The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today announced the DARPA Network Challenge to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. The competition requires participants to discover the exact position of 10 large, red weather balloons that DARPA will place in undisclosed locations across the continental United States. The first person to identify the location
As straight as the pigeon flys…
The U.K. Daily Mail must have a geographer on staff because they always have interesting geospatial related stories. They recently have an article about a white water rafting company in Colorado that is using a “pigeon express” to deliver memory cards to the their home base. According to the article, Rocky Mountain Adventures found that
Navigate By Ear
Treehugger has a story about a a GPS bike navigation device created by Kajimoto Laboratories that uses ear pulling for tactile navigation. From their website, it looks like Kajimoto Laboratories works with many tactile devices and that this one was actually created in 2008.
UK Crime Maps
Whenever anyone creates a crime map for an area, it always seems to raise the same questions about house values, safety, etc. According to the UK Daily Mail, The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) believe a new interactive crime map could seriously hurt home values. The National Policing Improvement Agency provides information on crime
White Horse Revival
According to the Daily Mail, the famous Alton Barnes white horse landmark is being restored with 150 tons of chalk. It was last refreshed 25 years ago. A recent story in the Telegraph states that an older landmark, Osmington White Horse, was damaged by a 1989 attempt to refresh it as part of a television
Autumn and GIS
The Foliage Network is a site that uses citizen scientists or foliage watchers to give them up to date reports on autumn leaves throught the U.S. and sends it to newspapers, television stations, and web sites. Highlighting the importance of participatory GIS is the fact that they can’t report on Delaware, Minnesota and Rhode Island
USDA Crop Explorer
The United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service in partnership with NASA has a Crop Explorer mapping global food supply by region. It can be searched by region or commodity. One of the things I found most interesting was the visitor’s map which shows where people who visit the site are logging in from
New Jersey is to Clerks as Idaho is to….
I was looking up some old movies online and found tons of fun information on movies and their associated landmarks or states. Rotten Tomatoes has a fun “50 Movies for 50 States” U.S. map. It has some obvious ones like Kansas and the Wizard of Oz or Oklahoma and Oklahoma! but also many that you
WWII Escape Maps, Monopoly, and Ebay
ABC News has a revisited the story of escape maps and tools hidden inside Monopoly games during WWII. According to the article, “The British secret service conspired with the U.K. manufacturer to stuff a compass, small metal tools, such as files, and, most importantly, a map, into cut-out compartments in the Monopoly board itself.” A
Halloween Mapping Action
There are several sites on-line where people have set up controllable Halloween decorations for various causes. Alek’s Halloween site is a little crowded but that’s part of its charm. He’s been doing it since 2005, has a Google map of the people who have participated, and all the decorations are wind-powered. Halloween Addict has a
Loading ...
Weekly Feed (mp3)
