Lockheed Martin and FortiusOne have inked a deal that allows Lockheed to be an exclusive distributor of FortiusOne technology to the federal sector. From the press release:

Under the agreement, Lockheed Martin will have the exclusive marketing rights for FortiusOne’s products to intelligence, defense and homeland security customers. Lockheed Martin will also integrate the company’s products into existing and future programs.

“We are pleased to enter into this agreement with FortiusOne,” said Mike Thomas, president of Global Security Solutions at Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Services. “FortiusOne’s innovative products will enhance our ability to provide geospatially enabled solutions to our customers.”

Popularity: 2% [?]

Andrew Turner has a great series of blog posts on the future of KML that were the product of meetings at the OGC on the topic a week or so ago. Lots of interesting content in Andrew’s series, but the one most near and dear to us is the discussion on metadata. Chris made it out to the meeting with Andrew to throw our 2 cents into the discussion, and convey Chris’s thoughts on the schema tag and how attributed data can be embedded into it. We should not confuse adding attribute data to KML to adding metadata to KML as Sean Gillies points out in response to Andrew’s post. Both are important but serve two different and distinct functions.

Our use of the schema tag is to allow additional data to be added to KML to describe a location on the map. Natively KML supports the ability to add a description and Z coordinate to a location. So, you can describe a push pin with text, HTML and/or a picture then add a Z coordinate that provides a metric to that push pin. This allows you to do many things and has created a lot of great KML, but there are limits. Namely you can only really add two attributes - a description and a metric. Lots of locations descriptions and data in general is multi dimensional.

Lets take a simple example of one of the first Google “My Maps” mashups of the 2004 US Presidential Election. The election mashup is a nice thematic map of Bush (red states) versus Kerry votes (blue states), and when you click on a state it shows you the percent of votes for each candidate. The data on the percentage of votes for Bush and Kerry is placed in the description field of the KML requiring the user to color code each state to create the thematic map. This is quite a bit of work since your are using a qualitative data field to try and do something quantitative.

This is something we would like to change, by making it a lot easier for anyone to create KML that easily handles quantitative data. The geoweb, to date, has done a great job of opening up mapping by allowing anyone to create a qualitative description (text, HTML, pictures) of a location. This is what KML is currently geared to support, but there are an increasing number of people that would like to expand quantitative data beyond a single Z attribute.

In his post Andrew pointed to our use of the schema tag to enable thematic mapping, and that is accurate, but only the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. Once you have access to multiple data descriptors about a location it enables a range of decision making tools. KML currently reflects the “read - write” functionality of Web 2.0, but in order to evolve to a “read-write-execute” web it will need the ability to support quantitative functions that allows users to be enabled by decision support.

Since things are always clearer with examples and our favorite example is finding bars and single (men/women) let me give it a shot. Currently we would search for bars and get back KML that describes the bar - name, address, user comments, maybe a user rating. The KML and current applications cover this very well - we can “read” and “write” back to the KML - very Web 2.0. What is missing is any analysis of those bars that tell me the best one to go to.

Lets say the application already knows a few things about me - I am a 33 years old, single, male, work in IT, and I am a Taurus. This information and much more could be easily picked up from a social network profile like Facebook or MySpace. If I now did a search on bars and the KML had embedded feature attribute data for the bars and the surrounding contextual data I could be directed to the bars that had the highest correlation with women that are single, in an adjacent age bracket, and work in IT. If I had a good experience at the bar I could post back my comment to the bar further reinforcing that quantitative correlation with user generated validation. Now my KML has enabled a “read-write-execute” application that is both qualitative and quantitative. That I believe is the long term value proposition for KML 3.0.

Popularity: 15% [?]

With just over 450 days left to elect a new President and another 70 plus to his/her inauguration; the recent turn of events can’t be all that encouraging for conservatives who care deeply about which party controls the three branches of the government.

It would seem, having control of executive branch for last six and half years and the rightward tilt of Supreme Court might ease their anxious minds. Instead the causes for worries have multiplied since Democrats took control of the congress last year.

For example, its entirely within the realm of possibilities that Democrats may still be in control of legislative branch after the next General election and election of a Democrat as the 44th President can't be ruled out either. Add to such litany the disappointing facts such as, President's dismal approval ratings mired in mid to lower 30s, a very unpopular war, energized Democratic base and record breaking funds raised by Democratic presidential contenders.

Although not as alarming as the possible loss of executive and legislative branches, the recent announcement by the 4th Circuit Appeals Court Judge Wilkins of taking senior-status after another such announcement not so long ago by Judge Widener and departure last year of Judge Luttig to private sector has created a sense of uncertainty. The control of what was once a solidly conservative court of the land is now in balance between liberal and conservative judges.

Already many of Bush’s nominees are bottled up in the Judicial committee’s nomination process. A recess appointment may temporarily avert what might be an inevitable takeover by the liberal wing.

So how does the current landscape of judicial vacancies look? Below is a map showing the number of vacancies both at the Appeals and the District court levels in the lower 48. There are total of 50 vacancies, 34 in the Circuit Courts and 16 in the District Courts. The hotspot over Richmond (the 4th Circuit Appeals Court ) displays the number of vacancies. Click here for a detailed list.

