Mercator (again)

This GIF is pretty cool (source):

And then there is: Real Country Sizes Shown on Mercator Projection

The Fourth National Climate Assessment

In case we needed more data and evidence:

• NCA4 - Volume I (Science)
• NCA4 - Volume II (Impacts, Risks, Adaptation)

The whole things presented as an Esri Story Map (also embedded below): Hot Numbers.

Housing and Income

Esri created two nice web maps / apps looking into housing across in the country in terms of a) availability and b) affordability:

• Affording the American Dream? (simple web map)
• Affording the American Dream? (immersive Story Map

The map below is more simplistic: the blues show higher housing affordability and reds show lower housing affordability.

Esri

2013-2017 AHR Map

2013-17 Top Ancestry or Hispanic or Racial Group with AA Estimate Multimap by Census Tract

Zoom-in: this is fascinating!

The Equal Earth Wall Map

The Equal Earth Wall Map is for schools, organizations, or anyone who needs a map showing countries and continents at their true sizes relative to each other. Africa appears 14 times larger than Greenland as it actually is.

The Red Cross/Crescent Climate Centre - Games

Who knew: The Red Cross/Crescent provides a series of excellent games and instructional resources to learn about climate change and its impacts @  https://climatecentre.org/resources-games/games.

Let's Get SASSY!

SASSY =  The Six Americas Super Short Survey - try it!

1880 to 2017

So warm werden die Sommer

So warm werden die Sommer is similar to 1001 Blistering Future Summers, but global (which is great) and in German (which is not great).

Countries by Area

Simple and fun: Countries by Area

Climate Change Timeline

@semi_rad

Choosing GIS Data

Nice post and figure: A graphical aid in deciding whether geospatial data meets your needs.

Remote Sensing with ArcGIS

ArcGIS includes plenty of tools for performing image analysis and image classification and the folks @ VirginiaTech have created an excellent tutorial with matching videos:

• Tutorial
• Video Playlist

Jupyter

Jupyter is a free and open-source computational notebook - think your good old orange field book, but for data science-type work. This article in Nature is a nice introduction. Google is in the game as well with Colaboratory.

The American Experience in 737 Novels

The American Experience in 737 Novels is a nice Esri Story Map and a great example of the so-called digital humanities.

Climate Impact Map

The Climate Impact Map is nice and simple. I like that you can view the USA and the world, but unfortunately they only offer the USA data at  the state-level for download.

The Social Cost of Carbon (SCC)

First, at the national level.

• Hsiang et al. (2017): Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States. That's the actual Science paper.
• Data for the above paper (Climate Impact Lab).
• Climate Change damage to the U.S. Economy (YouTube video).
• NPR News: Mapping The Potential Economic Effects Of Climate Change. That's a news article about it.
• MAP: How Much Climate Change Will Cost Each U.S. County. Includes a nice interactive map.

Second, globally.

• Ricke et al. (2018): Country-level social cost of carbon in Nature Climate Change.
• Vox: Climate change is a global injustice. A new study shows why. That's a news article about it.

Wealth Divides

Wealth Divides is a pretty impressive Esri Story Map.

Data Viz MOOCs

This sequence sounds interesting: the Information Visualization Specialization offered by Coursera.

Machine Teaching and Learning

Good stuff by Audrey Watters: Machine Teaching, Machine Learning, and the History of the Future of Public Education.

I like the 'black box society' quote from Frank Pasquale: “The term ‘black box,’” he writes, “is a useful metaphor… given its own dual meaning. It can refer to a recording device, like the data-monitoring systems in planes, trains, and cars. Or it can mean a system whose workings are mysterious; we can observe its inputs and outputs, but we cannot tell how one becomes the other. We face these two meanings daily: tracked ever more closely by firms and government, we have no clear idea of just how far much of this information can travel, how it is used, or its consequences.”

And: “knowledge is power. To scrutinize others while avoiding scrutiny oneself is one of the most important forms of power.”

Lynching Maps

Maps Mania has compiled three maps related to this topic. Personally I find the simple dot map especially intense because it is 'just' a simple dot map: One Dot for every Lynching Victim in the US 1883-1930.

REMA

REMA is the new DEM for Antarctica - explore it here as the REMA Hillshade Viewer (using Esri ArcGIS Online).

One Chart, Many Tools

Interesting: here the author took a data set and charted in a bunch of different tools:

• One Chart, Nine Tools – Revisited
• One Chart, Twelve Tools
• One Chart, Twelve Charting Libraries
• What I Learned Recreating One Chart Using 24 Tools

Unfortunately, the situation here has changed for the worse in my opinion - there is simply no good and free option out there, especially for creating online and interactive charts. Maybe it's time to go offline again and just use https://www.libreoffice.org/? Or just admit defeat and go 100 percent Google or Esri?

