Friday, June 12. 2009

Using Foursquare to Track InternetWeek Week Visitors

Sam Lessin (Drop.io) crunched data collected from some 100 contacts based on their "check ins" in the mobile social network Foursqaure during the weeklong event in NYC last month.

Lessin trawled through the data to find what time people checked into coffee shops in the morning (and whether they were doing this earlier or later on a given day), how much people "lost steam" over the course of a party- and conference-filled week, and how much the most popular gatherings actually matched up to the Internet Week New York official schedule. As it turns out, the hottest parties were impromptu, unofficial gatherings at the Standard Hotel and, um, Sing Sing Karaoke.

How might someone use this data to plan for, or react to conference audiences or other groups that might be "tracked?"

- C|net
- Lessin's report

Education Tidbits

Dr. Wansoo Im, president of Vertices LLC, a GIS consulting firm, and a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, helped students and parents documents routes to school armed with pedometers and digital cameras. The idea was to highlight areas in need of upgrade so that youngsters could walk safely to school. Sixteen schools participated on different teams. The data was uploaded, with help from Im's former students into a GIS program for analysis. The project site, with videos, is here.

- Woodbridge Sentinel

Students in Hartford, VT are putting White River Junction on the 'net. The local TV station says they are putting their local history information on Google Earth, though I'm not sure what that means. It's also unclear if they are making 3D models or simply linking pictures and text. Most interesting: the work is down alongside "TeleAtlas" (sic).

- WCAX

Jakarta teachers are learning to put Green Mapping into the curriculum. The idea is to get students to be involved with and thus take care of the environment around them. A most interesting quote from the article: "He [Robert Zuber, a Green Map expert]
added the process of making a Green Map was more important than the map itself, as it raised the mapmakers’ sense of responsibility toward preserving the environment."

- Jakarta Post


Eastern Michigan University's Department of Public Safety and the Ypsilanti Police Department have teamed with the university's Institute for Geospatial Research, to track crime. The solution is built on Google Maps.

- press release

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences member Peter Bol, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations has been named Walter Channing Cabot Fellows. The annual awards recognize tenured faculty members for distinguished accomplishments in the fields of literature, history, or art, broadly conceived. A historian of later imperial China, he chairs the China Biographical Database Project, an online database that contains biographical information on individuals who lived between the seventh and 14th centuries. The data is primarily used for statistical and spatial analysis. He also chairs the China Historical GIS, a geographic information system covering 2,000 years of China’s history.

- Harvard Gazette

GPS (not address) Gets Demolition Location Wrong

Bottom line: a demolition team which used GPS coordinates to locate the target house in Carroll, Georgia, erred and knocked down the wrong building.

UPI