geography

Today I came across this, which immediately made me think of this which in turn gave me the idea for this - Street View Art. Essentially in this little Street View project I've embedded Street View images inside other (different) Street View images to create new imaginary landscapes. So far I've created just ten new landscapes using different Street View images from around the world. My plan is to create more imagined landscapes when I have the time and turn the application into a slideshow, which will automatically play through each image in turn.

A unit at the State Deptarment has been working with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) to explore the use of OSM and its community in times of crisis. This week there's a proof of concept exercise mapping refugee camps in the Horn of Africa. How to help: We are going to open... Continue reading

There are now quite a few cheap(ish) solutions for capturing aerial imagery with balloons, kites or UAV's (see this Mapping with Drones post). Pix4d's low altitude aerial imagery software can help turn captured aerial imagery into a full 3d map of an area. The Pix4UAV showcase demonstrates a number of example Google Maps displaying aerial imagery captured by different UAVs and processed by Pix4UAV. This is impressive in itself but Pix4D can also generate 3d images from the 2d aerial imagery. Check out the video below to see how Pix4d can create 3d models from aerial photographs.

< From the same brains behind Uncivil Servants, the crowd-sourced Google Map for reporting illegal parking in New York, comes this map for reporting illegal car parking in bike lanes. MyBikeLane is a map reporting system for reporting vehicles parked illegally in bike lanes. The system is active in a large number of cities around the world. To report a car with MyBikeLane the user just needs to take a photo of the offending vehicle and jot down its license plate number. The MyBikeLane map for each city shows the location of all the submitted reports. The map sidebar provides a league table of the worst offending vehicles in the city. The licence plate number of the most reported cars are listed in descending order in the sidebar.

In a brief report entitled "U.S. could lose aging eyes in the sky," CNN listed the challenges with aging earth observation satellite system this way: Tights budgets, growing costs and failed launches hurt satellite programs, report finds "We'll be hobbling through the year... Continue reading

Apologies, but Episode 357 has been delayed by an unexpected series of events which mostly revolve around the end of Maymester and the beginning of Summer 1 classes. The episode will be up shortly.

Como si de una gran casualidad se tratara, de forma repentina han aparecido en los últimos tiempos gran número de aplicaciones web destinadas a crear infografías o gráficos de datos de todo tipo. Realmente no son herramientas a considerar para crear infografías profesionales, pero para casos especiales o en los que se piense en gráficos rápidos para la web, podrían ser de utilidad. Por falta de tiempo no he podido sino revisar por encima estas curiosas herramientas, que sin duda serán de utilidad para ciertas personas, pero no quiero dejar pasar la oportunidad de citar los casos que me han llegado en los últimos días:

• Easel.ly | create and share visual ideas online.
• Infogr.am | Infographics and charts – interactive data visualization.
• Venngage | Infographics Simplified.

Fair warning. This article is going to resemble a travelogue more than a discussion of geo-oddities. I figure I can change the rules occasionally for self-indulgent reasons so I hope you don’t mind. Come back in a couple of days if you’re more a fan of the usual content on the Twelve Mile Circle. The in-laws are visiting this week and they offered my wife and I a rare and very much appreciated opportunity: a night away from the kids. Parents in the audience know exactly what I mean. We love our little monsters darlings of course — wouldn’t trade them for the world — and our brief times apart guarantee that they won’t be abandoned on a roadside or given up for adoption.

Before kids, bed-and-breakfast inns were our overnight accommodations of choice. Now it’s all about whichever hotel has an indoor pool and a breakfast buffet. Still, there was a time when historic was more important than practical. We were happy to accept a 24-hour reprieve to live like we once did before we occupied the house of a million Lego Star Wars kits.

We also chose an activity that is ill-advised with children in tow: a full-day of wine tasting. I’m an experienced beer snob but I’m definitely not an oenophile. I know comparably little about wine. That’s not the point. I’ll admit it — this was completely about removing oneself from parental obligations for the day. There are few things worse than dragging kids to a bunch of vineyards. They’re completely and utterly bored, and they do their best to create a miserable time for everyone involved as punishment for inflicting this horror upon them. The other tasters shoot dirty looks in your direction like you’re one of "those parents". All of us with children been on the receiving end of this at one time or another, haven’t we?

