Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Foreclosures and Crime: A Geographical Perspective
Foreclosures and Crime: A Geographical Perspective – Volume 1, Issue 3 of the Geography and Public Safety Bulletin The Mapping and Analysis for Public Safety (MAPS) program at NIJ and the Community Oriented Policing Service (COPS) office would like to announce the third issue of the Geography and Public Safety Bulletin. This newsletter will be useful for all police practitioners who are interested in geography and its relationship to crime. Additionally, researchers, policymakers, and others may be interested in reading it to better understand the impact of geography on public safety. Readers will also find practical articles on how to use geographic information systems (GIS), including technical tips and techniques. Issue 3 of Geography and Public Safety examines how the nationwide home foreclosure crisis is affecting crime, police practice, and public policy from a geographic perspective. Articles show that GIS can assess how foreclosures influence crime trends and improve city cleanup of graffiti and blight. Additionally, the issue describes the tenets of the broken windows policing theory, and how this theory explains why police and public planners must react quickly, before crime has a chance to escalate. The articles bring to the fore how the varying geography within a metropolitan area, as well as across metropolitan areas, has an impact on understanding the patterns that are occurring and how to approach the problem.
The publication is available in electronic format at:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/bulletin.htm
Or
http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/RIC/ResourceDetail.aspx?RID=464 A subscription is available by request, in either print or electronic format. If you request a print copy it will be automatically mailed to you, beginning with the next edition. If you request an electronic copy, you will receive a notification that the new issue is ready for download. To make a request, go to:
https://puborder.ncjrs.gov/Listservs/nij/MAPSBulletin.asp
Sincerely, Ronald E. Wilson Program Manager Mapping & Analysis for Public Safety Program and Data Resources @ the National Institute of Justice http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/ 810 7th Street, NW Room 7201 Washington, DC 20531
Brady Forrest, at O'Reilly's Radar, tips us to an interesting mash-up of Flickr, Open Street Map and the Burning Man festival. Why not use this idea for local festivals — fairs, classic car rallies, an introduction to a new shopping center?
Flickr's Burning Man Map Uses Open Street Map
Posted: 26 Aug 2008 07:38 PM CDT
Flickr is best known for its photo-sharing, but increasingly its most innovative work is coming from its geo-developers (Radar post). Yesterday they announced the addition of a street-level map of Black Rock City so that we can view geotagged Burning Man photos. Flickr got the mapping data via Open Street Map's collaboration with Burning Man.
Flickr uses Yahoo! Maps for most of their mapping (and fine maps they are). The underlying data for them is primarily provided by NAVTEQ. NAVTEQ's process can take months to update their customers' mapping data servers. For a city like Burning Man that only exists for a week every year that process won't work. However, an open data project like Open Street Map can map that type of city. To the right you can see what Yahoo's map currently looks like.
This isn't the first time Flickr has used OSM's data. They also used it to supplement their maps in time for the Beijing Olympics. I wonder if Yahoo! Maps will consider using OSM data so that their sister site doesn't continue to outshine them (view Beijing on Yahoo Maps vs. Flickr's Map to see what I mean). OSM's data is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.
In other geo-Flickr news they have added KML and GeoRSS to their API. This means that you can subscribe to Flickr API calls in your feed reader or Google Earth. (Thanks for the tip on this Niall)
If you want to get more insight into Flickr's geo-thinking watch their talk from the Where 2.0 2008conference after the jump.
A new Web 2.0 tool came across our desk today. Widgenie supplies a basic, but effective way to quickly get some elementary dataviz images up on your page(s). Note, however, if you go to the demo page there will be three or four different links for tutorials. They are all the same content. Lets hope these guys give us more riches soon. In the meantime, “MrExcel” gives a slightly richer tutorial on his site here.
Widgenie empowers everyone, from bloggers to business people, to quickly visualize data and share it in many different ways. Now you can publish data in the places you already know and love, places like iGoogle, Facebook, WordPress, and even your own website. We combine all the power of an enterprise-level business intelligence platform and provide it in a convenient Web 2.0 widget.
It's simple to get started, all you need is the Internet, a browser and an understanding of your needs. Are you:
If so, then widgenie is the service for you. With just a quick rub of the lamp, all your data can easily be visualized and shared with everyone who needs it. Best of all, you can do it all by yourself! And it's free!
