I was catching up on my blog reading and came across a fascinating post on Fred Taylor’s Google Earth Blog from a few days ago (with some more Detail on Dan Karran’s blog). In short the post talked about a project where Google has been sending “care packages” to cities they do not have good street and local data for – like Hyderabad, India. The yet to be revealed package has software and tools that allows citizen cartographers to go out and create street and local interest data. It would be fascinating to see what Google has put together for the package, but we can see what OpenStreetMaps has put together to successfully achieve roughly the same objective.

In my last post I talked about the Open Source GeoWeb and what was possible with citizen cartographers and low cost democratized technology. I had originally envisioned this being in the grass roots mold of OpenStreetMaps, but it looks like Google is going to be playing a (big?) part in driving the effort. I guess this is not a gigantic surprise. Someone asked me at the OSM “State of the Map” conference how the Google ecosystem would adapt to a growing successful user generated movement like OSM – buy, duplicate, ignore, partner? Looks like we have a first part of the answer with more to be revealed in the future.

The implications, in general and for OSM specifically, lead to a ton of questions (Is Google paying the data generators? Who are the data generators? Who owns the data? How is Google’s user generated data licensed? Owned by Google? Creative Commons with attribution? Could it be combined with open source project like OSM (i.e. partnership) or would it pollute to CC license? etc. etc.).

Since I have little insight on any of these I am left pondering the long term question of what this all means for geodata more broadly. The “care package” news came from a wide ranging presentation Michael Jones gave in Cambridge, UK. In it he talks not only about the India “user generated” data initiative, but also their desire to work with governments directly to use Google as a portal to make geodata available to their citizens. This brings in another integral set of licensing and redistribution/reuse questions, but regardless it would be worlds better than the current arrangement of proprietary GIS software and data standards used today. The kicker of course is if the governments do not want cooperate Google can now go the user generated content route (for instance India has data but it doe not license it to 3rd parties). Quite clever from a negotiation stand point.

Lastly if users have been this effective in creating descriptive data (push pins with text and pictures), what is the potential of them creating feature attributed data that provides statistics about a location like population, pollution emission levels, crime rates that enable another level of description and analysis? If crazy schedules do not get the better of us we’ll have tools out to help that cause shortly.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Imagine a situation where as many as 25 million people in the US could go to jail for possession of illegal substance.
On average 10% of U.S. population of age 12 and above smokes pot. If these many people were affected by an infectious disease such a West Nile or Avian flu, it would be a national emergency. And yet we hardly pay attention to this huge but hidden (mental) disease of substance abuse that affects a vast portion of the population.

Smoking pot is a Federal offense and along with other substance abuse issues Feds take this very seriously. A person smoking pot for so called medical use could land in slammer even in states (
Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, Maine, New Mexico and Vermont) that allow
medical use of marijuana.

The Supreme Court ruling of 2005 made clear that state laws such as California’s Compassionate Use Act provide no defense against legal action by Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other Federal agencies.
Recent raids on the likes of Medical marijuana dispensaries have stirred up quite a storm among advocacy groups.

So how serious is this substance abuse problem?

It’s estimated that marijuana use among age 12 and over
ranges from as low as 5.6% in places such as Utah County, UT to as high as 19.7% in Washington County, RI.

According to the Office of Analytical Service (OAS), the analytical arm of relatively unknown Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHA) of US. Dept. of Health and Human services (HHS);
193 out of 347 substate treatment planning areas in the U.S have at least 1 out of 10 people over the age of 12 using marijuana.

Below is a split map of North-East and Western states. It was generated by FortiusOne Inc‘s data team based on the OAS‘s tables. Explore other parts of the lower 48 with pan and zoom.

North-East Marijuana use

The 193 substate (treatment planning) areas cover California, Colorado, Arizona, Michigan and
large areas of Florida (central Florida), Texas (Austin, Houston), Massachusetts, New York as well as smaller states such as Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. Only state of Utah and Western parts of Kanasas have less than 6% of its population using marijuana. The remaining 150 or so substate regions have between 6 to 9 percent of its 12 year and old population smoking pot.

Marijuana use west of Mississippi

So, does it matter if a certain celebrity stays in jail or not? Perhaps not. But it matters when John and Jane Does of the world are involved in substance abuse. It matters a lot more if they happen to be minors…

And now, it certainly matters, since the legalization of medical use of marijuana has become a political issue. So what’s your opinion?

Popularity: 13% [?]

Earlier this week, party girl Lindsey Lohan found herself in trouble with the law yet again when she was arrested after chasing the mother of her personal assistant in her car. What kind of celebrity engages in high speed pursuits days before the opening of a new film? Apparently one who’s hopped up on cocaine and alcohol. Lohan faces charges on two counts of driving under the influence, possession of cocaine, bringing a controlled substance into a jail facility, and driving on a suspended license.

