Here is the last part of the battlemap tutorials for NewbieDM.com, written by professional cartographer Jonathan Roberts.  Click here for part 1, and here for part 2.

At the end of the last tutorial we had a lovely map, though it’s a little bare. In this tutorial I’ll cover the little tweaks that will finish off the map and how to present the finished product.

Final touches to the terrain – lava!

Here I will cover how I went about creating the lava, and discuss some alternative approaches to the one I took.

Now I already have the lava lines drawn in, so as with my walls, I can create a selection by using the Fuzzy Select tool. I then use Select->Grow to expand it by 2 pixels so that it runs along the center of my lines rather than along the edge. Now I hit Select->Save to Channel to save the selection for future use. With this in place I can quickly lay in some colours.

I create a new transparent layer and fill it with a dark red (7f1800 in html notation for anyone that wants to re-use it). I now have a totally red map. Once again I right click the layer and add a layer mask, being careful to pick my lava selection. Now I only have red lava, but it’s still a little extreme. As before I soften this by duplicating the layer, setting one layer to soft light .

Now that looks good, though it looks a little more like rivers of blood than lava. From looking at some useful reference photos of lava from Google it’s clear that the defining feature of lava is the sharp bright line – almost like ripples. So I take a new layer, grab a nice bright yellow and the ink tool and start detailing the lava. It takes a while to place all the ripples, but it’s starting to look more like lava.

Currently it’s a bit harsh – and certainly not subtle. Now lava is bright because it’s giving off heat – so we should expect these bright regions to give off light. So I duplicated the layer and used the Gaussian Blur filter: Filters->Blur->Gaussian Blur… This adds a subtle glow to the lines.

I’ve also dropped the opacity of the hard highlights to 60% to avoid the harsh look that we had at the start.

Now each sharp line gives off light, but the whole pools of lava give off light too. To add to this effect I add a new layer, set it to soft light and use a very light yellow to lay in the light given off by the lava.

Now that’s quite a lot of trouble to get detail into the map, especially drawing in all the lines in for the lava. One workaround is to find a
texture that you can use to add detail. An excellent place to look is www.cgtextures.com. Here you’ll find a lot of good textures.
For this example I’ve taken the image that can be found here.

I placed this on a new layer, making sure that it covers all the lava:

Now obviously the marble doesn’t look convincing at is, but the pattern of light and shade looks like it might work well. I then set this whole layer to soft light and voila! – instant lava.

This works particularly well because the marble texture is almost greyscale. Had it been brightly coloured it would be best to desaturate it first (Colours->Desaturate).  You can use this technique to quickly add some interest to regions and delineate different types of terrain. It’s easy to overdo this, so drop the opacity low to start and then slowly build it up.

Remember that the more subtle layers you pile on top of each the better the final result will look.  We’ll cover more of this when dealing with regional and city maps.

Adding set dressing

Okay, so now we have a map with all our different features and terrain in place. Time to add some set dressing. There are two ways to go about this. Firstly, we can draw our items of set dressing ourselves. The alternative is to find some items drawn by someone else and steal them.  Remarkably, this second approach is perfectly legal as long as the person has made them freely available. There are loads of items that fall into this category in the User Creation Forums over on the Dunjinni website (www.dunjinni.com). I’ve also got a pack of items on my website that you are free to download and place.

For my example map I used torches, braziers and doors from the map pack, as well as some bones to give a properly ominous air to the
sacrificial pillar.  The rope bridge and the pile of dragon gold I created from scratch for this map. The process for these is the same as for other features of the map. Add a new layer and draw in the lines with the ink tool. Create a new layer for the colours. Finally add a soft light layer to add light and shade.

Here’s the progress of the rope bridge through this process. In the last step I added some extra shadows beneath the bridge to emphasise the height from the floor of the cavern.

Now to add some torches to light the caverns (lifted from my map pack):

A side view to help the GM:

and a signature! Don’t forget to leave your mark on your map. It’s good to see it there, and it also means that if you put it up on the web for others to use that people know it’s yours.

Oh, one final edit. I duplicate the grid layer and blurred one of them slightly. This is helpful because if you are looking at a map at different scales (say in a virtual tabletop where you can zoom in or out) then the program that does the scaling can easily lose a 1 pixel wide line. It just averages the pixels out and gets rid of the line. This doesn’t happen to the gently blurred line – so you have a smooth transition as you zoom out rather than getting a jagged effect with bits of grid disappearing in chunks as you zoom out.

With that final tip we are finished:’

Make sure that you keep all these features on their own layer, I’ll explain why when we get to showing off your map using a virtual tabletop.