Hurricane Michael Damage Viewer

Hurricane Michael Damage Viewer is an Esri Story Map showing before and after images. Certainly visual and important (perhaps) for recovery efforts, but also an example of 'disaster porn' that has become the norm these days.

Google Sheets Test #1

Datawrapper Test #1

The chart as a link.

Where we live, block by block

There is nothing really new about Where we live, block by block - just an interactive web map showing racial demographics at the census block level.

AirMap

AirMap is a quick and interactive web map for drone users to see local airspace restrictions and other important information needed to plan a drone 'mission'.

Minard in Tableau

See it here: Charles Minards's famous map rendered in Tableau.

USGS Streamer

USGS Streamer is fun, but I'm not sure what I would use it for.

Chromebook Data Science

Not a bad idea: Chromebook Data Science is a series of MOOCs using just Chromebooks and accessible online apps for data science.

The Opportunity Atlas

The Opportunity Atlas is a great data viz with a corresponding paper and all the data available for download.

Accessing USGS Topographic Maps on The Internet

This (almost) seems outdated these days as we typically 'stream' those layers nowadays as opposed to downloading them to a local computer. Still, there is often a need to do that and Joe Kerski has compiled a nice set of sources for those Accessing USGS Topographic Maps on The Internet, for example:

• The Libre Map Project
• USGS Maps
• USGS Historical Topographic Map Explorer
• topoView
• https://www.historicaerials.com/

Data Voyager

Data Voyager seems like the open-source version of Tableau.

• Data Voyager (load a data set)
• Data Voyager (example)
• Data Voyager demo (starts @ 15:50 minutes)

Constructing Charts and Graphs

Urban Growth of New Delhi

Nice satellite image comparison (1989 to 2018) from NASA: Urban Growth of New Delhi.

Morph

Morph sounds fun: a tool to generate abstract images from data. More about it on FlowingData.

Social Connectedness via Facebook

This has been all over the news: How Connected Is Your Community to Everywhere Else in America? by the Upshot at the NYT. That's basically the interactive data viz to the paper by Bailey et al. (2018) Social Connectedness: Measurement, Determinants, and Effects.

The basic results are very interesting, yet not all that surprising.

Figure 2, to me, is most interesting - mapping 20 'communities' across the USA based on their social connectedness on Facebook. I wonder how these intersect with the idea of mega-regions across the USA, for example The New Map for America (Parag Khanna, NYT, 15 April 2016).

100 Color Palettes

Well-done in Tableau: 100 Color Palettes.

Timeline of Earth

Timeline of Earth is fun - just scroll and scroll and travel from 4.6 billions years ago to today.

Your maps are not lying to you

Your maps are not lying to you is a nice discussion of the fundamental dilemma of map-making: how to portray something huge, complex, and 3-D (the earth) as something much smaller, simpler, and 2-D (the map). Here's a nice and simple illustration of this problem:

https://twitter.com/mjfoster83

Note-Taking Matters

We all know that, but Note-taking: A Research Roundup offers a nice and concise 'meta-analysis'. Plus: Sketchnoting.

The Geography of Facebook

The NYT mapped - in essence - how likely it is that you will be Facebook friends with somebody in a different county in the USA. And - in essence - people tend to be Facebook friends with people who (already) live close-by. Read more about it here.

Living Map

Living Map is a startup company to make it easier for people to navigate complex places.

• Read about here: Meet Living Map
• Example: The Met
• Example: This is Cleveland

DRAW

DRAW stands for 'Data Rescue: Archival and Weather', allows volunteers to participate in the transcription of historical weather logs captured at the McGill weather observatory since 1863. The weather information contained in these logs needs to be transcribed in a digital format in order to be used for scientific research.

Studying Up on Higher Education

Global Land Change (1982 to 2016)

Two recent papers in Nature quantified global land surface changes between 1982 and 2016.

Keenan and Riley (2018): Greening of the land surface.

That's nothing new - green vegetation has increased over the past decades due to (primarily) CO2 increases. In addition, global warming has led to a decline in temperature limitations and thus cold regions has experienced rapid increases in green vegetation.

Song et al. (2018): Land change.

Overall we see less bare ground and more vegetation and that is consistent with the overall greening trend.

• Net loss of forest in the tropics, net gain of forest in the extra tropics for a net overall gain in forest.
• Deforestation in the tropics due to agriculture expansion. The three countries with the largest forest loss: Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.
• Forest / woody vegetation expansion in cold regions (Siberia, Quebec, etc.) and other places due to locally increases in precipitation and CO2 fertilization.
• Bare ground cover has decreased, primarily due to agriculture, resource extraction, and urban sprawl. However, bare ground has increased due to land degradation in arid and semi-arid parts of the world.

