Apparently lots of people have been asking Google for biking directions and now they get their wish!  The directions get added right along with the driving and walking directions we’ve all come to know and love.  They’ve even added the ability to avoid hills (good luck with that in West Virginia)!   Like the walking [...]

This shouldn’t come as any huge shock to anyone familiar with LBS, but researchers have shown that 93% of human movement can be predicted by cell phone.  In an article published in Science, the researchers suggest that most human movement is fairly limited in area.  They actually say most customers stay in a 6 mile radius most [...]

Sue came across another great National Geographic project for this week’s web corner called Enduring Voices. The project seeks to document those languages that are disappearing through disuse or death of a culture. They estimate that we lose a language about every 14 days! From the project website:
Under the National Geographic Society’s Enduring Voices [...]

I just read a weird article about “Some Ways to Make Children Think Santa Exists” that includes children follow Santa’s journey on Norad all the way up to a voice transmorgified phone call from Santa. Like “How to Lie With Maps“, it unitentionally raises some questions about how kids are influenced by technology. I would [...]

When the main focus of your work is historical landscapes, like mine is, your biggest obstacles is finding good data about what that landscape looked like. I know I would do almost anything to find a source for my project like this amazing film footage of Market Street in San Francisco in 1905, before the [...]

Ars Technica is reporting that the Obama administration has decided to ramp up the broadband stimulus money outlays into one more round instead of the planned two.  The monies appear to be a different pool than what is funding the broadband mapping work, but the article is a tad unclear on that point.  All in [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation had an interesting piece about two weeks ago that I just ran across.  The Supreme Court of Massachusetts recently ruled that it is against their state constitution for the police to track a vehicle using GPS without court approval.  The interesting thing here is that the crux of their rationale is that the [...]

In case you haven’t seen this around, BoingBoing.net has a nice link round up for NASA’s photos of the current California fires as seen from space.  The smoke cloud is impressive in the most depressing way possible.  The BoingBoing link has links to NASA’s original image and large version, a NYT piece on the fires [...]

If danger is your middle name and you like to eat, breath, and sleep in danger, then you might want to check out this Popular Mechanics article.  Whether you like the extreme cold, fiery mountains, potentially getting drowned by global warming, living in the eye of hurricanes, there’s a place here for you.  I’m no [...]

Here’s an interesting bit of geographic news from the USDA – rural counties with broadband tend to have more jobs and those jobs are better paying.  Another fascinating finding is that households above the same income level tend to have broadband.  Rural-urban differences become non-existant above a certain level.  There are also some regional differences, [...]