Target vs. Wal-mart - coming to FlowingData.com soon

Taken from the fascinating visual display of store growth over time, http://www.flowingdata.com/ put together the "dot expansion" of Wal-mart, then Target - and promises for a comparison visual are equally intriguing.

I claim no such greatness of creation skill, only wanted to help spread the exposure of brilliant output.

Click thru and enjoy.

Wal-mart Growth











Target Growth

If you love the visual display of quantitative information, I highly recommend subscribing to the FlowingData feed.

Cool Geo-Politic Pic: Pan & Zoom Inauguration

Try to find me, I dare ya (I wasn't there).

Credits to http://gigapan.org

Count how many Supreme Court Justices are sleeping.

President Barak Obama's interview on Arab TV

While transcripts of this interview were on several sites - I wanted to post the actual interview. This is a telling sign of a new style of diplomacy in US-Middle East foreign policy, given this occurred within a week of the inauguration.



Credits:

Date: 27/01/2009
Title: President Obama's first interview on Al Arabiya
Sender: Mohammed Salem
Location: U.S.A
Description: President Obama's first interview on Al Arabiya (Exclusive)

To read the transcipt - click here

The public commentary on the transcipt is also quite lengthy.

Three Letter Words Unite - CRM & GIS

Neat combination of GIS & CRM via Microsoft's Virtual Surface.

Group Cartography

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

Open Street map project - intriguing display of "group cartographic creation" - literally "the Social Group is building the Network". Very cool - brilliant display, impressive collective accomplishment.

Quick "Cut & Paste":
" ..... An animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world and this animation displays a white flash each time a way is entered or updated. Some edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official data. ...."

Full Link - Click Here

Credits:
This animation was produced by itoworld.com with financial support from ideasintransit.org; it is licensed CC-BY-SA and can also be downloaded from this page when you are logged-in. Various stills are available from flickr.com/groups/itomedia/pool/. The music is 'Open Electro' by Vincent Girès' jamendo.com/en/artist/silence and can be downloaded from archive.org/details/silence-silence.ITO World provide free online support software for OpenStreetMap (itoworld.com/static/osmmapper) and also provide online mapping services to organisations and individuals.

Cool Geo-Pic - CERES Global Cloud Fraction

Cool Geo-Pic: CERES Global Cloud Fraction

Low-altitude Cloud Fraction
download large image (1 MB, PNG) acquired December 27, 2008

High-altitude Cloud Fraction
download large image (672 KB, PNG) acquired December 27, 2008

From NASA's Earth Observatory - This is a student based online project to study cloud pattern formation. School has definitely gotten cooler since I studied clouds.....


Quick "Cut & Paste" highlights:

" .... Low clouds were more common over the ocean than over land, with the cloud-free skies over Earth’s driest areas standing out most prominently: the Sahara, southwest Asia and the Tibetan Plateau, Australia, and Antarctica. High-altitude cloud cover was patchier. A streak of high clouds penetrated the western Sahara from the Atlantic Ocean, and a river of high clouds meandered southeast from the heart of South America into the southern Atlantic. Only over the western Pacific was there widespread high-altitude cloud cover. ...."

Full Article - Click Here

Credits:

S’COOL Project Website
Arctic Reflection: Clouds Replace Snow and Ice as Solar Reflector
Arbiters of Energy
Global Maps: Cloud Fraction
NASA images created by Jesse Allen, using CERES FLASHFlux data provided courtesy of FLASHFlux team at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.
Instrument:
Aqua - CERES

Cool Geo-Pic: Changing Sea Ice along the Antarctic Peninsula

Cool Geo-Pic: Changing Sea Ice along the Antarctic Peninsula

Another from NASA's Earth Observatory. This is temporal comparison image is both beautiful and concerning. Not the sky blue ice changes - melted water that is re-absorbed into the surrounding ice pack.

