Last week was a bit of a roller coaster starting in Las Vegas for the American Association of Geographers annual meeting and ending at Gov20Camp in Washington DC. In many ways the 2009 AAG meeting was a coming out party for the GeoWeb. There was a critical mass of presentations - well over twenty, and several respected figures discussing the GeoWeb’s impact on the traditional study of geography. Mike Goodchild’s talk on Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) was packed and focused on the impact of several GeoWeb innovations ranging from OpenStreetMap to geotagged Flickr photos. Much of Goodchild’s work has been focused on the rigor (metadata, ground truthing etc.) of VGI, which despite skepticism is emerging with surprising levels of accuracy.

Jack Dangermond’s talk explicitly called out the growing importance and role of amateur geographers, comparing their contributions to the amateur astronomy community. He even envisioned the emergence of a GeoFlickr where the community shared and remixed ESRI layer packages. While both talks had their unique quirks and perspectives on the GeoWeb/neogeography each acknowledged its growing importance in mainstream geography and GIS. I thought this was a subtle but interesting shift from previous talks that were couched in a shade more skepticism.

The particular session I presented at was entitled “Is Google Good For Geography?”. I think the title was largely chosen for its alliteration and being a bit provocative, but made for an interesting and engaging session. There were two sessions and the papers were spilt with 75% taking a critical theory approach to answering the question and about 25% taking a qualitative or quantitative approach to the general subject matter. If the Wikipedia page does not give you a flavor of critical theory - one paper posited that Google creates, “the tyranical majority in a dystopian algorithmic space”. While this can border on sounding almost farcical, well researched critical theory can provide valuable insights if you can cut through the obtuse vocabulary.

For my presentation I tried to play it down the middle of the road and provide as objective an analysis as possible. That said GeoCommons is a GeoWeb application and my opinions trend in that direction. I’ve embedded the presentation below:

(if you download the presentation the notes provide more depth to the arguments)

The point I was trying to drive at in the presentation was that geography as a discipline is missing the big picture when it comes to the GeoWeb and Google. While critical theory has its place and makes several valid points, the most important thing is the public actual cares about geography now, and we need to use the opportunity to better educate the public. For every criticism leveled in the session there are current initiatives in the community to address them. I’d wager that Google spends a good amount of time thinking about them although we rarely know it till they launch something. That said I’d put solid Vegas odds on it being much harder to say Google’s cartography is homogeneous in the future.

Back to the point, geographers need to engage in the conversation the community is having on the very problems and issues they highlight in their papers. Some geographers were annoyed that the community was not coming to them and acknowledging their work. I think this is the exact insular attitude that has made the discipline less relevant in the first place. It is all about out reach and communicating with the public if you want your research to matter, in my opinion at least.

Mike Goodchild, acting as the discussant, closed the session with his own set of questions and insight. Including reversing the question “is Geography good for Google?”. Although the more controversial statement he posed was that next year the topic should be, “Is Microsoft better for geography?”. A backhanded way of concluding that Google is good for geography, which I believe was the consensus with appropriate caveats.

The question this begged for me was, what is the difference in Microsoft’s mapping efforts that would make them better - outside of a partnership with ESRI…. Would love to hear some opinions one way or the other.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Most people know that in order for champagne to be legit it has to come from the Champagne region of France.  I am not putting down some of the popular and tasty sparkling wines you can find from California but if you are celebrating a special occasion,  and bubbly is in order,  it might be a little easier on the wallet to get a domestic bottle of sparkling wine instead.. I’ve tried a few and will admit that are not half bad.

I was curious where France exports most of it’s champagne and found some data off of the UK’s Gaurdian News website.  It’s no surprise that France is the biggest consumer of champagne with a whopping 181,209,546 bottles in 2008, but in terms of which country imports the most champagne, the UK comes in 1st with the US close behind.

Here is a thematic map I built in Maker! that shows the number of bottles of champagne exported around the world from France in 2008 :

To view the dataset in Finder! click here.

Cheers!

Popularity: 17% [?]

Safety Seats are used throughout the country to help protect children from injury during an automobile wreck. Currently motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children ages 14 and under. It is easy to see that a large emphasis needs to be made in order to help protect children when they are in a car crash. From state to state different laws and regulations have been established referring to size, weight, and age of the child riding. All states have different requirements on who must be in a child safety seat when riding in a car.