Showing off your map

Now all of this is a little overkill if all you want to do is keep the map to yourself and draw the combat encounters out on a dry erase battlemat.

So how do you go about getting this map in front of your players? Well there are two ways to do it.

1. Printing it out.

It’s perfectly possible to print out your map and use it at the table. If you’re feeling flush you can take it to your local print shop and have them run it off on a large format printer. There are even dedicated online printers that specialise in RPG battlemaps (http://www.gamerprintshop.com/). However if you want to print it at home you certainly can.
First of all, make sure that your map is scaled to the correct size. Here I’ve got a 100px grid, so I need to set the resolution to 100dpi to make sure it prints out 1 inch squares. This can be set through Image->Scale Image…

Now make sure that you turn off any images that you don’t want your players to see. Hide the secret doors, remove the traps. In this case I’m going to turn off all the elevation text. Now save the map as a jpg. To do this go to File->Save As… and save it out as something like MapFinal.jpg. It will ask you to set a quality. 85% should be fine so just click okay.

Now you need to download a wonderful little program called Posterazor.  It’s free and cross platform and you can get it here.  Load it up. This program slices up an image – without rescaling it – into a multi-page pdf. Once it has done this, you can print out your map page by page. Not only does this allow you to print the map yourself, it also
means that you can keep most of the map a secret from your players before they explore it.

When you start the program you’ll be asked to load an input image.  Load up your MapFinal.jpg and make sure it’s got the right dpi setting.  As long as you scaled your image right this should be fine. On the second page make sure you have the correct type of paper selected.  Letter for the US, A4 for the UK, just check that your printer has the paper that you pick. Next comes the overlap. This sets the amount of overlap between images on each page. You can have as little or as much as you like. It’s worth having a little as it helps line things up at the table. In step 4 you’ll see an image of your map with red lines over it.  This shows you where the program is going to cut your map. You can edit the values on this page to move the cuts around, but it’s usually pretty good. Finally on step 5 you can save out your pdf. You’re done!

Open your pdf, print it out and take it to the gaming table. You’re all set to use your glorious creation for your game.  For those who would like to save ink, you can also do this at the end of stage 1 – when you have black and white map with a simple grid. This gives you all the same play value, without costing you a fortune in colour cartridges.

2. Using a virtual tabletop

The alternative, and one that uses no ink at all, is to use one of the growing number of virtual tabletop programs out there. I personally have used maptool (www.rptools.net) ever since I moved country and wanted to keep my old game going. I now use it both with my friends from the UK, and also for a face to face game in the States.  Preparing the image for use in a virtual tabletop is much the same as
preparing it for use in Posterazor. Remove all GM only information – remember you’re showing the players the map. Now save it out as a jpg.  Before you saved it at a high quality. Now when the Save As JPEG dialogue comes up, click the Show Preview In Image Window checkbox.  This will give you an estimate of the filesize. As you move the quality slider you’ll see how this size changes.

Now this is a fine balance. Too low a quality and you’re map will look rough and have obvious compression defects. Too high a quality and you’ll be trying to upload a 10MB file to all your friends at once. Now your internet connection may have a great download speed, but I’ll bet it will take a while to upload 50MB. So strike a balance. If you’re using it for a face to face game then you don’t need to worry about internet speeds and you can go with a high quality that looks good.

Finally, depending on the virtual tabletop program, you may want to use a version of the map without the set dressing and add those items, such as the torches and braziers, in the program itself. Now you see why I said you might want to keep those on their own layer! Equally, maptool has an inbuilt grid, so I use a version of the map without a grid, and let maptool keep track of the distances.

With a little set-up for the light and shade, and with a top down token from the wonderful tokens of Devin Night of the Four Ugly Monsters the dungeon is ready for use face to face (with a second monitor, a player laptop or a projector) or across the world.

Here I set up the light sources to conform to the light rules and told maptool where the walls were. I also made sure that the elevations were only visible to the GM – so they can quickly see all the relevant information, but it doesn’t break the suspension of disbelief for the
players.

Now doesn’t that look better than a dry erase battlemat with markers?  And all for the price of two free pieces of software and a small investment of time.

If you want to have a look at the full blown maptool campaign file it’s included in the RPGNow download. In fact there are two campaign files in there – one for Pathfinder/OGL lighting rules and another for 4th edition rules.
If you’d like to see this process in real time, then sign up to The Breaking of Forstor Nagar – a patronage project with Rite Publishing. As
a patron you’ll be directly involved in the development of the adventure with input at every stage. This includes map design, storylines, NPCs and encounters. If you’d like to find out more, visit The Breaking of Forstor Nagar and get involved.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first mapping tutorial. I’ll be interested to see what people create! I’ll be back in due course with similar tutorials for some larger scale maps, dealing with towns, regions and perhaps even whole worlds. Until next time, happy mapping!