8 Chains North Vineyard

I took leave from work for the day, figuring correctly that wandering the countryside on a Friday afternoon would cut down on the crowds. We drove out to Loudoun County, an area of Virginia about an hour west of Washington, DC (map). Longtime 12MC readers might recall that I’ve mentioned Loudoun before. It’s where I lived as a kid. That’s true enough although the Loudoun of my youth was much different than the county of today. Loudoun had fifty-thousand residents when I lived there. Now it has more than three hundred thousand residents and it’s been one of the fastest growing counties in the United States consistently for the last two decades.

Loudoun Valley Vineyards

There also weren’t any vineyards back then, or at least none that I can recall. I wasn’t of legal drinking age at the time so maybe there were a small handful that escaped my attention. Now there are something like 30 vineyards and wineries located in several clusters and there are reputedly more in Loudoun than any other part of Virginia. It still confounds me. The Loudoun of my youth was a redneck place (said respectfully) and today it epitomizes upper-class sophistication.

We began with a leisurely lunch in historic Leesburg — not far from where I flipped burgers during my High School job — and continued a few miles west towards the edge of wine country. There are countless wine trails and guides although we used a more haphazard approach. We selected a small cluster on the route between Leesburg and our B&B.

View Larger Map

I figured this would minimize driving and maximize tasting and loafing time. Three vineyards in less than three miles: 8 Chains North; Loudoun Valley Vineyards and Sunset Hills Vineyard. Their close alignment is quite remarkable. I think the two southern ones nearly abutted property lines. One often hears of the "terroir" of wines, that combination of unique geography, geology and climate affecting a specific vineyard’s flavors. I would have thought three vineyards so closely located would have had the same basic terroir, and yet even I could detect distinct differences with my considerably untrained palate. There are plenty of human-controlled variations too I suppose, and perhaps those made up the bulk of the differences.

Sunset Hills Vineyard

We settled in at the third location, Sunset Hills. It turned out to be a place that’s rather well regarded by visitors. Again, that was a completely random choice. It was just one of those days were everything seemed to fall into place. Even the weather was amazing: a sunny day with perfect temperature (75°f / 24°c) and low humidity. It seems like we get only a handful of days like this every spring before the pounding heat and stifling humidity settles in for the summer months. Here, we sat on an outdoor patio for awhile and chatted. It was also time for me to turn the car keys over to my wife for the remainder of our day. I wasn’t a menace to society or anything, and frankly I was probably still considerably and safely below the legal limit. Why take chances, though?

Veramar Vineyard

We’d planned to visit other Loudoun vineyards but we skipped them, and drove into neighboring Clarke County (map) to the west. We crossed the Shenandoah River, which is primarily a geographic feature of Virginia in spite of of what the song says! We were already nearly palate-fatigue but we pressed onward for one more stop.

The vineyards haven’t gained the same foothold in Clarke as they have in Loudoun. There are a couple though and stopped at Veramar Vineyard. Clarke reminded me of the Loudoun County of thirty years ago in its pre-McMansion era. We stayed overnight in Clarke at the Smithfield Farm Bed and Breakfast. This allowed me to change the color for Clarke on my County Counting Map (any county where I spend the night gets a different color).

View Larger Map Right along the state line!

I noticed a National Register of Historic Places plaque on the entrance. This was a wonderful development because it allowed me to pull its nomination package from the Internet and truly understand its significance. That’s typically what I do when I notice one of those National Register plaques. The other interesting feature is that property borders the state line. I would have gone looking for boundary markers if we’d been there another day, to which my wife replied, "I love you, but you’re such a geek."

Smithfield Farm Bed and Breakfast

We returned home on Saturday morning to two kids who had such a great time with their grandparents that they hardly noticed we’d left.

Possibly the most earnest folks in the real estate development industry assembled for the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Congress of the New Urbanism in West Palm Beach, Florida this month. Among the excellent accomplishments of CNU20 attendees: a credible car/pedestrian strategy, some fine looking new communities, and perhaps best of all, a body of hard-won knowledge about town-making for citizen education.

Officially, CNU20 was optimistic and confident, but an undercurrent of negativism marred the event. More than one New Urbanist questioned the validity of what by now should have been a transformative movement. But the imposition of form-based codes and regulations on city growth has become a stress point in the movement's evolution.

Three hundred communities now boast New Urbanist town planning, over a dozen communities have adopted form-based zoning, and urban design schools are teaching the New Urban principles all over the country, facts triumphed during the opening plenary session. Form-based zoning uses a hierarchy of increasingly dense districts with defined boundaries, rather than land-use (or Euclidian) zoning to regulate growth. These principles are exquisitely defined in a model code nicknamed the Smart Code, which defines street width and sidewalk width, and provides fine-grained guidance on the form of a building on a given lot. Participants in early work sessions were taught how to work the code, and walked the hot, humid streets of West Palm Beach to interpret its many nuances and subtleties.

