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In the days after the Haiti earthquake last January, Google released high resolution satellite imagery of the destruction on the ground. Again, today the company is offering this same sort of imagery in the aftermath of a 6.9 earthquake in Qinghai, China. Sponsor The earthquake in Qinghai last Tuesday killed hundreds and injured thousands more, leveling many of the buildings around the city. As with last time, Google is working with GeoEye to provide high resolution satellite images, which you can download and view using Google Earth. The company says that it is also working to aid in the relief effort there by creating a Crisis Response page , which includes a China Person Finder tool, Google News and real-time search featuring posts to Twitter and other sources and a map to help show user-contributed data. Currently, the China Person Finder tool has only "about 100 records" being tracked and, while Google is offering both a Chinese version of its page as well as pages on both google.com.hw and google.com.tw, we have to wonder how effective the company will be in its efforts in China. Discuss
Originally posted here:
Google Offers Satellite Images of Chinese Earthquake
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around-the-city,
buildings,
China,
City,
crisis-response,
destruction,
Earth,
earthquake-last,
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google-earth,
Haiti,
killed-hundreds
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Technology has been a part of archaeology from the time it shifted from treasure hunting to academic profession, from using geography to plot a grid on a dig site, mechanics to pump out a flooded tomb, statistics to map demographic changes or now, using personal technology and global positioning software to identify the previously unknown. The latter is what Professor Chris Fisher , associate professor in CSU's Department of Anthropology, and his team from Colorado State University have done. They discovered a large, ancient urban center using rugged handheld computers and GPS. Sponsor This thousand-year-old urban center stands, overgrown with scrub and soil, in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Fisher's team used four Trimble Recon rugged handheld computers in conjunction with GeoXH and GeoXT GPS receivers, to do real-time, on-site mapping of over 1,300 architectural features, including hundreds of "house mounds," in just one acre of the site. They took 25 to 30 data points on each feature but were still able to complete the initial full-coverage mapping in a month. "The technology accelerated our ability to get meaningful data," he said. "We were able to create an architectural typology of the site right away!" The city was part of the Purépecha Empire , also known as the Tarascan Empire. The Purépecha controlled a great chunk of western Mexico with a fortified frontier. On the other side of that frontier? The much better known Aztec Empire. The technology, and the strategy Fisher developed for its use, allowed the near-immediate capture of a frieze-like picture of the urbanization of a Purépecha center that enabled empire. The city, which prior to Fisher's work, was nothing but a couple of ruins and a pin in a map, turned out to be five square kilometers. Without the hand-held, on-site tech, it would have possibly taken seasons of painstaking mapping to develop the picture. "The Lake Pátzcuaro Basin was the geopolitical core of the empire with a dense population, centralized settlement systems, engineered environment and a socially stratified society," said Fisher. Although the city was initially discovered during the 2009 season, Fisher is currently presenting his findings officially at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis. His team will continue mapping the city this summer. Fisher specializes in climate change archaeology, plotting changes in climate and the cultural adaptation that went with it, including identifying which strategies worked and which failed. A project studying this, Legacies of Resilience , is partially funded by the National Science Foundation. "One of the great challenges for the 21st century will be creating solutions to link social and environmental change," said Fisher. "Archaeology is uniquely poised to make a significant contribution to this debate by helping to explain trajectories of socio-ecosystem evolution over long time periods." When Fisher heads back the site on April 18, he intends to make greater use of Google SketchUp , a 3D modeling program. He already used it to make in-field sketches but this season he and his team will use it extensively to create a portfolio of walkable sketches and a three-dimensional picture of the urban center and its agriculture. The same technology we use in our daily lives is helping to make that contribution possible. I'm sorry. But exactly how cool is that? Fessin' up time. I hooked Chris up with his computer system during the time I worked for its manufacturer. I did so because the project, climate change archaeology, was so cool I almost fainted when he told me about it. Discuss
