Development Seed has mapped Recovery Act spending on a county-by-county basis and compared it with county unemployment figures over the same time period. So, does government spending have a positive effect in job recovery? That would be telling and we're going to abide by the doctor's prescription not to tell when you can show. The map is after the jump.

The change in unemployment over the last year is reflected in the colors, with red indicating an increase and green indicating a lower unemployment rate, or job growth. Counties that received under $10 million in recovery funds show a white hash pattern. The counties with the most spending - about a third - are shown in solid colors.

Dave Cole discussed the results of the mapping on Development Seed's blog.

"Overall, it's impossible to tell for sure how much recovery spending improved the economic situation, because we just don't know how bad things could have been. It may be the case that without spending, this map would have a lot more red. Or maybe not. What's interesting here is the local impact and information we are able to see from processing a few sets of open data."

If you liked this, you may also be interested in the data visualization mapping Audrey Watters covers in her post for O'Reilly's Radar. That one maps U.S. job losses by location since 2004.

Here Professor Dan Bailey and his crew have created Visualizing Early Washington D.C., a project to use today's technology to recreate yesterday's national capital. It was inspired by a request from PBS to create a 3D version of Capitol Hill for a documentary on the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. But it has grown over four years into a project to map the entire city, from 1790 to 1820.

Watching the project come alive online is analogous to watching the city come alive through the work of the IRC. It is so patently a Symbol these days that it is refreshing to see it again as a city.

According to Bailey, the tech has reached a point where it is not the problem.

"The task of visualizing the nascent city has proved to be more challenging than we'd anticipated, not due to the limits of technology, but due to the sparseness of reliable historical evidence."

The steps involved ran the gamut from hand drawing off a database of DC drawings, paintings and documents to advanced 3D modeling.

The project is not just about DC. In a sense, it is, to use Bailey's phrase, "proof of concept" that a dynamic computer rendering of history is a useful tool, responsive, detailable and here to stay.

Other sources: io9, OpenCulture, The Washington Post

Given the extensive mapping services available here in the U.S., why would Google open up this tool here? Google is crowdsourcing corrections and additions, the company says, by allowing its users to add more detail about the places they know best. But there may be more to it than that.

With the Map Maker, Google says you can fix the name of local businesses or add improved descriptions. You can also add more information about an area, like bike lanes or the names of buildings on college campuses, for example. To prevent any high jinx from occurring, Google notes that it will review the user-created submissions before they go live.

While on the surface, the launch of Map Maker in the U.S. appears to just be another useful feature to differentiate Google's mapping service from its competitors, there may be some additional motives behind this launch.

One motive may have to do with the expansion of Google Places, the search company's Yelp-like business locator service. In April, Google merged its socially-infused local business recommendation service called Hotpot into Google Places, the larger business database which provides reviews and venue information. Now Google is crowdsourcing edits to that same database via this U.S. launch of Google Map Maker.

Building a Better Location Database, Thanks to You

One of the primary assets of companies involved in providing location-based services is their database of venues. On this front, Facebook is a tough Google competitor, with its own database of locations called Facebook Places. In September 2010, a company spokesperson said the goal for Facebook Places was to be the "central platform for location data" across the Web. And in February 2011, Facebook made some under-the-hood changes to the way it houses venues listed on its site, a move that enables the network to have an accurate, universally standardized database of locations.

Location-based check-in service Foursquare also has its own venue database, and, like Google will now as well, uses crowdsourcing to help keep that database accurate. In theory, select superusers on Foursquare's service are enlisted to clean up duplicate venues and make sure each pushpin is accurately placed. The job of crowdsourcing this cleanup is not going well in my local area - nearly every major venue has at least 2 or 3 clones, if not more. In fact, last I checked, my gym was listed four or five times!  (I'd love to hear more about your experience with this problem, or if you don't have one.) This may or may not be an across-the-board complaint, but it does highlight the challenges of creating a location database where users themselves are permitted to enter venues of their own, with no direct company oversight.

It should also be noted that another Google competitor, Microsoft's Bing, has also gone the crowdsourcing route to some extent, partnering with Open Street Map (OSM) back in August 2010, to make it available as an additional layer on top of Bing Maps. The company has donated aerial imagery to the Open Street Maps community too, and, in November, hired OSM founder Steve Coast to come work at Bing Maps.

To put it simply, today's announcement from Google has a deeper impact to the company's overall strategic initiatives than simply a case of "oh look, new tools!" Clean, accurate, robust, detailed and up-to-date maps and databases of locations will be key to growing any business that leverages location data in the future, which today includes a number of mobile services, and their online counterparts.

