There’s a nice feature in today’s New York Times that outlines the use of open mapping tools to deal with a crisis. The focus is on Ushahidi, with the title, “Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis”.

“This kind of everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into places with little good information. And an important force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation and the nature of what we label as truth.”

Read the full feature from the New York Times here.

The U.S. State Department launched a new data visualization site called Opinion Space yesterday. The online data visualization tool gives you the means to gauge how your own opinions stack up to those of others around the world. The visualization isn’t aligned to geographic space, but instead maps opinion space by showcasing the consensus and moderate views. T opinion map aims to depolarize online comments while also allowing for a text-based sharing of “Ideas for Secretary of State Clinton.”

This innovative means to collect feedback is made possible through a partnership with the Berkeley Center for New Media. The idea to collect and map opinions over time will add a feedback mechanism and a sense of changing perceptions about the objectives of U.S. diplomacy and how these efforts are perceived both domestically and internationally.

The U.S. Census Bureau is hard at work on the 2010 Census, fighting technological hurdles and an apparent malaise about being counted. In order to highlight the tradition of the these population counts that occur ever 10 years, the agency has put together some highlights for each of the 23 counts that have taken place since 1790.

The “Through the Decades” website contains interesting facts about the population size, the number of census workers, any new types of questions or race categories, and any new technologies deployed to ease this monumental task. There are some fascinating facts here about the changing size and makeup of the population as well as the march of technology.

Here are some of the details about the progression of computers and geospatial tools:

• 1890 is the first year that census workers were given detailed maps to help complete their tasks, and it’s also the same year that an electric tabulating system was utilized for the count
• 1950 was the first time a computer was used to tabulate results, and it was also the first computer designed for civilian use
• 1960 was the first time that census results were digitally recorded (on magnetic tape)
• 1970 was the first time that census data products were made available digitally on magnetic tape.
• 1980 saw the creation of the State Data Center Program for easier access to digital data on computer tapes
• 1990 was the year that the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER), computer-based maps, was introduced. It also was the first year that data was released on CD-ROM
• 2000 was when the Internet became the primary means of distributing Census data
• 2010 won’t include the “long form” because this more detailed collection has been converted to the ongoing American Community Survey

Taken in 10 year chunks, this condensed history provides uncovers some trends about how society has changed, the growing role of technology for administration, and the way that Americans view themselves. The 2010 Census is less of a focal point for geospatial technologists given that the American Community Survey has provided much more detailed and ongoing data for spatial analysis, but it’s still the largest ongoing geographic data collection effort in the world.

Borrowing from federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s success with Web Services challenges for the District of Columbia in his Apps for Democracy challenge, the federal government is now poised to usher in an era of web services challenges for federal problem solving. A detailed 12-page memo was released on Monday to executive department heads and agencies that outlines the use of challenges for transparency and open government, with details on the potential benefits as well as an outline of many different types of prizes.

Geospatial tools are well poised to take advantage of this new Web Services paradigm shift, and individual developers as well as larger companies stand to benefit. With this big federal push, it stands to reason that states and local government will soon follow suit. If you’re a consultant or small service business owner, now’s the time to polish your web services skill sets and to forge alliances with other developers.

The White House released a list of appointees on Friday to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel that’s in charge of oversight and feedback on how the recovery dollars are being spent and communicated. The appointment that’s chiefly of interest here for geospatial users is Edward Tufte, professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale University. His books on the Visual Display of Quantitative Information place him as a key force for the concise and insightful display of information.

Tufte is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Society for Technical Communication, and the American Statistical Association. He includes several maps in his work, and his ideas have influenced cartographers equally among other infographics practitioners.

It’s great to see the emphasis here on crystal-clear communication of information in a visual fashion. Let’s hope that his counsel results in some interesting and concise condensations of critical information.

The Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control has just released an online fatal injury mapping model that allows you to query injury statistics to create custom maps of death rates throughout the United States. There’s a fascinating level of detail to this resource, including the intent of injury, ethnicity, age, and cost of injury. The map can be detailed at several different levels of detail, and there’s the ability to smooth and color code the data for definitions.

There’s a nice book review in today’s New York Times that professes a love for books about maps and reviews several recent examples.

“There’s nothing like sitting by the fire with a good book, except maybe sitting by the fire with a good map — or better yet, a good book about maps. I’ve noticed an upsurge in cartographic interest these days, especially for maps’ value as conceptual artwork. They can be maps of the designer’s mind as well as maps of terrain, concerned not just with topography but with typography too.”

Read the book review here.

Cost of entry into Mobile Mapping work is a considerable expense according to Lewis Graham of GeoCue from the ASPRS Hot Topics Session at ILMF 10 in Denver.

• $750 to 900K for the mapping system
• Vehicle $50K
• Production hardware $150K
• Production software $125K (can share some hardware and software if you already have airborne)

Personnel costs include the need for a driver, equipment operator and surveyor on the collection side. On the office side there’s a need for a production manager, geometric correction specialist, and at least two data collection technicians.

Mobile mapping has hit its commercial stride in 2009. As many as 10 different systems were sold last year even in a down economy.

Software is lagging now to exploit the data, but more software and solutions will emerge to speed up the data processing and visualizations of the final product.

I love the idea of Obscura Day, a day of expeditions, back-room tours and hidden treasures in your own home town. The event planned for March 20, 2010 is organized by Atlas Obscura, a website that aims to compile the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica. The event serves as both a promotion of the site and as a means to compile more locations into this Atlas of curious places as they’re actively recruiting new sites and cities.

There are worldwide events scheduled here that range from the behind-the-scenes museum wonders, to interesting tours of large machinery such as one of the largest pneumatic tube system at the Stanford University Hospital (4 miles of tubes), to a gold-plated home outside of Chicago, to the 3D Center of Art and Photography in Portland, Oregon. The site organizes participation in these events as many of them may fill up on this date. There’s no charge from the organizers, but some venues may have an admission price.

I scrolled through more than a dozen events and locations and found that I’d love to explore each of these places, and will be sure to check out the Atlas Obscura site prior to travels in new cities. I’ll be in Florida at the end of the month, and in a bit of the Everglades, so I may just have to check out the streets of Unit 11 in West Palm Beach that were laid out as a subdivision more than 40 years ago and that are now reclaimed by nature. Sounds like a movie set for an apocalyptic future that would be fascinating to see first hand. And judging from the rest of the list, these site are designed to offer an alternative take on what we know as reality.

Discovered via Twitter from a post by @reidab.

Louisiana Senator David Vitter wants to stop the Federal Emergency Management Agency from updating flood maps in areas where levees have been found deficient. The senator would like to see a phased levee certification fix that would allow repairs prior to mapping in order to avoid steep insurance hikes that would hamper redevelopment.

The sticking point seems to be the need for local dollars to fix the problems, with a federal entity that is pointing out the risks.