Sen. Durbin and 15 others to Talk Flood Maps with FEMA and ACE

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and 15 other senators will meet with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to discuss “the lack of communication on the part of FEMA and the Corps; the affordability of flood insurance; and the lack of time and resources to complete flood levee repairs before flood maps are finalized.” The group tried to use administrative and legislative means to solve the issues, but found no resolution. Hence, a meeting. The other players, mostly from Mississippi River states, includeSen. Roland Burris, D-Illinois, as well as both of Missouri’s senators, Claire McCaskill, a Democrat; and Christopher Bond, a Republican. Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, are also part of the group and all 16 are from states facing river flood map issues.

- News Democrat

Hear Tufte and Bishop (Google)/Black (Cloudmade) on Maps

On my iPod this weekend were two tasty bits of audio of interest to geospatial folks:

On the Media (NPR) interviewed Edward Tufte about his new role as an advisor to Obama administration regarding visualization. He renders judgment on Recovery.gov and some of his plans for it, and how it might be the reference implementation for how other agencies share visualized data.

Update: Tuft was also interviewed in the New York Times; he gives Rocovery.gov a B+.

Reporter’s Roundtable (C|net) is hosted by one of my favorite BOLers, Rafe Needleman. He tackles a single tech topic each week with experts on the matter. This week he delves into online maps with Peter Birch, product manager of Google Earth and Nick Black, co-founder of Cloudmade, a company looking to build a business around OpenStreetMap (OSM). The pair did a nice job of highlighting the differences between how Google deals with data and how OSM does and Needleman asks many of the questions regular folks have regarding privacy, Google blurring things (it doesn’t), and how quickly maps are updated.