Sunday, December 22, 2019

https://www.solar-estimate.org/

https://www.solar-estimate.org/ is clearly commercial, but it would be interesting to compare the results with the good old PVWatts Calculator by the NREL.

R, RStudio, RStudio Cloud

R is a programming language or a software environment for statistical analysis, scientific computing, and graphics. RStudio is an IDE for using R. In other words: You can use R without using RStudio, but you can't use RStudio without using R. Finally, there is RStudio Cloud.

Now, just be aware: R is open-source, but RStudio is not.

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Green Mountain Maps

Nothing really 'fancy' here, but Green Mountain Maps is a nice use of open-source data for a specific purpose (here tree skiing in Vermont).

Colors

Here are two great apps for better color choices:
Of course there's always the good old ColorBrewer 2.0.

Sunday, December 15, 2019

McKibben (after Humboldt)

“We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?”

Bill McKibben (http://grist.org/article/mckibben-imagine/)

Friday, December 13, 2019

Weather Time Machine

The title is somewhat misleading, but the Weather Time Machine is a great data viz / story map of how we can use old ships logs to estimate past weather and climate.

Sunday, December 8, 2019

Awning Design

Here's a nifty little modeling tool for your passive solar house: Awning Design (from Science Pickle, just scroll-down).


Thursday, December 5, 2019

ERA5 Explorer

The ERA5 Explorer is pretty fancy: click on the map and get a bunch of interactive charts. 

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Counting Zebras

This is a nice explanation of pattern-based AI.

DataWrapper

DataWrapper recently changed their pricing structure and their new free plan is really appealing now: unlimited charts, export as PNGs, and collaboration. Nice.

Sunday, December 1, 2019

Google Earth Projects

I almost forgot about this, but Google Earth Projects are a quick and easy way to fly around the earth from place-to-place. More here or have a look at the Help Content or watch below.

Saturday, November 30, 2019

NetCDF into ArcGIS Pro

The lesson Explore Future Climate Projections is pretty good and nicely-shows how to import and map NetCDF files (and convert to tables).

Thursday, November 28, 2019

En-ROADS and C-ROADS

En-ROADS and C-ROADS are both climate change policy/solutions simulators - great tools for teaching and learning.

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Mercator, it's not hip to be square

Good stuff from Ken Field: Mercator, it's not hip to be square. Quote: "Simply put, Web Mercator kills thematic maps." Perfect example: 2019 Canadian election maps.


Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Infrared Radiation

The first 15 seconds (and the rest) show a nice example of infrared vs. visible radiation (aka light).

SLR Maps

There are a bunch of web-based interactive tools to visualize the impacts of sea-level rise - here are a few of them:

Sunday, November 3, 2019

Saturday, October 26, 2019

ParkScore and ParkView

How does your community 'score' in terms of access to public parks? Have a look at ParkScore and ParkView (by The Trust For Public Land).

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Overview

Overview is great and you can search and access the high-resolution images either via the index or the map.

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

City Streets

The direction of streets in cities can tell you a lot about its geography and history: Urban Street Network Orientation is a nice data viz of that.

MS Excel and Google Sheets on Steroids!

I admit: I use MS Excel a lot and I'm still amazed how much more there is 'under the hood' in terms of functions, analysis options, and charting tricks - here are a few good ones I came across recently:

Friday, October 18, 2019

Atmosphere, Oceans, and Continents

The EarthWindMap (https://earth.nullschool.net/) is awesome, especially the ability to visualize different atmospheric levels and weather variables. Now we have KCM-earth to compare ocean and wind currents between today and the Early Cretaceous.

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

1-Minute Map Hacks

John Nelson put together a series of quick videos called 1-Minute Map Hacks with some neat tips and tricks. My favs: 1) How to Fix Overly-Busy Coastlines, 2) How to Tweak a Projection, and 3) Georeference Images.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

Saturday, September 28, 2019

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Inclusive Teaching

This is a pretty good read: Want to Reach All of Your Students? Here’s How to Make Your Teaching More Inclusive. The authors emphasize the importance of structure and offer a nice analogy: "For example, say you threw a party to bring together your single friends. They are far more likely to meet a variety of people if you plan icebreakers and activities (high structure) than if you simply provide space and time for the event (low structure). The same is true of learning: More structure means more students will engage and learn from you and their peers...the extroverted party lover is going to mingle and meet people in either a low- or high-structure event. But the introverts (like us) who aren’t comfortable with random mingling won’t. Helping those who need the structure doesn’t harm those who don’t."

