Month: March 2020

Still More Coronavirus Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Kera Till

Kera Till’s “Commuting in Corona Times” is a transit map of the new normal. More at Untapped New York.

On a personal level, the coronavirus map I stare at the most is the one closest to home: a dashboard that shows the regional incidence of COVID-19 in Quebec. Maintained by two geographers at Laval University, it’s extremely helpful in that it shows the per capita rate as well as the raw numbers, which highlights (for example) just how many cases there are in the Eastern Townships, and how few there are here in the Outaouais, as a percentage of the population. [Le Droit]

New York City COVID-19 mapLess helpful is New York City’s map showing the percentage of patients testing positive for COVID-19, because its neighbourhood detail is so difficult to interpret, as Patch’s Kathleen Culliton points out. “Neighborhoods are designated by numbers instead of name—408 is Jamaica, Queens, by the way—and the percentages are not connected to population data but to those tested. The number of people tested per zone? Not included. The population [per] zone? Not included.” [Kenneth Field]

It’s hard to maintain social distancing in a dense urban environment like New York, but that doesn’t mean that rural areas are inherently safer. Identifying areas that would be hit harder by the coronavirus can be a factor of age and various social vulnerability factors (such as poverty and vehicle access); John Nelson looks at the intersection of age and social vulnerability in this StoryMap and this blog post. The Washington Post’s maps of vulnerability are based on age and flu rates. A third example is Jvion’s COVID Community Vulnerability Map, which is based on anonymized health data from some 30 million Americans [ZDNet].

The New York Times maps the number of cases at the global level and for the United States. It’s also making available county-level coronavirus data assembled from various states and counties, since there seems to be no single agency tracking this at the national level.

Failing to observe social distancing makes the pandemic worse. You might have seeen Tectonix’s video on Twitter, drawn from the location data of mobile devices that were active at a single beach in Florida over spring break, and followed them home. As CTV News reports, the video has drawn fire from privacy advocates, though Tectonix asserts that the data was anonymized and collected with user consent. Meanwhile, the New York Times explores several scenarios of coronavirus spread, comparing what might happen with some control measures, more severe control measures, and no action taken at all.

For mapmakers: Matthew Edney on how and how not to map the COVID-19 pandemic. Kenneth Field on using coxcomb charts (memory-intenstive example here) and waffle grids to map the pandemic.

Can GPS Be Used on the Moon?

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

More on the question of whether GPS can be used for navigation on the lunar surface—that is to say the existing constellations of Earth-orbiting GNSS satellites, not a new constellation of satellites around the moon. A new study suggests that the answer is yes: GPS and other navigation systems could be used.

Cheung and Lee plotted the orbits of navigation satellites from the United States’s Global Positioning System and two of its counterparts, Europe’s Galileo and Russia’s GLONASS system—81 satellites in all. Most of them have directional antennas transmitting toward Earth’s surface, but their signals also radiate into space. Those signals, say the researchers, are strong enough to be read by spacecraft with fairly compact receivers near the moon. Cheung, Lee and their team calculated that a spacecraft in lunar orbit would be able to “see” between five and 13 satellites’ signals at any given time—enough to accurately determine its position in space to within 200 to 300 meters. In computer simulations, they were able to implement various methods for improving the accuracy substantially from there.

A mini-network of relays—a couple of satellites in lunar orbit, say—could improve accuracy further. [Geography Realm]

Previously: Many Moon Maps.

Alternate Geographies on the Imaginary Maps Reddit Group

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Gizmodo takes a look at the Imaginary Maps group on Reddit, where members mostly post imagined maps from alternate timelines—countries that never existed, the aftermath of wars that went the other way, that sort of thing. The bulk of the piece is an interview with frequent contributor xpNc, who talks about their own motivations for creating such maps. Some, of course, are controversial—a good way to pick a fight, apparently, is to draw a map of the Balkans with alternate borders. And, as xpNc tells Gizmodo, “Some people are just a little bit too enthusiastic about scenarios where Germany takes over the world, and I really don’t want to attract that crowd”—fortunately the wave of “Germany wins the Second World War” maps that I saw on the group a while back (last year?) seems to have abated.

