The Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) has very interesting data at the municipality level (of which there are nearly 2,000). Conteo de Población y Vivienda 2005 (or Count of the Population and Housing) provides data ranging from migration to indigenous languages to household details. Finder! has made many of these datasets available for mapping with more to come. Below, is an example of the dataset on indigenous languages spoken by municipality normalized by population. To explore this dataset or the many others, check out Finder!

Popularity: 9% [?]

Geopolitical tensions wreaked havoc on oil prices last week. While an unstable U.S. dollar can partly explain the recent volatility in the market, Russia’s invasion of Georgia and continued military presence in that region is clearly a factor. First, Russia sits on a lot of oil and natural gas. The maps below, which were generated using data from the USGS World Petroleum Assessment , show known reserves of oil in millions of barrels of oil (MMBO) and natural gas in billions of cubic feet of gas (BCFG) for countries outside of the U.S. The color ranking for the volumes from high to low is red-orange-yellow-green (Thanks Sean and Raj for help on the mapping side).

Known Crude Oil Reserves

Known Natural Gas Reserves

Also at issue is the fact that Georgia is a key transshipment node in the movement of Caspian crude oil and natural gas to markets in Europe and beyond. The 1,109 mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, one of the longest in the world, runs straight through Georgia and carries upwards of 1 million barrels of oil a day. Carola Hoyos, chief energy correspondent for the Financial Times recently discussed on NPR how important that oil is to the West; particularly, in terms of promoting energy security and reducing our reliance on uncertain sources like Russia.

Three excellent sources of geographic data on international oil supply and demand include the Energy Information Administration, the USGS and the British Petroleum Statistical Review. Below is a list of some of the datasets we’ve extracted from those sources and geocoded along with a few others that may be useful in exploring the geopolitics of oil and the oil dimension of the Russia-Georgia conflict. Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks for a collection of domestic oil and natural gas data and other relevant data on endangered species and constraints to exploration and drilling in the United States and offshore.

Supply

Proved Oil Reserves by Country (1997-2007)
Natural Gas Production by Country (1997-2007)
Natural Gas Proved Reserves by Country (1997-2007)
Oil Production by Country (1997-2007)
Known and Undiscovered Natural Gas in the World (Except the U.S.) – Total Petroleum System (2000)
Known and Undiscovered Oil in the World (Except U.S.) – Total Petroleum System (2000)
Known and Undiscovered Natural Gas in the World (Except the U.S.) – Assessment Unit (2000)
Known and Undiscovered Oil in the World (Except U.S.) – Assessment Unit (2000)
World Oil Transit Chokepoints

Demand

Crude Oil and Petroleum Product Imports from Russia by U.S. Port (Jan-June 2008)
Valero Imports of Oil and Petroleum Products from Russia by U.S. Port City (Jan-June 2008) (Valero leads the pack in terms of oil imports from Russia through U.S. Ports)
U.S. Imports of Total Crude Oil and Products by Country – Monthly (Jan 2005-May 2008)

Popularity: 10% [?]

The Carbon Project announced the release of their Secure Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) 1.0 extension for ArcGIS 9.2 desktop this week. The SDI 1.0 is a selected suite of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards endorsed by government agencies to promote interoperability. The extension will be the world’s most powerful geospatial security framework and is scheduled to be released this month as part of the CarbonArc PRO 1.6 update. According to the President and CEO of The Carbon Project, Jeff Harrison, “The combination of CarbonArc PRO and Secure SDI functionality answers one of the primary challenges in deploying real-world systems based on OGC standards – making sure critical geospatial information goes to the people who are supposed to have it.”

Google Maps has now added a new API from Map Channels, Feed Maps, which “lets users create Google Maps mash-ups from a number of different data sources.” Now, feeds from MyMaps or Google Spreadsheets ‘can be brought together on a single map.’

EarthGamz maps Olympic athletes using Google Earth. The new site, which connects sports fans to sports locations, has created an ode to the Olympics – a map of the athletes. Upon clicking on the home town of these athletes, users can see information about them, such as their bio and TV listings for their next competition. EarthGamz also has a Facebook application for the Olympics and their site describes plans to involve social networking with their sports viewing applications.

An interesting discussion about GIS possibly disappearing into the cloud was made by Vector1 last week. Insight about the idea came from Vector1’s editors Jeff Thurston and Matt Ball, while Kirk Kuykendall, founder of AmberGIS, also discussed his thoughts. According to Jeff, “GIS has been waiting for the cloud…the cloud has enormous potential to change shift spatial gears and accelerating the wider use of GIS functionality.” Matt states, “Predominantly geospatial capabilities are purchased by organizations, and by companies of such a size and complexity that they feel they must control these systems, particularly when they’re of a critical nature to operations and/or contain proprietary information that must be kept from competitors.” And although Kirk agrees with Jeff and Matt, he states that “disappear is too strong of a word” and “subsumption is more likely.”

Popularity: 12% [?]

Decisions are made by those who show up. Since the State Department is responsible for promoting peace and stability in regions of vital interest, the Secretary of State has to show up in a region to promote diplomacy there.  The travels of a Secretary of State thus reflects the foreign policy priorities of a Government.

Data from all the countries that current Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice has traveled to in the past 4 years and the number of times that she traveled there are available in Finder! for the years 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. The following figure illustrates the premise of this blog:

Yes. this is the world. Oops, no not exactly – it has a continent missing in it – Africa! After several years of using cartographic projections that misrepresented Africa as being smaller than Greenland, now we seem to have completely eliminated it from our scope of interest. Yet, this is a continent that could use help the most. A continent that suffers from diseases and despair; inhuman tragedies – caused both by nature and humans. But beyond the formal visits, how much do we actually spend on this continent?

USAID has a interesting collection of data on the amount of economic assistance that is being dispersed to individual countries. You can find the data here in Finder! The following figure illustrates the disparity. The darker the color of the country on the map, the more assistance they received from the U.S. in 2006. Apparently we gave approximately $5 to each person in Africa while we gave $400 to certain countries in the Middle East that are already quite well developed. As you can see below, the greenback sure is thin in Africa!

Popularity: 8% [?]