Thursday, June 30, 2016

World Births and Deaths, Simulated in Real-Time (Beta)

World Births and Deaths, Simulated in Real-Time (Beta) is pretty neat and nicely illustrates that more people are born than die...hence world population is rising. What's missing is a clear description of the data sources and methods/assumptions underlying this simulation.

Sketchfab

Sketchfab is / wants-to-be the YouTube for 3D and VR. My guess is that Google will eventually just buy it.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Blistering Future Summers

Blistering Future Summers (embedded below) is a nice way to better understand what global warming will 'feel like' for us. The basic approach is not new, see, for example The Changing Northeast Climate Our Choices, Our Legacy by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Yeah Science!

Good read: Science Education, Millennial Workers, and the Mad Skillz Gap

My favorite quote: The paradox of students feeling confidence but lacking skills may be partly the result of our toxic culture of unearned self-esteem, where effusive praise for mediocre achievements mixes with the haunting dread that some child, somewhere, might not feel like a champion all the time.

E=mc2

Great stuff as usual: E=mc2

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

The Ultimate Spreadsheet Dashboard

So you have a bunch of spreadsheets in whatever format (MS Excel, Google Sheets, CSV) and now can connect them all and make pretty charts using Spreadsheet Dashboards by Datadeck. See The Ultimate Spreadsheet Dashboard for more information.

60 Years of Urban Change

60 Years of Urban Change is simple and elegant: 1) take the earliest available aerial of a city, 2) take a recent aerial of the same area, and 3) and combine them in a cool slider window - done.

Monday, June 13, 2016

Sankey Diagram

Acquire’s Sankey Diagram Generator is a fun and useful online tool for creating Sankey Diagrams. I found it helpful to Load an example data set to figure-out some of the terms and nomenclature. How to make a Sankey Diagram explains what they are and how to make them.

Light Pollution Mapping

Here we have a new paper by Falchi et al. (2016) The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness and the associated 2D map and 3D globe.


Friday, June 10, 2016

Geological CCS

This idea has been around for a while: can we inject CO2 into the ground and wait for it to turn into calcium carbonate? In other words: mineral carbonization. Of course we can, but this geological process is considered far too slow to be useful for operation CCS as a mitigation strategy.

But, maybe not - at least for localities with suitable geology: Rapid carbon mineralization for permanent disposal of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions (Science, 10 June 2016).

Here's the science news version GEO-INJECTION SYSTEM CAN TURN CARBON DIOXIDE INTO STONE and the video.

Turning Carbon Emissions to Stone from Earth Institute on Vimeo.

Who lives where?

'Raw' demographic data does not really tell the story of who actually lives in a particular area. Now we have Esri and CartoDB essentially competing for your attention (and business):

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

How-To: Hurricane Map

How-To: Hurricane Map is a great little tutorial (complete with all the needed data) to make the map below using ArcGIS. Try it!


Friday, June 3, 2016

What if we burned all the fossil fuels we have?

This is not a 'new' question and here are some studies and answers:

How old is your map?

http://xkcd.com/1688/large/

Map Maker Bot

Very cool: Map Maker Bot automatically generates maps of US Census ACS data.

Datamaps.co

Datamaps.co is simple and easy: upload a CSV file (with regional data), generate a map, and save it as an image file.

Terrapatten

Terrapattern got people pretty exited: you can search satellite images for patterns. In essence this is similar to a supervised classification used in remote sensing analysis where you define training areas and the software analyzes the satellite images for areas with similar spectral characteristics.

Smartphone GPS Accuracy inside an Urban Jungle

You can read the entire post How accurate is your smartphone’s GPS in an urban jungle? or even the underlying study, but all you really need to know is about 90 feet (on average).

Mapping in QGIS

30 minutes = 1 Map. Nice.

Esri Geoinquiries

GeoInquiries (by Esri) are short, standards-based inquiry activities for teaching map-based concepts found in commonly used textbooks. Collections include:

  • Earth Science (Middle School)
  • US History (High School)
  • Advanced Human Geography (High School)
  • Advanced Environmental Science (High School)
  • Grade 4 Interdisciplinary