Well, there it is guys.  One of my goals for the site has come true.  A kick ass mapping tutorial by a professional.  I can’t thank Jonathan enough for this series.  Based on the number of messages I’ve received about it, I know it’s destined to become a popular feature here (if it isn’t already).  We have other tutorials coming down the pipe, but let’s give Jonathan’s photoshop some cool-down time!  Make sure you visit his website at Fantastic Maps, for more mapping goodness, and if you have made some maps following the tutorials, share them with the rest of us!

Niagara Falls is in New York!

In one of my classes tomorrow we will be looking at New York, so please take a look at the map of New York state.

From t.he recently re-opened Osher Map Library at the Univeristy of Southern Maine in Portland are great transportation maps

View Larger Map
On Exactitude in Science . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

two maps to consider: 1st the state of education estimates 2007-2008

the map original location is at wikipedia education article. The other are the relative locations of our star and neighbours

the map original location is at wikimedia commons nearby stars

The controversial plan to redevelop borough garages and associated community award-winning gardens into affordable housing has been the official go-ahead.

The demolition of these garages is part of the ‘linked-sites strategy’ which has ties to the much wrangled and protested Twickenham riverside development plans.

Despite delays to the Twickenham scheme, the building of the 13 three-bedroom affordable houses will go ahead separately. Councillor Stephen Knight: “In the case of the riverside, the strategy will allow us to minimise the amount of development near the river, and hence maximise the amount of the site available for new public open space.”

Specifically in Teddington areas to be used for the housing will reside in Railway Road and Shacklegate Lane and Teddington garage blocks. Across the borough residents have collaborated to officially complain about the consultation process and generally the need for the housing vs impact that removing the garages will have.

I was talking with someone recently about the Waikato River water that provides some 10% of the drinking water in Auckland. This was approved despite much protest, on the basis that Metrowater would only use it in emergencies. I suspect that Mayor George Wood at the time knew that it would end up being turned on all the time, as part of his deal with his crony mayors.

The water was declared safe by WHO standards, however councillor Joel Cayford, who is now employed by ARC said that it was unsafe. I attended the public meeting where he explained that WHO standards listed a number of quality requirements, but excluded many ingredients such as dioxins, heavy metals, fertiliser and more. In my opinion the meeting wasn’t helped by constant interjections from rent a protester, which didn’t help the cause.

Not long after approval was given by the regional mayors, including the Mayor Bob Harvey of Waitakere who approved it on the condition that Waitakere water would only come from local dams in the rainforest, thus not having to take this water.

What has this got to do with dead zones in the ocean? Well here’s the thing. A lot of the objections against using Waikato river water were because it contains huge amounts of leached chemicals from farms including fertiliser, antibiotics and much more. It appears that these same types of chemicals are flowing from rivers around the world into the sea and several studies are suggesting that the rise in industrial food production is increasing the number of dead zones rapidly.

Oceanic dead zones are areas where the oxygen levels in the water are so low that they kill of almost all forms of marine life. There are now more than 400 oceanic dead zones around the world and they are growing fast.

According to experts, including NASA a major contributor to these dead zones is fertiliser that flows to the ocean from farms both in the form of chemicals leaching from farms and from the animal manure which still contains these chemicals. The nitrogen and phosphorous feeds the algae and phytoplankton, making these plants grow rapidly.

In New Zealand, we have become aware of algal bloom. This is occurring more commonly now both in coastal waters, such as our local Waiheke Island, and also in freshwater lakes, including many in the Waikato, where 10% of our drinking water is coming from.

So what does this mean? We know that fresh water is going to be on of the important issues in the future, both from climate change and from man-made intervention. We know that our oceans are becoming polluted, much of it from man-made waste. We know that the fish stocks are becoming depleted in many parts of the world, due to over fishing, to feed growing nations. But fish are also now seriously at risk from the oceanic dead zones, where oxygen levels are so low that fish and other marine life can’t survive.

We seem to be in danger of creating the ‘unrealistic and unbelievable’ wasted planet that is often depicted on science fiction movies.Am I exaggerating? Well check these examples out:

A dead zone the size of New Jersey of the coast of Oregon and Washington, may be irreversible.

The Mississippi Delta dead zone is one of the smaller ones in the world, only 3,000 square miles. The US Government is investing $320 million to try to slow it down, but as long as the chemicals keep flowing down and farm production is increased, we have a problem.