This rescue was possible only due to the use of disruptive, community-driven Web 2.0 technology by volunteer and technical communities (VTCs) working on disaster and conflict management. VTCs such as OpenStreetMap, CrisisMappers, Crisis Commons, Sahana and Ushahidi have contributed greatly to disaster management. VTCs have used SMS, social media and satellite imagery; built communities around humanitarian efforts; and created technology tools and wikis, using open source software, hardware and platforms, as well as free cloud based services in affected countries such as Haiti, Libya and Japan.

Despite their successes, it has not been an easy ride.

VTCs continue to face major challenges, such as language and coordination. Many disasters occur in countries that are not English speaking, while much of the volunteer community is Angolophone. Coordination can be a problem too. Established development organizations such as the UN have been dealing with crises for many years and have a rich knowledge base, but are also challenged by data silos, proprietary systems and bureaucracy. VTCs are more agile and technically adept, but can be uncoordinated.

Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies, a report produced by the UN and partner organizations, examines these issues in detail. It identified a host of additional challenges facing VTCs

1. The need to build a reputation for reliability, trust, professionalism
2. Lack of resources
3. The technical challenges of geolocation with partial information and verifying accuracy of reports
4. Building local capacity to manage disaster and conflict situations

Despite these challenges the VTCs will play an increasingly important role in the future disaster management, thanks a to a growing number of volunteers and the power of Web 2.0 technologies.

So, what's next?

Geolocation

We may see better methods of locating people during an emergency. Perhaps a Foursquare type check-in, or even better, an automatic check-in technology, where you don't have to press a button to enter where you are, could be included in low-cost cell phones.

It is true that this presents privacy concerns. However this may be a bigger issue in the West. For example, the Singapore constitution does not contain any explicit right to privacy. In countries where privacy is not a cultural norm or expectation, geolocation software installed on the cheapest phones could provide enormous help during disaster relief efforts.

The countries with the highest number of people affected by disasters in 2010 include China, Pakistan and Thailand. These are countries where privacy protections are low, and where privacy is not a strong cultural value. They also score low on "individualism" in a framework developed by Greet Hofstede as a way to evaluate a country's culture.

If we are to postulate that a lower score in individualism for a country also indicates that its people place a low importance on privacy, then it seems plausible that some disaster-prone countries could implement geolocation on cell phones without violating societal norms and save thousands, if not millions of lives.

Mapping

A recent trend in VTC disaster management has been to use social media data as a layer on crisis maps. For example, a Hypercities project maps live Twitter messages on a map of Egypt, showing the location and picture of the Twitterer. This is helpful but some of the messages are clearly not relevant to crisis mapping. The challenge in using social media as a crisis map layer is that the data is huge, chaotic, free, and collectively good, but individually unreliable. To improve the social media data for inclusion on crisis maps, we need to focus on quality and relevance.

To determine quality in a Twitter stream, we can assume that source-quality equals information-quality. To identify quality sources for a given topic, we could use Twitter sources via curated lists from Listorious or established news media outlets and non-profits like Ushahidi. For instance Listorious has a list of reputable sources for the Haiti Earthquake curated by The New York Times.

To further refine the source-quality measure, we could also look at the number of followers of sources and the number of retweets that contain a relevant hashtag. For example, a tweet containing #civ2010 #IvoryCoast #civsocial #ict4d about the Abidjan crowd-sourced crisis map:http://is.gd/7IUkix was retweeted extensively in April.

We can assume that when we get higher quality tweets, the tweets are more relevant. Once the parameters for source and content quality are set, a program could read the Twitter stream and filter the quality tweets based on the selected parameters. In addition to improving the quality and relevance of the social media layer of crisis maps, perhaps we could also focus on improving the quality of the sources of the crisis map, through crowd sourcing methods such as incorporating Google's +1 or a like-type function on information contained in the collaborative disaster maps.

Finally, improved matching between people needing assistance in a disaster and those who can help would add value. A service could be set up to match people affected by natural disaster with those who have the funds, goods, time or know-how to assist them. For example, Kiva partners entrepreneurs with lenders via existing microfinance institutions that facilitate the loans. DonorsChoose.org matches American public school teachers who need classroom supplies with "microdonors."

This kind of a matching service could be set up for organizations, groups, individuals and families affected by natural disasters. Some of the elements that would include skills, available time, specialty, needs (goods and services) and urgency.

