A Canadian paper now offers a map where readers can post details of where they see debris from the Japanese earthquake of 2011.
Now, The Province is offering an interactive map on its web-site where readers can post the sites where they find Japanese debris. Simply log on to theprovince.com/debris and follow the instructions.
- The Province
In the Horn of Africa, Somalia makes headlines, but often only because of drought, famine, crisis and insecurity. Al Jazeera launched Somalia Speaks to help amplify stories from people and their everyday lives in the region -- all via SMS.
Somalia Speaks is a collaboration between Souktel, a Palestinian-based organization providing SMS messaging services, Ushahidi, Al Jazeera, Crowdflower, and the African Diaspora Institute. "We wanted to find out the perspective of normal Somali citizens to tell us how the crisis has affected them and the Somali diaspora," Al Jazeera's Soud Hyder said in an interview.
It's great to see crowdsourced, geotagged news in one of the world's most challenged places.
- MediaShift Blog
Want to thank our troops? How about letting them know from where the greetings come? How about a crowdourced Thank You map? That's what the USO created.
- South Brunswick Patch
by Adena Schutzberg on 01/09 at 03:07 AM |
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Jakarta’s Ciliwung River will be on the map if activists from the Green Map Jakarta community have their way.
Nirwono Joga, the coordinator of the nongovernmental organization, said on Sunday that the community was working on a map that would identify places along the banks of the river to create a picture of life along the city’s longest waterway. ...
“That means that the information for the map will come from the people themselves, those who best know the area and their needs,” he said.
The city already has several successful Green Map projects completed including busways.
- Jakarta Globe
A group of Penn Medicine researchers is set to save lives with cell phone cameras -- and they're challenging the public to help. The MyHeartMap Challenge, a month-long contest slated to take place beginning in mid January, will send thousands of Philadelphians to the streets and to social media sites to locate as many automated external defibrillators (AEDs) as they can. The contest is just a first step in what the Penn team hopes will grow to become a nationwide, crowd-sourced AED registry project that will put the lifesaving devices in the hands of anyone, anywhere, anytime.Armed with a free app installed on their mobile phones, contest participants will snap pictures of the lifesaving devices -- which are used to restore cardiac arrest victims' hearts to their normal rhythm – wherever they find them in public places around the city.
- press release via AnyGeo
Wild monkeys have been enlisted by Japanese researchers to obtain detailed readings of radiation levels in forests near the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Plant.
Professor Takayuki Takahashi and his team of scientists at Fukushima University are fitting nearly 1000 animals with radiation meters and GPS transmitters in order to track the spread of radiation leaked from March’s nuclear accident, the worst in Japan’s history.
I guess that's VGI, though it's hard to argue the monkey's are volunteering.
- ABC News Blog
by Adena Schutzberg on 12/13 at 06:02 AM |
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The Guardian is spearheaing a mapping project, worldwide to map ghost bikes. Ghost bikes commemorate a lost cyclist. The project is Flickr based and will use the geocoded images to create the map.
- The Guardian
Eight months after a tsunami caused a nuclear accident in Japan, ordinary people are using new technology and the power of crowdsourcing to find radiation hotspots.
- PBS Newshour
It turns out zebra patterns are unique for each zebra...so
that makes it possible to be scanned like a bar code. McDermott reports that scientists and citizen scientists can use an app called Stripe Spotter created by the University of Illinois at Chicago and Princeton University to upload the zebra’s identity into a database.
- Very Spatial
by Adena Schutzberg on 11/14 at 05:04 AM |
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While the initial request for scholars appeared earlier this year, this is the first I believe I saw of GeoCrowd, an effort to research user generated geodata processes and train the next generation of scientists who will use those data. The project is based in and seems to be drawing on European talent as it is funded through the European Commission. Esri Redlands and University of Texas at San Antonio, USA are associated partners as are organizations in China, but the rest are from Europe.
geocrowd – “Creating a Geospatial Knowledge World” aims at establishing a fertile research environment by means of a training network that will promote the GeoWeb 2.0 vision and advance the state of the art in collecting, storing, analyzing, processing, reconciling, and making large amounts of semantically rich user-generated geospatial information available on the Web. Specifically, activities will focus on (i) exploiting user-contributed geospatial data, (ii) Web-geodata management and (iii) efficient means for data collection and dissemination, e.g., mobile computing.
Four universities are helping Japan by providing image analysis services. Auburn Montgomery, George Mason University, Clark University and Penn State University students are involved after replying to a call for service from GIS Corps. At AUM:
Winemiller and his students have been doing the work for about a week. They have collected the remote sensing data from the U.S. Geological Survey Hazards Data Distribution Center.
Winemiller and his students have had to pore over many images to find detailed photos with little cloud cover where they can assess damage caused by the quake. Their maps eventually will help with infrastructure planning and other elements of the recovery.
- Montgomery Advertiser
Fourty-five eighth grad boys walk the length of Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans to explore its history and geography. The students of Brother Martin High School world geography teacher Melanie Williams carried GPS receivers and digital cameras to document what they found. That data will be included in a report by the Communities by Design panel of the American Institute of Architects, whose conference will be held in New Orleans in May. One interesting note based on how effective low end GPS is at determining elevation:
Students clicked photographs, jotted down observations and measured land elevation with their GPS units as they walked.
- Times Picayune
by Adena Schutzberg on 03/28 at 04:09 AM |
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