Interactive Cartograms

How We Share The World is a series of 'dynamic' cartograms - this would be great to add to Worldmapper.

Volcanoes!

Here is a nice interactive map of all known volcanic eruptions of the last 2,000 years. Even better: Richard Husdon published a great tutorial on how to create this map using public data and CartoDB. (via Map Mania)

LiDAR and SFM

Everything you always wanted to know about LiDAR and SFM: Analyzing high resolution topography for advancing the understanding of mass and energy transfer through landscapes: A review (by Passalacqua et al., 2015, Earth-Science Reviews).

The title is a bit misleading...the focus is very much on airborne LiDAR. Plus, the term 'transfer' implies a process (or processes), but LiDAR and SFM can only give you 'states' at high spatial resolution, but (in-practice) not high enough temporal resolution to get at actual processes, transfers, and rates thereof.

Passalacqua et al. (2015, Figure 2)

Science 360

Science 360 (by the National Science Foundation) is a great source for science news in a variety of useful formats: web posts, videos, radio programs, etc.

Mapping Segregation

Mapping Segregation is a great dot map by the NYT!

The ArcGIS Book

This looks promising: The ArcGIS Book

Ride the Light!

Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.

Global Top-10 GHG Emissions

A 4-tiered interative donut chart - cool! Global Top 10 Greenhouse Gas Emitters

Excel Data Bars

Quickly visualizing patterns with Excel's data bars (by Anne K. Emery)

Canva

Canva is a simple cloud-based (and mostly) free design / layout program. It provides layouts, templates, text options, frames, backgrounds and you can upload your own images - pretty much all you need for simple design projects. You can download your work as PNGs or PDFs. However, some of their premium content such as images cost $1 each, but you can always upload your own.

• Canva for iOS
• Reviews by  PCWorld and FastCompany

When Maps Lie

When Maps Lie is a summary and discussion on how to avoid being fooled by maps. There is nothing  particularly new about  it, but the author provides a series of nice examples to illustrate his points.

http://xkcd.com/1138/

Are you living in the past, present, or future?

At least in terms of your state demographics compared to the demographics of the country: Find out if your state is America's past or future!

IPUMS USA

Integrated Public Use Microdata Series or IPUMS USA is a way to access U.S. census data - an alternative if you will to American FactFinder. Even better (in my opinion) is Social Explorer, but you need a Pro License to get access to all the good stuff.

Himawari-8 weather satellite

Great time-lapse! More here from the NYT.

The OpenGeoportal

These open geoportals have been around for a while - basically led by the folks at Tufts, MIT, and Harvard. The idea is to create an open 'clearing house' for authoritative geospatial data that are scattered all over cyberspace as part of state/local/federal agencies, colleges/universities, museums, libraries, etc. I'm not sure this has really taken-off  - and may never will - but have a look at Opengeoportal.org, Open Geoportal 2.0, and a recent review by Esri's Joe Kerski.

NASA Mars Trek

NASA Mars Trek is an interactive story map of - you guessed it - Mars exploration. It comes in 2D and 3D and includes all the standard bells and whistles we have come to expect from these things.

Climate Central Surging Seas

Climate Central Surging Seas has been around for a while and a great tool to 'see' how the U.S. will look like under different sea level rise scenarios - for example 2°C warming and sea level rise. Or, explore by location - for example Boston.

Landsat Story Map

This is pretty fun - the Landsat Thematic Bands Web Mapping Application gives you on-the-fly image processing so you can explore the world in different Landsat 8 band combinations.

Confused? Have a read! More about it here via Spatial Reserves.

Now if they could just add-in a band-ratio or band-index for simple snow and ice mapping!

Time Zones explained!

A brief history of time zones by the BBC is a nice interactive visualization of how time is organized on Earth.

Google Street View Hyperlapse

This has been around for a while now, but Hyperlapse somehow merges Google Street View frames into cool mini movies. The web version has some limitations, but the source code is available on Gitub.

Solar Windows

The Future is Clear shows that we can convert regular windows into photovoltaic cells and thus create solar skyscrapers and solar cities!

Population Change in Europe

This is quite impressive: Where the population of Europe is growing - and where it's declining by the Berliner Morgenpost. I would love to see an interpretation / explanation for some of these very obvious spatial patterns - some appear to be related to urbanization, others perhaps to immigration? For the techno-geeks: here's a tutorial that describes how this map was created.

Via Map Mania

AIDSVu

AIDSVu is extremely-well done: you can view the data as absolute or relative amounts, apply various demographic filters, and view the data at the city, county, and state level. All that's missing is a way to get the underlying data!

Wave Energy

I cannot imagine wave energy will ever amount to anything significant, but there seems to be some progress with Hawaii actually connecting a wave energy device to its power grid.

Is Africa bigger than North America?

Well, is it? Is Africa bigger than North America?

Time-Lapse Mining

The concept is simple: let's crowd-source pictures of popular landmarks and stitch them together in-time to create a time-lapse video. The details are of course much more complex and explained in Time-lapse Mining from Internet Photos by Ricardo Martin-Brualla and others.

A 3D Body Scanner

This is cool: all you need is 50 Raspberry Pis, 50 digital cameras, a bunch of PVC piping, and some other stuff and you can build yourself a 3D scanner: A very low-cost 3D scanning system for whole-body imaging

Social Media for Scientists

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, SnapChat, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Myspace (gasp!) - it is not easy to choose your social media identities! A similar problem nowadays exists for scientists with at least three competing academic social networks: ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Mendeley. The article Scientists and the social network (Nature, 14 August 2014) explores the issue.

GradeCraft

GradeCraft is an LMS to support 'gameful' courses - read more about it over at the Wired Campus. The basic idea is to mimic a video game where mistakes don't come with any real consequences - you can simply start over and repeat the level. In contrast, most college courses are structured around several high-stakes tests and/or papers and any mistakes on those typically have a real negative impact on the final grade.

The Planetary Dashboard

This has been around for a while - but updated as of January 2015: The Planetary Dashboard showing the Great Acceleration (since 1950). What I like about this is that you can access this study in a variety of ways: a) the aforelinked website, b) the peer-reviewed paper, c) the detailed slide show, and d) the underlying data (as a MS Excel table).

The BBC Climate Challenge

If learning about climate policy options and consequences as you play a game sounds good to you: try the BBC Climate Challenge game or first read the review by Kate Heffernan on the NCSE blog.

Personally I always feel a bit ambivalent about using educational games in the context of serious issues such as climate change - framing it as a game to me sends the wrong message and trivializes the very real consequences of climate change. Yet I also realize that games can be a good way to explore complex issues in a way that is structured, fun, and engaging.

http://ncse.com/files/bbc2.0_0.png