Yesterday we posted a blog about the international fiber cuts a few weeks ago. While I am interested in the geography of fiber and failures in general, we thought it would be a good opportunity to put Google MyMaps through its paces for creating a substantive data driven map. After 25 or so hours of collective labor I thought it would be useful to give the postmortem on our experience.

While there are many positive qualities to Google MyMaps the biggest complaint is that we spent 40 hours mucking about with it. The goal for the last blog post was to create a map that had 1) the fiber routes and landings for impacted carriers, 2) the location of the fiber failures, and 3) the countries that lost connectivity because of the failure. Seemed like a straight forward set of goals and I naively thought we could bang it out in a few hours. So, what ate up our time? Could we just be cartographically challenged?

1) Creating country boundaries - tracing all the countries with outlines so we could make polygons for the failed states was a big sink hole of time. The worst part was when we were not quite complete we hit the limit for the number of points a MyMap could support. Thus it was unfinished and did not make it to the blog post. If you are curious at what point MyMaps bonked here is the map:

View Larger Map

I’m trying to convince someone to count all the points so we have a numeric threshold but I think I need to offer more beer to get the bribe to work. The limit I’ve seen for number of points a My Map can support is 150, but it looks as if we exceeded that for drawing polygons.

2) Dealing with multiple layers - since there were three distinct layers to our MyMap we thought it would be useful to separate them out so the map would be easier to understand. The issue is that you can’t embed a Google MyMap with multiple distinct layers, they have to created as one continuous set. This was almost a deal breaker since we had broken up the work between three people (Bill Emily and myself). Fortunately we found a work around where we saved each of our maps/layers as kml then imported all three onto a new map (except Emily’s countries since it was the limit busting bonking layer).

3) Little bit of cartographic love - while push pins and drawing tools are great for posting pictures of my summer vacation some basic cartographic tools would have made life far easier. Dealing with the lack of a legend is challenging for conveying the story the map is telling. In MyMaps you get a list of every point on the map running down the right pain and with the embed you get nothing.

The conclusion at the end of it is MyMaps is a phenomenal drawing tool for maps - simple and intuitive. On the other hand if you want to create a data intensive map be prepared to run up against some technological limits, but more importantly be prepared to invest a good chunk of time. A large number of these limitations (need for enhancement) have been suggested in the MyMaps Google Group and it will be interesting to see if any are picked up in future releases.

* When I searched for other blog posts that have talked about the pros and cons for MyMaps I came up with zilch - making cross linking pretty tough. Interestingly the only comparison I found was for mapping service, but no one has compared the newer map creation tools. Maybe a topic for next time.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Ok - we are bit late to the game but digging up good data was a bit harder than we thought. There has been a lot of blog and media buzz over the last two weeks regarding a spate of submarine telecommunication cable failures. Various reports have counted as many as nine failures, but the best documented number of failures I’ve found totals the failures at six:

1. Consortium cable SeaMeWe-4, 12.334 km from Alexandria, in the Mediterranean. Currently under repair, should be fixed by this weekend.

2. Qtel’s cable from Haloul (Qatar) to Das (UAE), in the Persian Gulf. Probably not a cut, but damaged power system due to weather.

3. FLAG’s Europe-Asia (FEA Segment D), 8.3 km from Alexandria, in the Mediterranean. Currently under repair, should be fixed by this weekend by cable ship CS Certamen.

4. FLAG’s FALCON (FALCON Segment 2), 56 km from Dubai, UAE in the Persian Gulf, on the route to Al Seeb, Oman. Currently under repair, should be fixed by this weekend. This cut was due to a ship’s anchor–an abandoned 5-6 ton anchor was recovered by FLAG at the site (see photo in FLAG’s update, PDF)

5. FLAG’s Europe-Asia (FEA Segment M), 28 km from Penang, Malaysia. Scheduled for repair on February 11 by cable ship CS Asean Restorer.

6. FLAG’s FALCON (FALCON Segments 7a and 7b), two faults on the cable between Kuwait and Bandar Abbas, Iran, scheduled for repair on February 19. (Courtesy of the Lippard Blog)

Much of the blogging and media coverage has been around conspiracies that these submarine cable failures are sabotage by a various number of hypothesized bad guys. We thought it would be useful to see what this all looks like on a map, so we collected all the substantive data we could find and posted it up.

