popular logistics

Ben at MagnetBox - a keen observer of information arrays and streams - reports on Everyblock.com and its new special reports about more complex geographically-related data:

We’ve launched our first EveryBlock “special report” — an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation “Operation Crooked Code.”

As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We’ve been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web. However, over the past few months as we’ve been building the site, we’ve come across a number of types of information that don’t exactly fit the EveryBlock mold.

We’ll interrupt this excerpt here to point out that this tool might be of particular use to groups like the Disaster Accountability Project - particularly with decentralized efforts like its  Disaster Accountability Monitor and Blogger network.

For example, an architectural group named “Chicago 7 Most Endangered Buildings” in January. That’s geographically relevant news (i.e., if you live near one of those endangered buildings, you’d likely be interested in knowing about it), but because it’s such a “one-off” type of information, we haven’t done anything with it on EveryBlock. It didn’t make much sense to add such a relatively obscure type of information to our list of news types.

From the EveryBlock blog.

Via Magnetbox.

Palos Verdes on the Net (PVNET), a non-profit, has been formed to provide local municipalities with GIS services for emergency/disaster planning at low cost.

Via All Points Blog.

Mapz: a gis librarian  - a mysterious and anonymous GIS librarian, to boot - has a post which may well answer the question - what do underfunded and non-funded community-based groups do about their GIS needs.

In this post,  My Powerful Geospatial Suite of Free GIS, Mr. Mapz has a pretty impressive list of applications, about which he says:

These are the freely available applications and services that make up my own personal free GIS. Individually, many freely available applications do not of themselves constitute a full geographic information system, but when these are all pulled together within one suite of tools…Well, it is remarkable what someone can do without spending a cent. (And without needing to spend an enormous amount of time developing your own applications out of open source components or needing to learn, or install, complex applications, such as GRASS GIS.)

- snip -

For a more comprehensive freeware software list, see FreeGIS.org.

Mapz also points to a more exhaustive list of resources of desktop GIS applications, including not-free software, at this link on Very Spatial.

The GIS/map piece of the planning function is, without question, critical. There are two barriers, I think - cost and learning curve - that prevent community-based groups from doing more. This is especially true in communities where local government isn’t supporting community planning and response: it’s hard to get to thinking about a steep learning curve when you’re worried that your municipality is slacking on basic safety issues and you’re trying to persuade your neighbors to buy flashlights.

The Supreme Being in Time Bandits had Randall, Fidgit, Strutter, Og, Wally and Vermin. ¹ Jonathan Crowe of Map Room now brings us the new that the

The United States Geological Survey’s National Map makes use of a corps of volunteers, who are assigned a given area (a USGS quad) and report the names and coordinates of various map features, such as schools, town halls and other facilities, and any changes thereto. The sorts of things that aerial surveys might reveal, but not necessarily identify. Sounds interesting — something a dedicated individual with spare time and a GPS might have a lot of fun doing, akin to what OpenStreetMap volunteers are doing in the UK. (U.S. geographic data is in the public domain, so this may well be the next best thing.) Via Very Spatial and Catholicgauze.

Maproom post here.

Another example of the amazing thing that can be done by volunteers - and by distributed and coordinated teams of people.
The United States Geological Survey’s National Map makes use of a corps of volunteers, who are assigned a given area (a USGS quad) and report the names and coordinates of various map features, such as schools, town halls and other facilities, and any changes thereto. The sorts of things that aerial surveys might reveal, but not necessarily identify. Sounds interesting — something a dedicated individual with spare time and a GPS might have a lot of fun doing, akin to what OpenStreetMap volunteers are doing in the UK. (U.S. geographic data is in the public domain, so this may well be the next best thing.) Via Very Spatial and Catholicgauze.

1. See also Wikipedia entry about Time Bandits for, among other things, theory that Terry Gilliam meant the Bandits to represent the Pythons. [↩]

Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles (PSR-LA)  makes the case that military activities have had a profound environmental effect on Southern California:

Southern California’s health and environment has been profoundly transformed by military activity.   Did you know that the entire San Gabriel Valley is an EPA Superfund site - and the eastern half of the San Fernando Valley is similarly a Superfund site due to military pollution?

  PSR-LA is working to ensure the cleanup of the Rocketdyne Laboratory in the Santa Susana Hills above Chatsworth

Military, intelligence, and to some extent, law-enforcement agencies, not without some reason , are exempt from many regulatory schemes. In the first place - there are often no civilian analogues - making regulations less relevant. Even more powerfully, they’re charged with critical and specialized tasks   that might well, in an individual case, or in wartime, outweigh other concerns.

However, as Lord Acton observed, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and the power - especially when masked by official government secrecy - tends to aggregate these decisions.

Fewer than 300 people were killed in the planes on September 11, 2001. The two planes which hit the World Trade Center hit buildings which were owned by the Port Authority of New York  and New Jersey - a bi-state agency. Because they were government-owned - even though most of the tenants were commercial tenants who might have rented from a regular commercial landlord - all sorts of building and fire codes were waived.

via Critical Spacial Practice

For those having trouble with the metric thing - you know who you are - 18 grams is a wee bit more than half an ounce. From Engadget, via Identity Unknown :

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to a point where this is the preferred means of communications or cartography in a domestic emergency in the United States. However, Popular Logistics is committed to makings its readers aware of all types of systems, although we’ll probably drawn the line at squirrels. Here’s an image of a German World War I photo-taking pigeon, from PigeonBlog:

Link to concise article on this subject on PigeonBlog here.

Via Cynical-C.

The NPMS Public Viewer  generates maps of gas and “hazardous liquid” pipelines.

We’ve yet to sort out the definitions (precisely what “gas” and “hazardous liquid” mean), the map viewer (you see we haven’t provided a sample map), and what’s in the restricted access database (the main page provides for government and contractor login - it may just be for submissions).

Check back for more on this. Anyone who knows their way around .asp applications - and how we can export images - we’d be happy to have some assistance.