The future of Web 2.0, social media and their applications are as unpredictable as the people they connect. But from what we have seen and and what we can reasonably postulate,  it is clear that these technologies have a profound positive impact in disaster management. I am sure the best is yet to come.

Photo by connor212

OpenStreetMap is a great way to learn about the nooks and the crannies, the hills, valleys, parks, paths, monuments, parks, businesses, neighborhoods and more in your own home town or exotic places far away. It's like the Wikipedia of world in local maps, but to date, it's been a little challenging to fill up with rich edits. The improved WYSIWYG interface, vector background layers and improved undo function of Potlach 2 should make the service even more enjoyable to edit. The barrier to getting started is now even lower.

Google gets a lot of kudos (and, okay, triggers a fair amount of concern) about its mapping efforts with Google Maps and Google Street View. But even with innovations to the vehicles that Google is using to capture the data - tricycles, for example, not cars - it's just not feasible to map everything.

There are alternatives to Google Maps, of course, and one of my favorites is OpenStreetMap, a collaborative map-making effort that allows people to correct and add information to maps. With a wiki-like process, OpenStreetMap, users can create and edit a map as a "living document," often including much better local information.

And now, there's another way to access OpenStreetMap offline - paper and pencil not required. ForeverMap is a new app by Skobbler. While the European version of the app has been available for a while, Skobbler has just released a version containing North American data, with maps from the U.S. and Canada. While it doesn't have every street corner mapped yet (of course, neither does Google Maps), it's a pretty reliable option.

And the best part: it works offline. The app allows you to download a map of your location and lets you access all the data points there - points-of-interest, restaurant and shop info, route calculation data, and so on.

It's worth pointing out that downloading a map does require WiFi access (not 3G - WiFi) in the first place, and depending on the region you're in, the file size can be quite large. But once you've done so, you have a map in your pocket, or on your iPhone rather, that doesn't require Internet connectivity.

The app is great for areas where there's limited access to Internet and for users of iPod Touches and iPads who don't have data plans.

(And while you're out there in the great unknown, print out a copy of Walking Papers, make notes on what you see, and then add those details back to OSM when you get home.)

Using a web app that is provided online, participants are asked to attempt to identify certain constellations and, if they can, rate them against magnitude charts. The project tracks the increasing problem of disappearing darkness, which can interrupt the cycles of plant and animal life, eventually to a fatal degree.

"With half of the world's population now living in cities, many urban dwellers have never experienced the wonderment of pristinely dark skies and maybe never will. Light pollution is obscuring people's long-standing natural heritage to view stars."

Among the negative changes light pollution brings, GLOBE lists the following as examples.

• Disorientation of sea turtle hatchlings by beachfront lighting
• Nesting choices and breeding success of birds
• Behavioral and physiological changes in salamanders
• Disturbances of nocturnal animals
• Altered natural light regimes in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems

In addition to the effect on biological life and the psychological - some would say spiritual - effects of the absence of the stars, light pollution decreases the earth's ability to resolve hyrdocarbon pollution as well, as Wired points out in its coverage. Excess light destroys those chemicals that destroy hydrocarbons and which normally build up in the atmosphere each night.

Last year saw 17,805 participants tracking their night skies; 15,300 the year before; and 6,838 in 2008. They are hoping to at least hit 15,000 this year.

All the datasets from each year are available, to professionals and lay people alike.

Other sources: PopSci

The women used Google Map Maker, and their specific local knowledge, to fill in schools, health centers, market centers, community development projects, restaurants and roads in a country too often neglected by cartographers.

"We had a mix of students, web developers, Non-profit CEOs, an advocate and even an editor. Their backgrounds were quite an interesting mix as we had Computer Science students and Geography students, participants with an environmental background but the common factor is that they had an interest to improve the Kenya maps. Either where they live, where they have projects or areas they frequent."

This is hardly the first time Google has invited people to an intensive mapping party. Not unlike the independent Map Kibera experiment, Google invited the inhabitants of Korogocho to put themselves on the map. A Pakistan project brought people together last year to map changes after that country's horrific mudslides.

Google is hardly a non-profit. All the information entered is available for further iterations of the company's maps. However, Rajuai says this undertaking extends beyond making a profit.

"The bigger aim of all this is to make the world's information accessible, and also to make sure that we get more African content, and to make the internet useful and relevant for Africans."

Any readers involved in other crowdsourced mapping projects? Let us know in the comments.