The Baltic sea apparently contains 7 of the 10 worst oceanic dead zones and it appears that the surrounding countries haven’t been doing much about them. The end result could be the loss of almost all marine life in the area. This map shows how bad it is in places, where the red areas represent areas where the water essentially contains no oxygen.

It appears that the man-made damage to the oceans and lakes in the world could present an even greater problem than global warming and of course one that is compounded by it. If so much water ends up unable to sustain life, how will we survive, especially the poorer areas on the planet, where water is already scarce. The sea’s health is not something we can take for granted, no matter how vast it appears. The attractive colours of algae bloom that we sea coming back each summer in bigger areas, is evidence that we need to change some of our ways, and quickly.

I’ll leave the last word to Joanne from Rocketboom who explains it far more succinctly than I:

I am about to depart on my Southeast Asia adventure. I am going to visit Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. This is the tentative route that I will be following. After 25 + hours of fun filled air travel (what is the the World Record for playing Tetris??), I will arrive in Bangkok, via Taipei, Friday (11/20). I am going to spend a day or two in Bangkok then head north to Chiang Mai. Let the adventure begin!!

Leuke dag op kantoor bij ESRI in Rotterdam. Kennisdag (1x per maand), dan valt er altijd wat te leren. Ik schoof aan bij een presentatie over de ArcGIS Server Portal extensie. Knap om een complex verhaal zo duidelijk te brengen. Het belang van metadata zie ik in, hoe zorgen we ervoor dat alle geo-organisaties in Nederland dit ook inzien?

Tijdens een discussie over sociale media valt me pas op dat ESRI nieuws heeft voor IPhone liefhebbers. Via Itunes zonder kosten te downloaden! Kan het helaas zelf niet testen. Kerst of diploma kado?

Deze post komt binnen via email aan mijn blog. Mijn locatie opgeven (Station Almeerderzand) lukt nog niet. Welcome in suburbia, het aards paradijs… Morgen leuk ik dit bericht wel op.

Ben and I have just got back from a rather long day in London.  We were visiting a couple of researchers who are interested in location based services on mobile devices.

Our first stop was at City University to visit David Mountain of the Informatics group.  David has been using geo-enabled mobile devices for research and teaching over the last couple of years.  He has looked specifically at geographic information retrieval on mobile devices and mixed reality interfaces for mobile devices.

Our next stop was at UCL where we met with Anthony Steed in the department of computer science.  Anthony has worked on data collection with mobile devices and how users might use geographic data beyond just consuming maps and utalising geoannotation and temporal tagging.  He has also investigated how real-world knowledge can be exploited in computing, particularly through GPS enabled devices.

It was really interesting to engage with these guys as they were able to tell us what they had done, what they found easy or difficult and what they would like to see in a GIS service for mobile devices.  It is fair to say that Ben and I learnt a great deal, many aspects seemed simple and obvious after the meetings, but we had not even considered them before.

We are on the road again this week, visiting Nottingham on Thursday.  I have no doubt that this will open our eyes to other aspects of service delivery that we have not previously appreciated. Fortunately the flight is at a slightly more civilised time, but only slightly.

Hello all you map loving geeks!

With the holiday season coming up, and since it’s Geography Awareness Week, why not consider buying a calendar for your loved ones?  But not just any calendar…a calendar of Calendria!

The calendar above features the Atlas of Calendria, an imaginary land loosely based on earth and the months of our beloved calendar.  The amount of detail for each nation (month) in Calendria is impressive.  The map itself is beautiful.

Created and produced by Elizabeth Daggar, the Atlas of Calendria would make a lovely gift for any map aficionado on your gift-giving list.

I’m buying a few for myself to grace my wall and hand out.  It’s just a great example of an imaginary world so like our own.  And, it’s gorgeous – what’s not to like?

H/T to Cartophilia.

tmso

“Transformations“, an exhibition scheduled for March 2010, will examine artists who work between 2-D and 3-D media. Today’s post is a preview of Thomas Lyon Mills’ unusual and breathtaking artwork which deals with themes of memory, time, and mapping.  Mills is a Professor of Drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design in the Division of Foundation Studies. He recently completed a sabbatical where he is the only non-archeologist who has been granted permission to explore and work alone in the Roman and Neapolitan catacombs. This past November and December, he was on a grant to work in Kapadokya and underground cities in central Turkey. Below you can read a short excerpt from his artist statement.

“No.63 from the series 73 Prayers in the Underground”, 2001 – 2006
40.75” x 35.75”, watercolor, charcoal, conte crayon, collage.