Air Bubbles in Ice

Great photograph by @ lakewoodhiker:

https://twitter.com/lakewoodhiker/status/1173978513247879168

Sunday, September 15, 2019

IBM Watson Studio Desktop

IBM Watson Studio Desktop does it all: data viz, Big Data, AI, gives back rubs, etc. Way too expensive @ $199/month, but there is a free student edition.

Saturday, September 14, 2019

Extreme climate change has arrived in America

2°C: BEYOND THE LIMIT is a nice scroll-able data viz from the Washington Post. Be patient, keep on scrolling, and you will eventually find an interactive chart showing temperature changes between 1895 and 2018 for a U.S. County of your choice.

SLR & Coastal National Parks

SLR & Coastal National Parks is well-done.

LabScrum

Scrum for academic labs = LabScrum. I like it: sprints, stand-ups, etc. could make the way we operate so much more effective. Nice article in Nature: A project-management tool from the tech industry could benefit your lab.

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Mercator (again)

Mercator - It's  flat, flat world is a nice immersive story map that nicely describes and illustrates the history of this map and map projection.

Sunday, September 8, 2019

Snow Depth Mapping using SfM and more

Goetz and Brenning (2019): Quantifying uncertainties in snow depth mapping from structure from motion photogrammetry in an alpine area. Water Resources Research, doi: 10.1029/2019WR025251.

Filhol et al. (2019): Time-lapse Photogrammetry of Distributed Snowdepth During Snowmelt. Water Resources Research, doi: 10.1029/2018WR024530. Ground-based, oblique with 3 cameras - easy in concept, but the details are complex. They make a good point: usually we either have high-frequency time series from point measurements or sporadic spatial data from satellites, UAVs, etc. Their approach tries to bridge that gap.

Friday, August 30, 2019

uHandy Mobile Microscope Duet

The uHandy Mobile Microscope Duet looks really fun and a great way to use a smartphone for science teaching. It's a little pricey at $129.95, but there's the uHandy Lite for $34.95. Read a review here.

Monday, August 26, 2019

Google Earth Studio

Google Earth Studio is an animation tool for Google Earth’s satellite and 3D imagery. Sounds fun!

Thursday, August 22, 2019

Anchor Phenomena in Science Teaching

Anchor phenomena is one of the buzz words today in STEM teaching and learning: something that connects a specific activity or learning sequence to something that students find compelling. Here are some resources:

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Cyber Agriculture

Cyber Agriculture: read more about it The future of agriculture is computerized (MIT News). That's all fine - now please show me that this works for growing something useful such as potatoes, cassava, tubers, etc. - then I may get excited.

Educational Attainment in America

Educational Attainment in America is a nice dot map. I find these maps a little tricky to interpret due to the uneven distribution of population across the country. This one, however, has a nice feature in that you can generate a simple bar chart for the current view.

Sunday, August 18, 2019

Julia

Julia = the speed of C with the convenience of Python. If you don't know what any of this means...have a look at Julia: come for the syntax, stay for the speed, download Julia, and start your coding with Juno.

Science & Military

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02389-8

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Machine Learning / AI

Or as we also call it: voodoo. Something that some people do somehow using this thing called Big Data that is out there, but nobody can see (= dark matter). Here are a couple of days to do this voodoo yourself and makes a lot of money.

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Wind Speed, Wind Direction, and Temperature

Wind Speed, Wind Direction, and Temperature across the USA in one animation? Have a look at US Wind Patterns. Cool? Yes! Useful? No.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Mapping Segregation

Nothing new here, but two nice interactive visualizations using two different approaches: one is a classic dot map, the other a census polygon map.

Monday, August 5, 2019

The Top 12 Landsat Image Sites

The Top 12 Landsat Image Sites is pretty obvious. I'm still using the good old USGS GloVIS viewer (works great, also for the Sentinel images).

Saturday, August 3, 2019

Beer in MA

Runways and Wind

Obviously, runways are oriented to match the most common wind direction, so therefore a map of runways should be able to tell us a lot about the most common wind direction. Have a look at Trails of the Wind for just that.

Explore the Solar System with Tabletop Whale

Her work is just incredible: Tabletop Whale. My recent favs:

Dynamic Mapping with MS Excel?

Perhaps not the most efficient way to map, but fun: I Made a Dynamic Hurricane Map with Excel!

The Daily Selfie

Pretty cool animation showing how Planet's fleet of satellites image the entire Earth, daily.

Poverty USA

Poverty USA offers demographic data viz at the US county level for different years in a nice and clean interface. Now, what would be better:
  1. Add the US cities level.
  2. Add a comparison function that let's you compare two cities or counties.
  3. Add a image export.
  4. Add a data export.