See How Well You Can Draw All 50 States

Silly, but fun: Quiz: See How Well You Can Draw All 50 States

'Mapping' Global Warming

Here's a nice 'map' of temperature anomalies by country from 1880 through 2017 (The Washington Post): Temperature anomalies from the past 137 years

Contemporary Global Warming placed in geological context

Read more about this visualization here: Contemporary Global Warming placed in geological context

Climate change is local

There are a bunch of nice interactive / animated visualization available that let you 'see' climate change right where you live, for example:

• How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? (NYT)
• 1001 Blistering Future Summers (Climate Central)
• Winter Loses Its Cool (Climate Central)
• The Climate Explorer (as a website, NOAA)
• The Climate Explorer (as an Esri Story Map, NOAA)

Wind Data

Here are two sources for wind data:

• Wind Energy Maps and Data by WINDExchange (Energy.gov). I can see the maps, not entirely sure about the data.
• GIS layers for state maps (US EIA).

Yale Climate Opinion Maps 2018

The Yale Climate Opinion Maps 2018 reveal the basic patterns across the USA that you would expect to see. It is great that they include the actual survey questions and also make the data available for download.

Padma River: The Shape of Erosion

Padma River: The Shape of Erosion is nice NASA video illustrating fluvial erosion and meandering of the Padma River in Bangladesh.

Last Glacier Standing in Venezuela

Last Glacier Standing in Venezuela (by NASA) includes some great images and information about the Humboldt Glacier.

Solar in China

This is how you do solar!

DigitalGlobe

VR Glaciers and Glaciated Landscapes

Okay, I'm impressed: VR Glaciers and Glaciated Landscapes is awesome!

Digital Mappa

Digital Mappa looks pretty cool - from the website:

Digital Mappa is a freely available online environment for creating projects out of digital images and texts. The premise of DM is simple and powerful: if you have a collection of digital images and/or texts, you should be able to produce an online resource that links together specific moments on these images and texts together, annotate these moments as much as you want, collaborate with others on this work, have the content you produce be searchable, and publish this work to others or the public as you wish. And you should be able to do this with little technical expertise.

Humboldt Glacier

Here's a simple web map with a Landsat view of the Humboldt Glacier from 13 December 2017 - showing the 'hole' that is starting to develop in the SW-lobe of the glacier: https://arcg.is/1HT1me

Urban Planning and Sim City

This is maybe a little dorky, but pretty cool: An Urban Planner Plays Sim City

Story Maps and the Digital Humanities

Story Maps and the Digital Humanities includes some great examples, for example:

• The Fight for Fair Housing in the United States
• Indiana Limestone

The author also makes some very salient points regarding the usefulness of digital technology in the humanities. DH technology (here: Story Maps) can offer new insights and allows for the broader dissemination of those insights.  

Voyages in Deep Time

Voyages in Deep Time is an exciting project which has developed free smartphone apps to encourage people to visit and enjoy learning about their local rocks and landscapes that tell us what our part of the world was like millions of years ago – in deep time! That's all I know - give the apps a try!

Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs)

Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) are getting more and more popular - here are some resources:

• How to pick an electronic laboratory notebook
• Electronic Lab Notebooks
• The Electronic Lab Notebook in 2018: A comprehensive guide

Mapping Deforestation

Nice article: Combating deforestation: From satellite to intervention (Science, 22 June 2018). They include the figure below showing how one can use Landsat and Planet imagery in combination to get at the drivers and causes of deforestation.

Global Warming

Lot's of interesting stuff going on in this graphic!

Cartography Playground

The Cartography Playground is a simple and interactive website for explaining cartographic algorithms, problems and other matters.

Fluvial Erosion

World of Change: Padma River has a great animation with images between 1988 and 2018. Below is the simple animated GIF.

From Data to Viz

From Data to Viz is really impressive!

1. A cool decision-tree (with examples!) to best visualize data based on the input data format (numeric, categoric, etc.). Here's the poster of the complete decision-tree.
2. An interactive overview of chart types.
3. A collection of data viz caveats (with examples).

https://www.data-to-viz.com/

American Land Use

Here's How America Uses Its Land is a great visualization of land use across the USA in a series of stylized maps to see the relative contributions of pasture/range, cropland, forest, urban, and more.

http://flowingdata.com/

NASA Remote Sensing Toolkit

NASA’s new Remote Sensing Toolkit promises to be the kitchen sink for all things remote sensing: data, tools, and code. More about it here.

