6/22/2011 Maps Communicate Actionable Information

In his June 20, 2011 blog click here for blog, David Kroodsma references the Flood map and Drought map on the USGS WaterWatch website click here for link


David's firm (Climate Central) built an interactive tool that links directly to the USGS map of real-time streamflow:

At a glance, the streamflow map shows (with thematically colored locations) where there is too much water (flooding) and too little water (drought). Immediately, the idea of "pipeline from flood to drought" pops into my head. Google it, and, aside from numerous website postings and blog comments, we find references to the "National Smart Water Grid" and "House of Representatives (H.R.) Bill 135 (Twenty-First Century Water Commission Act of 2009) would establish the Twenty-First Century Water Commission to study and develop recommendations for a comprehensive water strategy to address future water needs."

According to govtrack.us click here for link, the bill was introduced January 6, 2009, and, on February 4, 2009, was Referred to the House Natural Resources/Subcommittee on Water and Power. It never got out of Subcommittee, and is therefore dead. The proposer of the bill, Representative John Linder (R-GA7), retired from Congress at the end of 2010; his successor in Georgia's 7th congressional district is Rob Woodall, who took office in January 2011. It is unknown if Rep. Woodall will re-introduce the bill.

govtrack.us provides a link identifying the 48 members of the House Committee on Natural Resources click here for link. I urge you to look at the list - if your representative is there, you should write him/her expressing your concern about the lack of movement in solving our country's Infrastructure Problems - the National Smart Water Grid would solve today's problem of flooding-and-drought.

Maps Communicate Actionable Information - once we identify it, let's solve the problem!

6/19/2011 Maps for the 2010 Census, Part 2

It has been a great experience watching the emergence of GIS and Thematic Cartography over the past 10 years. The ubiquity of Google Maps and in-vehicle navigation systems has made everyone more "Geo-aware". Working off this greater geo-awareness, the private-sector media has expanded its presentations of Thematic Maps. I especially like those in USA Today:


Here is the link to the "Unmarried couples" map/article:Unmarried couples map/article


Here is the link to the "Fewer kids" map/article:Fewer kids map/article

3 reasons why I like these maps:
- the # of ranges is manageableFor a single-color ramp (the blues in the Unmarried map), 5 ranges from white-to-dark-blue is easily comprehended, and clustering (or lack thereof) is readily apparent. The "Fewer kids" map is actually easier: 2 color ramps of only 3 colors each (3 above-and-below the U.S. average), with the colors going from light-to-dark according to intensity.
- the borders do not get in the way of the maps Although the data is presented at the county-level, the county boundaries are very subtle in both cases (light blue or light gray). This allows both the colors to stand-on-their-own, and the states themselves can be identified by their own unique black borders.
- the use of color ramps In the Unmarried map, I intuitively understand that dark-blue is "more" than light-blue/white. Knowing this allows me to concentrate on the map, and not have to keep referring back to the legend (is blue higher than yellow? is green more than red?). Although the "Fewer kids" map has two sets of color-ramps, once I know the reds are more/gain and the blues are less/loss, I can just focus my attention on the map.

Another area of mapping at USA Today is their Census 2010 data page:
Here is the link to the USA Today Census 2010 data website:Census 2010 link

This website is interactive - click on a state, and the bar-graph statistics change appropriately while the new county-level map is drawn. It is very smooth and looks good. Needless to say, these visualizations are inspirational - I want to learn how to do this with my data!