Extreme Climate!


Mapping American Artists

Here is a nice example of DH by the NYT.

The Humanitarian Data Exchange

The Humanitarian Data Exchange looks great and Joe Kerski tried it here.

The Cruel Irony Of Air Conditioning

Why the Future of Cars is Electric

Monday, July 29, 2019

The National Map

The National Map (USGS) is one of the most underrated sources of GIS (and other) data, for example the USGS 3D Elevation Program data.

Sunday, July 28, 2019

WorldClim Data

WorldClim is a set of global climate layers (gridded climate data) with a spatial resolution of about 1 km2. These data can be used for mapping and spatial modeling. Best of all: you can get past, current, and future climates. And: all as geoTIFFs and not some cryptic NetCDF...

To Code or to Excel?

https://xkcd.com/2180/

Saturday, June 8, 2019

Timeline JS and Storyline JS

Storyline JS is a fun tool: take a simple Google Sheet with time series data and annotate dates/times of interest with interactive cards. That's it. Simple.

Timeline JS is similar, but offers more features with embedded media to illustrate events over time.

Both are in a sense story maps, but here the main organizational frame is time, not space.

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

First You Make the Maps

First You Make the Maps is just awesome - a great visual narrative of how maps enabled and shaped global trade using an immersive Story Map.

A Slusher!

Nice footage of a little runnel / slushflow in Tuckerman Ravine on 4 June 2019.

The Geographies of Innovation

Seen on Maps Mania: The Geographies of Innovation

And, I agree: these maps are beautiful, artistic, and technologically very high-end. But, they are also confusing, too dense, and just 'too much' data viz wizardry. Thus, they fail that what is perhaps the most-important reason for data viz: telling a data-driven story that your audience finds compelling enough to take action.

Friday, May 31, 2019

Thursday, May 30, 2019

The JPEG

Yep, the JPEG: Read Unraveling the JPEG and you will learn more than you ever wanted about this image file format - excellent!

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI looks interesting - a fancy 'enterprise' version of Tableau maybe (dashboards are certainly hip these days).

Monday, May 27, 2019

Blockly

Blockly is a visual programming 'interface' that uses interlocking blocks to create a programming 'workflow'. Then, on the right, the underlying code is displayed in JavaScript, Python, etc. Looks interesting - I wish they would provide clearer instructions (= without the jargon) on how to install and setup Blockly.

Deforestation: Guatemala vs. Belize

Pretty clear differences in environmental policies highlighted here in Google Earth Timelapse along the Guatemala / Belize border.

Thursday, May 23, 2019

Flourish

Flourish is great: a web-based interactive data viz tool with all the usual features - all very similar to the other players in this field such as Datawrapper. The free public version is great, anything beyond that is outside of what a 'normal' person in higher education would want to pay.

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Monday, May 20, 2019

China's Belt and Road Initiative

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive infrastructure project (aka. the New Silk Road). The goal is obvious: extend China's power by facilitating trade and opening new markets for goods and services - westward and southward.

Here's the catch: these projects are funded via loans from China to the participating countries. And of course China expects a return on that investment. If the countries cannot repay the loan, then China takes over the project (e.g. Sri Lanka's Hambantota port) and thus establishes its presence. Thus, some view the BRI as a 'Trojan Horse' to dominate the rest of Asia.

There is also a scientific side of the BRI as described here: How China is redrawing the map of world science (Nature, 2 May 2019).

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Tinkercad

Tinkercad is a free 3-D design web-based CAD software: design, then export your design for 3-D printing. Not sure how it differs from SketchUp, but both are ultimately linked to large commercial companies.

How Was the Grand Canyon Formed?

Sunday, May 12, 2019

How Does Your State Make Electricity?

How Does Your State Make Electricity? is a great data viz presentation from the NYT. However, I'm not a fan of these 'turd charts' as they imply that huge changes have occurred when the 'turds' cross each other.


Friday, April 26, 2019

The State of Glaciers in 2019

Two recent papers presented global assessments of glaciers outside of the two major ice sheets:
  1. Farinotti et al. (March 2019, Nature Geoscience)
  2. Zemp et al. (18 April 2019, Nature)
In summary: the about 215,000 glaciers (outside of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets) represent about 0.4 m SLR equivalent and glacier mass balances are negative everywhere. Caveat: of these about 215,000 glaciers we only have direct mass balance observations from 450, ice thickness data from about 1,000, and geodetic mass balance data from 19,130.