download large image (2 MB, JPEG) acquired December 13, 2008

download large image (3 MB, JPEG) acquired January 2, 2009

Quick "Cut & Paste" Highlights:
" .... Changing weather conditions left their mark on sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula in late 2008 and early 2009. In mid-December 2008, melt water resting on the sea ice colored it sky blue. At the beginning of 2009, however, the sea ice appeared snowy white, and cracks had begun along the ice margin. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured these images on December 13, 2008 (top), and January 2, 2009 (bottom). Both images show the northern portion of the Antarctic Peninsula.... "

" .... In the image acquired on January 2, the sky-blue hue is gone, indicating that the melt water had either drained through cracks in the ice, or refrozen. The full-resolution image of this scene shows the formation of new sea ice in areas to the south, suggesting that refrozen sea ice is more likely. A storm or cold front passing through the region could drop temperatures just enough to form new sea ice. Although the melt water was gone, the sea ice was cracked, and several fissures appeared along the northeastern ice edge ..... "

Full Article - click here

Credits:
State of the Cryosphere. (2008, November 14). Ice Shelves. National Snow and Ice Data Center. Accessed January 8, 2009.
State of the Cryosphere. (2008, November 26). Sea Ice. National Snow and Ice Data Center. Accessed January 8, 2009.
NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott, based on image interpretation by Terry Haran and Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Instrument:
Terra - MODIS

Cool Geo-Pics: Sediment off the Yucatan Peninsula

Cool Geo-Pic from NASA's Earth Observatory: Sediment off the Yucatan Peninsula

Beautiful image of sediment flow in the Gulf of Mexico on the western coast of the Yucatan.

download large image (2 MB, JPEG) acquired December 14, 2008

Quick "Cut & Paste" Highlights:
A burst of color lit the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico off the Yucatan Peninsula on December 14, 2008, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image. The swirls of tan, green, blue, and white are most likely sediment in the water. The sediment scatters light, giving the water its color. The sediment comes from two sources: the land and the sea floor. Some of the color may also come from phytoplankton, tiny plant-like organisms that live in the sun-lit surface waters of the ocean.

Full article - Click Here

Credits:

Further Reading
S’COOL Project Website
Arctic Reflection: Clouds Replace Snow and Ice as Solar Reflector
Arbiters of Energy
Global Maps: Cloud Fraction
NASA images created by Jesse Allen, using CERES FLASHFlux data provided courtesy of FLASHFlux team at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.
Instrument: Aqua - CERES

Cool Geo-Pic - Insect Damage in British Columbia Forests

Cool Geo-Pic: Insect Damage in British Columbia Forests

The latest from NASA's Earth Observatory, this is a neat use of imagery to monitor environmental stress.

Cut & Paste Details:

download large image acquired June 26, 2006 - July 11, 2006 (7 MB, PNG).

" ... Beginning in the 1990s, British Columbia’s forests were increasingly plagued by a population explosion of mountain pine beetles. This beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae, destroyed large tracts of forest in the province.

Such widespread forest loss affects more than just the scenery. Forests have economic value, and they provide habitat and food for wildlife. In addition, they play an important role in Earth’s carbon cycle, which affects climate. Healthy, growing forests take up carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Dead forests produce carbon dioxide when trees decay. Being able to map the location and severity of pine beetle and other insect infestations is a crucial task for forest managers and biologists. ... "

Click here for full article & image:

References:

Kurz, W. A., Dymond, C.C,. Stinson, G., Rampley, G. J., Neilson, E. T., Carroll, A. L., Ebata, T., Safranyik, L. (2008). Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change. Nature, 452, 987-990. doi: 10.1038/nature06777.

Leatherman, D.A., Aguayo, I., Mehall, T.M. (2008). Beetle Information. Colorado State University. Accessed December 15, 2008.

Ministry of Forests and Range - Province of British Columbia. Mountain Pine Beetle. Accessed December 15, 2008.

Ranson, K.J. Montesano, P.M. (2008, December 16). Application of MODIS for general survey of forest insect disturbance in British Columbia and Siberia. American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.

NASA map by Robert Simmon, based on data from Paul Montesano, Jon Ranson, and the MODIS land team. Caption by Michon Scott and Rebecca Lindsey.
Instrument:
Terra - MODIS