In 2003, Downtown West Palm Beach was redeveloped, and it should be a proud example of the earliest New Urban efforts. Instead, conference participants spoke of the result with open distaste. The main outdoor plaza features a noisy fountain, which a group of attorneys, architects, and land planners belittled as "a mini Bellagio”; a pale imitation of the huge Las Vegas hotel's water feature. Andrés Duany, one of the founders of the CNU, stated during the conference that “much of the architecture of the downtown zone was junk.” The movement’s most flamboyant spokesman, James Howard Kunstler, cited the "cartoonish, low quality finish of the buildings” as a failure. The distance New Urbanists have put between themselves and one of their finest achievements is dismaying.

When not complaining about West Palm Beach, many practitioners wandered the somewhat sparse exhibit hall of booths sponsored by municipalities, attorneys, and consultants. Conversations often hit notes of personal suffering. Few new communities of any scale are being funded, so just as the supply of highly trained New Urbanists has hit the market, demand has dwindled to a trickle of infill projects here and there. Morale at the ground level was quite low, given the effort New Urbanists have put forth.

Pedestrian-based urban form is a science that New Urbanists can offer to every community, and it has been a win for them where it has been implemented. Our monocultural vehicular transport model of car-dominated cities has made people work hard to carve out social space. The New Urbanist critique of the aesthetics of transportation is right on target. Armed with plenty of real data about how pedestrian environments work, New Urbanists have succeeded at softening the city and allowing pedestrians to compete.

New Urbanists can also point to successes in the real estate market. In one study session, three single-family residential New Urbanist communities were analyzed, and the developer’s financial models were revealed. Each of the three communities fared better than their competitive set through the 2008-2012 cycle, in terms of net present value, appraisals, and foreclosure rate. New Urbanists claimed credit for this, although the affluent demographics and in-town locations tilted the plate in their favor. Still, New Urbanists have created a strong model that works for a segment of the population.

Perhaps New Urbanism's most potent contributions are to the art and science of traditional town planning. A solid body of knowledge that is based upon beautiful real places— Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, to name just two — now informs much of the theory behind place-making. We Americans are notably unsentimental about our cities, tearing down landmarks and whole districts in the quest for efficiency and betterment. New Urbanists have made it fashionable once again to care about history and good design, and our cities are the better for it.

The CNU’s 20th anniversary marks a curious point in the life of this laudable and lasting movement. Because there isn't any new development occurring, government effortshave turned towards adding form-based code overlays to existing cities. Already, Miami and Philadelphia have passed these codes to regulate growth. Many other cities like Orlando operate a standard zoning code by ordinance, while enforcing a form-based code as well. Property owners, developers, and design teams must now satisfy the intricacies of two local codes, rather than one, to get a building permit.

While de-regulation is a term on everyone’s lips, this quiet up-tick in regulation has occurred largely under the radar screen. Those pushing for form-based code are largely consultants, who argue that the code will make for a better city by protecting us from ourselves. Municipal officials are amenable to, it, too.Both groups see the job security it promises them. Developers see profit if their communities can boast adherence to a strict code that promises a better lifestyle.

Developers would normally scream loudly at any new regulation, no matter how trivial, but they are passively allowing form-based code because of the effect it can have on their bottom lines. If these codes tend to increase cost, well, the financial investors don’t complain, because the more money that's borrowed to complete these structures, the more interest income they earn. So — form-based codes benefit all the interest groups that advocate their implementation.

At CNU20 we witnessed the coming of age of a new regulatory regime. Place-making, once an activity trusted to individual citizens, has become codified; a vision enforced by authorities and interpreted by high priests who have special training to understand how to make a proper city. Maybe we have so abused our power as individuals that we deserve to have this power taken away. Perhaps our city form is so ugly, and so dysfunctional, that we cannot rescue it without serious intervention.

Or, perhaps not. The American Dream is not about freedom from sprawl, as suggested in the movement’s seminal manifesto, “Suburban Nation”. Rather, it's about freedom to choose. New Urbanists might be able to provide this freedom within the confines of a new institution, the Smart Code, as long as the Smart Code produced good results. But if the critique at CNU20 of their own Downtown West Palm Beach is any indication, the Smart Code ain’t so smart after all.