Widgenie makes it easy to create a widget out of any data including:
Widgenie's one-click upload process makes it easy to upload your data to our service. Once the data is here, widgenie allows you to customize your data to only display the columns and fields you want to see. Best of all, when your data changes, it's easy to re-upload your data so all of your widgets will have the latest information in real-time.
We've been pushing to get news sites to appreciate — and employ — the value of developing timelines for a couple years now (and have the rejected grant proposals to show for it). But thanks to Nathan at FlowingData, we now have an example of what's at hand.
Timelines, much like calendars, can be used to show changes over time in a straightforward way. When you have a bunch of events that occurred at certain times, mark them on a timeline, and you quickly get a sense of what's going on. Take the timeline of 10 largest data breaches for example. You see breaches get more dense as time goes by.
Wrap this idea into web application form, and you get Dippity. There have been similar timeline applications, but Dippity does it a bit better with a primary focus on telling stories with timelines and a good interface. Zoom in, zoom out, drag, and get alternative views as flipbook, list, and map.
Below is a little bit of context to my gas price chart. Check out the full version for a better idea of what Dippity offers.
[Thanks, Canna]
The NYTimes moves an interesting short today describing how a couple of economists did some creative analysis suggesting that Oprah was worth a million-plus primary votes for Obama.
MEDIA TALK Endorsement From Winfrey Quantified: A Million Votes
By BRIAN STELTER Published: August 10, 2008
Presidential candidates make the most of celebrity supporters, showing them off in television ads and propping them on podiums to stand and wave. No doubt Mike Huckabee’s aborted campaign for the Republican nomination got some sort of bump from those commercials of him with Chuck Norris, right?
Or maybe not. Politicians and pundits routinely claim that celebrity endorsements have little sway on voters, and two economists set out recently to test the premise. What they found was that at least one celebrity does hold influence in the voting booth: Oprah Winfrey.
The economists, Craig Garthwaite and Timothy Moore of the University of Maryland, College Park, contend that Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama last year gave him a boost of about one million votes in the primaries and caucuses. Their conclusions were based partly on a county-by-county analysis of subscriptions to O: The Oprah Magazine and sales figures for books that were included in her book club.
Those data points were cross-referenced with the votes cast for Mr. Obama in various polling precincts. The results showed a correlation between magazine sales and the vote share obtained by Mr. Obama, and extrapolated an effect of 1,015,559 votes.
“We think people take political information from all sorts of sources in their daily life,” Mr. Moore said in an e-mail message, “and for some people Oprah is clearly one of them.”
In their as-yet-unpublished research paper on the topic, the economists trace celebrity endorsements back to the 1920 campaign of Warren Harding (who had Al Jolson, Lillian Russell and Douglas Fairbanks in his corner), and call Ms. Winfrey “a celebrity of nearly unparalleled influence.”
The economists did not, however, look at how Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement of Mr. Obama may have affected her own popularity. A number of people — women in particular — were angry that Ms. Winfrey threw her first-ever political endorsement to a man rather than his female opponent.
The research did not try to measure the influence of other stars’ endorsements; for instance, no similar measures were available for Obama supporters like the actress Jessica Alba or Pete Wentz of the band Fall Out Boy. “If a celebrity endorsement is ever going to have an empirically identifiable audience, then it is likely to be hers,” the researchers said of Ms. Winfrey. Sorry, Chuck Norris.
Joe Francica and the other good folks at Directions Magazine and their “All Points Blog” just moved an interesting story headlined below. No doubt this will call for some tweaking of projections and a ton of storage space, depending on your area of interest, but it also bodes well for those arguing about who should have access to the data taxpayers have already paid for.
“Speaking at the ESRI UC Senior Executive Summit in San Diego, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, announced that the 35 years of archived Landsat data will be made available over the web free to the public by the end of the year. The EROS Data Center (EDC) of the USGS will be the lead center to implement this initiative. Though not mentioned specifically, it's likely that some of the data may be released through EDC's EarthExplorer portal that was a pilot project begun last year for Landsat 7 data.