Story Maps and the Digital Humanities

Story Maps and the Digital Humanities states the obvious: story maps are perfect tools or vehicles for the digital humanities. That being said: Esri Story Maps is a great environment to create and share story maps, but there are other great alternatives (for example https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/projects/).

Voting Software

Nice!

2016 Election at the the precinct level

States - Counties - and now we can explore the 2016 election results down to the precinct level with An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election by the NYT. Well-done!

Define Projection or Project?

Define Projection or Project? is a nice and concise explanation of the Define Projection and the Project tool in ArcGIS (the currency analogy is great!).

QGIS 3 Beginner's Basic Tutorial

The QGIS 3 Beginner's Basic Tutorial is a nice and quick way to get to know QGIS.

Visual Vocabulary

Visual Vocabulary is a cool interactive (created in Tableau) that connects data relationships to their most appropriate data visualizations. That's similar to the Chart-Doctor poster.

Why Earth Has Two Levels

The Wayback Machine

From Esri: Wayback imagery is a digital archive of the World Imagery basemap, enabling users to access more than 80 different versions of World Imagery captured over the past 5 years.

• Read more at Wayback - 81 Flavors of World Imagery
• The World Imagery Wayback app
• Using World Imagery Wayback

I suppose going back 5 years is useful, but a longer time frame would be better. 

Mastering Geospatial Analysis with Python

Mastering Geospatial Analysis with Python looks like a great book for those interested in using Python for geospatial analysis.

A Crash Course in Cyclogenesis and Conveyor Belt Theory

This is quite good: A Crash Course in Cyclogenesis and Conveyor Belt Theory.

https://www.mountwashington.org/uploads/Conveyor.jpg

Assessment of Undergraduate Research – from David Lopatto

Good stuff from Laura Guertin: Assessment of Undergraduate Research – from David Lopatto.

All the building footprints in the United States

Found on FlowingData: All the building footprints in the United States. That's 124,885,597 computer-generated building footprints created by Microsoft and available as open-source.

Now here it is mapped by the NYT: A MAP OF EVERY BUILDING IN AMERICA

FloodRisk

FloodRisk is a plugin for QGIS to quantify flood impacts and risks. Here are a few papers using FloodRisk:

• FloodRisk: a QGIS plugin for flood consequences estimation (Mancusi et al. 2015)
• FloodRisk: a collaborative, free and open-source software for flood risk analysis (Albano et al. 2017)
• Using FloodRisk GIS freeware for uncertainty analysis of direct economic flood damages in Italy (Albano et al. 2018)

Freeman Hrabowski: 4 pillars of college success in science

Data Illustrator

Data Illustrator looks great - a browser-based data viz tool - and comes with a nice Getting Started tutorial. The rest is a bit murky, especially their business model, pricing, etc.

Open Source 3D Mapping

Okay, I'm not a big fan of 3D mapping - I think its more hype than an actual practical improvement. But, here are two open-source options:

• OpenGlobus
• CesiumJS

Teach with GIS

Teach with GIS is  new compilation of educational resources by Esri focused on K-12 (JIT for the Esri UC/EdUC).

kepler.gl

kepler.gl is Uber’s open-source geospatial toolbox and for some reason that is not clear to me they make it available to us. Read more about it: From Beautiful Maps to Actionable Insights: Introducing kepler.gl, Uber’s Open Source Geospatial Toolbox.

I took a quick Uber (...) and it seems to work just fine. The data export worked, the image export did not, but that is probably solvable.

W-MA 1 June 2011 Tornado

Here are a couple of nice videos:

• https://youtu.be/qGYCkGv5sPs
• https://youtu.be/zPGlgMg72iE

Scientific Programming with Python

https://www.ats.amherst.edu/software/scipy/

Blockchain explained

Blockchain explained is a nice viz by Reuters Graphics. I guess I get it now. Maybe.

https://readable.io/

https://readable.io/ has been around for a while to test and measure just how readable your text is. Anne K. Emery offers a nice example on how to use it for data viz.

Ancient Earth Globe

The Ancient Earth Globe has been around for a while, but remains a nice way to take a spin around our plant starting 700 million years ago.

Humboldt Glacier (12 March 2018)

Earth from Space

This is just cool: the Earth and the Moon from a CubeSat headed for Mars. This is similar to the famous Pale Blue Dot image from 1990.

What Is the Point of a Makerspace?

I get it - sort of. What Is the Point of a Makerspace? and the associated podcast (with transcript) helps to clarify things - sort of. The overall argument: a maker mindset is essential for a happy and successful life in the 21st century. In other words: all that 'new' learning becomes much more effective if it makes an actual product (as opposed to just planning or designing it).

We have a word for that already (especially in higher education) and it's called student research and creative scholarship: a) you make something tangible, b) you need to share it with others, and c) it has to have some level of academic scholarship associated with it.