American town planning needs less regulation, not more. Let’s use CNU’s body of knowledge to educate citizens and provide a path forward, not with the manacles of a new code, but with the freedom to create a new urban form that suits the lifestyles of the 21st century.

Flickr photo by Eric Alix Rogers, New Urban, in Six Corners, Chicago. New houses, all facing a common sidewalk, with garages on alleys behind. Off of Kilbourn, just south of Irving Park.

Richard Reep is an architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and he has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

The Map Developers Award for Innovation this week must go to The Twin Cities Storm Ready Map, an interesting Google Map showing the time-line of a simulated tornado storm hitting Minneapolis–Saint Paul. The map, created by Minneapolis Public Radio, shows the likely effects of a tornado hitting the Twin Cities and features a really clever time-line control. To navigate through the time-line of the simulated storm the map user just needs to use the browser scrollbar. As the user scrolls down on the page the Google Map stays stationary in position on the page but the time-line progresses and the scrollbar even initiates events on the map. To achieve this effect the map uses the Waypoints jQuery plugin.   The most shared post on Google Maps Mania this week was the new Made in NY map of New York's digital industry. The map shows the locations of over 500 homegrown startups, investors and coworking spaces across the city. As well as showing the extent of New York's tech industry, the map can also help you find a position in Silicon Alley. Those companies that currently have positions available are indicated with a 'We are hiring' link in the map sidebar. Derek Eder's Searchable Map Template with Google Fusion Tables is a free, open source tool that can help you create a searchable, filterable Google Map from a Fusion Table. The template can create a Google Map pulling in data from any Fusion Table. It includes a number of features, including, an address search (with variable radius), geolocation (automatically center the map on the user's location), results count (using the Google's Fusion Tables API) and the ability to easily add additional search filters (checkboxes, sliders, etc). Derek Eder's website includes a number of maps created with the template. These include Derek's own maps, mainly centred on Chicago and lots of maps created by others with the template. 

I knew there was the possibility that this month's Congress of New Urbanism — CNU20 — in West Palm Beach would be an exercise in brainwashing. While I was excited to be meeting some of the thinkers at the forefront of my profession, I certainly was aware that the founders of the movement were opinionated and outspoken. The number of attendees has way outgrown the close dinner group that began New Urbanism more than 20 years ago, but heavy hitters like Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Ellen Dunham-Jones, and John Norquist, to name a few, still have a big hand in the direction of the movement.

I was pleasantly surprised to find just the opposite. The first session was a debate on theology between two very prominent urban designers, Daniel Solomon and Andres Duany, which set the tone of challenging our own and each other’s beliefs in what New Urbanism is and should be.

During what is hopefully the worst economic downturn I will ever see there has been almost no New Urbanism development. The movement, along with the rest of the housing market, has stalled. When the market picks back up will developers and planners condemn the stringent LEED-ND framework, a prescriptive guide for sustainable development developed in part by the CNU?

Daniel Solomon thinks so. In Solomon’s lecture, which he humorously titled “My Dinner with Andres,” he challenged the prescriptive and code-based turn New Urbanism had taken, saying that the movement’s implementation guide, particularly LEED-ND, “strangles and sucks the life out of the American economy.” He blamed Duany’s Smart Code and Manual, describing Duany as a man who was rigorous and defiant in his beliefs, and simultaneously as a man who questioned his own ideas constantly, saying “Andres Duany creates an intellectual straightjacket that others wear, but that he won’t even put one arm in.”

I think I understand why people gravitate towards concrete codes and manuals. We live in a time that is full of challenges for our built environment. People feel comforted by a set of rules: Here’s a problem, and if I follow this, I can fix it. This equals confidence and control for urban designers and planners.

But perhaps Solomon’s most striking argument was to call the New Urbanist code a “reductive certitude” that was no different than Le Corbusier’s Athens Charter. For the uninitiated: Just the mention of this document makes planners shudder. It is blamed for some of the biggest idealistic planning screw-ups ever. Solomon’s argument was that, like Duany’s Smart Code, Le Corbusier's plan was written with certainty, and with little room for questioning. It was a quite a slam to compare Andres Duany, the founder of the very movement to which all in attendance subscribe, to Le Corbusier, often cited as the destroyer of city life. Man, were we in for a rebuttal.

And we got one.

I was eagerly watching the first row for the response of some of the New Urban heavies. Ellen Dunham-Jones leapt up immediately, cheering and loudly applauding. It was obvious that there was a divide in this union, but it existed in a context that welcomed it.