I'm not so sure that these specific numbers are all that useful - here's the summary: there are a lot of glaciers on Earth and they are all losing mass due to global warming. The details are interesting, but not all that important.

Zemp et al. (2019, Figure 2)

Thursday, April 11, 2019

Urban CO2 Data

Here you can have it all: an interactive map, the data as text files, and the gridded model output as GeoTIFFs: Global Gridded Model of Carbon Footprints (GGMCF)

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Glaciers and Climate

A few resources that I came across recently:

AT Map

Totally impractical, but cool: Appalachian Trail Map by John Nelson.

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Renewables since 2010

This is nicely-done: explore by region, country, and technology: How much electricity is generated from renewable energy sources?

Wave Power

Bears Ears National Monument

Impressive immersive 'scrolly-style story map about the Bears Ears National Monument from the Washington Post.

https://jeopardylabs.com/

https://jeopardylabs.com/ is great as a non-stakes formative assessment.

Saturday, March 16, 2019

Citizen Science

It's been a while since I read anything about that and so the paper Engagement in science through citizen science: Moving beyond data collection (Phillips et al. 2018) was interesting: yes, tell me how we can move beyond just running around outside to collect data. That's fun and important, but that's not science.

Well, turns out that we may want the CS participants to get involved more in the data analysis and project design, but they don't. They are happy collecting data and leaving the rest to the scientists.

Well, that makes sense - we simply cannot engage with everything. There are some things that we just want to do and support but not think about too deeply.

Firefox Send

Firefox Send is a simple and easy way to share files that are too large for Email attachments. I really would like to use Firefox...but Google Drive/Docs works so much better in Google and my Outlook for Web works so much better in IE.

Need a better bar chart?

Take a look at ways to make a better bar chart @ the Bar Chart Menu.

FastCharts

Add your data and chart it using FastCharts. That's it. Quick and easy and not many options for customization. Download as PNG or SVG.

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

The Lifespan of News Stories

The Lifespan of News Stories is pretty cool with an animated timeline of 2018 and a matching interactive map below. I wonder if one could 'classify' the shapes of these 'curves' and create a model to predict the level, intensity, and duration (= lifespan) of future news stories.

Saturday, February 23, 2019

Monday, February 18, 2019

Cyber GIScience Literacy

Yep, that's a term - read more about it here: Cyber Literacy for GIScience: Toward Formalizing Geospatial Computing Education (Shook et al., 2019).

Interesting read, but it is difficult not to get a little disillusioned when you are actually teaching Introduction to GIS to undergraduates in 2019. I like the inspirational ideas, but let's start with some basic computer literacy (where's my file and why does it matter?) - that's especially a problem for Mac users.

https://blogs.agu.org/onthejob/files/2019/02/Forrest-blog.jpg

Saturday, February 16, 2019

Katharine Hayhoe @ TEDWoman 2018

Katharine Hayhoe is getting a little overexposed these days, but her message is important in this TED Talk. Even better is her Global Weirding with Katharine Hayhoe YouTube channel.

3D Printing

Noting new to see here, but some useful links related to 3D printing:

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Shifting Cities Due To Climate Change

Simple and powerful!

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Where Batteries Begin

Where Batteries Begin has great pictures and information on how and where we get the lithium we need for all these batteries that will solve global warming.


Climate Change in 10 Words

After John Cook: It’s real. It’s us. It’s bad. Experts agree. There’s hope.

Sunday, February 3, 2019

Urban Footprint

Urban Footprint sounds cool, but even after exploring their website I'm not sure what it really is...they claim that Urban Footprint will allows us to "Teach basic and advanced planning methods without the hassle of traditional GIS systems".

Thursday, January 24, 2019

How we make electricity

Here are interactive web resources related to electricity generation in the US:

MOL: The Map of Life

MOL Map of Life has it all: interactive web map, data, and an app to contribute to biodiversity observations.

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Thursday, January 10, 2019

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

2018 Winds

This is super-cool: 2018 Winds

This animation nicely shows the main large-scale wind systems and, superimposed, the travels of mid-latitude cyclones in the Westerlies and tropical cyclones ('hurricane pearls') in the Trade Winds.

Embedded below is a similar effort by nullschool (hurricane season starts ~1:15).

Monday, January 7, 2019

Gilbert Plass (1956 and 1959)

Gilbert Plass had this all figured-out 50 years ago.



Google Tour Creator

Google Tour Creator is basically a quick and simple way to build tours using Google Street View imagery. Here's a quick video: How to Use Google's VR Tour Creator.

Nice tool, especially for urbanized and developed areas with good Street View imagery.