I watched the CNN coverage of the Ft. Hood shootings and, during one segment of the program, the on-air reporter "told" the story using Google Earth's "tour" feature. This is a commonly used feature for those that are familiar with the touring function but what struck me was how much it put into context the unfolding of the day's events and timeline of the shootings.

In the past, this type of report might have been supported with rather crudely-drawn 2D maps. In this case, not only was the reporter able to trace the footsteps of the gunman spatially, but the supporting aerial imagery added real context for those who may not be familiar with the extent of the base, but especially for those who might have been stationed there at one time.

As I have commented before, there is some caution with this type of reporting. When the mainstream media uses imagery in this manner, the viewer often gets the sense of being there "live" and in "real-time." In truth, we know that the imagery might be several years old. In this case, I applaud their expert use of Google Earth. It was an added dimension that was used to tell the complete story.

The New York Times gets it! All the news that fit to map! In their coverage of the New York City mayoral and city council elections this evening, the New York Times displayed a precinct-level map of the voting on their home page. Now, you wouldn't show the results at any other geographic level, right? It's important for two reasons: one, every reader knows in which precint they voted and two, now you can begin to discern some trends in voting which can then be tied to demographic information and hence a better understanding of the political preferences of the voters.

I have a problem with CNN's John King and his "magic wall." In tonight's New Jersey gubernatorial election, it's impossible to draw any conclusions on voter preference (conservative vs. liberal) based on county-level mapping, which seems to be the only level of mapping that Mr. King has at his disposal. County maps show yield no true spatial information and the comparisons with the national presidential election of 2008 are spatially irrelavent because the mapping is too "coarse." These are relatively large counties and voting blocks are more easily discerned at the ZIP code level where most demographic patterns are established. Look at any of the psychographic profiling schemes established by the leading demographic data suppliers and you will find that you only begin to understand spatial phenomenon at the ZIP level and preferably, the Census Track. The political punditry will draw improbable conclusions if they stick with the County-level maps to understand voting blocks. It's important to look at the psychographic trends by ZIP code if you want to then draw extensions to voting blocks or changes to political preferences.

The job outlook for 2010 doesn't look very rosy according to a map published by USAToday. Though the prospect for job growth will rebound in some areas, most states will continue to so slow or no growth. Hardest hit continue to be Florida, the upper Midwest, and Nevada. The bright spots include the corridor of Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington State where jobs in energy and technology are likely to be found. By metro area, look toward Huntville, Alabama, my current hometown, where jobs gowth is expected to be the highest in the country with a projected growth of 2.9%. This high tech mecca will see job growth due to Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) and the supporting jobs that will move into the region.

Chad Meyers of CNN provided a stellar, "on-air" explanation of subduction zones while describing the earthquake that generated the tsunami in Somoa and American Somoa. Maps and other reports from CNN at their website. Meyer's report included great visuals using Google Earth but his most impressive review of the situation included a description of what happens when the tsunami reaches shallow waters and the coastal shelf, pushing water inland. Kudos to Meyer for making complex geological and geomorphological phenomenon understandable to the average TV viewer.

Today, the New York Times and other media outlets released imagery from DigitalGlobe and GeoEye showing the location of the newly revealed nuclear material manufacturing plant in Iran. The GeoEye-1 half-meter imagery taken on 9/26/2009 shows the completed facility while an image taken in January by DigitalGlobe's WorldView-1 satellite shows the plant under construction. Certainly, U.S. intelligence agencies had their eye on this facility for some time.

The imagery reveals excellent detail showing ventilation shafts, surface-to-air missile batteries and the supporting road network. However, what's missing? No scale bar, no north arrow. If the media is going to start regularly using imagery, maps, and other supporting map-based information, they better learn how to follow correct cartographic principals.

Leading up to the recent Afghan elections, violence plagued the country. The Wall Street Journal has documented the terrorist acts by mapping bombings, missile strikes, rockets and clashes on an interactive map. The map is supported by a calendar and time scale so the user can choose to see the chronologic order of the incidents. Though the map provides and interesting chronology of events, it lacks the ability to spatially reference or sort incidents by type which would help in understanding the proximity of events and their relative significance to each other, at least for the "arm chair" spatial analyst.

The U.S. unemployment job statistics, on a state by state basis, are nicely explained in a map published today by the Wall Street Journal. What's particularly noticable, if you watch the animated sequence that shows how unemployment rates have increased across the country, is the story of how the states where manufacturing is most heavily concentrated has taken a beating while the agriculturally-based midwest has remained somewhat stable. The service economies of the east coast have been hit hard but not as bad as the tourism economies of Florida, Nevada, and California. Texas, stabilized by oil, has remained below the national average. The graphs also tell an interesting story as you see how some states have only just recently crept up to the national average.