Spatial distribution of Judicial Vacancies: August, 2007

Compare this with judicial vacancies at about the same time period during President Clinton’s 2nd term. There were total of 65 vacancies, (23 in Circuit courts; 41 in District Courts) and total of 41 nominations were pending. Pennsylvania’s Eastern district led the number of vacancies with 8, followed by 9th Circuit in Pasadena at 7. In fact Clinton administration faced judicial vacancies in nearly every District and Circuit Appeals Courts. That picture didn't improve. In fact, towards the end of President Clinton’s 2nd term, on Jan 04, 2001, the total number of vacancies had gone up to 80 (Court of Appeals had 26 and 54 in District Courts) with 8 nominations still pending.

Spatial distribution of Judicial vacancies: August 1999

Will the current administration face similar fate? Its possible, however, let’s not forget that the President still has the bully pulpit! Especially in times of war, the President gets the last word!

Popularity: 3% [?]

A Typical Day in Iraq

Open the newspaper or turn on the news, and nearly every day there are reports of terror-inspired violence in Iraq. Just today, a deadly car bomb took the lives of 11 and wounded 45 others in an area near the northern city of Kirkuk. Sixty badly decomposed bodies were found on August 6 in a secluded area of the turbulant Diyala Province. A brief moment of normalcy for some Iraqis was violently disrupted when a car bomb hit a bustling ice cream parlor on August 1, killing 60 people. On July 30, six were killed and several wounded in a car bomb that abruptly interrupted the fesitivies following Iraq's win in the Asian Soccer Cup. These are just a few examples of what a typical day in Iraq looks like.

The statistics on violence in Iraq are bleak. MSNBC reports :

The number U.S. casualties per day in Iraq is around 25.

The average number of Iraqis who are wounded or killed each day is 100.

There are roughly 1000 attacks per week on people of all nationalities.

This is up from 600 just a year ago.

U.S. citizens are the target of more than 75% of the attacks that occur in Iraq.

Terror Hotspots in Iraq

The National Counter Terrorism Center maintains a database, called the World Wide Incidents Tracking System, that provides a record of observed terror incidents across the globe going back to 2004. According to the center, "Terrorism occurs when groups or individuals acting on political motivation deliberately or recklessly attack civilians/non-combatants or their property and the attack does not fall into another special category of political violence, such as crime, rioting, or tribal violence."

Included in the dataset is detailed information on each incident - e.g., nationality of perpetrator, nationality of victim, weapon of choice, event type and faciltiy targeted. The number of fatalities, wounded and hostages taken per incident are also on record.

So, which areas of Iraq have been most prone to terrorism? To answer this question, all of the records for Iraq were extracted from the database, and for most incidents geocoded to the city level and mapped according to fatalites. The map below shows where there are "concentrations" of incidents with high impacts. Other lower impact events are scattered all over Iraq and you can see this in geocommons by selecting Show Points and Shapes when viewing the "Violence in Iraq (2004 through March 2007) data set in MyMaps.

Gaining a Richer Understanding of the Problem

In the upcoming weeks, I will be taking a more fine-grained look at the World Wide Incidents Tracking data for Iraq. The data that was extracted for today's blog includes unique identification codes that can be joined to subsets of the incident data based on any of the criteria present in the records. Future blogs wll examine how the spatial pattern of terror attacks in Iraq has changed over time, whether the location of hotspots differ by weapon of choice or nationality of the victim and any other interesting tidbits that surface from the datamining exercise.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The political blogs have been stirring over last weekend’s passage of a bill that expands the government’s authority to eavesdrop on Americans. The administration began pushing for the new legislation in order to better gather information on foreign terrorists. But opponents of the bill say it goes beyond the small fixes that were initially sought.

By changing the definition of “electronic surveillance,” the new law allows the government to eavesdrop on international phone calls coming or going from the United States without a warrant. However, this is only permitted when the government’s target is a foreigner.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, stressed this point by saying that the objective of the new law is to give the government greater flexibility in focusing on foreign suspects overseas, not to go after Americans. “It’s foreign, that’s the point,” Mr. Fratto said. “What you want to make sure is that you are getting the foreign target.”

But the left isn’t satisfied with that rationale. And they’re expressing their frustrations with the Democrats.

Kevin Drum, a Washington Monthly blogger, feels the “Democrats pretty clearly got steamrolled on this.” He writes that negotiations were going smoothly until the language was changed in the final hours. "Democrats weren’t ready for it, and with Congress about to adjourn and no backup strategy in place, they broke ranks and caved in. The only concession they got was a six-month sunset in the bill.”

Jack M. Balkin, a constitutional law professor at Yale, who writes for The Balkinazation blog, places more direct blame on the Democrats. “The passage of the new FISA bill by the Senate and now the House demonstrates that the Democrats stand neither for defending civil liberties nor for checking executive power. They stand for nothing at all.”

If those frustrated with the Democrats want to focus their displeasure, they should take a look at the following map. It displays the locations of the 41 Democrats who voted in favor of the bill.

Popularity: 2% [?]