Duany came out on fire in defense of his “straightjacket,” saying that the code allows for local calibrations and adaptations. His argument focused on the fact that the real world is a world of laws, not a world of opinions and ideas, and that the same system that was used to destroy the urban form can be responsible for fixing it. Disputing the notion that without a code planners will be free, he made the case that the building code is the default setting for US municipalities, it is not going away, and that we need to use it to make change. In short, don’t fight the system; use it to your advantage.

Interestingly, Duany also defended those who love traditional suburbs. He described research exercises where people were shown a picture of an ideal New Urbanism development, and a picture of typical suburban scenario. The former usually contained a compact, dense cottage with a picket fence and beautiful streetscape. The latter contained a plain house with garage alongside the front door, sitting on a large, empty street. Despite the obvious attempt to sway opinion, 30% of people still chose the suburban scenario as their optimal place to live. He takes the stance that these people’s freedom to choose older-style suburbs must be protected, and that his smart code provides for that.

I challenge you to watch the session here and ask yourself the same questions about New Urbanism that these men do. I look forward to sharing my response to the other sessions at CNU20. Stay tuned....

Erin Chantry is an Urban Designer in the Urban Design and Community Planning Service Team with Tindale-Oliver & Associates, and the author of At the Helm of the Public Realm. A different version of this post appeared there. With a BA in Architecture, an MA in Urban Design, and an MSc in Urban Planning, she has served

Flickr photo by Florida Community Loan Fund, Townhouses at Henrietta, West Palm Beach, FL. Developed by New Urban League CDC / Urban League of Palm Beach County.

The 'Where Should I F..ckin Go' franchise is expanding. In December we saw the launch of Where the F..k Should I Go for a Drink?, a simply Google Maps based app that gives users useful, if slightly rude, advice about where they should go for a drink. Now you can also get advice on nearby places to eat with Where the F..k Should I go to Eat?. The swearing nomenclature may be a bit of a gimmick but the application is actually very useful. The simple design and no frills approach actually works perfectly on a smart-phone. If you are out and about and you want some quick advice about a nearby bar or restaurant then this app is perfect. It shows you a nearby restaurant and even shows you on a Google Map how to get there from your current location. If you don't like the restaurant suggested you can quickly move on to the app's next suggestion.

  A staffer from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) was fetted with monetary bonuses for his work on the imagery analysis that led to the capture of Osama Bin Laden. Per Senior Executives Association spokeswoman Carol Bonosaro, who speaks on behalf of senior government... Continue reading

The GITA website explains that its Oil and Gas Pipeline Conference, set for Oct 22-24 in Houston, has been cancelled. This would have been the 21st iteration of the event. The website text goes on to note the status of the organization is unclear: The GITA Board of Directors is... Continue reading

The  $104 billion Facebook IPO testifies to the still considerable innovative power of Silicon Valley, but the hoopla over the new wave of billionaires won’t change the basic reality of the state’s secular economic decline.

This contradicts the accepted narrative in Sacramento. Over five years of below-par economic performance, the state’s political, media, and business leadership has counted on the Golden State’s creative genius to fund the way out of its dismal budgetary morass and an unemployment rate that’s the third highest in the nation. David Crane, Governor Schwarzenegger’s top economic adviser, for example, once told me that California could easily afford to give up blue-collar jobs in warehousing, manufacturing, or even business services because the state’s vaunted “creative economy” would find ways to replace the lost employment and income. California would always come out ahead, he said, because it represented “ground zero for creative destruction.”

Schwarzenegger’s successor, Jerry Brown, and his economic team have been singing the same song, hoping, among other things, that the Facebook offering, and other internet IPOs, might bring in enough money to stave off the state’s massive, growing deficit, now estimated at more than $16 billion. Yet even as the new IPO wave has risen, California’s fiscal situation has worsened while state tax collections around the nation have begun to rise.

Of course, Facebook’s public offering will help, but only so much. According to the legislative analyst’s office, the Facebook gusher should put an additional $1.5 billion into the state coffers this year, roughly one tenth of the state deficit, with perhaps another billion in the following few years. This constitutes a nice win, but barely enough to sustain the state even over the short—not to mention the long—run.

The problem lies in large part in the nature of the economy epitomized by Facebook. Being based in cyberspace and driven entirely by software, such companies employ almost exclusively well-educated workers from the upper middle and upper classes. In the past “a booming tech economy created all kinds of jobs,” notes Russell Hancock, president and CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a key industry research group. “Now we only create these rarefied jobs.”