The Wall Street Journal published a map this weekend of the growth in the Hipanic population of the United States by state. The map was part of a related article on how the 2010 Census will demonstrate how large the population of hispanics has risen.

On this anniversary of Apollo 11, perhaps it's my expectations that the images of the lunar landing sites would have imagery good enough to see the actual lunar module but I did not find that the maps provided by Google and published online by CNN very exciting; informative, yes, but fairly mundane. The images had rather course resolution and when you zoomed into the landing sites, the image for Apollo 11, for example, changed to a map that was embedded over the actual site. I was looking to be moonstruck by the imagery my expectations might be clouded by the finer resolution we find from earth orbiting satellites. And the fact that the budgets for lunar exploration were drastically cut after the Apollo program have really not provided the means to do further lunar imaging. Some NASA budget have now only been modestly restored when President Bush said we were headed back to the moon.

Check out some of the other Apollo landing sites (like 16 & 14) which have better resolution and a better map of the travels by the astronauts. But also click on the CHARTS and ELEVATION options as Google registered some additional geology and terrain maps to the lunar surface.

If you Google for a map of The Tour de France you'll find the same map issued by the tour itself...a basic route for the race. The mainstream media has essentially replicated that map without much enhancement. USAToday took the route and posted it to Google Maps but the interactivity is minimal.

However, the Tour's own website is very cool. Each stage has the day's segment in a small map but the most nifty part is the "real-time" update of the riders portrayed against a topographic profile map. Lead riders and the peleton are shown in a "cartoon-like" portrait of the race along a road segment and the map is updated every minute or so. The map is updated with the leader's speed, the position along the post (in Km) and the remaining distance. Riders can be individually idenitified by their avatar in the cartoon.

Nicely done.

Clem Henricksen at ESRI helped point me toward some maps published in some of the recent editions of Crain's New York. The publication is using ESRI technology to create basic demographic information for the city. What's impressive is that they've devoted several pages to demographics and maps. Pictorially aethetic in a tabloid format, Crain's has done a nice job of displaying geospatial information. The information can also be found online.

The World Trade Organizations (WTO) has created a map of that identifies the outstanding disputes between members. The map shows whether an individual country has been a respondent to or has issued a complaint against a specific country. The map at right shows the number of complaints (red) and responses to complaints (blue). By clicking on any individual country where a relationship has been discerned will display a list of the specific complaints. [The map reference is courtesty of Gary D. Price, Librarian and Editor, ResourceShelf and DocuTicker.]

Sports Illustrated writer Andy Staples validated a theory of his that when recruiting highly prized talent for college football programs "geographic distribution isn't a quirk." So, when he received a spreadsheet of 422 nominees for the annual U.S. Army All-American Bowl to be held next January in San Antonio, Staples went about "mapping" the location of each of their hometowns.

Now, the map itself is not that well constructed. The Yahoo Map has the location of each hometown and the nominee's basic bio information such as high school and position. I was hoping to see more information such as proximity to nearest big time football program or schools that actively recruiting them.

More interesting was Staples' assessement of how Pete Carroll of USC could field top talent within 119 miles of the school; or how Randy Shannon of Miami "should never waste a penny recruiting outside South Florida, has 30 nominees within 79 miles of his campus." Now that's good information. I wonder just how many coaches employ a geospatial analysis of the top talent. Oh, perhaps intuitively they understand the proximity of their talent pool. But, I'll play the skeptic...I want to walk into the coach's office so he can "show me the map!"

And what about the recruit? Talented football recruits typically don't look much further than a few hundred miles away from home anyway. Perhaps they like the support network to be close by or have grown up in proximity to the region's favorite big time school.

And we need to talk about weather as well. If you're recruited by Notre Dame and USC do you choose to play in the warm or the cold? There's a theory that many of the big time schools of the east, north and plain states lose out to the south, west coast and southwest and that over time, weather is a major factor in the migration of talent and the success of each program.

In the end, it's all about geography in may cases to both the recruited and the recruiter.

The New York Times has created a map of foreclosures in the New York region and found that they are highest where high minority populations exist. An interactive slider bar allows you to see the results from past years and you can zoom it to see the results by Census Tract. Dots on the map represent the location of foreclosures or multiple foreclosures. The basemap is by Google Maps and the data is from multiple sources. The region of coverage includes not just the boroughs of New York but also several counties in New Jersey as well as Suffolk County, N.Y. north of the city and the New Haven, CT area.

