to summarise and to decant - summarise in a structured manner - information from an article my colleague Terry Jackson at Cambridgeshire.ai (under construction) asked me to try using Google Gemini (formerly known as Bard, their AI tool).

"AI for the rest of us", Part III

Update: follow on Part IV.

 Part II (here) showed a small but significant use of AI in preparing our Prospectus (link in that post). Let's look at how we're taking this further now.

The Spectator did a great state-of-the-AI here, including basically what we did above on steroids. They also highlighted Google Gemini, Bard's successor we signed up for. We also joined Wikimedia UK in open data space.

"AI for the rest of us", Part II

Update: follow on Part III.

 My previous post (here) showed a useful if trivial example of Bing AI (here), not only replying in the addressed language but also quickly & easily teasing a relationship among related items.  Now let's look at a non-trivial common task, to summarise a 110 page document.

"AI for the rest of us"

 Update: follow on Part II.

In my other blog (here) Language and mores, Part VII (here) described what I found out about my family's status as immigrants in our complex story of a pregnant mother's escape from Hungary and my siblings ½ generation later. When I later discussed how I thought my marriage ended, my family saw a Jungian influence in my thinking. Jung's disciple Adler apparently inspired Kishimi & Koga's recent best seller "The Courage to be disliked" (Google books). Ensued a three-language dicussion to understand what this was all about... Mum prefers our mother tongue Hungarian, my brother lives in Montreal and my sister in Paris.