As Hancock suggests, this contrasts with previous California booms. Back in the ’80s or even the ’90s, California’s tech booms were felt broadly in Orange and other Southern California counties and appeared to be moving inland to places like Sacramento. Anchored by its then dominant aerospace industry, Los Angeles remained a tech power on its own while enjoying employment from a burgeoning fashion industry, the nation’s dominant port and, of course, Hollywood. 

In contrast, today’s job surge has been largely concentrated in a swath from San Francisco down to Sunnyvale. These firms create the kind of outrageous fortunes celebrated in the media, but their overall employment impact has not been enough to keep California even at parity with the rest of the country. Over the past decade, the state has created virtually no new STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering and math-related employment), while the U.S. experienced a 5.4 percent increase. Arch rival Texas enjoyed a STEM job gusher of 13.6 percent. More important still, mid-skill jobs grew only 2 percent, one third the rate nationally and roughly one fifth the expansion in the Lone Star State.

Even the Bay Area itself has enjoyed less than stellar growth. Indeed, even now overall unemployment in the Valley remains at 9.3 percent, below the state average of more than 11 percent but higher than the national average. The Valley now boasts 12 percent fewer STEM jobs than in 2001; manufacturing, professional, and financial jobs also have shown losses. Overall, according to research by Pepperdine University economist Mike Shires, the region at the end of last year had 170,000 fewer overall than just a decade ago.

Today’s Valley boom is also very limited geographically as well, with most of the prosperity concentrated in the Peninsula area, particularly around places like Mountain View (headquarters of Google), Menlo Park (headquarters of Facebook) and in pockets of San Francisco. Meanwhile, San Jose, which fancies itself “the capital of Silicon Valley,” faces the prospect of municipal bankruptcy, a fate increasingly common among cities across the state.

The magnetic pull of the current tech boom is even weaker across the bay in the Oakland area, where unemployment scales to 14.7 percent. According to the recent rankings of job growth Shires and I did for Forbes, Oakland ranked 63rd out of the nation’s 65 largest metropolitan areas, placing between Cleveland and Detroit.

Outside of San Diego, which has continued to gain jobs, the echoes of the tech “boom” are even fainter elsewhere in the state. Sacramento placed 60th in the job creation study, just behind Los Angeles, by far the largest region in the state. Former high-flier Riverside-San Bernardino ranked 50th, while the once booming “OC,” Orange County, could do no better than a mediocre 47th.

These economies have also become technological laggards. According to a study on tech job creation by my colleague Mark Schill, greater Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Riverside-San Bernardino, three large regions, now rank  in the bottom third in tech growth. The Los Angeles area, once the global center of the aerospace industry, now has a lower percentage of jobs in tech-related fields than the national average.

Beyond the big coastal cities, in places few reporters and fewer venture capitalists travel to, things are often worse. Fresno, Modesto, and Merced have among the weakest employment numbers in the nation. They may be partying in Palo Alto, but things are becoming increasingly Steinbeckian just 50 miles inland.

This is happening even as there has been an ominous decline in the overall quality of California’s talent pool. For residents over age 65, the state ranks 2nd in percentage of people with an AA degree or higher, but among workers 25 to 34 it falls to 30th. Even worse, according to National Assessment of Educational Progress, California eighth graders now rank 47th in science-related skills, ahead only of Mississippi, Alabama, and the District of Columbia.

None of this seriously affects the new wave of Valley firms. A Google, Apple or Facebook can cream the top not only of the California workforce, but the most gifted drawn from around the world. The old Valley depended on engineers and technicians cranked out in unheralded places like San Jose State and the junior colleges; the new Valley simply mines Stanford, CalTech, Harvard and MIT for its most critical raw material.

This reflects the contradiction inherent in California’s emerging economy.  High-end, massively financed tech firms like Facebook can endure the Golden State’s weak general education, insanely tough regulations, high energy costs, and rising tax rates. Silicon Valley software firms generally tend to support, or certainly don’t oppose, the draconian energy, land use, and other state regulations widely opposed by other, less ethereal industries.

The main reason: costs cannot be so well sustained outside the favored zones. This explains why people are not flocking in large numbers to California anymore. Last year, according to IRS data, California ranked 50th ahead of only Michigan--for rate of in-migration. So as the most gifted young nerds cluster around Palo Alto, middle-class families leave; between 2000 and 2009, 1.5 million more domestic migrants left the state than came. Even the Bay Area--the epicenter of the boom—has been losing 50,000 domestic migrants a year, due to unsustainably high housing prices and a narrower range of employment options for all but the best educated.