5/30/2011 Maps for the 2010 Census, Part 1

To support the distribution the information associated with the 2010 Census, the U.S. Census Bureau has launched an "Interactive Population Map". Start at the Census Bureau website (www.census.gov) and click on the link for 2010 CENSUS BRIEFS

This takes you to the PRESS KITS webpage. Click the 2010 Census Home tab, then click the DATA link, then click the Interactive Population Map link:

At the Interactive Map page, click the POPULATION link; in the popup window, enter Essex County, Massachusetts and click the FIND button. After the map loads, use the + tool to zoom-in. When appropriate, change the GEOGRAPHICAL LEVELS to County / Municipio. Hover your mouse over the map, and the population numbers pop-up: 743,159

To see the distribution-by-towns, change the GEOGRAPHICAL LEVELS to Minor Civil Division. Hover your mouse over Newbury, and the population numbers pop-up: 6,666

Unfortunately, the county looks incomplete: where are Haverhill, Methuen, and Lawrence? What about Gloucester, Beverly, Peabody and Salem?
Change the GEOGRAPHICAL LEVELS to Place. Hover your mouse over Lawrence, and the population numbers pop-up: 76,377

The display over Google Maps is very clean and intuitive - unfortunately, as I discussed in my May 2, 2011 posting, when you work with Census Data: Be Careful! By going back-and-forth between Place and Minor Civil Division, you see a geography for Andover CDP, as well as a geography for Andover town


Once you are aware of the limitations of working with the data, this Interactive Map is a great tool. Looking forward, I am excited to see how they will display data at the Census Tract-level.

The next blog (Part 2) will discuss the interactive maps being released by USA Today.

5/23/2011 Mapping the beaches of Essex County

The weather is warm, and summer is coming! I want to, in Google Maps or Google Earth, soar (Navigate/Pan Through Points) from beach-to-beach on the North Shore of Boston, going from Joseph’s Beach down in Nahant up to Salisbury Beach in Salisbury. I LOVE that in Google Maps, when you specify a "nearby" place, the map just slides over to the new location (there is no jerky/jumping/redrawing).

A Google search of “beaches Essex County, MA” results in the MA HomeTownLocator page, with a list of the beaches in Essex County:

Clicking on a beach’s Name takes you to specific Maps, Driving Directions & Local Area Information for that beach:

Open a new spreadsheet, type in the beach names, and, for each beach, its Latitude and Longitude:

Since the Essex County coastline runs nearly vertical (except around Gloucester/Rockport/Essex), sort the file by ascending Latitude:

There are a few ways to work with maps online; for the "Navigate/Pan Through Points"-aspect that I want, I like to use map a list:

Map A List uses Google Spreadsheets for its data, so open your Google Docs account copy your spreadsheet into a new Google Spreadsheet, and save it. Open an account in Map A List, link to your Google Spreadsheet, tickle your default zoom up to 12, and View it:

Click the Navigate (airplane) icon at the bottom, and your map goes from beach-to-beach! (unfortunately, it looks like it does a random path through the points, which isn't what I had in mind. But I have an email into their help desk, so we will see what develops.)
Here is a link to the interactive map:
interactive map

5/2/2011 American Community Survey (U.S. Census Bureau)

A subtitle should be “Working with Census Data: BE CAREFUL!”

This morning, the Merrimack Valley Planning Commission hosted a Census Data Workshop at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, MA. Laura Medrano represented the U.S. Census Bureau, and showed us how to access both Census 2010 data and American Community Survey data through the Census Bureau web site. For this demostration, we will examine Social Characteristics from the American Community Survey for Andover, MA.

Go to the Census Bureau Home Page, and click on the “American FactFinder” text:


You currently have both factfinder and factfinder2 available.
Click factfinder.census.gov
At the FactFinder screen, type Andover for City, select Massachusetts from the drop-down list, and click GO


Unfortunately, three listings appear:


We know that North Andover is a different city/town from Andover, so we can ignore it. But what is the difference between Andover CDP and Andover town, Essex County?
And is there any difference in the data?

Click the link for Andover CDP (CDP stands for Census Designated Place), and the Fact Sheet appears:

Print this page (or take a screen-shot), then go back to the Andover listings and select the link for Andover town, Essex County, and the Fact Sheet appears:

Well, you can see that there is a huge difference between the two listings!