1-3-25

Excellent points: Why No One is Reading Your Report (by Stephanie Evergreen) and also applicable to the way we usually present scientific information.

http://stephanieevergreen.com/why-no-one-is-reading-your-report/

MappiMundi

Seen on Maps Mania: MappiMundi is a new interactive mapping platform for recording and exploring historical events in space and time.

EO Browser

EO Browser looks pretty useful. From the website: EO Browser combines a complete archive of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3, ESA’s archive of Landsat 5, 7 and 8, global coverage of Landsat 8, Envisat Meris,  Proba-V and MODIS products in one place.

EarthTime

EarthTime is a pretty slick web-based animation / time sequence of climate change impacts seen from space. The deforestation examples are particularly striking. I also like that you can export the views as images, videos, and animated GIFs (see example below).

Map Warper

Map Warper has been around for a while - a nice and free tool to georectify old maps / aerial photographs, etc. Once done, the (now georectified) map can be exported as a GeoTiff, KML, PNG, etc.

Boston 3D Buildings

OK, let's all pretend to be impressed: Boston 3D Buildings as of 2/15/17. Sure, it looks cool (maybe), but what can you realistically do with this?

Maps in Story Maps

Indeed, you can use maps in Story Maps! It seems a bit weird to have to even mention that, but I guess Story Maps have matured. To me, a Story Map template has always been just one of the many ways that I can create a web app from an ArcGIS Online map. In other words: the map(s) come first.

Note to Esri: perhaps you should consider simpler and more consistent terminology...it's getting a little confusing!

Anyways, How to use maps in Story Maps introduces two Story Maps that demonstrate how to use maps in Story Maps. If that sounds confusing, you are not alone.

The Nuclear Waste Problem

Ecological Footprint

The Ecological Footprint map is rendered nicely using Tableau. You can download the data for each country, but I can't find a way to just grab the complete data set.

Historical Aerials

Historical Aerials is a nice and simple way to find historical aerial photographs from across the USA. The catch: it's a commercial site and thus they charge for the images.

The Augmented World

From their website: AugmentedWorld is a location-based, interactive, educational crowd science platform that facilitates the collection, presentation, and sharing of scientific data. AugmentedWorld facilitates the examination of natural phenomena by the generation of an open question that leads to an inquiry-based learning process.

Read more about it and how the tool can benefit teaching and learning: Barak and Askale (2018): AugmentedWorld: Facilitating the creation of location-based questions. Computers & Education, 121.

The COPUS Analyzer

Here a recent paper in Science that basically proofed and quantified what we already know: most STEM teaching and learning is (still) dominated by passive lectures. Here's what's cool: the authors created an online app to conduct their analysis and now we can use the app to compare our own teaching to the large data set used in the study. This is a great examples of crowd-sourcing additional data while at the same time give teachers a way to place themselves into the context of the wider community.

• Stains et al. (2018) Anatomy of STEM teaching in North American universities
• Press release (U. of Nebraska-Lincoln)
• COPUS Analyzer

The Smart Citizen Toolkit

This is interesting. First, you have the Smart Citizen Kit = a simple gizmo for citizen-based environmental monitoring, especially for urban area. Then you add Citizen Science Toolkit as a process and community.

How many PVs do you need?

More specifically: what's the area of solar panels that you need to power a country?

Wind Power in the USA

Seen on Maps Mania: America Powered by Wind

• The U.S. Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB)
• Wind Farms Through the Years
• Global Wind Atlas

Population

Resource Watch

Resource Watch is a pretty incredible web mapping tool. You can load-in all kinds of data sets and also download the underlying data, for example the Global Power Plant Database or the Climate Vulnerability Index.

SplashMaps

SplashMaps makes the perfect gift: define your area of interest and they make you a wearable map.

The Power of Ten using Census Data

That sounds weird, but works very well - zooming-out from a census block to the country and you can pick your starting location: A map "dealing with the relative size of things" in the American Census

ArcGIS Image Analyst

People always forget: ArcGIS Image Analyst is part of ArcMap / ArcGIS Pro and works just fine for image analysis in my (limited) experience. Now also available for free with ArcGIS for Personal Use and ArcGIS for Student Use.

The Climate Atlas of Canada

The Climate Atlas of Canada is great: rich content with an interactive gridded map and links to data and reports

DigitalOcean eBook: How To Code in Python

DigitalOcean eBook: How To Code in Python looks promising: a nice (free) eBook in various formats and good ideas on how to teach and learn coding with Python. Nice OER option!

• How To Code in Python 3 (eBook as PDF)

EOS Land Viewer

The EOS Land Viewer is a simple, intuitive web interface that EOS provides as a direct market product to the public. Land Viewer allows non-expert users to select a geographic area for analysis, an earth observation data types, and then apply their choice of on-the-fly imagery analytics.