Drawing: Making and Unmaking
Thomas Lyon Mills, Professor, Rhode Island School of Design
June 2009

Despite increasingly precise measurements, contemporary maps of the cosmos or the minutiae of the sub-atomic world will likely be no more accurate in the future than ancient seafaring maps that included half-remembered landscapes and sea monsters.

Like mapmakers, we draw and paint what we observe, but find our drawings inevitably cross over into the unknown, for, like maps, they are never truly, wholly accurate, never allowing for shifting points of view, or even the necessity of dreams.

This then, is our region – where the visible and invisible meet, where the observed and the intuitive lie side by side, and where the seen pays a constant debt to the unseen.

Everything changes when we draw: channels open up between our eyes and our breathing, heart rate, and neurological paths.  Borders dissolve between touch, smell, and sound.  Along with this synaesthesia, primordial forces rush in.  The ideas absorbed when we draw are infinitely better than when we don’t draw.  And, like making maps, what we draw we remember; what we don’t draw, we forget.

But like maps, drawing is about the specific, not the general: about revealing ideas with precision and authority.  Ironically, it is the discrepancy between one’s unfocussed marks – one’s lack of precision compared with the purity of the subject, full of complexity and unseen forces at work – that leads to the prolonged search.

We learn from myriad artists’ work including Matisse and Giacometti and their clouds of erased marks, the breathing and ghosts in the drawings of Michelangelo, Mu’ Chi, and Tohaku, and in the mirrored worlds of Piero.

This is a great resource for teachers to post images on the web and have students able to really zoom into sections and look at a particular image. I have found this very useful for things such as maps. Often when I give a map assignment students like to go to Google map and begin working. However, since they can do so much with Google maps they often get lost in the process and are off task looking at their house or other things that are not the focus of my lesson. This is one of the pitfalls of technology. To combat this I have begun using this website to create usful maps that limit what they can look at so that the focus stays on the task at hand. In an age of immense technology sometimes we forget that students can get lost in the amount of information they can find in a simple Google search. We as teachers need to ensure this does not happen and provide resources that limit the inflow of information to attain our learning objective.

http://www.zoomify.com/

I got the chance this morning to have a look at the newly released Bing Maps Silverlight SDK. The bing maps SDK allows you to add a map to your silverlight application and enhance it by adding pushpins, images, videos, shapes and scalable elements etc.

I’m impressed at how easy it is to get a bing map displaying in your silverlight application and start customising it.

I decided to create this getting started guide to help you create a simple silverlight application displaying a bing map.

When you have completed the guide below you should have a map similar to the one below.

1. Download and install the Bing Maps Silverlight Control SDK from here –

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=beb29d27-6f0c-494f-b028-1e0e3187e830

2. Create a new ‘Silverlight Application’ project in Visual Studio 2008/2010 whichever you prefer. When the box pops up to asking whether or not you want VS to host the silverlight app in a new web site – make sure its ticked.

3. Add a reference to the dll’s

Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.dll 

Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.Common.dll

you can find these dll’s in a subfolder of the installation directory called ‘Libraries’.

4. Create an account at the ‘Bing Maps Account Center’ and create a new application key (you will need this key to be able to use the bing map control) –

https://www.bingmapsportal.com/

4. Open the MainPage.xaml file of your project (not the web project) and a new xml namespace:

xmlns:m="clr namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl"

5. Next add the following code inside the Grid control (make sure you paste your bing maps application key into the CredentialsProvider property –

<m:Map
           Height="300"
           Width="350"
           x:Name="testMap"
           CredentialsProvider="Your application key goes here"
           Background="White"
           Mode="Road"
           Center="19.642588,50.273438"
           ZoomLevel="0">
           <m:Pushpin Location="52.97421339369046,-1.246250867843628"/>
           <m:Pushpin Location="-27.469442,153.030136"/>
           </m:Map>

6. Refresh the designer in visual studio by clicking the link and then build your project.

7. Hey Presto! – you should now be seeing a bing map just like the one above showing the locations of the ID offices.

Lately, David Smith from REvolution Computing set out to challenge the R community with the reprocuction of a beautiful choropleth map (= multiple regions map/thematic map) on US unemployment rates he had seen on the Flowing Data blog. Here you can find the impressing results. Being a fan of beautiful visualizations I tried to produce a similar map for Germany.

1. Getting the spatial country data

The first step resulted in getting data to draw a map of the German administrative districts. Unfortunately, the maps for Germany do not come along in the map package, which would mean I could easily adopt the code results from the challenge. Getting data: The GADM database of Global Administrative Areas has the aim to provide data of administrative districts for the whole world on different levels (country, state and county level). The data can be downloaded as as a shapefile, an ESRI geodatabase file, a Google Earth .kmz file and very convenient for R users, as an Rdata file.

