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December 10 · Issue #11 · View online
Email digest of all things spatial, remote sensing, and GIS
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Happy December! This is a brick of a newsletter - full of links! I hadn’t sent out an edition of Spatial Reader for a while because I didn’t think I’d saved many articles to send - but I was clearly wrong. I think this is the longest one yet. It starts out with some great bits of mapping and spatial analysis in the news, has some nice articles about techniques and processing in the middle, and then finishes with a bunch of articles about coding. As always, if you have feedback, feel free to reply and let me know what you’d like to see in these newsletters! See you next time.
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Why all world maps are wrong - YouTube
This is one of the best short video explainers on map projections I’ve seen. I do something similar with a ball in my courses to show it can’t easily be flattened, but I think he explains the concept of map projections even better, with a great set of visualizations!
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How the Circle Line rogue train was caught with data
Some really interesting data mining and analyis to determine why train emergency brakes were triggering in Singapore. A problem that could be tackled with traditional spatial analysis, or through various data visualization techniques that incorporate proxies for location (time/linear position). A fascinating read
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Four Million Commutes Reveal New U.S. 'Megaregions'
Another day, another amazing visualization and article from National Geographic, this time using commutes to determine what we naturally consider to be regions in the U.S. From the article: “As economic centers grow in size and importance, determining their boundaries has become more crucial.”
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Six Months of Drought in the American Southeast | ArcGIS Blog
This article is part data analysis, part tutorial on using ArcGIS Pro. It’s done by one of Esri’s excellent cartographers, and he shows off some cool techniques, some specific to ArcGIS Pro and some just plain advanced cartography (my favorite takeaway from this article was the link to his *other* article on enhancing imagery with terrain - he uses the technique here).
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The Gulf of Mexico Is Being Destroyed by Thousands of Invisible Oil Spills | WIRED
Loosely spatial, but interesting and with some cool maps nonetheless. From the article: “Oil pollution in US waters didn’t end with Deepwater Horizons. Small spills are a chronic problem, and their impact is cumulative.”
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For those of us in the United States, this election will be talked about, and mapped, for a long time. The geography of U.S. politics is subject to cartographic distortion - that is, the decisions of the mapmaker can dramatically change how our electoral maps are perceived. Check out these articles for more.
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Cartonerd: The NYT election map
Days before the election, the New York Times (which has a great mapping staff), published a foldout electoral map of the US - but it had some issues with how it presented its information. This post from the blog Cartonerd deconstructed and critiqued the map
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This Was the Real Political Map of America After the 2012 Election
This article is from the 2012 election, but points out that maps that show only blue or red (with very little purple where the two parties blend) are painting a much more divided nation than actually exists.
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Lost Cause
Just before the election, ProPublica mapped all of the counties won by the losing candidate in U.S. presidential elections all the way back to 1828. A cool read and a nice set of maps.
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A Technical Follow-Up: How We Built the World’s Prettiest Auto-Generated Transit Maps
A great read on how something that’s easy enough to do manually can be hard to automate when it needs to scale to a country (or the whole world) and work with changing data. Here’s how Transit makes its maps.
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Census Reporter: Making Census Data Easy to Use
The update to the American Communities Survey was just released, which makes this a great time to link to a site that’s been around for a while, but just loaded the new data too, Census Reporter. From the site: “Census Reporter provides useful facts about every place in America. Compare places using tables and maps, download data, and embed charts on your site!”
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Our most detailed view of Earth across space and time
Google loaded up a whole lot more public imagery into Earth Engine giving them timelapses going back to 1984. From Google: “Today, we’re making our largest update to Timelapse yet, with four additional years of imagery, petabytes of new data, and a sharper view of the Earth from 1984 to 2016.”
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Landsat 9 Will Launch in 2023 ~ GIS Lounge
Want to be 7 years ahead of the curve? You can start reading about Landsat 9 today!
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Satellites confirm sinking of San Francisco tower / Sentinel-1 / Copernicus / Observing the Earth / Our Activities / ESA
Out here on the west coast, the Millenium Tower has become the subject of some ridicule for how quickly it’s sinking. Now, we can verify with satellites thanks to satellite mounted radar. From the article: “The Sentinel-1 satellites have shown that the Millennium Tower skyscraper in the centre of San Francisco is sinking by a few centimetres a year. Studying the city is helping scientists to improve the monitoring of urban ground movements, particularly for subsidence hotspots in Europe.”
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OpenEO: a GDAL for Earth Observation Analytics
If you’ve used Google’s Earth Engine to process remotely sensed imagery, you know just how wonderful an environment it is since it removes the time consuming data management aspects of remote sensing. This article proposes a new “competitor” - an open source model to provide those kinds of capabilities. Definitely worth watching!
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UT professor develops algorithm to improve online mapping of disaster areas
After major disasters, teams of volunteers build new datasets for OpenStreetMap to help first responders, agencies, and disaster relief groups have the best sense for what resources and routes are available. Now, a team of researchers is developing an algorithm to help those volunteers prioritize their work.
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JavaScript 30 — Build 30 things with vanilla JS in 30 days with 30 tutorials
Have you been wanting to learn Javascript so you can make web maps or write code for Earth Engine? Well, now there’s a nice free set of tutorial videos on working in plain old Javascript (as opposed to the many frameworks out there). Worth checking out if you want to learn to code!
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Fog Creek's Gomix makes bot and web development quicker and easier
If you already know Javascript, but wanted some practice, this new service from Fog Creek Software lets you code in Javascript in a collaborative online editor using app templates - none of these are spatial, but they will get you practicing - and you can probably make something spatial with them. (Fog Creek has been around the industry for a while - they’ve been tied in with Stack Overflow and other services you may have heard of)
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Advent of Code 2016
If you really want to practice your coding, here’s an advent calendar full of puzzles for coders (Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it!)
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How to use GitHub for Beginners - YouTube
The ability to understand and use version control - in this case GitHub - is becoming more and more important, even for noncoders. I’ve been looking for some good introductions to the service and concepts to give to employees and collaborators. Here’s one to start with.
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How to Use Version Control in Git & GitHub | Udacity
If after watching that video, you want even more, then check out this entire class on using version control. You can also take a look at this free book on the subject.
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Not brand new to coding? Great - well, here are a few more advanced articles I’ve come across recently. If you’re not a software developer, some of the text here might be gibberish to you!
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How to Build Asynchronous Workflows in a Geospatial Application - Azavea - Beyond Dots on a Map
If you’re building spatial web services, offloading processing to worker threads is critical - this article details one approach. From the article: “Create asynchronous workflows using JavaScript on the front-end, Python on the back-end, and GeoTrellis and Spark JobServer for geoprocessing.”
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GitHub - urbica/gis-notebook: Jupyter Notebook Python GIS Stack
This GitHub repository has a dockerfile for building a GIS-oriented Jupyter Notebook setup. Basic, but nice to have around!
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