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Mobile Tech Helps Uncover Mesoamerican Lost City
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anthropology,
aztec,
City,
climate-change,
daily,
fisher,
lake,
mexico,
mobile,
picture,
society,
summer,
time,
university,
urban
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Yesterday we looked at DASH7 , a wireless sensor networking standard that may play an important part in next generation mobile services - including location-based services, Internet of Things and social networking. In this post we analyze some use cases for DASH7, which also point to where the Mobile Web is heading. We'll explore long distance mobile advertising and mobile coupons. We'll also look at how location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla could evolve. Sponsor Extending Location-Based App Functionality Given the growth of location-based apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla in 2010, it's intriguing to think about what's next for these services. According to the DASH7 report, enhanced loyalty programs could be the next big thing. With a DASH7-enabled phone, the white paper states, "a user could set his or her preferences in the Foursquare or Gowalla application that would allow the user to be automatically "discovered" or "checked in" at the coffee shop/restaurant/gun store/etc. and thereby accrue loyalty points passively, i.e. by just being "in" the establishment, rather than requiring active/conscious user behavior to participate in the program." Even more advanced services could offer customized promotions created "on the fly", targeting a certain user's preferences. Mobile Advertising From Long Distance and On-The-Go A long-held goal of the Mobile Web - at least for retailers - is using mobile phones for mobile advertising, loyalty programs, couponing, and other 'personalized shopping' experiences. Of course there are privacy issues with these things, but nevertheless these scenarios are (finally) coming soon. NFC-enabled phones have shown glimpses of this functionality, via smart posters, kiosks and billboards. As discussed in a previous post, NFC technology is limited to a 4 centimeter range - so the phone needs to be held close to the media asset in order to initiate the data transfer. Also it requires a tag reader application to be installed on your mobile phone. According to an as yet unreleased white paper that ReadWriteWeb was shown, the DASH7 Alliance thinks that "a far larger set of customers would be willing to execute the same applications provided that they were executable a) from a longer distance, b) while moving, and c) in some cases, passively/without any conscious initiation of their own." DASH7 has a range of hundreds of meters and can be used while on the move. While point 3 might scare some privacy advocates, it's very likely that customers would need to opt in before they "passively" received such advertising messages. If this is still to abstract for you, here's a potential scenario: I'm driving down a street and I pass a smart poster pasted onto a building wall. This elicits a beep from my phone, because my phone has 'passively' scanned the poster and discovered something that I want to be notified about (I've opted into receiving notifications only about certain things). Because it's against the law to check my mobile phone where I live, I wait till I'm parked and then I check what the beep was for. Turns out that one of my favorite bands is playing in the city tomorrow night! The smart poster I'd driven past was an advertisement for that band. So I then proceed to book a ticket, using my phone of course. Mobile Coupons Mobile coupons are a hot area of activity already, with Google and others offering them. However, currently mobile coupons are limited to short-range and active receiving. Soon we might have long-range couponing, real-time interaction and 'passively' receiving coupons. The DASH7 Alliance white paper offers a scenario of Paramount promoting its upcoming movie Iron Man 2, using a smart poster. In the NFC scenario, someone could walk past the Iron Man 2 poster and download a 2-for-1 coupon to see the movie. However, according to the DASH7 Alliance: "...a combination DASH7/NFC-enabled smartphone could still support the default NFC scenario, but could also provide for a) longer distance distribution of the coupon b) "passive" acquisition of coupons according to a user's pre-defined "coupon acquisition criteria" (e.g. "auto-accept coupons for any movies starring Al Pacino" , and c) real-time interaction with the media asset (e.g. "answer the following three questions correctly and win a 2-for-1 coupon to see "Iron Man 2".)" Those are just some of the next generation mobile services we can expect to see soon, thanks to wireless technologies like NFC and DASH7. Let us know in the comments if you have other potential use case ideas! Discuss
The rest is here:
What's Next For Mobile Apps?