“Listen to my interview with Secretary Kempthorne and USGS Director Mark Myers regarding the announcement of the Landsat data and a follow up questions I asked regarding the USGS's roll in providing policy-makers information about the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and offshore drilling.”
A new version of Flare, the data visualization toolkit for Actionscript (which means it runs in Flash), was just released yesterday with a number of major improvements from the previous version. The toolkit was created and is maintained by the UC Berkeley Visualization Lab and was one of the first bits of Actionscript that I got my hands on. The effort-to-output ratio was pretty satisfying, so if you want to learn Acitonscript for data visualization, check out Flare. The tutorial is a good place to start.
Here are some sample applications created with Flare:
The phrases “community journalism” and “convergence journalism” have been around for decades (in the case of the former) and at least 10 years in the case of the latter. For a long time, “community journalism” referred to the publishing of “…a small daily, 20,000 or less, or maybe a larger weekly or twice- or thrice-weekly.” And “convergence” most often talked about using various print and Audio/Visual media to deliver the same old reportorial product of traditional newspapers and broadcast.
Finally, some are starting to see that the real and much-needed “convergence” has to be implemented on the front-end of the reportorial process. Paul Niwa, at Emerson College, has done just that with some graduate students who created bostonchinatown.org. And we are grateful to Niwa for writing a “how and why we did it” piece for the current issue of the Convergence Newsletter.
Here's Niwa's lede, but do check out the entire piece:
“Community Embraces a Converged Journalism-Sourcing Project By Paul Niwa, Emerson College Boston’s Chinatown is one of the largest and oldest Asian American neighborhoods in the country. Yet, this community of 40,000 does not even have a weekly newspaper. Coverage of the neighborhood in the city’s metropolitan dailies is also weak. In 2006, The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald mentioned Chinatown in 78 articles. Only 16 percent of the sources quoted in those articles were Asian American, indicating that newspapers relied on information from non-residents to cover the neighborhood. With all this in mind, I created the bostonchinatown.org project as an experiment to build a common sourcebook for newsrooms.”
“Community Embraces a Converged Journalism-Sourcing Project
By Paul Niwa, Emerson College
Boston’s Chinatown is one of the largest and oldest Asian American neighborhoods in the country. Yet, this community of 40,000 does not even have a weekly newspaper. Coverage of the neighborhood in the city’s metropolitan dailies is also weak. In 2006, The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald mentioned Chinatown in 78 articles. Only 16 percent of the sources quoted in those articles were Asian American, indicating that newspapers relied on information from non-residents to cover the neighborhood. With all this in mind, I created the bostonchinatown.org project as an experiment to build a common sourcebook for newsrooms.”
O'Reilly Radar delivers an interesting update on Google Earth releasing an API embedded in your browser. What this means is that you can fire-up Google Earth directly from a browser, instead of having to open GE as a separate application. We haven't checked yet, but what this will mean is the potential for another perspective tab on the Google Maps menu.
Embed Google Earth In Your Site
Posted: 28 May 2008 05:43 PM CDT
The Google Earth Plugin was just released this morning (Radar post) and there is already a handy third-party tool available. This is unsurprising considering the general buzz at Google I/O. If you want to embed a 3D Google Earth Map in your site simply follow the directions below.
Browse to the TakItWithMe.com Google Earth Embedded Map Tool Paste in a Google Earth KML link or Google Maps MyMap link if you'd like to include an overlay Click on the 'Load Preview' button. If you did not provide a KML link, you will get a warning before you continue Use the Map Navigation Controls or your mouse to set the Google Earth viewpoint you’d like to be the default for your map Click on the 'Set Center and Zoom' Button Click on the 'Generate Embed Code' Copy the resulting code and paste it into your webpage or blog where you'd like the map to appear To create another map, simply refresh the page and start again
Browse to the TakItWithMe.com Google Earth Embedded Map Tool
I am sure that embedding will be available as soon as Google integrates GE into their main site. While this is something Google hasn't committed to, I think we can assume it will happen. This release of the plugin is Windows only. Michael Jones, CTO of Google Earth, stated that Mac and Linux plugins will be available by August. I assume that Google will wait for those releases before the integration happens.
I met the developer via Frank Taylor at Google I/O. Frank actually has an embed in his post — I don't have windows on this machine so I can't test before embedding a sample on Radar.