The May 11th issue of Time Magazine is dedicated to the 100 most influential people in the world. You may have missed the map of "where they are from" as it is hidden in the double page fold-out section just after page 42. You won't find the map online unfortunately but it is quite a compilation of information because it maps all 553 of its Time 100 from this year as well as past years. I wouldn't say there are any patterns other than the geographic distribution is not a surprise. The state of New York has the most of any followed by California. The UK has more than any other European country; China has the most in Asia/Pacific. So, forget looking for a pattern...just enjoy browsing the fold out map and finding out more about those who touch our world in unique ways.

Several publications this week noted the closing of hundreds of car dealerships across the United States. Once the backbone of the American dream, the auto industry is drastically paring its dealerships. CNNMoney.com provided a map (at right) of the Chysler dealerships closing their doors, nearly 800 or one-quarter of the total number. Meanwhile, GM announced that 2600 dealerships were being eliminated. The closings will have a near immediate ripple effect across the country as many lose their jobs and communities will feal the impact of additional unemployment.

Need to know where your favorite entertainers are and when? The Washington Post has created an interactive map to show in both time and space (or is that time & spatial?) the location of photos, video, and news articles about celebrities. You can navigate the map by date and a slider bar at the bottom of the map can help you to narrow the time window when the images were taken. The technology uses Google Maps.

MSNBC has created an "Adversity Index" map of 381 metro areas in the U. S. In conjunction with Moody's.com, the maps displays a thematic map of whether a state is either in "recession," "at risk," "recovery," or "expansion." By clicking on each state a table will be displayed showing the largest metros and the economic indicators for each such as "employment," "single family housing starts," "housing prices," and "industrial production." Hover the mouse over each state and it will show you the aggregate indicators for each.

The map also has a slider bar that will allow you to move along a time line from 1995 to present to thematically display the conditions at any particular time.

This is an extremely good representation of the data that is highly useful to any company looking at moving into or expanding existing operations in any given region.

There has been an unprecedented decline in the publishing business as a result of declining advertising sales due to the sluggish US economy. So hard hit has the publishing industry been that such stalwarts of the business like the Rocky Mountain News have closed shop while others cancelled their print editions entirely, slashed staff or moved to an online-only version. This map by the Wall Street Journal chronicles the bad news. This only tells part of the story as the remainder of the publishing business has not been without equal or worse devastation. Entire magazines have been discontinued and publishing companies like Taunton Press have gone so far as to eliminate the job of "publisher" and has reorganized staff into "content," "sales," or "marketing" with everyone reporting to a vice president.

Thanks to Paul Overberg at USA Today, he clued me into a very comprehensive map the newspaper published showing the projected job growth through 2010. The job forecasts can be displayed by metro area or by state.

You can click on the map of the metro areas and see, by quarter, the projected employment picture, both the number of jobs and percent change from previous quarter. Click on the list of metros and the metro is highlighted on the map.

Jobs and employment can be segmented by industry sector and likewise illustrated geographically.

As usual, USA Today always seems not only to have the best research but the graphic "eye" by which the location-based data can most easily be portrayed.

The mainstream media is now behind in their coverage of the H1N1 (i.e. Swine Flu) coverage. Maps are not being updated with the latest outbreaks. None of the media outlets I cited in yesterday's blog post has kept up with the locations of the latest outbreak. HealthMap however is doing a good job.

As the World Health Organization moves to alert level "Phase 5 " for the H1N1 Swine Flu, various media outlets published interactive maps of the outbreak. Here is a list of the mapping websites that the media outlets have created:

• Wall Street Journal
• New York Times
• CNN
• The Guardian (UK)
• USAToday
  
• A Google-based has been published based on news reports of the outbreak. (created by someone named niman [source All Points Blog]
  
• HealthMap is a mashup compiled from various (non-media) sources on all types of viruses
  

Recently, I posted a link to maps by the Wall Street Journal about how they mapped the unemployment rate by state and they provided some useful metric from past years. However, the New York Times has taken it a step further by mapping the unemployment numbers by county. What the NYT has done exceptionally well is to "tab" through by metro, rural or manufacturing areas plus highlighting those counties where the "housing bubble" burst! A tool tip provides the county name, unemployment rate and one-year change. In looking for some spatial correlation among the data, the most surprising comes by looking at the one-year change map. I would not have expected to see such a high change in the south. The shift in manufacturing jobs southward and the accompanying increase in population density has certainly contributed to the higher unemployment picture of the "new south."

Some of the more recent pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia have been mapped by the Wall Street Journal. The interactive map provides a location and mouse-over tool tip about the details of the pirate's latest escapade.