Awesome: MinuteEarth

From the creator of MinutePhysics now comes Minute Earth - science and stories about our awesome planet. Here's an example:

Visualize Climate Change

This is fun: what would you like to change and see what others said!

• Visualize Change

STEM and Gender

Here's a great interactive visualization of the gender divide between high school-aged girls and boys.

• The STEM Gender Divide
• More STEM-related Data Visualizations

Map MOOC

This could be fun: a 5-week MOOC about modern web-based digital mapping. After that you should be ready to take a real GIS class, for example at Westfield State University.

• Maps and the Geospatial Revolution

The Geospatial Revolution (Videos)

This is a well-produced series of videos by Penn State as part of their overall Geospatial Revolution Project: how is digital and web-based mapping changing the way we can interact with our Earth and each other.

• Link to Videos

What About The Sun?

Here are 3 years of the Sun in just 3 minutes as seen by NASA - fun!

ArcGIS Online

Here are two new useful web applications using ArcGIS Online.

1. Esri High Water Map (based on NOAA AHPS real-time data)
2. Soil Orders of the USA (includes profiles, photographs, and properties)

The UNFCCC

Maybe this is why nothing ever gets done at the international level, especially around climate change: have a look at this infographic!

Wing-Nut Flies Through Hole!

What could possibly go wrong...

• Wingsuit daredevil flies through tiny hole in mountain

ISS Picture

This is a great recent image of the US east coast from the International Space Station. Follow this link for the high-resolution version.

A Decade of Climate Change

This is an interesting and interactive infographic: article and word counts from UK newspaper Guardian for the last 10 years related to climate change.

LurnQ

This may be interesting or entirely useless: LurnQ - looks like a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) / RSS Reader / Pinterest for organizing your learning streams and content.

• LurnQ Infographic
• LurnQ website
• LurnQ video
• How to create a LurnQ lesson

The World Climate Widget

Create your own graph of temperature, CO2 concentrations, and sun spots and finally put the argument to rest that the current warming is caused by solar activity - NOT! Learn more about the context from Stefan Rahmstorf.

Thin Ice

This movie looks promising - it's about time we got an updated movie about climate change and its impacts. An Inconvenient Truth served that purpose well...but the current generation of students have no idea who Al Gore is and that creates a problem placing the movie into its proper context. Thin Ice will be released 22 April 2013.

• Thin Ice website
• Review by R. Pierrehumbert

First Satellite Image - Ever!

Map Projections

Here are two great animations / visualizations of different map projections we can use. Take-home message: reality is the thing you see outside...a map is always a distorted version of that.

• Map Projection Transitions
• Geoprojections for D3
• Projection Transitions

25 feet Sea Level Rise!

That's an extreme number and would require large-scale collapses of the Greenland Ice Sheet and/or the West Antarctic Ice Sheets. Nevertheless, it is instructive to see what such a rise in sea level would actually look like - here are two options:

• Nickolay Lamm (includes a good description how this was done)
• io9 (additional animated images such as the one below)

25 feet sea level rise from io9

American Community Survey

This is a great interactive web map by the NYT showing demographic data from the American Community Survey between 2005 and 2009.

• Mapping America: Every City, Every Block 

Mapping Population Density

This is a great way to visualize population density - move the interactive slider all the way to the right and see the shrinking 'islands' of human settlement. I not sure what's going on in northern India though, is that area really so densely populated?

• Population Islands by Derek Watkins

Presentation Software

This used to be easy: MS PowerPoint...but here some interesting alternatives:

• rvl.io (= Reveal) - fully-browser-based using HTML5
• Prezi - also browser-based, highlights interconnections (read more about it here @ Profhacker)
• Spicynodes - more of a concept mapper
• D3.js - browser-based, daten-driven documents
• JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit - interactive web-based data visualizations
• Raphael - JavaScript library for web-based vector graphics

The iPad solves it all!

Surely whoever made this works / gets paid by Apple...I wonder when we finally get to the logical conclusion here: the iPad as the Teacher!

• Infographic: iPad = Teacher's Pet

GPS to GIS

There are many solutions for field data collection...here's one more that looks interesting: Take a TruPulse 360 laser rangefinder (measures distances and angles) and connect it via Bluetooth to an Android-based GPS-enabled tablet running GeoJot+ to share it via the Cloud and/or transfer the data to standard GIS file formats - sounds great...how much?

• GeoJot+ app (from Google Play)
• GeoJot+ website
• TruPulse

The New Arctic

When will the Arctic be sea ice-free: 2020? 2030? 2050? Here's a great and pretty intense video: The New Arctic

Teaching GIS

Here is a new website / blog dedicated to supporting the teaching and learning of GIS. Not much there yet, but a promising start: www.teachgis.org

Google Maps meets Gaia meets WALL-E

This is great!


Motorville by Patrick Jean from Iconoclast on Vimeo.