Many of these people–and companies—are moving to places that are far less attractive in terms of climate or culture, such as Utah, Texas, or even Oklahoma. The migrants may miss the beach or the temperate climate but reap huge benefits from lower home prices, lower taxes, and much better business environments. 

Of course, any state would welcome the windfall that is coming from Facebook and other dot.com phenomena. But the celebration over IPOs and rich payouts obscures the greater danger that threatens the future of the Golden State. The current boom demonstrates that Californians can no longer count on the prosperity of a few as the harbinger of better things for the rest of us. Instead Californians now inhabit, as a recent Public Policy Institute of California study    suggests, a society that is increasingly class divided, far more so than the national average.

Ultimately, one should not expect Facebook, or any company, to solve these vast problems. To expect this tech wave to reverse California’s decline is nothing short of delusional. 

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

This piece originally appeared in The Daily Beast.

Facebook photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

ESRI recently sent out reminders about submitting static paper or interactive maps for the 2012 ESRI UC Map competition. This year they have added a User Software Applications contest for applications using Esri technology or customized Esri software product.  The map gallery and user software application fair are huge events with hundreds of submissions, but don’t let that discourage you from submitting to their or other upcoming map contests.

The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) is sponsoring its 14th Annual Student Dynamic Map Competition to promote cartographic excellence and innovation. There are two competition categories: narrative maps and interactive maps. Entries must be submitted by Friday September 14, 2012.

National Geographic has several map competitions for college and young professionals through the  Association of American Geographers/Cartography award, British Cartographic Society award, and the Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS) award

The Barbara Petchenik International World Map Design Competition has a new theme for their 2013 competition: My Place in Today’s World.  Many teachers worldwide use the competition as part of their geography or GIS curriculum. The rules for the 2013 competition can be downloaded in September.

And because I think that video game maps use many of the same geo-spatial skills and design techniques as other types of interactive maps, I have included video game layer map contests. The  Source engine based Multiplayer game, Nuclear Dawn, has a Nuclear Dawn map contestwith prizes due by June 25.  Beanstalk, a search engine optimization company, is promoting a contest to create Minecraft maps based on the beanstalk theme with prizes due by May 31st.

Whatever form they take map contests are a good way to encourage students, professionals, and the general public to think about maps in creative ways.

 

The HeyWhatsThat: Eclipses Map uses two synchronised Google Earth maps to show the path of this Sunday's solar eclipse. One map shows the path of the solar eclipse on a map of the Earth and the other map displays a planisphere showing the path of the moon across the face of the sun. If you press the play button you can watch an animation of the eclipse as it will be seen from anywhere along the path. If you can't manage to get to a location that gives you a view of the full solar eclipse you can use the application to find out if you can view a partial eclipse from your location. Just drag the purple square on the left hand map to a location to observe what the eclipse will look like from that location. The NASA 2012 Solar Eclipse Map uses Google Maps to also show the path of the solar eclipse. You can lick anywhere on the map to mark a position and calculate the eclipse times from that location. For example, in San Francisco you can view a partial eclipse starting at 5.16 pm.

Hay términos que se ponen de moda y que terminan quemados de tanto usarlos sin mucho sentido, o bien se convierten en realidades que llegan para quedarse. Hoy en día todo el mundo habla de la “nube”, pero hay otros conceptos que compiten en popularidad en ciertos ámbitos. Uno de ellos es Big data, algo que me tiene intrigado y que intuyo que tiene un potencial terrible si se asocia con técnicas cartográficas de análisis espacial propias de los SIG.

Porque, pensemos un poco, ¿qué fenómenos podrían descubrirse si se analizan gigantescas bases de datos de tráfico o de cualquier otro tipo sobre una base cartográfica? Las aplicaciones pueden ser increíbles. Esto es, precisamente, lo que estaba pensando al ver una serie de experimentos de Eric Fischer, que no son sino un pequeño paso en esa dirección. Al añadir una capa con datos de miles de tweets geolocalizados en un periodo de tiempo concreto a la trama urbana de una ciudad, aparecen patrones que muestran otra cara muy diferente de la urbe. Se trata de sencillos experimentos que hacen pensar en las posibilidades de cruzar a gran escala Big data de todo tipo y cartografía. He aquí algunos ejemplos.

