Wind Regions .kmz, Celtics win Championship, Dying Maps, Google Maps GIS?, and moe. at Gov's Island

I added a downloadable .kmz file of NYS Recommended Wind Farm Development Areas from my graduate research (or see top of right side of page). It's based on my research using NEPA, wind speeds, and transmission line accessibility (10 miles or less) as a pre-screening tool for identifying areas as suitable for wind farm development.

The Celtics tore up the Lakers in the NBA Finals.

Another article on the dying paper map referred by The Map Room.

Off the Map continues the discussion of if Google Maps is GIS?

I got some free tickets to the moe. show at Governor's Island this past Sunday. It was great to take the ferry and visit the island for the first time. I hadn't seen moe. in a few years and didn't recognize all the songs but the venue and vibe was great. It felt like a college campus and there were so many trees that the light show projected onto the tree canopy. There were only about 1100 people there (likely due to late Sunday show and $40 ticket prices). There's a Governor's Island blog here. And here's what they had to say:

The Highline Ballroom brought Moe and a lot of happy jam-band fans to Governors Island this weekend.

It was the first of three evening concerts in the Highline Ballroom’s Governors Island Concert Series. Darkstar Orchestra is coming out on Friday, July 11 and the Saw Doctors are scheduled to pay a visit on Saturday, August 23. Because these concerts start and/or end after the Island’s free public ferry stops running, the ticket price includes the cost of transportation to the Island. Visit http://www.govislandconcerts.com for tickets and info.

Sunday is believed to have been the first time Governors Island had been allowed to stay up late (11pm!) on a school night since the Coast Guard’s going away party in 1996.

Here's the bootleg of the show for download from Internet Archive.


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Park Ave. No Car Zones & Open Portable GIS

Image from the NY Times

The New York Times is reporting that Mayor Bloomberg successfully got NYC pedestrians and bikers three Saturdays in August to travel on Park Avenue and Lafayette car-free. Park Ave. was car-free up until the 1920's. Hence, Park Avenue.

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Open Source Portable GIS from Fuzzy Tolerance: Like other Portable Apps, Portable GIS is a self-contained stack of open source GIS software for Windows, including GRASS, QGIS, FWTools, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, MapServer, Tilecache, Featureserver, GeoServer, and lots more. It takes the pain out of installing and configuring all this software by making it stand-alone - you can upzip it to a thumb drive and run everything from there.

150 y/o Central Park map on display, free Battery Park Sonic Youth tickets impossible to get, and Remote Sensing for Human Rights

image and text from NYTimes

The map is the centerpiece of “Celebrating Greensward: The Plan for Central Park, 1858-2008,” which will be on view in the old Arsenal at Fifth Avenue and 64th Street until June 19.

Thursday I tried to get free Sonic Youth tickets for 4th of July at Battery Park but was timed-out. I had to wait for over a half hour for a page to load only for it to say that all the tickets are gone. There was no password or anything to protect the site so I'm speculating that some people definitely hacked in and got all the tickets.

And lastly, check out this interesting clip of using Remote Sensing as a tool for identifying global conflicts and refugee migrations.

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Data ownership, NYC Subway evolution, Citysol concerts, Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park for summer '09 concerts& the new iPhone

There are always a lot of arguments about data ownership and distribution among GIS professionals. If your organization creates data (or adds value to it) should you protect it or distribute it and if so for free or at what cost? My personal opinion is to freely distribute it (unless it is sensitive or private information). However, professionally I must acknowledge that at one point someone was paying for all the hours it took to create. But what if the client is a public agency? If the tax payer is footing the bill shouldn't they have access to the data that the consultant created? The issue is very complex but interesting nonetheless. It would also be interesting to see how age and or any other characteristics define a person's standpoint on the issue. I find that younger GIS folks are more apt to data sharing since we've grown into an already data sharing friendly GIS world. Check out this great article on the evolution of the NYC Subway map. Men's Vogue did a piece on subway maps that likely inspired that post.

Here's a link to Solar One's Citysol concert series.

The Friends of Bushwick are trying to get the McCarren Pool concert series (which will be closed for renovation next summer) to be moved to Bushwick Inlet Park. The meeting was Monday but its not too late to voice your opinion. Lastly, the new iPhone is great. While the average user may not be too impressed with the new release I'm very excited about the GPS capabilities. Using Google's My Location iPhone users can now use a combination of GPS, cell towers and wi-fi to find their location. MacRumors took notes of what transpired at the Worldwide Developer Conference 2008 Keynote.

High Earth Orbit, Google Calendar to GeoCal, Green Musicians & NY Times mag: future cities

I thought I'd highlight a great geospatial blog called High Earth Orbit. It's written by Andrew Turner who runs Mapfacture.

I've been trying to integrate a mapping component linked to my NYC free concerts calender. Through some searching I stumbled upon this blog article which then brought me to this Yahoo Pipes Geocode App. It works pretty decent, except the geocode is off since many of the concerts are at landmark places rather than standard addresses. I have the resulting map linked below - (REMOVED). Sorry about the far-out extent. By the time I fix it it'll probably be removed because I'll have tried a GeoCal solution outlined in this page.