Fuller’s Quarantine Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Gareth Fuller: Quarantine Maps: Day 4
Gareth Fuller

Gareth Fuller, whom we first heard about thanks to his masterpiece London Town, is in the news again. Now based in Beijing, he found himself forced to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip to Kuala Lumpur. Fuller has mapped every place he has lived, so he spent his two weeks of isolation creating quarantine maps—one for each day. The maps are claustrophobic—his apartment is 590 square feet—metaphorical, even fantastical. They’re very much on-point in this age of self-isolation and social distancing. They’re available as a set of postcards for £14, which is considerably cheaper than his other limited edition prints.

Last fall Fuller released a tourist map of Pyongyang (BBC News). I seem to have missed his map of Beijing when it came out.

Previously: Fuller: London Town; Fuller Update.

Antique Globes, Virtual and Real

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
British Library digital globes
British Library

The British Library is digitizing its collection of globes, with the first seven virtual globes scheduled to be released online next week.

The digital globes will be available to view on the British Library website—www.bl.uk/collection-items—from 26 March, via a viewing platform which includes an augmented reality function (available on phone or tablet via the Sketchfab app). This online access will allow unprecedented up-close interaction with the globes from anywhere in the world and means that for the first time, a variety of previously illegible surface features on the globes can be read.

A total of 30 globes are being scanned this way. [The Guardian]

Meanwhile, in Russia, the Grabar Art Conservation Center is restoring the State Historical Museum’s badly dilapidated pair of Blaue globes. Work on the terrestrial globe has been completed; the celestial globe is next. This video (in Russian) documents the process. See also TVC Moscow (also in Russian). [WMS]

Some More Coronavirus Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Washington Post

The Washington Post maps COVID-19 cases by U.S. state and country (above).

Animated maps from HealthMap and NBC New York trace the spread of the coronavirus over time. [Maps Mania]

Maps Mania also has a list of official government coronavirus maps.

Via Geography Realm, a collection of “responsible” live visualizations, some of which are maps, that can be embedded on other websites.

(See my other posts about COVID-19 for maps I’ve already linked to.)

Emissions Drop Due to Coronavirus Outbreak

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Map of mean tropospheric NO2 density over China, January-February 2020
NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens

As you may have seen elsewhere, the coronavirus pandemic is having an impact on air pollution, as countries shut down human and economic activity in an attempt to deal with the outbreak. Take nitrogen dioxide. Tropospheric NO2 density decreased significantly over China between January and February, and the same seems to be happening in northern Italy, which normally has some of the most severe air pollution in Europe. See the ESA’s animation:

More broadly, try this online map, which compares NO2 emissions before and after 20 February 2020 anywhere on the planet. [Maps Mania]

Previously: Mapping Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution.

Fake Coronavirus Web Maps Are Spreading Malware

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Hackers have created fake coronavirus map websites that install malware on users’ computers. According to Reason Security’s analysis, the websites resemble the coronavirus map dashboards produced by legitimate organizations, but prompt users to download an application: the application activates a known malicious piece of malware called AZORult, which collects browser information (cookies, browser histories, IDs and passwords). Not terribly surprising that bad actors are trying to exploit a crisis, but depressing all the same. More at Business Insider, The Hacker News and TechRadar.

When Google Won’t Let You Fix a Map Error

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A couple of years ago, Amanda Ripley discovered that Google Maps had two locations listed for her home, which made giving directions difficult. As the change propagated to services that used Google Maps, the problem worsened. Deliveries kept turning up at the other location. But it turned out that there was no way to notify Google of this specific problem. She had to use her media credentials as a workaround to get it fixed. (Check out Google’s statement at the end: it’s a textbook case of customer service gaslighting.)

2020 Miami Map Fair Cancelled

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The 2020 Miami International Map Fair, originally scheduled for 13-15 March, has been cancelled. While they don’t blame the COVID-19 outbreak explicitly, it’s of a kind with many other recent event cancellations.