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| Vía People and Place |

The New York Times Water Pollution Map is a Google Map of over 200,000 facilities in the U.S. which have permits to discharge pollutants. Users can search the map by state. Each state map shows at a glance all the polluting facilities. The blue markers on the map indicate facilities that have not violated their permits and the orange markers show the facilities that have one or more violations. If you click on a map marker details about the selected facility are displayed beneath the map, including information about violations, fines charged and enforcement actions.

I’m still working out all of the details on my upcoming trip to Oregon and Washington later this summer. The path is starting to become clearer to me as I fill in missing pieces. It appears I’m going to have to apologize in advance to my Portland readers. The route will likely skirt the city without actually entering it. I know, I know, so many geo-oddities in such a concentrated area and I’m probably going to have to bypass it. Life often requires compromises and I had to trade certain routes to keep peace in the family. I had to accommodate a preference of my wife in order to extract a concession, so Portland fell. You can always email me if you want to know the details about the nearby spot outside of Portland that I will be forced to visit instead. That’s what happens when there are four family members jockeying for personal definitions of cool stuff.

Anyway, and more to the point, check out this neat town I stumbled upon as I mapped various routes from the Oregon coast to the interior.

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I’m sure Sweet Home, Oregon a wonderful town. They’ve got nine thousand residents, great scenery, a nice website and all sorts of outdoor activities. Is it terrible of me that all of those great features were drowned-out by the constant droning of a song I couldn’t dislodge from my head, "Sweet Home Alabama?" — Turn it Up! I won’t get into controversies associated with that song, whether it tacitly favored or rejected racial segregation. I will note for the record that it’s considerably more nuanced than most listeners probably realize. You are free to research and form an opinion on your own. That didn’t matter in this scenario where I was concerned solely with the repetition in my mind. As I’ve discussed before, I don’t have to necessarily enjoy a song for it to lodge firmly within my brain, although I do like this one more than that other one.

For those of you unfamiliar with "Sweet Home Alabama" — maybe you live far away from the United States or you’re really young, or whatever — it was released by the band that epitomized the Southern Rock genre, Lynyrd Skynyrd, in 1974 and made it all the way to #8 on the U.S. music charts. The only other thing you need to know is that according to Wikipedia: "None of the three writers of the song were originally from Alabama. Ronnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington were both born in Jacksonville, Florida. Ed King was from Glendale, California." Actually you don’t need to know that. I just found it oddly funny. I concede that some people will claim that Jacksonville would more properly belong in Alabama, though.

I checked one of my all-time favorite sites, the U.S. Geographic Names Information System to investigate Sweet Homes. Sure enough, there is a Sweet Home, Alabama listed in their records.

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The good news is that the United States government recognizes Sweet Home, Alabama as a populated place. The source it lists for this designation is "McMillan, James B., Dictionary of Place Names in Talladega County, Alabama, 1985. p.138." Google Books recognizes that such a source exists but apparently it’s too obscure for them to have scanned and made available to the public within their collection of a bazillion different volumes.

Sweet Home Baptist Church is located there. They don’t have a website, or at least one that I could find because it’s lost within piles of awful Search Engine Optimization garbage links. Honestly, Sweet Home, AL is pretty underwhelming and I’m not impressed. This is an excellent opportunity for an enterprising Alabaman to put a housing development on an open field outside of Birmingham or whatnot and seize the state’s signature theme song ("Sweet Home Alabama Country Estates and McMansion Farm"). After all, it’s good enough for the Alabama Motor Vehicle Division (speaking of license plates).

But wait! I did find a few other Sweet Homes.

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Maybe we can change the song to Sweet Home Arkansas. It’s close enough, right? — a southern state starting with an A? Sweet Home, AR is a suburb of Little Rock, just a bit south of Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport.

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If that’s not sufficient, how about Sweet Home, Texas? This one was my personal favorite because it’s only a few miles from my grandmother’s birthplace in Yoakum, TX. She was born in 1909 and lived for another 102 years). It’s also very near Shiner where the Spoetzl Brewery (my visit) makes Shiner Bock and various other beverages. It’s not too far from Borden, the original one too, not that poseur version further north. You could visit all of these places easily as a day trip from Houston or San Antonio.

I’ll also give an honorable mention to Sweethome, Oklahoma. I don’t know any more about it other than it was reputedly settled by people from the Texas version that arrived in Oklahoma during the Run of ’91. Oh, and they spelled it funny.