Google Earth Escapes the Client and Comes to the Browser
Posted: 28 May 2008 02:49 PM CDT
Google's 3D data has escaped the client and is now a welcome addition to the browser! Today at Google I/O a Google Earth Browser plugin is going to be released. With the plugin installed anybody with a Windows machine will be able to view Google Earth mashups in the comfort of their own browser instead of having to pull up a separate client.
This release does not change Google Maps, the mapping site on Google's domain; it will not be serving up Google Earth imagery (yet). This release does not change all Google maps mashups into Google Earth Mashups. Instead the plugin enables developers to offer Google Earth imagery to their users very easily. I think it is notable that this is being offered to developers first. Why developers first? For one the plugin is being released at Google I/O, Google's developer conference. I think that we should expect many developer-only treats today and tomorrow. Second, mashups can really help with distribution and help gain mindshare with those who don't make it to Google's sites on their own.
As Paul Rademacher, the creator of the first mashup (Housingmaps.com) and the technical lead on the project, pointed out to me during a call last week “The goal, apart from opening up Google Earth, is to bring Earth to the user. You can't help but see Google maps when you surf now you'll also see Google Earth.” The final reason, I am sure, is to keep Google's main mapping site clean. Google Maps has had a lot of features added lately; they will need to spend some time figuring out a 3D UX.
Here are some sample apps for you to try out. You will be prompted to download the plugin:
On the call Paul and Google Earth Product Manager Peter Birch pointed out some of the technical features of the plugin. The Firefox and IE plugins enable a Javascript API, very similar to the existing Google Maps API, that enables the imagery, camera titling, new controls, and 3D models (importable from Sketchup and websites). Developers will be able to use KML to instruct the API. Mouse events are available for all features and the default behavior can be overridden. Google's Sky imagery is also available and can be accessed programatically. Developers can create an events window for their application that renders 100% full HTML for the browser you are in.
The plugin enables the latest Google Earth features (release 4.3) including “Photo-realistic buildings from cities around the world”, “Dawn to dusk views with the Sunlight feature”, ” and “Swoop navigation from outer space to street-level” (this was incredibly smooth when I tried it). Developers will be able to toggle the buildings on and off (the screenshot above has them on – wow, they rival VE's latest work, Radar post).
Using the plugin was very cool and fun. I have always enjoyed swooping around the world. I almost never fire up Google Earth unless I m specifically researching something for it. I think that I will use the client even less, but will use the Google Earth data even more. They have a packed an amazing amount of functionality into a browser plugin.
The “battle” between Google and Microsoft is closest at the mapping front. Both are spending amazing amounts of money collecting imagery and data (Radar post). Up till now Google had ceded the 3D space in the browser to Microsoft. This is a strong shot across the 3D bow. Both Virtual Earth and the GE Plugin are Windows only — right now. Mac support is coming from Google (I didn't ask about Linux, but I can't imagine that Google would exclude the developer-centric platform). Virtual Earth on the other hand was implemented with a C# plugin and has never said that they will release a version that supports Macs. As a mashup developer which 3D platform would you choose? I'll bet for most it will be the one that supports all comers. I hope the GE Plugin helps push the VE team towards supporting the Mac.
Paul Rademacher, the technical lead, will be giving a session on the Google Earth Plugin today at 3PM2PM. The session is currently entitled Map Mashups Session — are there any other coyly titled sessions? Good chance there are releases associated with them. I'll be at Moscone Center today and tomorrow. If you're at Google I/O, say hi.
Update: Paul has posted on the Google Lat-Long blog. Frank Taylor has two posts over on the Google Earth Blog.
Screenshot from the Milk Truck game. The truck is out of view on the side of Mt Everest.
Screenshot from the Maps API sample app; look at those controls; they are very well-done.
Directions Magazine reports:
Podcast: ESRI and Google Offer New Solutions for Finding and Using Geospatial Data At last week's Where 2.0 conference held in Burlingame, California, Google's John Hanke and ESRI's Jack Dangermond shared the stage to describe their updated vision for making ESRI's users' geodata and services more usable across the Web. Our editors describe the key points in this technological and business handshake and explore its implications.