2. Getting socio-demographic data (e. g. unemployment rates by administrative district): A lot of data is available online at www.statistikportal.de. On this site you find links to several data bases. To get the unemployment stats by county I clicked my way through: Regionaldatenbank Deutschland -> Arbeitsmarkt -> Arbeitsmarktstatistik der Bundesagentur für Arbeit -> Arbeitslose nach ausgewählten Personengruppen sowie Arbeitslosenquoten – Jahresdurchschnitt – (ab 2008) regionale Tiefe: Kreise und krfr. Städte -> Werteabruf -> save as CSV format. This table contains all the information I need, although for some reson, for a few districts there is no data listed. I also looked for another source. On Regionalatlas a nice online visualization tool is offered. In the menu I selected unemployment rate 2008 as indicator. Besides the nice visualization you get, there is a menu button “tables” where you can retrieve a html table of the data. I simply copied and pasted it into a .txt file which gives me a tab seperated value format I can read in R. But still: some districts are not listed. Here is a pdf file containing the data.

3. Preparing the data

Now I have two datafiles: One (gadm) containaing the spatial information, the other one (unempl) containing the unemployment rates. It turns out that the same districts are not always named alike. Sometimes the name comes along with a supplement or in other cases the deviations are more severe so that simple parsing will not do it.

I decided to take the quick-and-dirty route and do a fuzzy matching, which surely is prone to errors, very slow and not at all elegant… Well, never underestimate the rawness of raw data.

4. Plotting the data

On Claudia Engel’s Anthrospace blog I found an R script already perfect to make use of the data provided. The Rdata files turn out to contain SpatialPolygonsDataFrame so we can print the data without any further preparation using the sp package.

###############################################################
library(sp)
library(RColorBrewer)

# get spatial data for Germany on county level
con <- url("http://gadm.org/data/rda/DEU_adm3.RData")
print(load(con))
close(con)
# plot Germany with random colors
col = rainbow(length(levels(gadm$NAME_3)))
spplot(gadm, "NAME_3", col.regions=col, main="German Regions",
       colorkey = FALSE, lwd=.4, col="white")
###############################################################

This looks nice. To produce a color vector to visualize the unemployment rate the two data sets have to be merged.

###############################################################
### DATA PREP ###
# loading the unemployment data
unempl <- read.delim2(file="./data/data_germany_unemployment_by_
                     county.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "\t",
                     dec=",", stringsAsFactors=F)

# due to Mac OS encoding, otherwise not needed
gadm_names <- iconv(gadm$NAME_3, "ISO_8859-2", "UTF-8")   
# fuzzy matching of data: quick & dirty
# caution: this step takes some time ~ 2 min.

# parsing out "Städte"
gadm_names_n <- gsub("Städte", "", gadm_names) 

total <- length(gadm_names)
# create progress bar
pb <- txtProgressBar(min = 0, max = total, style = 3) 
order <- vector()
for (i in 1:total){  
   order[i] <- agrep(gadm_names_n[i], unempl$Landkreis, 
                     max.distance = 0.2)[1]
 setTxtProgressBar(pb, i)               # update progress bar
}
# choose color by unemployment rate
col_no <- as.factor(as.numeric(cut(unempl$Wert[order],
                    c(0,2.5,5,7.5,10,15,100))))
levels(col_no) <- c(">2,5%", "2,5-5%", "5-7,5%",
                    "7,5-10%", "10-15%", ">15%")
gadm$col_no <- col_no
myPalette<-brewer.pal(6,"Purples")

# plotting
spplot(gadm, "col_no", col=grey(.9), col.regions=myPalette,
main="Unemployment in Germany by district")

###############################################################

It seems that the districts for which no data was available mainly belong to the states Sachsen-Anhalt and Sachsen. Also you can see that east of Germany has got a much higher unemplyoment rate than the west. The same holds true for a north-south comparison.

Besides ths sp package there are many other ways to produce such a graphic. I will now take another approch using shapefile data which also is available on GDAM. The data is availabe as a .zip file which includes several dBase files for all levels (3=district, 1=state etc.).

###############################################################
library(sp)
library(maptools)

nc1 <- readShapePoly("./data/DEU_adm/DEU_adm1.dbf",
                    proj4string=CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=NAD27"))
nc3 <- readShapePoly("./data/DEU_adm/DEU_adm3.dbf",
                    proj4string=CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=NAD27"))

# col_no comes from the calculations above
par(mar=c(0,0,0,0))
plot(nc3, col=myPalette[col_no], border=grey(.9), lwd=.5)
plot(nc1, col=NA, border=grey(.5), lwd=1, add=TRUE)

###############################################################

What I like about all this, it that it is pretty simple to draw almost any country you like. Besides the very messy part of data preparation it is only a few lines of code and the results are nice.