Land Viewer seems to be one part of the broader EOS Platform. You can read more about it here: New EOS platform lets you run image processing tasks in browser (be warned: this reads like a paid advertisement like many things on Geoawesomeness).

Humboldt Glacier (Venezuela): Drone Videos

Here are three incredible drone videos by Helena Carpio of the Humboldt Glacier in late February 2018.

• https://youtu.be/cqHXK3v1WII
• https://youtu.be/t3xCB7k6aR4
• https://youtu.be/KLbO0eNE4aQ

Alternative Fuels Data Center

The Alternative Fuels Data Center (US DOE) provides a nice interactive map and complete data download option for alternative fueling stations (e.g. electric, hydrogen, etc.) across the country. Data are updated monthly.

Perceptions of Science in America

A new report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• The report
• The quiz
• The figures

A Domain of One’s Own

Great essay by Alan Jacobs Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future highlighting the importance of owning (and thus controlling) your digital work and identity.

Historypin

Historypin is a place for people to share photos and stories, telling the histories of their local communities.

Looks great - not sure what their business model is here...

Oblique Satellite Views

Earth at a Glance highlights some impressive obliques from 280 miles up using Planet’s SkySat constellation.

Shorthand

Shorthand claims to be beautifully simple storytelling for professional storytellers. Not sure we needed yet another Story Map platform, especially a commercial one.

Kibana

Kibana lets you visualize your Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack. I have no idea what that means, but it looks and sounds cool.

Animated GIF

This was originally an interactive map in the NYT.

Free Courses by Anne K. Emery

Not sure how this works financially, but it seems like she's offering free self-paced courses on how to write better reports, work with spreadsheets, and data viz.

• Soar Beyond the Dusty Shelf Report in 7 Days is running right now.

'New' iPad for education

Not sure how much is really 'new' as opposed to 'new branding', but Apple Reveals A New iPad Aimed At Students is a nice review.

There is some truth here...

Just Google It!

LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You) is great: http://lmgtfy.com/

Leaf-Out

Seen on FlowingData: Hang On, Northeast. In Some Parts, Spring Has Already Sprung.

Video Editors

I don't really do any video editing, but here's a good list and discussion of some free options: The best free alternative to YouTube Video Editor 2018: polish your clips before publishing.

Easter Island is Eroding

Easter Island is Eroding is a classic scrollable story map, showcasing all the current bells and whistles of these things.

Sit, Stay, Heel

Such a classic and so relevant to education today.

Peter Steiner, New Yorker, 25 June 1990

ICEMAP

ICEMAP is fun - animating the expansion and demise of the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet over the last ca. 35,000 years, complete with sea level and temperature. I want this for North America!

The Rise and Fall of American Cities

Seen on Maps Mania: The Alperin-Sheriff/Wikipedia population dataset - very cool in terms of the data and the presentation as a scrollable Story Map.

What to consider when creating pie charts

What to consider when creating pie charts is great and nicely-illustrated with examples. In-fact, the whole Datawrapper Academy site has some great information (regardless of whether or not you use Datawrapper).

The Energy-Water Nexus

Here's a new online tool - complete with learning activities - to explore the connections between energy, food, and water: HydroViz. The tool is described here: New Online Tool Teaches Students About the Energy-Water Nexus.

This reminds me of the great book Oil, Water, and Climate: An Introduction (by Catherine Gautier) - I hope she's working on the 2nd edition!

Global Weirding

Global Weirding is a YouTube channel with/by Katharine Hayhoe. She has become somewhat of a celebrity climate change science communicator because she is a) a real and accomplished atmospheric scientist and b) a real evangelical christian. If those seem at odds with each other have a look at her book A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions.

• Season 1 Summary (via GeoEd Trek)
• Season 2 Summary (via GeoEd Trek)

Here's her recent TEDx talk: What if climate change is real?

mPing app

Crowd-sourcing precipitation type with mPING by NOAA.

Extremes

Twine 2 and Harlowe 2

Twine 2 and Harlowe 2 are two connected tools to make games in the classroom - broadly connected to the world of Digital Humanities. Looks interesting!

R Markdown

Getting Started with R Markdown is a nice tutorial to get started.

AR, VR, and MR in the classroom

Kathy Schrock has compiled a lot of great resources:

• Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality in the Classroom
• Augmented reality (AR) in the classroom
• Also: Augmented reality for STEM learning: A systematic review (Computers and Education, 2018)

This video is a great example of what will be: Hyper-Reality (it gets really good at the 2-minute mark).