Most states use age as their determining factor. Below is a map in Maker! from a dataset in Finder! that shows the maximum age that a child must be in a child safety seat in their state. (Click on the map for a larger image)

The map shows that some states go as high as eight years old (Wyoming and Tennessee) and some states go as low as three years old (Alaska, Florida, Minnesota). The low ages in some states seem surprising and it seems that some states need to do more to improve their laws and regulations regarding child safety seats. Let’s look at the map below.

The map compares statistics on the number of children ages 4 to 7 killed in automobile accidents from 2005 to 2007 to the maximum age map that we first viewed above.

From the map I see three states that are in need of a change to their child safety seat laws. Florida, Texas, and Arizona. Let’s look at the states in the table below compared with three states that seem to be doing a better job with their laws and regulations:

Florida, Texas, and Arizona each rank in the top ten for number of child auto accident fatalities from 2005 to 2007 (Texas and Florida in the top 3). With this in mind it seems that maybe more should be done to increase the number of children in car safety seats.

Something else that I found peculiar was in first time maximum fines. States that set their maximum ages from 3 to 5 have an average fine of $90. States with maximum ages between 6 and 8 had an average fine of $52. Does this mean that states that set younger ages simply make their penalties higher? This seems like a disturbing trend. I’m not sure that extra fines will do the job of saving lives.

Another disturbing trend is that in many auto accidents children were not secured properly in their car safety seat. To help prevent this, many Car Safety Seat Inspection Centers have been established. These centers teach parents with young children how to properly secure their children and if their safety seat is the right type to use. Below is a map that shows all the locations across the country. If you have a small one riding in your car, check one out today!

Links to datasets in Finder!
Child Restraint Laws by State, USA, 3.2009
Total Child Traffic Fatalities by State and by Age Range, USA, 2005/2006/2007/2005-2007
Child Safety Seat Inspection Centers, USA, 3.2009

Links to maps in Maker!
Maximum Age that a Child must be in a Car
Safety Seat
Number of Child Ages 4 to 7 killed in Auto Accidents vs Maximum Age a Child must be in a Car Seat 2005 to 2007
Child Safety Seat Inspection Seat Centers, USA

Popularity: 6% [?]

Last September, as the big honchos of the financial world - the regulators and the bankers - were witnessing the imminent collapse of Lehman Brothers, they realized that they were facing a far bigger problem: The possible collapse of American International Group (AIG), the biggest insurance company in the world. If AIG collapsed, so the theory went, it would cause a chain-reaction that could potentially prove fatal to large number of financial institutions all over the world, plunging the world economies into a financial abyss!

Fear of financial meltdown was the reason given then for the taxpayer paid bailout of AIG, that would eventually rise to more than $160 billion. However what was not clear then, in what way AIG bailout would save the rest of the world. Even as some in the media did expose the role played by the independently operating but wholly owned subsidiary AIGFP and its unit in London headed by Mr. Cassano, under the name of innovative financial products and services was essentially gambling with AIG investors money. And yet it was not clear who were the partners in this gambling scheme who would ultimately get the counterparty claims.

Both AIG and the Feds hemmed and hawed around to release the names of these counterparties under the legalistic language of confidentiality agreements. And it would have continued that way till the AIG bonus-babies scandal broke last week, forcing AIG to issue the press release that gave partial list of trading partners/counter parties.

Below are the maps that show locations of financial institutions who were paid by AIG in the counterparty claims for the complex financial transactions such as Credit Default Swaps (CDS), repurchase of mortgage-backed securities and security lending obligations.

From these maps it would appear that the problem is limited to Western Europe and the U.S. And yet nearly $22 billion was paid to other counter parties, who probably are scattered all across the globe. The partial list of Western European institutions and those in the U.S. reads like who’s who in the financial world. A cross check with Madoff’s clients and TARP list reveals that many of these are the same players who lost billions in Madoff’s ponzi scheme and are also getting TARP money and its quite likely that these same set of players will show up for TARP-II, the TALF!

Talk about small-world! In the name of spreading risk, they have collectively managed to plunge the U.S. and rest of the world into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Your tax $ at work: AIG’s payment to financial institutions for Credit Default Swaps (CDS)

View the map in Maker! here

Your tax $ at work: AIG’s payment to financial institutions for Mortgage-backed securities

View the map in Maker! here

Your tax $ at work: AIG’s payment to financial institutions for Security lending obligations

View the map in Maker! here

Explore interactive map on the Maker!
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Popularity: 17% [?]