mapping for a changing california
Welcome to the Kellylab blog! We post fun facts and things that catch our eye. Occasionally I wax lyrically about a topic of interest.
Here are the top 50 images that have been chosen by our users as their favorites. It is now time to select your favorite image. You may vote for only one, so choose carefully and come back on April 29 to see which image has been 
voted the favorite.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1xXTi1nFCo
This video on Myriahedral Projections is a great illustration of how projections work in general, but the cuts it makes are fantastic. Myriahedral Projections have many sides, but are (almost) conformal and conserve areas well. This video is entertaining for any crowd.
Recent Paper on Myriahedral Projections here: http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/myriahedral/CAJ103.pdf
This blog post is written by Clayton Crawford, a Product Engineer in the Software Products Group's 3D Team in Redlands.
This is the forth in a series on Lidar Solutions in ArcGIS.
Leah Evans makes these hand-sewn quilts that channel cartographic themes. Just like us, her current work combines aerial photography, maps, and satellite imagery. But unlike us, she uses appliqué, reverse appliqué, piecing, natural and synthetic dyeing, needle-felting, hand printing, and a variety of embroidery stitches. Intriguingly, she says it is the use of maps in organizing our ideas of land that interests her most of all. The maps themselves “are not consciously based on specific places,” she writes. “For me they are intimate explorations of map language and imagined landscapes.”
You've got to watch this video. I love these dudes. Originally from the Map Room.
The project uses an innovative underwater video system that takes Global Positioning System (GPS) digital data and stores it continuously on the audio track of the DVD as the kayak floats down river.
Simultaneously, the river’s surface features are recorded using a similar geo-referenced video camera. Images from both video cameras are downloaded into a Geographic Information System (GIS) to produce digital maps that depict the stream in minute detail, above and below the surface.
here are some gems I learned about at CalGIS:
1. Go to ArcGIS Online Resources to quickly, easily, and freely add in terrific basemap data and high res imagery to any .mxd. If you are logged in you will have access to a lot more options.
2. Arc 9.3.1 (to be released any day now) will include a "layer packages" feature. So, if you want to send someone your file exactly as you are looking at it, you can right click on the layer and select "save as layer package", and it will zip the .shp + .lyr into a .lpk to share more easily. Also, there will be free access to Microsoft Virtual Earth within your Arc desktop.
This is a great way to open the new website. “Where am I?” is being replaced by, “Where am I in relation to everything else?”, and location-aware thinking, services and businesses are on the increase. As the Department of Labor is working with other GIS societies and institutions to develop content standards for required skills for these new employees, it is worthwhile to look back and see how far, and from where, we have come.
In that vein, the Penn State Public Broadcasting is developing the Geospatial Revolution Project, an integrated public service media and outreach initiative on the brave new world of digital mapping. Check out their video, which stars our very own 2009 CNR Citation winner Kass Green.
Love love love the work the historical ecology group at SFEI is doing. The Chron recently had an article highlighting the work of Robin et al in reconstructing the past landscapes of the bay area. Image from the SF Chronicle.
Not so much a "gang" as a few irate villagers. But worth noting the ever-increasing intersection between google's goal of omnipresence and personal privacy.
The same information, and a related post from the Map Room about the future of Street View.
The NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory was intended to monitor carbon dioxide in order to help assess global warming.
Now it's hanging out with Landsat 6.
The rocket that the satellite was traveling on failed to separate from its payload fairing. The extra weight prevented the rocket from reaching orbit and the satellite plunged into the Ocean near Antartica. That's a $278 million swim.
Really though, it's all about Google Ocean now, so OCO probably just wanted a piece of the spotlight.
I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan: Load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible.From this experience, he highlights some of the social and security issues that confronts a person who is very "geo-online." The article has references to various geo-applications for the web and mobile devices. It's a good reference article in the proliferation of geo-applications.
I saw this guy present his project about revisiting sites of historic photography in Yosemite (1980's and 1910's,1920's). Obviously, it reminded me of our own VTM project.
GIS at its most... creative? Definitely at a micro-scale. Pretty cool project where they have esentially "georeferenced" books within a library by their call numbers. The shelfs are referenced to an existent CAD model within a GoogleEarth/GIS framework. The bottom line: lookup a book within the library and this model will take you to the correct shelf on the correct floor, GoogleEarth style. They also have links like "Laptop Charging Station," "Quite Reading Zone," etc.
This is a really neat google-earth API -- as in, it uses Google Earth (not Google Maps) capabilities in a web page instead of the stand-alone application. This API is particularly cool because it combine satellite imagery (Google) with ma (Google), with Street view (Google), with oblique aerial photography (Microsoft) all in one view. Anyway, you have to look at it see how cool it is. Notes: 1) A very quick installation of google-earth plugin may be necessary. 2) Click "Create!" button, then "Start," and then just watch. :)
There's a cool post over at Ars Technica today about using high-precision GPS to measure soil moisture. To do so, you need a survey-grade unit, but it's still really cool. And the story behind it is even better.