Fixed Broadband Deployment

Fixed Broadband Deployment (by the FCC) is a nice web map that offers all kinds of options, including nice data downloading.

Workshop on data visualization literacy

Plotting the Course Through Charted Waters is pretty good.

How Machines Learn

One part of AI is machine learning, where the machine derives expertise (= algorithms) from experience based on training data. And that's where Big Data comes-in: if the training data are indeed 'big', then our AI can learn from many many data points (aka circumstances) and that makes the AI algorithms more and more useful.

Here's one catch: since the training data are not the same, AI algorithms are not reproducible as they train themselves using the ever-growing 'big' training data.

Northwestern University Knight Lab

Northwestern University Knight Lab is a community of designers, developers, students, and educators working on experiments designed to push journalism into new spaces.

There you have it. In-practice this means some great open-source tools for data viz:

• Timeline JS
• Storyline JS
• Scene VR

SCAM & FLICC

Found this here: The Franklin Institute hosts Science and Storytelling speaker

Related: How to Spot Fake News

Starving the Beast

This should be a 'fun' movie: Starving the Beast or how the right is trying to sabotage public higher education.

Esri Demographics

Esri shared a couple of very nice ways to look at the changing demographics of the United States:

• The Demographics and Statistics Atlas is a nice story map with embedded story maps.
• The Tapestry Segmentation app.

OpenAerialMap (OAM)

OpenAerialMap (OAM) is a set of tools for searching, sharing, and using openly licensed satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery.

Sure - looks good. Let's hope people will use it!

There’s a chart for that

Esri is promoting their new Insights for ArcGIS product, here with a nice series on charts and how to best use them.

• There’s a chart for that (Intro to charts, part 1)

Redlining in Modern America

Seen on Maps Mania: Redlining in Modern America

Slack and MatterMost

Slack is pretty hip right now and also popular among scientists as a collaboration tool. MatterMost is an open-source alternative.

There is really nothing / not much that these tools do that you can't do with Email, but there is just too much crap these days on Email and people are looking for more-focused collaboration alternatives.

The Carstenz Glacier

The Carstenz Glacier used to be one of the largest ice masses on Papua New Guinea on the Puncak Java massif. NASA has a nice comparison between 1988 and 2017.

November 1988

December 2017

Typefaces for Maps

Here is a useful compilation of useful typefaces for maps as well as other uses (e.g. presentations, reports, etc.): Cartographers' Preferred Typefaces.

Nuclear Waste

NOAA Data Snapshots

NOAA Data Snapshots is simple and you can download the maps as simple graphic files - very convenient!

Live, Interactive, Open-Source, and Open-Access Figures

Yep, that's a thing and an important one in science and Jeffrey Perkel has written a couple of nice articles about this in Nature:

• Data visualization tools drive interactivity and reproducibility in online publishing (Nature 1 February 2018)
• Interactive figures address data reproducibility (Nature Jobs Blog 20 October 2017)

The tech-side of this gets pretty nerdy pretty fast: have a look at Plotly, Jupyter, and Binder.

Shifting Population Centers

Here are two nice web maps that illustrate the westward-shift of population across the USA:

• County Populations
• Top-10 Cities

Both use different web mapping tools - here a more simple approach (e.g. animated GIF or video) would be nice to include as well.

Accessing and Using Lidar Data from The National Map

Accessing and Using Lidar Data from The National Map is a great little tutorial to a) Lidar, b) the National Map, and c) ArcGIS Pro.

Speaking of ArcGIS Pro: Esri, are you really sure that this will run faster then ArcGIS Desktop? Maybe in-theory, but not in-practice on my computer. In other words: using ArcGIS Pro is an exercise in patience and waiting.

How to talk to an ostrich

How to talk to an ostrich is a video series by Richard Alley that 'answers' some of the most common misconceptions about the reality of global warming. Some are pretty good, some are pretty bad, but all are useful for teaching.

That being said: I'm not sure people will be too interested in watching and learning if first insult and belittle them by calling them ostriches. Is that effective communication?

Crash Course Statistics

Crash Course Statistics looks promising:

1. Crash Course Statistics #1
2. Crash Course Statistics #2

NASA WorldView

NASA WorldView is great for exploring MODIS images (and many more types of data) over time: quick, easy, and you can download the images or quick JPGs. As often the case, the website can be overwhelming die to its design and amount of available data.

Here's something much quicker and simpler: Global MODIS for the last 7 days - nothing more - just a quick way to see what the earth looked like from space last week

Planet Labs and Planet Explorer Beta

Planet Labs runs a fleet of little CubeSats and Planet Explorer Beta is their free tool for viewing their data. The 1-month mosaics are pretty nice, you can easily save a screen image, measure distances/areas, and upload KML, shapefiles, etc.