As expected, the story is showing up everywhere in the media. Last night, Rob Schneider got decked out to do a full impersonation of Lohan on the Tonight Show. In the blogosphere, sites like The Superficial are loving her claim of innocence and the statement that the cocaine found in her pocket wasn’t hers. And others, like Steve Colbert’s blog, are finding humor in a CBS news anchor’s refusal to comment on the story.

The 21-year old could spend up to a year in jail, but maybe she’ll have better luck than Paris and get out on early parole. If any parole board members are reading this blog, take note. Having looked at the dataset Cocaine Usage on GeoCommons, here are some suggestions on restrictions.

Lohan should be banned from these cokehead locations:

Pima, AZ (4.28% of population uses cocaine)

Denver, CO (4.01%)

Bernalillo, New Mexico (3.75%)

Washington, RI (3.74%)

Washington, DC (3.7%)

And restricted to these more virtuous communities:

Montgomery, MD (1.41%)

Aberdeen, SD (1.48%)

Jamestown/Devils Lake, ND (1.48%)

Twin Falls, ID (1.5%)

Faith, SD (1.52%)

Stay tuned for the next celeb-reality show, “The Extremely Simple Life,” documenting Lohan’s clubbing escapades in Twin Falls, Idaho.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Back and Stronger Than Ever

A recently released U.S. intelligence report paints an alarming picture about the resurgence and renewed threat posed by Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network. According to this document, Al Qaeda and the Taliban have been able to re-energize over the last several months, in part due to the hands off policy of Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf. The terror group is also tapping into Iraqi subordinates, who are helping to spur on Sunni Muslim extremists in various parts of the world, and to recruit, train and inculcate Al Qaeda cells in Iraq.

These developments pose some new and daunting challenges for U.S. counter terrorism efforts. Newsweek writes: “the U.S. counterterrorism community may now be facing the worst of both worlds: a reconstituted Al Qaeda leadership coupled with a growing and dispersed worldwide army of angry jihadis inflamed by the U.S. presence in Iraq.”

North Africa: A Weak Link in the Al Qaeda Network

While most of the recent front-page, above the fold stories on Al-Qaeda focus their attention on the Middle East as a source of the problem, there are some in the media and in blog discussions who are pointing their fingers to another part of the world: North Africa and in particular, the countries of Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria – also, known as the Maghreb region.

The concern is the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (SGPC), a group that was born some decades ago to counter the Algerian government, but who are more recently touting and attempting to carry out a much broader agenda to create terror around the world.

The group is very much alive. According to EUROPOL, the European Union’s criminal intelligence unit, most of the 340 individuals who were arrested for terrorist activities in the EU during the latter parts of 2005 and in 2006 came from the countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Many of those individuals were from or associated with the SGPC.

The group has ties to Iraq. Some estimates indicate that between 9 to 25% of all foreign fighters in Iraq are from the Maghreb region and the SGPC has played an active role in channeling many of these militants to Iraq .

The group also has strong ties to Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was instrumental in helping with the early formation of SGPC and provided financial backing for the SGPC cause. And both groups have publicly proclaimed support for each other’s efforts.

Tracing the Origins of Al-Qaeda

The map below lends some support to the concerns that have been raised about North Africa being a major player in the global terrorism network. It shows the birthplaces of some 200 individuals who have been said to be associated with Al-Qaeda, including the group’s ringleader, Osama Bin Laden.

The data was extracted from the U.N. List of “Individuals and Entities Associated with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda”, which includes as one element in its list where each associate was born – in most cases, down to the city, town or district level. Google Earth and other cartographic resources were used to identify latitude and longitude coordinates for each location and to geocode where Al-Qeada members are from. Individuals associated with the Taliban were not mapped.

According to the data, Al-Qaeda has origins in many parts of the world, including the Middle East, the Pacific region and even parts of Europe and the U.S. However, almost a majority come from portions of North Africa. In fact, a little over 40% on the U.N. list were born in Tunisia, Morocco, Libya or Algeria. Many of these members are relatively young, under the age of 40.

Time to Rethink the Geography of U.S. Foreign Policy?

So while many focus on Iraq and other parts of the Middle East as the centerpoint of Al Qaeda’s network, our map does reveal a distinctly different picture. Some like the Huffington Post question the strength of the organization post 9-11, but are we targeting the right places? Will winning Iraq or comparing annual growth rates make a difference with so many terrorists coming from untargeted countries? These issues highlight the geographic complexities of U.S. Foreign policy on terrorism and suggest some of the challenges we face in the war on terrorism.

Popularity: 5% [?]