Unfortunately, the Glossary is confusing (click on Glossary and find "Census designated place" and "Town").
Which means we must go to the map for clarification. Close the Glossary window.
On the left, click MAPS > Reference Maps


In the REFERENCE MAPS window, select Massachusetts from the State pull-down menu, and click GO. A Big Messy map appears:

If we zoom-in on Andover, and adjust the Boundaries being displayed, we see a pink Andover - Census Designated Place within the Town Boundary of Andover:


Which gets us back to our first line:

If you are Working with Census Data (“Andover, MA”): BE CAREFUL!

To download a 10-page expanded document (with extensive screenshots), click herehttp://www.dixonspatialconsulting.com/AmerCommSurvey.doc

4/2/2011 Visions of The Future

American Pastor W. A. Criswell (1909-2002) is credited with saying, "We're all fascinated with the future because that is where we will live the rest of our lives."

All my life, I have lived with both the expectation of living into, and the disappointment of the reality of, the future (as one of my favorite t-shirts says, “this was supposed to be the future – where is my jetpack”).

Isolated communities are the past.
Interconnected communities are the future.

The “one guy in the car with the map” is the past.
The “everyone in the car can see the map on their smartphone/GPS/iPad” is the future (hopefully, “relying on the nice GPS voice for directions” is just a middle step).

It is not the point of this blog, but a wonderful area-of-study is Past Visions of the Future (amazon.com even offers a book: "Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future").


I imagine my personal framework started with The Jetsons, progressed through Science Fiction authors (60’s: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein; 70’s: Dick, Herbert; 80’s/90’s: William Gibson, Neal Stephenson), and was reinforced through movies:
the work environment of Minority Report


and Quantum of Solace


and, of course, the Stellar Cartography room in Star Trek: The Final Frontier



Which brings us to today. A nice little article in today’s Barron’s
Barron's Corning article
discusses Corning and its 6-minute video “A Day Made of Glass”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38

Aside from an in-vehicle navigation display (Automotive Display Glass) [and, of course, their Wall-Format Display Glass and Flexible Display Glass!], the Computer Cartographer in me LOVED their All-Weather Surface Glass used in a bus stop:

As a woman approaches the city map,

her cell-phone-preferences RFID tag alerts the Display to change language


She uses the pull-down menu to select her destination


The display draws the route

and, by holding her smartphone/portable device near the Display, it syncs with the map:

And off she goes!

Currently, maps are everywhere, and the “general public” is certainly becoming much more Geographic-savy. GIS is a “field of the Future” - I look forward to be living with it the rest of my life.

3/24/2011 2010 Census Tracts in Google Earth

There are a number of ways to get MapInfo .tab files (and Esri .shp files) into .kml format, for display in Google Earth. Having said that, I feel that it is a "Best Practice" (if you have the native software program - MapInfo for .tab files) to work in the native program as much as possible. MapInfo offers Google Earth Link, which is "a MapBasic application that automates the export of vector and raster maps created in MapInfo Professional to the Google Earth application."



Unfortunately, even now in 2011, the size of these files can get pretty big, and things can move pretty slowly (zooming in-and-out, panning around the map). The AZ_2010_Census_tracts_2011_3_24_13_06.KML file is 28.6 MB (built from 5.35 MB in MapInfo files); the MapInfo files for California are 19.1 MB, but they explode to 113 MB as a Google Earth kml file.

The files need to be thinned. MapInfo has an operation that specifically thins a file:


I recommend specifing Thinning for 3-Node Collinear Deviation and Node Separation of only 10 meters. This pair shows the blue nodes in Census Tract 2051.20, before and after thinning:



The resulting thinned files still follow streets, which is the ultimate test in Google Earth. The thinned California kml file is 25.9 MB, a reduction of 87%. This reduction makes everything run smoother, with no sacrifice in visual integrity.

The link to the thinned 2010 Census Tracts for Google Earth:
http://www.dixonspatialconsulting.com/kml_files.html

Help yourself!