AP and Google Team to Cover Super Tuesday other Election GIS News

The Associated Press and Google are rewriting the book this year on how to provide fast, accurate election results, and the theme of the latest chapter is cooperation.

Tuesday night, news outlets that pay AP for election results for particular states will be able to embed Google Maps of the results on their sites.

- Poynter

Time Magazine is offering some special content to Foursquare users who check in at the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August or the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

Users who unlock the Time-Foursquare badge get “access to a curated list of must-attend venues and events,” plus convention tips from Time reporters—like historical facts from past conventions and 2012 campaign tips about the nominees and delegates.

- Paid Content

Two fascinating and useful studies of California’s political landscape have been published in recent days, one mapping the geographic variations of attitudes and the other creating and applying a scientific measure of communities’ ideologies.

“California’s Political Geography” by Eric McGhee and Daniel Krimm of the Public Policy Institute of California, matches California counties by residents’ party identification, 2008 presidential vote and by responses to two social and two fiscal survey questions with what McGhee calls “clear liberal or conservative dimensions.” ...

“The California Political Precinct Index” by David Latterman at the University of San Francisco, is a powerful tool for assessing counties and electoral districts according to actual precinct votes on nine ballot measures that are “easily interpretable” as liberal or conservative.

- CalBuzz

GIS Algorithm Cup and other GIS Competition News

With the goal of encouraging innovation in a fun way, ACM SIGSPATIAL is hosting an algorithm contest with winners to be announced at the ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS conference in November 2012. Contest participants will submit original computer programs to be evaluated by the contest organizers on a common dataset. The first place team will receive US$ 500 plus one NVIDIA Quadro 6000 (or similar) graphics card. Second place will receive US$ 400 plus one NVIDIA TEGRA tablet device. Third place will receive US$ 300 and one NVIDIA TEGRA tablet.

The 2012 contest will be about map matching, which is the problem of correctly matching a sequence of location measurements to roads. 

- contest page via @michael_d_gould

How about a game based learning contest? Ideas for teaching spatial literacy and/or geography would be valid!

In an effort to circulate innovative ideas about integrating electronic gaming in the classroom, the NEA Foundation, in a partnership with Microsoft U.S. Partners in Learning, is hosting a competition for the best ideas on "how interactive technology and game-based learning can improve teaching and learning," according to the Foundation's website. Game-based learning can mean anything from understanding physics through the popular Angry Birds app to delving into the structure of society in the computer game Minecraft.

The Challenge to Innovate (C2i) competition is open to educators, students, parents, or anyone who has an idea and has registered for free as a member of the U.S. Department of Education's Open Innovation Portal, which acts as a public forum for improving education. Participants post their gaming idea to the portal, and other registered members—most of whom are educators and parents—award points to the ideas they think are most innovative and helpful.

- US News

Aim: The main aim of the OneGeology Best Application competition is to demonstrate the wide range of potential applied uses and applications that the OneGeology Portal, and geological data/services that it provides, can offer for easy discoverability, access and use.

...

The registration of the applications developed for this competition will be accepted until the end of May 2012.

...

The winner of the competition will receive a free registration for the 34th International Geological Congress, Brisbane, Australia (August 2012) and will also have the opportunity to present the new innovative application during the Geoinformation Symposium/ OneGeology Session at the conference.

You must be under 35 to enter.

- website via @jeffharrison

Through their Google+ page, Google Maps announced the inaugural Map Your University competition for all students in the U.S. and Canada. Through the use of Google’s Map Maker, Google is asking current students to create detailed maps of their campuses that will be viewable on Google Maps and Google Earth. Winners of the competition will be award fun Google-y prizes such as Android tablets, phones, GPS devices, and more.

- Web Pro News

New York City kicked off voting today in its third annual BigApps competition, which rewards apps that use some of the city’s open data sets to build apps. But one of the most popular resources appears to be Foursquare, which is in use in more than half of the top apps in early voting.

- GigaOm

Google+ Map Game Announced and other LBS News

Yesterday, the company [Google] released a video of the new game, which takes advantage of its Google Maps product. The video shows a cube with a map overlay. A small blue ball travels through the map based on the spinning and tilting of the cube. Judging by the video, it seems players will have to move through the map, hitting certain destinations to collect points along the way. When a destination is hit, a small piece of information about the place pops up, then you can go on to your next.

The game [WebGL based] is expected in February. The intro video, like other Google intro videos doesn't reveal much.

- VentureBeat

Poynt, a mobile local search and advertising firm, is now trading on the highest tier of the over the counter (OTC) market, OTCQX®.

- press release

[Walt] Doyle [CEO of Where, now owned by eBay] told me earlier this week that PayPal could be adding "several hundred people" in Boston over the coming years. (There are currently only three open jobs in Boston that I could find.) ... eBay's government relations staffers plan to pay another visit to Beacon Hill next week to continue the discussions.

- Boston.com

Foursquare's local recommondation engine is now live on the Web. It's been on mobiles since March 2011.

- VentureBeat

While the majority of dating websites do a good job of managing the privacy of their users, a class research project at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business found that 21 of 90 dating websites the class examined did not properly remove location data from pictures uploaded by their users.

- press release

Google Launches Schemer, non-checkin Location Based Service for Finding What to Do

Yes, the name Schemer is perhaps a bit off-putting and the soft-launch via Google+ may also make the now invite only beta less immediately appealing. And, of course, there's the question of "Do we need ANOTHER one of these?"

Continue reading...

Update: FCC LBS Forum Today

The companies in LBS pretty much said that they provide enough options for users to manage their privacy. For example:

"On Facebook, the hallmark of privacy is user control," he, [Tim Sparapani, the director of public policy for Facebook] said. "We allow people to delete any check-ins they don't want to be made public. So if someone tags you at a place and you say, 'I don't want people to know I was at that bar,' or maybe, 'I shouldn't have taken that coffee break because my boss could find out about it,' you can then untag it."

- Network World

--- original post 6/28/11 ---

The topic of is location-based services and privacy and the forum is hosted by the Federal Communications Commission's Wireless Bureau. There are three panels: one on trends in LBS, one on how industry is supporting privacy, and one on how consumers can ensure privacy. Companies represented among the panelists: Foursquare, Google, Sprint, Facebook, Verizon, FTC and HP.

- FCC (including link to live webcast)

- The Hill