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Renewable Energy Potential Mapped

Wednesday, October 12, 2011



I've been fiddling with some data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the solar potential in particular has a great spatial angle to it. Using QGIS for analysis, I fused NREL's Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) database with U.S. Zipcodes. Then I used Developmentseed's Tilemill engine to give a picture of how insolation changes over the course of a normal year. If you click on any of the zipcode polygons, you can tease out the regional variations in specific months, and maybe even make a longshot prediction about how viable it might be to install some rooftop photovoltaic panels.

Sorry, Pittsburgh. It doesn't look good for you or Seattle, honestly. This may not be news to you.

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Crowdsourcing the Guatemalan Election Cycle

Thursday, September 15, 2011
Photo: Associated Press
Ushahidi has just been deployed in Guatemala for monitoring of the election cycle there, with a really slick interface. It looks like they have a pretty robust participation and reporting as the national race goes to a runoff between two right-wing, "ley y orden" candidates. Fun tidbits include the Partido Patriota buying votes for about $38 a head in Xela and election workers being assaulted in the capital:



Guatemala is a mess, but they don't need some hack gringo from the subarctic to say so. What they need is a "Functioning-Civil-Society-in-a-Box" and the instantaneous establishment of rule of law. They were stripped of these things over years of civil war that we in the U.S. abetted, but I have hope of their return when I see a crowdsourcing application like this bring a little bit of transparency to an otherwise-depressing democratic exercise.
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Crowdsourcing the High Water

Tuesday, August 30, 2011


Now that the floodwaters have receded, it's really important to document the extent of the water before the traces change. Emergency management agencies still have their hands full, but they've recommended we collect geolocated photos of high water marks around the state - these help with mapping the effects and preparing for the future. If you're in a position to do so, we'd be psyched if you'd help out by:

1.) Taking photos of any high water positions around you (sides of buildings, washouts, etc.), then entering them with location info in the map below or here: Submit a Report to the Crowdmap

2.) Downloading the free Ushahidi App on your Android or iPhone and recording high water marks live from the field. Once it's installed,

  - Add your info,
  - Click on "Add Deployment",
  - Then enter this crowdmap address: "vtirene.crowdmap.com"

  and you're set to enter info from the field using your smartphone's GPS and camera. Reports will go directly     to the crowdmap.

3.) If you've got a high-resolution GPS unit like a Trimble or Garmin, collect position info on any photos you take and add them to the map using either of the above methods (They both accept latitude/longitude coordinates). Here's a guide to getting the greatest accuracy while mapping high water marks this way

With any of the above methods, be sure to check the "High Water Mark" box to clarify what type of info you're entering.

Be sure to defer to first responders and residents at all times. Some towns have restricted access, and it's important to respect that as they dig out. Also, keep an eye on the weather at all times and stay out of danger if more rain is threatening. But overall, thank you all for the work you've been doing; we're lucky to have such a great community in Vermont.


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In Which I Miss the Point . . .

Sunday, August 28, 2011
This storm appears headed straight for Iceland! Egads! High winds and rain in the North Atlantic! Unprecedented! I wonder if Icelandic TV has an endless feed of a meteorologist standing on the Reykavik waterfront with excessive rain gear on.

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Republican Fundraising 2012 - the Early Days

Thursday, August 25, 2011
They're coming! Holy crap, they're coming!

It's always instructive to see the spatial dimensions of politics. Development Seed in D.C. just set up this snappy way of viewing individual donations to candidates so far this election cycle [it's already a cycle? Jeez, slow down, Hoss.]:



The regional clustering of some candidates - Romney owns the coasts, the midwest is split - is a fairly good representation of how our society fractures and gathers, even on the conservative side of things alone.

Mostly surprising is the number of times Ron Paul's name shows up. Dude just won't quit. Or make a coherent argument for a tight monetary policy.
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Oh for the love of . . .

Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Finally took a look at ArcGIS Online, released in May this year. I now feel a wee bit like Mike Doonesbury circa 2000:


So I've been working for a few months on an open-source workflow that runs between a web map and an editable database with embedding capability, actually pretty psyched that ESRI wasn't in that space yet. I wish I'd tried this out months ago:



View Larger Map

It looks like you still need some ArcSDE and ArcGIS for server chops to pull off a completely-editable interface - to actually practice vector editing in a webpage window - but this was frightening. I threw the above map together in 30 minutes using ArcGIS Online, while coding something similar from scratch took closer to 40 hours (though I'm no programmer).

ESRI strikes again.
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Shapefiles to Fusion Table Maps

Thursday, August 4, 2011
So you need a web map on the fly?



Google's fusion tables toolkit is something of a killer app for cartographers. As many have already discovered, it's sort of a miniature, compacted version of the process by which a relational database gets viewed as a web map. By tossing it all into the same browser-based, code-free blender, Google has removed a whole slew of otherwise-tedious steps from the process. Fusion tables can do the following:

  • Clean data
  • Serve data
  • Centralize authentication and access
  • Merge/Relate Datasets
  • Map and style geographic data
  • Serve maps on the web.
That's anywhere from three to six different types of software using traditional methods. Hot damn.

The one downside to fusion tables has been the use of KML as the standard accepted geometry type for complex features like lines and polygons. For those of us who work with the shapefile format, that's an extra step. Fortunately, Josh Livni at Google hacked together a way to send shapefiles directly to fusion tables with geometry intact for mapping:


It's a sweet add-on that lets you send - say - a shapefile showing Vermont towns directly to a styled web map, with queryable information via Google charts.

I love how this stuff just keeps getting easier . . .

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Cartodynamism

Monday, July 25, 2011
Herodotus laid down his world on parchment with ink. Samuel de Champlain traveled with paper and pencil. They - and every mapmaker in between and since - created map objects that were imbued with authority.

Maps have always been trusted for complex reasons; social, cultural, political. But for millennia map-making and even map-reading were the province of an elite few, mirroring the dynamic of priests who owned the word of god when the world was 5% literate. Only in our great-grandparents' lifetimes have maps been democratized, their use become common for road navigation and capital-memorizing.

Broken Survey - Incomplete topography in Wyoming


The same way it shook everything else in our lives, the internet has brought maps a step further. Common map interfaces are available in every browser and show only the most basic of facades - these maps contain the world within, and the whole of geography in a 4"x3" container on a glowing screen. Cartographers are only just starting to grasp the possibilities here - this technology isn't yet a decade old - but now that maps of everything are available to everyone, the size of the world has changed.

Washington D.C. live - dark dynamic cartography
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