IFTF's Future Now

Kids and GPS

The next thing to add to Baby 2.0: geolocation! At least when the kid turns three:

New research from the University of Bristol shows for the first time that global positioning systems technology (GPS) can be used to show how children as young as three find their way around. GPS, the technology used in sat-navs, is a navigation system based on satellites that allows a user with a receiver to determine precise coordinates for their location on the earth's surface.

Using things around us to regain our bearings is known as reorientation and the process has been widely studied in non-human animal species. More recent research, looking at the development of this ability in children, suggests that we do not accurately use landmarks to orient ourselves until about the age of six. However, all studies to date have taken place in artificial laboratory environments rather than the real world.

Now Dr Alastair Smith from the Department of Experimental Psychology and colleagues from his department and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol have tested the ability of children aged between three and seven to orient themselves in the great outdoors. The results suggest that children as young as three use outdoor landmarks, like trees and buildings, to find their way around.

Technorati Tags: children, geoweb, psychology

Small quake

We had a small earthquake here in the Bay Area this evening. On the Peninsula, where the Institute is located, it probably lasted about 30 seconds or so, and buildings shook a little; but nothing fell over.

Seconds after it was over, I started getting IMs from colleagues, asking if I'd felt the quake too, and how long it had lasted. It was my kids' first earthquake, and so naturally I wanted to explain what an earthquake is (though without the part about the near inevitability of the Bay Area eventually being hit hard by a Hayward Fault quake); so naturally, I fired up Google Earth, found the USGS report (5.6, not so small), and showed them where the epicenter was:

The red star is the epicenter, and the yellow pin is where we live.

A little later, I was curious to see what fault it was on, so I went back online, grabbed a KMZ file from the USGS showing the locations of Bay Area fault lines, and added it into the mix:

Now I could see it was on the Calaveras Fault, not the Hayward, as I'd assumed.

We at IFTF write a lot about how visualization tools create new interpretive possibilities, and how the existence of substantial, free data sets creates new opportunities for amateur science. Turns out we're right.

Technorati Tags: earthquake, Google Earth, menlo park, visualization

Public Geodata - OpenStreetMap, Shapewiki and GeoCommons

I spent some time this week at the annual Bay Area geo-geek gathering - OReilly's Where 2.0 conference in San Jose.

There is a lot of really exciting stuff going on with open public geodata repositories - essential infrastructure that will enable developers to quickly build new sites and applications that leverage geographic data.

OpenStreetMap is trying to solve an enormous barrier to the geoweb which is the way basemaps are licensed in the United Kingdon and other European countries - where the government owns a copyright and requires a license for use of basic geodata like the street map. (In the US, this is free public data). The project is leveraging the commons and GPS track logs to create a public repsoitory of street grid data. The London map is one of the most developed and shows how a wiki-like commons can be used to build such an open, free data archive that any web developer can use to build applications through an open API.

During lunch I met a really interesting fellow Andre Lewis, who didn't present but told me about his pet project ShapeWiki is another spin on the OpenStreetMap idea, but instead of drawing lines, you draw shapes, another critically important kind of geographic feature that is useful in designating all kinds of zones, districts and areas.

I've been entering some shapes into the database - mainly different neighborhood boundaries in New York City, and various iterations of them as they have changed over the years. The coolest part is that you can tag shapes and then look at the GeoRSS feed of the whole collection of shapes using Google Maps - check out all of the shapes tagged "nyc" for instance.

Most exciting of all, though, is GeoCommons - recently launched by my friend Sean Gorman and his startup FortiusOne. GeoCommons is a potenital killer of desktop GIS, by combining a free, massive public geodata repository with lots of tools for doing web-based GIS analysis and tools for collaboration. People can create an share maps that answer questions like "Where is the Safest Place to Go to College?" or "Has the DEA Busted a Meth Lab in MY Neighborhood?"

The geoweb is really starting to blossom - for more background, take a look at IFTF's 2004 research report - Infrastructure for the New Geography.

An amazing way to waste time, and possibly learn about the world

Google Gap Minder.

Create a chart in which "Internet Users Per 1000 People" is on the Y axis, and watch how around 1990 Internet use bubbles up like a Mentos dropped in a Diet Coke.

"Discrimi-Nav": A Spoof of the GeoWeb's Downside

Thinking about the impacts of location-awareness and the geoweb in 2001, I wrote this:

In addition, location-based services will be used to actively avoid certain elements of the urban social and physical landscape. In Tom Wolfe’s bestseller, Bonfire of the Vanities, the protagonist is thrown into a series of trials after taking an exit off an expressway in the Bronx, getting lost, and striking a pedestrian. This represents the classic “urban jungle” storyline, playing upon fears of urban crime and disorder. Yet, today with the help of information portals like TellMe (800-555-TELL), or in-vehicle navigation systems such as OnStar and the aptly-named NeverLost, the basic chain of events that drives Wolfe’s story becomes impossible. A potentially threatening interaction with the urban environment can be averted through the processing power of a GIS located thousands of miles away in California.