I have a thing for rooms with columns. I like characters reaching around them in a fight and in a more wuxia styled game (one of the 3e games I’m in routinely has people bouncing off walls and having melee battles in treetops) they provide a great place dodge around, flip over and run up.

Geomorph 3c

Alaska SeaLife Center

Before leaving Seward, after boarding our tour bus and meeting up with the guide and passengers for our land tour, we took a short drive to the Alaska SeaLife Center, where we saw the birds, water mammals, and fish of Alaska. 

Seward is roughly 100 miles by sea from Bligh Reef—the site where the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil in March 1989.  The oil traveled more than 470 miles from Bligh Reef, reaching the waters around Seward roughly eight days after the spill, as illustrated on this map.

Exxon Valdez Spill Map

According to the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, the Exxon Valdez spill has dropped out of the top 50 largest oil spills in the world, but is still considered the greatest in terms of environmental impact because of the “spectacular location, the thousands of miles of rugged and wild shoreline, and the abundance of wildlife in the region.”  Check out the Council Web site for information about the impact and degree of recovery, and lack thereof, over the last 20 years. 

The Alaska SeaLife Center was built between 1995 and 1998, receiving $26 million from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Settlement Fund to help build the $56 million facility.  Signage inside made a big point of the fact that the money did not pass directly from Exxon to the Center—presumably for the purpose of suggesting that Exxon did not control the content of the Center’s small exhibit about the spill. In addition to their exhibits, they have a research, rehabilitation, and educational mission. 

I was glad we visited the Center.  Although it’s possible that I’ve seen many of the same species at the Shedd Aquarium or the Vancouver Aquarium in the past, it’s an entirely different thing to see marine life found in Alaska exclusively during an Alaskan voyage.  The tight focus helped. 

Here’s some of what I saw there.

Jelly Fish!

Live Salmon

Squid

Crab

Puffins

I’d previously heard of puffins but didn’t know anything about them.  At the Center, I learned that they “fly” underwater (flapping their wings to move).  I didn’t see any puffins out of captivity during the trip, but I did see other birds surfacing after underwater “flight’ when I went kayaking in the Prince William Sound that very night.  (More on that in a future posting.)

Oh dear! I went out to see if I got any letters today and discovered something truly disturbing in my mailbox. It was a booklet sent from the Office of Emergency Management and an agency with the strangely archaic-sounding name, “His Majesty’s Stationary Office.” I guess they got my address when I applied for a disaster assistance loan and added me to some list.

In Case of Attack

Of course, none of this craziness would require fiddling around with atomic nuclei in a secret laboratory in New Mexico or Snezhinsk. No Atomgrads here, just lines of code developed whenever it was felt necessary to provide a “deterrent” in the interest of protecting National Security. “The mad fools!,” as Alexei de Sadesky proclaims in Dr. Strangelove when he discovers that his own government has activated an automated doomsday device.

Jeez, this stuff used to scare the knickers off of me when I was a young one out there in real life la la land. Now, I guess the youth and the crazies have the planet Niribu to fret over, and when I think long and hard enough on it, I have a difficult time finding any substantial difference between my adolescent fears and theirs. So, who am I to judge?

Anyway, I’m going to let you read a particularly frightening section of In Case of Attack here, because I feel like the material therein is something with which every Second Life resident should at least have a passing familiarity…

Do You Know Where You Stand?

The map pictured below graphically represents the range of effects from the detonation of a 1 Megabyte Blue Mars ground burst device in the approximate center of the Sansara continent of Second Life. Descriptions of modifications to builds, avatars, and the long-term effects of such a detonation follow.

Blast effects from a Blue Mars 1MB Device

1-2 Sims from ground zero

Builds: All structures, scripts, and textures instantly deleted. Terrain mesh is turned black with a fine dusty brown glow which persists for a period of several years, post-event.

Avatars: 100% of avatar account information, including inventory, Linden Dollars, etc. deleted instantly. Permanent IP block from Second Life placed into effect immediately for everyone within these regions.

Long-Term Effects: Rebuilding, scripting, and texturing becomes impossible within this zone for a period of at least two years. Avatars spending more than 15 minutes at a time in these areas automatically have their accounts set to expire one year after date of over exposure with a permanent IP block from Second Life.

3-4 Sims from ground zero

Builds: Structures, scripts, and textures heavily damaged or destroyed (many missing prims, lines of code). Remaining textures take on a gray or black underlying color. Terrain mesh becomes a dark brownish gray.

