geomantic

Not too long ago, Upton Tea was having trouble sourcing Yunnan Gold tea because most of the production had shifted to Pu Erh teas. Well, now the bubble has burst and the effect on the composition of Yunnan’s tea production is anybody’s guess.  In my experience, there is some basis for the health claims made for Pu Erh teas, but I think most of it is psychological. Not that I care. I’m as succeptible to the placebo effect as anyone. But there is nothing like Pu Erh when you have a hangover or a particularly stressful day.  The market for Pu Erh will recover, or at least return to something more rational, eventually. I simply hope that the farmers can hang on without having to forgo much of their newfound prosperity.

A County in China Sees Its Fortunes in Tea Leaves Until a Bubble Bursts - NYTimes.com

This is a good thing for both the standards setting community and the open source community:

OGC and OSGeo Sign Memorandum of Understanding | OGC®

With respect to goals and objectives, both communities have an obvious  natural affinity. I’m encouraged to see this finally happened.

From Boston.com, an interesting piece of journalism about the growing ubiquity of maps. The article cites several examples of  the effect of this ubiquity, which can be applied for good (monitoring global climate change) or bad (Mumbai siege).

Incidentally, I posted a while back about the cartograms from Mark Newman. Newman quite accurately sums up the explanatory power of the cartogram:

Mark Newman, the University of Michigan physicist who created the algorithm responsible for the best-known election cartograms, coauthored a book this year that uses cartograms to illustrate hundreds of global trends, from immigration flows to carbon dioxide emissions to Internet use. Surprises abound. Spain leaves a large footprint in book publishing, but dwindles to insignificance when it comes to library use. A map of the world’s rabies deaths is little more than a giant, bloated nation of India - which also dominates the world in movie viewing.

The value of the cartogram, Newman argues, is its simplicity. Even a color-coded map, after all, requires a legend. But cartograms embed information in the contours of the map itself, using our assumptions about maps, and our familiarity with the actual shape of the world, to drive home the point.

“You don’t have to learn how to read these maps,” Newman says, summing up, in a sense, the whole enterprise of mapping. “You look at it and it makes sense.”

A cartography boom offers new ways to see the world - The Boston Globe

Happy New Year, everyone!

Very interesting animation of the growth of Wal-Mart’s store locations. It would be interesting to see an accompanying real-time graph with some statistical interpretation, such as rate of growth, sales volume, revenue, etc.

Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America

I accidentally bumped into this site whose purpose is “crowd-sourcing crisis information”. (Sorry; bad metaphor.) Initial deployments still in alpha, but should be interesting to follow in the coming months, especially in light of the value demonstrated by the Twitter platform during the recent siege in Mumbai.

Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS)

Here.

Business Week attributes an increased interest in Open Source software to the shrinking economy.

ReadWriteWeb cites a report conducted by Accenture that millenials (i.e. those born between ‘77 and ‘97) will ignore IT departments that don’t support their IT preferences and applications. That is to say, many emerging social apps like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and wikis, as well as support for some of those on mobile devices. The report also cites a shift away from email as preferred mode for communications.

What is the role of government to insure we have a robust Internet-based public domain? Principles articulating public policy with regard to digital content.

Columbia Journalism Review article on the role of Twitter in journalism. (See also #mumbai.) Flickr, too. Oh, and there’s Wikipedia, too. While I’m at it, Sean has a related post here on the issue of whether free geospatial information enabled the recent siege in Mumbai. I  to reflexively clamp down on public access and availability to geospatial information.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, the folks at FortiusOne speculate whether Americans will be driving fewer miles on this most heavily traveled of holidays.

Fuzzy Tolerance released Geospatial Portal v2.0, with RESTful services for query and spatial analysis. It’s a good example of (local) government use of open source geospatial software. It’s released under the GNU GPL, so you can download the source code and implement it for your enterprise. Read all the details on the project page.

SlashGeo links to Places iBegin, a tool that allows anyone to map their local, informal geography. Another tool for user-generated content, specifically geospatial content.

With the frenzy of the elections past, I’m gradually returning to normal life. Here are some things that have recently caught my attention.

Fuzzy Tolerance calls attention to a slew of recent open source software releases. Shiny new toys!

From the Google Geo Developers Blog comes word of a snazzy new KML Manual. (Must add this to my book list, since I much prefer to obtain knowledge by looking at pigment on sheets of cellulose-based material.)

Via Andrew Turner comes word of Apps for Democracy. Although it’s too late to enter (entries closed yesterday), I want to call attention to it because it’s a good example of how the web makes it possible and affordable to do something at a micro (i.e. neighborhood) level. There are very few local governments that can afford to organize and stand up programs that meet the same needs that some of these mashups. Examples appeal to the enlightened self-interest of a dispersed group to take collective action in the social realm.

To put the magnitude of Obama’s victory in perspective, here are links to two interesting maps of election results. Both of these resources provide a much better explanation of the outcome than do the state-level maps, which look pretty evenly divided. The county-level maps are overwhelmingly red, but when adjusted for population the margin of victory is abundantly clear.

First, the Washington Post shows the election results in 3D here:

Map: Presidential Election Winners by County | Election 2008 | washingtonpost.com

Second, be sure to see the cartograms produced by Mark Newman at University of Michigan. If you just look at the results at the state level you would miss the real story, which occurs at the county level. And, you would miss the impact of highly populated urban areas versus the vast, thinly populated areas of the country.