"Such a large collection of digital objects lends itself to the potential for meaningful quantitative analysis, including the geographical distribution of coins based on a variety of physical and categorical attributes...Dynamic visualization based on researchers' queries can lead to hypotheses that would have otherwise never been considered."

The interface, in the form of a widget set into the Nomisa site, is an open source build, with Apache Solr for the search index, OpenLayers for the display of maps and Ajax to connect the two in a usable interface. Once a coin is entered into Solr, the script Gruber has written checks the numismatic Nomisma ("a collaborative effort to provide stable digital representations of numismatic concepts and entities") to place it geographically.

"OpenLayers then builds its point layer with a KML file generated dynamically from the Solr search results for user's query. A list of facets appears under the map, providing the user with the ability to filter results based on constraints like deity, material, denomination, issuer, and region."

The project is drawing from 400MB of numismatic data, consisting of 560,000 objects. When it launches in mid-March, as a part of the American Numismatics Society's Collections site, it will have close to 200,000 georeferenced objects.

You will be able to search geographically to see what coinage was produced in area mints. You will also have a slider controller that will allow you to fine-tune your searches in terms of time.

Professor Stephen Laycock and his team have created a tool that will automatically extract dimensions and relationships from colored maps. Users can extract black and white maps by directing a cursor within the building's mapped edges.

As Jacob Aron points out, in New Scientist, this software can help not just visualize what's extant in a changed context but "make it easier to create digital reconstructions of long-lost cities." Neglect, change in economic lifelines like trade routes and natural disasters have all contributed, and continue to contribute, to the death of once-important cities. Being able to visualize how cities worked over the ages could help us understand how our own work, or fail to work, today.

Laycock's software increases the efficiency of extracting information from maps by at least 100 percent on black and white maps and makes the process as much as 100 times faster on colored maps or colored elements of maps, where the software's automatic function engages.

From the abstract of Laycock's paper on the creation of the software:*

"Archive cartography and archaeologist's sketches are invaluable resources when analysing a historic town or city. A virtual reconstruction of a city provides the user with the ability to navigate and explore an environment which no longer exists to obtain better insight into its design and purpose. However, the process of reconstructing the city from maps depicting features such as building footprints and roads can be labour intensive...Archive maps often exhibit problems in the form of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in scale which can lead to incorrect reconstructions. By aligning archive maps to accurate modern vector data one may reduce these problems."

The applications of this software are legion. Creating 3D virtualizations of cities that are changed beyond understanding or even destroyed altogether could help in educational endeavors, museum materials, historical work, public policy, even gaming. And it can be shared online, meaning a further democratization of the past.

Also, as I feel compelled to point out yet again: it's awfully cool.

*Yes, abstract. Do you have any idea how much academic publications cost, despite the advances of the Open Access movement? Plenty, that's how much.

Archaeologists have been adding web and mobile technologies to their toolkit for a while now. But this discovery is surprising just in the scope of it. And it indicates the possibility that we are verging on a new archaeological golden age.

Of those finds, 1,082 seem to be "pendants," the distinctive tear drop-shaped, stone tombs of ancient Arabia.

He published his account of these finds and of his method in the Journal of Archaeological Sciences.

Since 2007, Google Earth has delivered "2.5 meter resolution imagery taken from the SPOT 5 satellite."

Other archaeological and anthropological finds in the last year that have used new technology include identifying a major Mesoamerican city as it transitioned to empire using GPS and mobile handhelds; mapping another large city in the area using lidar; identifying 2,000 year-old Roman medicines using a database of digitized ancient medical texts; and using Google Earth to identify anthropological site that yielded a heretofore unknown human ancestor.

The notion that Google Earth and other tools will eventually see archaeologists doing all their work from their home offices is just dumb. What it means is that exploratory digs will be much more likely to produce important work since the number of targets is so much higher and more can be known about them prior to finding personnel, time and money to do the unavoidable, hand-on digging that will always be a part of the discipline.

Other sources: A Blog About History

There are 530 areas identified as suffering from low oxygen - that's hypoxia - and 228 more suffering eutrophication, or excessive fertilization, usually from run-off. Identifying problem spots is job one for anyone hoping to slow, stop or reverse these sorts of marine declines.

Added together, the affected areas total 95,000 square miles, the size of our founding editor's homeland. Unsurprisingly, the biggest dead zone is at the mouth of the Mississippi and covers 8,500 square miles, the size of New Jersey. (There's a joke there. I'm not up to it.)