Avatars: 50% of avatar accounts instantly deleted and IP blocked. Surviving avatars sustain permanent loss of one or more abilities, e.g. building, communicating, or flying. 50% of financial assets deleted. All accounts are set to permanently expire at a date not less than one year and no more than three years from the time of detonation. Avatars assume a stigmatizing dusty brown glow.

Long-Term Effects: Rebuilding and spending long durations in these regions is extremely hazardous, as random accounts will be flagged for expiration in one to three years from point of over exposure.

5-7 Sims from ground zero

Builds: Moderate damage to structures and scripts (missing prims, lines of code). Textures and terrain mesh receive a light gray underlying color.

Avatars: 25% of avatar accounts instantly deleted and IP blocked. Survivors suffer a temporary (3 to 4 month) loss of one or more abilities. 25% of financial assets deleted. Accounts are set to expire at a date no less than two but not more than four years from point of detonation.

Long-Term Effects: Rebuilding in these regions is risky. A small percentage of avatars who spend long periods of time in these area will have their accounts flagged for deletion in two to four years.

8-10 Sims from ground zero

Builds: A few structures sustain light damage (missing prims only). Scripts remain intact. Terrain mesh and textures unaffected.

Avatars: 1-2% of avatar accounts instantly deleted without IP block due to falling debris and small fires. Avatars outside of structures at the time of detonation suffer a temporary loss of eyesight persisting for up to two days. Most remain unaffected.

Long-Term Effects: Repair and Habitation of structures is safe in these areas.

In Summary

The immediate physical devastation and disease that this device would cause is certainly unthinkable, but such an event would have other, long-lasting effects, as well. Economic impacts would take place on a scale never witnessed before. Large refugee populations from affected areas would place a great strain on server resources. A sense of sadness would prevail over the whole land. Read the next chapter “WTF are We Going to Do Now?” to learn more.

##

Dang. Just typing that up was scary.

I do have to wonder a little bit at the specific anxiety subtext in terms of an assumed foe. I mean, I went to that wrongly hued Mars once, and it felt like a really hot and humid afternoon at Celebration, where all the people stay in the air conditioning. It didn’t look weird or broken at all. Not my thing, and, hopefully, no real threat to our way of life here on the mainland.

Well, I’m going to hop in my Dreamliner now and go to sleep and try to think about something nice. First thing tomorrow, I’m going to get up and call the OOEM and those stationary people (whoever they are) and have them take me off of their mailing list. This Cold War propaganda business is a real comb-over. Give me some propaganda that is a little bit more now.

Nite nite

Another tool that has great potential for journalists and crowd-sourced photo conversation projects is Microsoft’s Photosynth, which allows you to automatically assemble 3D tours and almost sculptural assemblages from photosets.

Check out this virtual tour of the Oslo Town Hall where the Nobel peace prize is awarded.

In this video Photosynth architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas talks about exciting ways this technology can be used to crawl through the millions of images on the web and effectively create a new hyperlinked visual structure.

There is also a google maps plug-in that lets you mash-up synths and maps.

News organisations have already seen the value of using the tool to cover big events and to crowd-source images from their viewers. From the photosynth blog:

Without a doubt, the highlight of the Photosynth’s first year was the Presidential Inauguration on January 20th. BothCNN and MSNBC featured synths of the moment at which the President took the oath of office, and CNN gave Photosynth 20 minutes of airtime over a five day period. These were tricky synths to shoot and assemble. MSNBC used just a few professional photographers, while CNN augmented its professionals with its “iReports” community.

CNN’s iReport synth of viewers “where were you” moment as Obama was sworn in received more than 9,000 submissions from people who were at the inauguration, or watched it at home and is a marvelous community assembled photo document.

Unfortunately only Windows users can create synths at the moment but you can view on Mac.

Google’s “Street View” application is the topic of a court case once again, this time in Switzerland.  For those unfamiliar with its use, “Street View” allows users a 360 degree street-level view of any location, from anywhere in the world. According to the BBC, Swiss concerns stem from the height of the Google camera, which allows it to see over walls and hedges that would otherwise prevent line of sight, and the application’s use of faces and vehicle license plates that are not rendered “sufficiently unrecognizable.” Google has already been asked (nicely?) to comply with the Swiss requests, but has not, and is now preparing to “vigorously contest” the case.

A Google "Street View" car (Photo courtesy of telegraph.co.uk).

Is this a violation of privacy rights? If all images were acquired from a legal perspective, is there a case here? This relates very strongly to photography and privacy rights, which we as journalists need to be aware of. What do you think is the proper course of action?