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advertising,
Al Pacino,
City,
coffee,
DASH,
dash7,
data,
functionality,
internet,
loyalty points,
loyalty programs,
media,
mobile,
mobile advertising,
movie,
phone,
user,
white
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Trumba , the shared calendar and events communications software company has added the ability for users to attach "custom objects" to their Web calendars and other websites. These "objects" are in essence tables that unfold graphically, keyed to links, or can stand on their own as pages. Trumba's customers use the company's software to publish interlinked calendars and provide other modular features to their websites. Clients include media companies like the New York Times and Ottaway Newspapers, academic institutions like Kansas State and Emory Universities, and groups like the City of Seattle and the New Orleans Saints. Sponsor The custom objects advance the inherent modularity of Trumba's offerings. From Trumba : "To quickly grasp the idea of an Object, think of it as a table. Each record is represented by a row. Each attribute is represented by a column. Because Objects are tables, you can use them to store any collection of data that you might want to publish on your website." Dan Hickman, Trumba's president, wrote us: "Some of our competitors offer a canned venue or performer features that let you track and publish that information along with your calendar but our custom objects feature lets you create any type of content that might be associated with your events. The feature can even be used to publish a connected database of information that's not even related to your calendar." Examples include attaching venue descriptions and pictures to events, to provide detailed listings of departments in a sleekly retrievable fashion and the ability to solicit and utilize user-generated content. Disclosure: The author helped Trumba start their first blog many years ago. Discuss
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Trumba Offers Custom Objects to Calendars
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because-objects,
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competitors,
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custom-objects,
events,
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our-competitors,
seattle,
Trumba,
websites
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What would you do if you heard a giant boom and you didn't know where it came from? If you're like thousands of people in Portland, Oregon, you might hit Twitter and Google Maps to participate in the city-wide exploration of a slightly frightening mystery. Last night at about 8 p.m., people in a big part of the city felt their windows shake and no one could tell them what caused it. Was it a sonic boom? An angry deity? Even the mayor himself tweeted this morning that he was looking into the sound. In the meantime, thousands of people were using the hashtag #pdxboom and adding themselves to a hastily configured Google Map showing where they lived and how loud the boom had been there. In just a few hours, a pattern emerged, with reports clustering around one city park. This morning the police found a detonated pipe bomb there and cited the Google Map in their announcement. Sponsor Pausing the Stream Reid Beels is a designer, geo-developer and one of the community organizers of Portland's forthcoming conference Open Source Bridge ("The conference for open source citizens"). Beels says he was sitting in a restaurant in southeast Portland when he heard the boom, and saw tweets streaming in about it within minutes. He searched Twitter for "boom" and "explosion," limiting the results by location. Within five minutes, he says, a hashtag had emerged: #pdxboom. What was the #pdxboom, people wanted to know? Some people said it sounded like thunder. Lots of people said it sounded like an empty trash Dumpster crashing on the ground. They mentioned their locations in their Tweets and Beels quickly grew frustrated that all this data was just streaming into the ether, lost from analysis. So he threw up a Google Map with instructions to put a pin in your location and describe how the boom sounded to you. Within an hour 100 people had placed pins on the map. Beels and developer Audrey Eschright came up with a color coded system to describe the intensity of the sound, and began retroactively coloring in pins based on any comments people left. Then they found out that Google Maps will only display the 200 most recent pins placed in a public map. Beels' friend Aaron Parecki wrote a script to download the map's data every fifteen minutes. That came in handy when a few hours later someone vandalized the map by dragging a large number of markers outside the town. It was trivial to roll back to the last valid data. The local TV news and the newspaper ran stories about the boom, and pointed their audiences to the Google Map. Thousands of people visited it, and just under 1,000 added a pin marking where they where and how loud the boom had sounded to them. It became clear that the boom originated near the Sellwood Bridge; a big cluster of red markers surrounded the area, especially to the east. Thousands of people are still streaming in to look at the map; at the end of the day it's now approaching 70,000 views, even if the mystery, if not the crime, is solved. Some people thought it was a precursor Earthquake Boom . (I woke up convinced my house was in an earthquake.) But the Portland police went to a park in the area most filled with red flags on the map and found a large detonated pipe bomb. A Portland police spokesperson said the maps and tweets were very helpful. A topographic view of the map made some inclined to believe that cliffs across the river and low-hanging clouds combined to make the sound travel as far across the city and in the direction that it did. That Was a Practice Run Beels says two big lessons came out of the experience for him. First, the tools they used were easy and fast, but they were also quite limited. Google Maps in particular was capable of multi-user collaboration but did poorly when it came to displaying a large amount of data. As Eschright wrote after the action, "It's not the best platform for a couple hundred people, many without prior experience editing maps, to be using all at once." Inspired by campaigns like CrisisCampPDX and the CrisisWiki , Beels says the community is interested in setting up an installation of open-source, crisis support software Ushahidi on standby in case a real crisis has to be dealt with. Beels says he's inspired not just by what was done in this situation, but by what it revealed about the future. "The community of people who will search for things online and go out of their way to try to figure out what's going on," he says, "is larger than you might think." Marshall Kirkpatrick is leading a webinar for Poynter's News University on Thursday about how location services are changing the news . It would be great if you joined us. Discuss
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Boom! Tweets & Maps Swarm to Pinpoint a Mysterious Explosion
Tags:
City,
crime,
data,
google maps,
location,
Maps,
news,
open-source,
police,
tools,
university,
windows