The last several years have seen a real upsurge in the mapping our natural and social resource concerns. Although the things the scientists and citizens have been mapping are discouraging, the fact they are recording, visualizing and sharing them leaves room for hope.

Mindy Selman, senior water quality analyst at WRI, agrees.

"Until now, a lack of information and monitoring has been a major impediment to understanding the extent and impacts of 'dead zones' and eutrophication in coastal ecosystems. This website is an important step forward because it compiles the current information into a central location to raise awareness and offer solutions for controlling nutrient pollution."

A 2007 study by the World Resources Institute indicated the largest impediment to fixing dead zones was lack of public awareness. Its administrators hope this project helps to address that lack. But they also hope the project, as befits the online media it employs, will act to gather missing information from lay-readers and scientific professionals alike globally. So take a look. If they're missing something, speak up.

The interactive map is only one aspect of the website, which is being described as a "'one-stop shop' that provides a global database and interactive map of affected areas, as well as links to articles, photos, and other resources."

The site also provides tools, like catchment and nitrogen calculators; a resource library of articles and websites; and a map-keyed regional resource listing.

I hope they provide a larger format map, as the one on the site, though navigable, is a bit close. It might also be interesting to consider releasing an API of the project to see what independent scientists, conservation groups and citizens could add to it.

Read ReadWriteWeb coverage of mapping the economic and legal effects of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico and other geolocation issues.

According to the United States Geological Survey, mass deaths are not in fact unusual and are usually unrelated. But once you start noticing something, you see it everywhere. So if you take your data mapped, here are a couple of options.

This map uses primarily news reports to track everything from 300 doves dying yesterday in Italy to hundreds of jellyfish and starfish dying near Charleston, South Carolina last month.

The USGS map of animal mortality focuses on the U.S. It is color coded for cause of death, ranging from bacterial to toxins to trauma. You can drill down to find out, for instance, that under 25 Lesser Scaup died in Snohomish County in November.

If anyone knows of any other significant map experiments with the die-off data, or other types of data visualization, please let us know in the comments.

The British Library wants to map different words and accents and chart the changing pronunciation of the English language. As part of its exhibit Evolving English, the British Library is adding to its already sizable collection of 20th century recordings of the English voice, and it's asking any English speaker worldwide to record their voice reading Mr. Tickle aloud.

In order to compare accents, the British Library is examining words in lexical sets, those that share certain pronunciation patterns. According to phoneticians, reading long lists of words aloud is not ideal as it tends not to be "authentic" or conversational, so reading prose aloud is preferable. And since you're likely to read it casually and with confidence, no matter your age or native language, a children's book is apparently even better.

The British Library says it chose one of the beloved Mr. Men series as the book contained all the lexical sets. (Personally, I preferred Mr. Chatterbox and always found the ending of Mr. Tickle to be quite annoying.) For its part, Mr. Tickle contains words like "mischievous," "postman," and "extraordinary." Do you say "miss-cheevy-us" or "miss-chiv-us"?

To add your voice, you can either use the British Library website or an Audioboo mobile app. Copies of Mr. Tickle are available on the library website, as well instructions on how to tag your upload so it appears as part of the collection.

Now Pete Warden is aiming to become something new: the guy who built the easiest way to publish maps on any website. His new project OpenHeatMap is an open-source tool to embed visualizations of data with a location element and changes over time. It works in Flash or HTML5, and it could be just the hackable thing you're looking for - if you're looking for a way to see where time, space and a set of numbers all come together.

Curious about where people around the world are Tweeting about a particular topic the most? Want to see world income levels as reported over the last 100 years by the World Bank, playing forward like a little movie map? Got your own data set you want to put on a map? That's what OpenHeatMap aims to make easy to do.

Why This Is Important

"This has the potential to make public data relevant to the lay user," Alex Howard, government 2.0 beat writer for O'Reilly Media, says.

"One of the biggest challenges government agencies, municipalities and any other body has is converting open data to information which people can take knowledge from. One of the most powerful ways humanity has developed to communicate information over time is through maps. If you can take data in an open form - and CSV files are one of the most standard formats available - then you have an opportunity to tell stories in a way that's relevant to a region and personalized to an individual. That's a meaningful opportunity. The fact that you can embed it and that it's licensed on GPL and on GitHub is a significant contribution by Pete Warden to humanity's ability to tell stories."

The service isn't perfect at launch - it's still buggy and rendering is a little slow - but OpenHeatMap could be the beginning of something very useful and important.