Beyond that it gets a little more murky: the daily images don't seem to show (or maybe it is just slow?) and it is not clear how one could obtain the actual image for proper analysis. They offer an Education and Research Program and so it should be possible to get at the data.

McCabe et al. (2017, Water Resources Research) discuss some interesting applications of the Planet Labs CubeSat data in hydrology.

PROMICE

PROMICE = Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet a) wins the prize for best acronym and b) the prize for best sharing of weather station data.

Flourish

Flourish is a new interactive data viz tool, similar in many ways to Datawrapper. People like Andy Kirk seem to like it. The catch, of course, is price: is the free version able to do what you need it to do? If yes = great! If no = pay or learn an open-source tool.

 Along those lines: have a look at RAWGraphs.

NYC from Space

http://www.dailyoverview.com/sixtytwo

Urgentry

Urgentry is a quick an easy way to display census tract data (1990, 2000, 2010) for Boston. Why only Boston...this should be easy to expand statewide. And, let's use block or at least block groups.

Glacial Retreat 1985 - 2017

NASA offered this nice example from the South Patagonian Icefield - make sure you click-on View Image Comparison to get the best effects.

NASA SEDAC

Who knew that NASA runs SEDAC = the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center. They provide tons of maps, population data, and a fun online Population Estimator.

Travel Time and Distance

Seen on Map Mania: here are two nice examples of travel time and travel distance analysis:

• Show where is reachable from _____ within _____ by _____
• Create a Radius Map

2017 - 2nd Hottest Year on Record

More here from NASA.

LiDAR vs Photogrammetry

Drone LiDAR or Photogrammetry? Everything you need to know. is an interesting and useful read. But it misses the point (I think). LiDAR is LIDAR = gives you a DEM, DTM, DSM - whatever you prefer to call it. Photogrammetry gives you orthophotos - which is something entirely different. Unless you are talking about doing SfM from your images.

Blockchain

I still have no idea how it works, but this video is a nice explanation of what it can do for us:

6 Ed Tech Tools to Try in 2018

6 Ed Tech Tools to Try in 2018 includes some fun things, for example Sway and AutoDraw. InsertLearning looks actually useful - basically allows you to create a learning activity by annotating a web page.

Want more ideas? Jennifer Gonzalez annually produces The Teacher's Guide to Tech 2018 that you can purchase for $25.

The National Climate Assessment (NCA)

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) still exists - at least for now. In-fact, NCA4 Volume 1 - the Climate Science Special Report (CSSR) has just been released.

• NCA3
• NCA4 Volume I
• NCA4 Volume II (late 2018, hopefully...)

Start with Why.

Worth 18-minutes listening to Simon Sinek here:

Mapping Electricity in Real-Time

Here are two nice examples:

1. UK offshore wind electricity generation in real-time.
2. Global real-time electricity generation map (great to compare different countries).

The Global Map of Accessibility

The Global Map of Accessibility is pretty much self-explanatory.

Digital Humanities

I'm reading the book Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom and here are some of the interesting websites and tools mentioned:

• Companion website
• Omeka as a content management system.
• We all know Flickr, but I did not know that it comes with an integrated annotations/notes feature.
• Then there is VideoAnt to annotate videos, for example from YouTube.
• Annotate music lyrics with Genius.
• Text analysis such as word clouds with Voyant.
• Scanner Pro to scan and manage documents.
• TimeGlider or Sutori for timelines.
• Canva, Vennage, and Piktochart for infographics.
• Wikispaces for wikis and PBworks for collaboration.
• Evernote for staying organized.
• Slack for collaboration.
• IdeaMâché to make online multimedia collages (has a Chrome extension).

Scene Viewer 2017

Some of the 2017 highlights and features of Scene Viewer presented as a story map: Scene Viewer - 2017 Review.

Story Maps 101

Story Maps 101 is a nice introduction to story mapping:

• What kinds of stories can you tell with story maps?
• What kinds of apps are available to help you tell your story?

Each 'kind' includes an example to illustrate the possibilities.

Giovanni

Giovanni is NASA's new web-based tool for accessing and visualizing earth science data. Looks great, but perhaps a bit too complex...have a look at Giovanni: The Bridge Between Data and Science for a nice introduction.

How does LiDAR work?

Go Anywhere

Go Anywhere gives you the best driving directions with your Tesla - taking into account the locations of charging stations.

Our Favorite Story Maps from 2017

Our Favorite Story Maps from 2017 by the Esri Story Maps team.

The Trump World - Mapped

Found on cartonerd:

• Trump's World
• Trump's Ties

The Noreaster of 2018

4 January 2018 - read more about it here.

Earth and Moon

Read more about it.