Here's a Treehugger article on green musicians. I'd like to see their methodology b/c there are arguably greener musicians out there....Willie Nelson (his biofuel bus and his env. activism) or any acoustic street musician (uses no electricity and travels using public transit)???

Also, the Sunday NY Times Magazine had some great articles on planning future cities.

NIM: Green Roofs, James Fee Interview, Goosh, Adobe/ESRI to include PDF add-ons for 9.3,

I really love this recent article from No Impact Man. Beaven, aka NIM explains why green roofs are a synergy of solutions. First, green roofs absorb heat and use water that would otherwise go to waste. Second, in poorer neighborhoods locally grown food is a great solution to those who can only afford cheap, unhealthy calories. And green roofs also connect city residents to the natural landscape.

Image from NoImpactMan.com

Check out this James Fee Interview from the folks at Off The Map.

Image and selected text from Off the Map

FortiusOne: Do datasharing and crowdsourcing have a place in GIS?
James Fee: Yes, but the problem is how do you give GIS professionals the ability to use the data and make decisions about its accuracy. I guess it brings up the question, do you trust a Biologist in the field with at GPS more than a hobbyist? I’d guess most GIS professionals would pick the Biologist, but a degree in Biology doesn’t mean the data is necessarily good.
Datasharing and crowdsourcing are great ideas but for GIS to use them, they need metadata, documentation, and possibly a rating system. A “marketplace” should allow users to rate the quality and accuracy of the data which both helps others make decisions about the data and gives feedback to the creator on how they can improve their dataset. OpenStreetMap has been a great example on how “experts” can help “novices” grow to be experts in data collection.
FortiusOne: What emerging technology trend will have the biggest impact on GIS?
James Fee: I think putting a GPS in so many “ordinary” things is going to impact GIS immensely. Walking around with a GPS in your phone should give you access to many GIS applications, digital cameras and video cameras with GPS will spatially enable tons of datasets. read more here

A new Linux-like Google search portable called Goosh Search developed by Stefan Grothkopp

Adobe and ESRI teamed up fro ArcGIS 9.3 to include PDF/GIS features.

Image from MacInstruct.com

And I just added another GB of RAM to my old powerbook G4 at home. It was very easy using this guide from macinstruct.com. Apple charges a decent amount to install additional RAM so I saved about $100-150 doing it myself. I managed to break a tiny piece of plastic (!) but it was not critical. Plus doing things DIY always makes you feel pretty good once the damn thing starts working.

Columbus, Ohio unveils bicycle master plan, Neogeography and cartography, Ontario teaches youth about sutainable energy & Governor's Island Sci. expo

Check out Columbus, Ohio's bicycle master plan as featured in The Columbus Dispatch.

Off The Map opens the discussion about the lack of cartographic principles in web-mapping. This is something that web technology has wrestled with since its advent. With fewer and fewer cartography classes and more and more web programmers and neogeographers producing maps there's a general lack of cartographic integrity in most web-based maps.

Image from Treehugger.com

Ontario, Canada is taking the lead in teaching its youth about sustainable energy production. This is the Treehugger article that describes the program that is helping teach the youth of Canada to take the lead in the global marketplace.

And lastly The 3rd annual Governors Island Science, Art Exhibition and Lecture Series: at presented by CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities at Governor's Island, NY. Here is a link from Green Brooklyn and below is a list of events:

* June 7th: The CUNY Sustainability Project and PlaNYC
Laura Saegert Wenkel, The CUNY Sustainability Project

* June 14th: Beyond Bike Lanes: Retrofitting the 21st Century Metropolis for Bicycles and Pedestrians
Tom Angotti, Hunter College

* June 21st: New Materials for Renewable Energy Technologies
Steve Greenbaum, Hunter College

* June 28th: Industrial Sludge as a Source of Composite Absorbents for Environmental Remediation
Theresa Bandosz, City College

* July 5th: Plants in the Green City
Steve Clemants, Brooklyn Botanic Garden

* July 12th: Greening the Big Apple: a Natural History of the New York Megalopolis
Betsy McCully, Kingsboro Community College

* July 19th: Water: The Integral Design Element for Green Infrastructure in the City of New York.
Paul Mankiewicz, The GAIA Institute

* July 26th: Fuel from Algae
Juergen Polle, Brooklyn College

* August 2nd: Curbing Catastrophic Waste in your Home, Condo, Coop, or Multifamily Building
Andy Padian, Steven Winter Associates

* August 9th: PlaNYC: Toward a Greener, Greater New York
Ariella Rosenberg-Maron, Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability

* August 16th: Water Efficiency in New York: Why It’s Important and How to Achieve It
Warren Liebold, New York City Department of Environmental Protection

* August 23rd: The Queensbridge Wind Power project
Andrea Polli, Hunter College

* August 30th: Sustainable Cities Town Hall: An open forum for New Yorkers
Moderated by Bill Solecki, Director CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities

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Bo Diddley , Dylan Art, the folks behind our clicking at Google and mapping consumptive behavior

Image from NY Times

Bo Diddly has passed away.

Dylan as a visual artist.

And NY Times brings us a great article on the faces behind our Google clicks...

Lastly, Off the Map brings us Dataset of the Day: Worldwide Consumption Behavior, Tobacco, Alcohol and Education.