View Larger Map

The map illustrate the fiber routes (red is the SeaMeWe-4 fiber route and blue is the FLAG fiber route), landings (blue and red pushpins respectively) and finally the fiber cuts (red flames). Each of the objects on the maps have details about the fiber routes, landings and details to date on the fiber cuts. They also provide some perspective on the cause of the event - namely it is unlikely the failures were a coordinated attack or sabotage. As the map indicates the failures were literally all over the map and one geographic region was not targeted. This is further confirmed by Renesys’ analysis of the fiber failures by country impacted:

This is reinforced with the visual mapping of the countries which further drives home the point the failures effects were well distributed and not targeted at any one region:

Official reports from FLAG determined the FALCON failure in the Persian Gulf to be the result of an anchor (specifically a 5 ton anchor they recovered on sight). So, the short conclusion is it is most likely the last two weeks has been a statistical outlier and not a conspiracy of some variety. It is even not that large of an outlier with Global Marine saying they report 50 cable repairs per year and that is just one firm. Fact is many cables fail on a regular basis, and the failure in Alexandria, Egypt of two major cables drew everyone’s attention and folks saw what happens - a good number of small breaks happen on a regular basis. The more important lesson here is that there are many natural geographic bottlenecks in the infrastructure that powers the Internet - whether it is a tunnel into a major city or the Suez canal - there are often very limited right of way by which to lay fiber. This is something technology will never change, and awareness of these bottlenecks is something worth paying attention to - whether you are major corporation or a nation state. While these failures do not appear to be the result of foul play - I will say that locating and failing a submarine cable is a good bit easier than many people would like to think - and no you don’t need the USS Carter to do it.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I read a while back that the Department of the Interior and the Federal Geographic Data Committee where putting together a federal advisory committee on all things geospatial. When I read this I thought it was quite encouraging given the rapid change of geospatial technologies and the huge number of new users appearing through the GeoWeb. A ray of hope that a new group could direct us towards truly open public data, a metadata standard that did not require 331 elements, and could guide the government towards creating a more inclusive environment for geospatial technologies in general.

This week the announcement comes out with the 28 members appointed to the committee, and sadly not a single true representative of the GeoWeb. Plenty of old school GIS, photometry folks, state and locals, feds, and academics, but nothing that reflects the huge change in democratizing geospatial technologies over the last four years. I read Microsoft’s name, and thought at least Virtual Earth is in the mix, but it is their director for e-Government ???? Take a look for you self by firm (who in this mix is really going to lead the charge of open access to public data?):

1) Fugro Earth Data 2) Waukesha County Land Use 3) NGA 4) State of Utah 5) Hunter Co1llege 6) Alta Vista (check out their map page it is done by Yahoo!!!!!!) 7) State of Louisiana 8 ) Hennepin County 9) Association of Tribal Colleges 10) Metropolitan Council 11) State of California 12) EPA 13) National Geographic (at least doing GeoWeb stuff, but not why they are there) 14) District of Columbia 15) Buffalo County 16) University of South Carolina 17) Dewberry 18) ESRI 19) Pictometry International 20) State of North Carolina 21) Photo Science 22) Microsoft 23) OGC 24) GeoEye 25) Southwest Florida Management District 26) Management Association for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors (the guys who sued the government saying you needed a surveyor license to win contracts for anything geospatial - yeah…) 27) IONIC (probably the closest to a GeoWeb company…sort of) 28) Pennsylvania Topographic Survey.

We have an audience of well over 300 million using GeoWeb technologies - we have government agencies embracing and asking for more access to GeoWeb technologies, yet when our government puts together a Federal Advisory Committee they exclude true GeoWeb representation. This may be why there are calls for reform of Federal Advisory Committee’s because of “concerns raised about secrecy, industry influence and political interference”. I’ve served on a FAC before and they can be great facilitators for changes and crucibles for creating progressive policy. They can also be cabals of corporate interest with an agenda not aligned with the public good. It will be interesting to see where this FAC goes, and worthwhile for those interested the GeoWeb and open access to public data keeping tabs on.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Super Bowl XLII not only gave us a great championship game but a great set of entertaining commercials. Bud Light lead all the advertising groups by having six brand new commercials during the Super Bowl broadcast. Below are the six commercials. View them and vote for your favorite one. The results will be displayed on a regional voting basis. Enjoy!

Popularity: 7% [?]

In a previous blog, “Fantasy Football Fun: A Look at the Offense Side”, Matia posted an intriguing comment: “It would be interesting to see if certain states are more likely to produce offense positions or defensive linemen — you could control for state population and see if California and Florida really can stand up next to some big stereotypical football states like Texas and Oklahoma.”

In an attempt to explore that issue, the hometowns of all defensive and offensive players on teams that were in the playoffs this season were scraped off of player profiles on espn.com, the numbers aggregated and geocoded to the state level and the information mapped in terms of both proportions and per capita equivalents.

Looks like, at least for the players whose hometowns were mapped, that Florida, California and Texas stand out as big NFL football player producers; however, the picture does indeed change quite dramatically when you control for population.

Proportion of Players by Hometown State

Defense

Offense

Per Capita Players by Hometown State

Defense

Offense

Other information that was compiled on the attributes of players by hometown states include: average years pro, average weight and average age of players. The full datasets for both offense positions or defensive linemen are available at geocommons.com for mapping.

Popularity: 17% [?]