Now, a TV spoof shows a fake ad for a system called "Discrimi-Nav" that lets you avoid neighborhoods with people you don't like!

Google mashup for the paranoid

Healthmap, which

brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HEALTHmap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

Via Wired News.

Technorati Tags: disease, epidemics, Google Maps, health, mashup

A Frontrunner for the Coolest Google Mashup.... Ever

I like to count myself among the Young Turks of Internet geography. There was a small group of PhD students in the late 90s that I hung with who did a lot of pioneering work figuring out where cyberspace connected to the real world.

The most technically gifted one in the bunch was Sean Gorman. You'll remember him as the guy whose dissertation was classified by the CIA, which meant his review committee didn't have the clearance to read it! We've gone our separate ways, but Sean started a company called FortiusOne which does all kinds of what-if analysis to large infrastructure data sets to help companies assess their exposure to public network failures. Like what if you blow up the Holland tunnel - how does that affect the movement of your people, goods and information locally, nationally and globally?

Sean and company have created a super-cool google mashup that lets you create "heat maps" of network data and overlay them on Google Maps. This is a huge leap for Google mashups because its really the first time I've seen them used for spatial analysis, not just information display. That is, you can answer questions like "is location A better than location B?" Over at Moving Past Push Pins, the company's aptly-named blog, you can see some screen shots and an article showing off the new tech. Very soon, Sean tells me, there will be a public demo.

phone shui

Jason Li at Virtual China writes: Samsung Motorola has recently put forth a patent for the Feng Shui Phone, which, according to Unwired View, does the following (and I quote):

• Three-dimensional Hall-effect sensor for measuring the strength of electromagnetic fields and to form a compass to determine the geographic direction in which the main wall of the house faces.
• Digital camera to determine color saturation, order and balance of the surroundings.
• GPS receiver to determine geographic location of the phone.
• The coordinates are then sent to the GIS databse through wireless network to to get the information about the surroundings of the location, e.g. the distance from the undesirable sites such as major airports, landfills, and factories.
• Cellphone microphone is used to measure noise level of the location.
• AM/FM radio to measure the AM and FM transmission strength and the distance form nearest AM/FM towers.
• The table with the chi values of each parameter is stored in phones memory and is used for calculation of chi  values of different parameters.

Via PostShow; info from Unwired View

I haven't read it, but it's excellent

That was the punch line to a New Yorker cartoon in the mid-1980s, spoken by a bookstore owner standing beside a stack of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Here, I use it as a caveat: I haven't actually read Anne Galloway and Matt Ward's article "Locative Media as Socialising and Spatialising Practices: Learning from Archaeology" (pdf), but the abstract sounds very interesting:

Pervasive computing and locative media are emerging as technologies and processes that promise to reconfigure our understandings and experiences of space and culture. With the critical hand of material and cultural studies, we start to shape questions about locative media representations of urban mobilities, and begin to unearth some of the struggles and tensions that exist within these fields of operation. By looking at archaeology’s constitutive processes of collection, ordering and display we highlight some of the problems found in mapping people and objects in space and time, and ask what kinds of social/spatial relations are made possible in particular locative media projects. Ultimately, we take archaeology’s critical focus on authorship and ownership, explain its relevance to locative media, and suggest questions to consider in the future research and design of locative media.

Technorati Tags: archaeology, digital/physical, geoweb, pervasive computing, place/space

Tracking Human Behavior

Intriguing piece on cellphones used to gather information about human behavior. While there are obvious privacy implications here, it could be used in permission-granted laboratory environments to understand human behavior in retail and elsewhere. (Extract via ACM)

As a participant in MIT Media Lab's Reality Mining project, graduate student Nathan Eagle has compiled about four decades' worth of continuous data on human behavior using communication, location, activity, and proximity information taken from 100 cell phone users, and this data could be used to enable new mobile phone functionalities. Reality Mining, as Eagle describes it, is the capturing of objective data on human behavior so that behavioral patterns can be more accurately predicted. The grad student says he splits mobile phone data into three categories: Location, determined through the use of cell tower IDs; communication taken from logs that list call recipients and frequency; and proximity revealed by Bluetooth scans every five minutes. Eagle says this data can facilitate behavior prediction by identifying patterns indicating life routines, which could be applied to the customization of a phone's appearance and operation for specific user demographics. He notes, for example, that about three out of every 10 MIT students in his study use their phone's clock as an alarm each day, but setting the alarm takes 10 keystrokes; from this observation, the value of a phone that assigns a single button to the alarm clock becomes clear. The grad student says he intends to apply the human behavior data he has collated to various disciplines, including computer science, social science, and physics. Eagle has created an application, Serendipity, designed to identify people with common interests by studying their distance in behavior states and/or proximity; Eagle admits that Serendipity raises privacy issues.