MapBrief™

Tonight in Denver, the City Council will take final public comments on its plan for redistricting.  Comments will be limited to 3 minutes. As someone who has been closely involved in the process and drafted one of the plans dropped from consideration earlier this month, I have more than three minutes of opinions to share…

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With the decennial redistricting process winding down in most states (or headed to the courts), one conclusion seems fair: the democratization of  map-redistricting technology has not led to an increase in democracy. Maybe the opposite.  As a longtime political veteran laughingly recalled, when redistricting was done by colored pencils and hand-held calculators, compromise was baked into the process because “no one wanted to redo the maps all over again.” My hunch is that the process would’ve benefited from lively argument with a single set of colored pencils rather than dueling mouse-clicks in isolation.

In addition to population re-balancing, contiguity, and compactness, redistricting brings into play political leanings, race, socioeconomic status, and cultural markers such as language. All of these ingredients are lumped into a potpourri collectively referred to as “communities of interest.” On one hand there are easily discernible city/county/town boundaries that already demarcate groups, and compiling party registration statistics for further differentiation is easy enough. But race, social class, and the voices of the newly arrived?

Silence descends.

And it’s an awkward silence.

To aid jurisdictions in complying with the Voters Rights Act of 1965, the Census publishes detailed block-by-block race/ethnicity counts. So if social class and culture come up at all, it’s through the imperfect analog of race statistics. But in reaching into the tangled skein of communities of interest, there’s a decided preference for a single objective criterion we can all agree on and tacitly avoid those conversational third-rail topics we reflexively shunt aside.  In state-wide redistricting battles, political party affiliation is the obvious proxy, especially in our time of heightened partisanship.

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Here in Denver, a majority Democrat city, the go-to criterion for drawing around the communities-of-interest conundrum is neighborhood boundaries.  No, not neighborhood organizations that meet regularly to hash out common areas of concern, but rather the city government’s statistical neighborhood designations which are as much about record keeping as they are symbols of geographic self-identification.

To understand the more technical tricks of the redistricting trade, I recommend the Redistricting the Nation white paper put out by my mapping colleagues at Azavea in Philadelphia. Because the techniques of gerrymandering that we associate with the non-intuitive shaping of districts (e.g. California congressional districts) also can be used with a defter touch to more subtly alter the voting dynamics of a district.

Five Easy Pieces: Flipping a District

The art of flipping the racial/ethnic mix of a district is to leave the representation of surrounding districts relatively unchanged.  Taking a closer look at the draft plan that is the last map standing after the April 9th meeting (and has been the clubhouse leader since the process began), we find the historically Latino District 9 of North Denver–now gentrifying–with a mix that currently looks like this:

Note:  the colors on the chart are the same colors to denote block-by-block race and ethnicity in the maps below.

Step 1:  Draw the most politically engaged Latino precincts in with highly engaged upper-middle class white voters

With District 1 needing to add population in order to balance, the push east seems a natural choice especially with gentrification at work in this area.  The voter participation of the Latino dominated precincts is relatively high, but now they are drawn into a district with an intensely political upper-middle class white community.  But the statistical neighborhood boundaries (in yellow) are being honored, so in isolation there’s a rationale at work.

Step 2: Split a Statistical Neighborhood to ‘Fix’ the Numbers

Having expanded District 1 aggressively eastward, its now both over its allowable population quota as well as having its white plurality jeopardized.  So, where to trim?

In claiming the unification of statistical neighborhoods as the primary desideratum, it’s more than passing strange that to “make the numbers work”, a previously unified neighborhood (in yellow) is split.  Not only is it split, it’s split along race/ethnicity lines with the predominantly Latino half of the neighborhood being packed into overwhelmingly Latino District 3.  Again, there’s no argument that, in isolation, it doesn’t make sense to group ethnically similar areas together, but considering race and class only when expedient smacks of…political opportunism?

Step 3: Pack More Latinos Into An Already Majority Latino District

To shave off the southern portion of District 9, the mostly Latino precincts are packed into District 3, which is approximately 3/4 Latino already.

Step 4:  Warehouse the Overflow from the ‘Latino’ district in Adjoining White Plurality District

All of this packing of Latinos into District 3 pushes their total population over the allowable limit, requiring the cracking of a few precincts to be moved to the white-plurality District 7 to the east.

Step 5:  Expand East to Pick Up More Favorable White & Black Precincts

Having shaved off predominantly Hispanic precincts to the west and south, District 9 can now be expanded east to pick up more demographically favorable white and black neighborhoods.

While we have focused on the dilution of Latino voting power, another interesting dynamic is that the decreasing Black population of Denver (approximately 9% of the city) is being further fragmented, presumably for the short-term interests of incumbents directly involved in the drafting of the map (see “victory, Pyrrhic“).

The Result:

All of this trimming, packing, and shifting flips a Hispanic district to a White district.  Making the margin even more comfortable is that a good portion of the Latinos left in the district are in poor, politically isolated neighborhoods (and physically isolated by virtue of being cut off from the rest of the city by an interstate).  And to reiterate, all of this was done without changing the racial/ethnic plurality of any of the adjoining districts.

Another unique element of the process is that the drafting of redistricting plans is done by members of City Council themselves.  (As far as I know, I was the only outside consultant hired by a councilperson to help draft a plan).  Not staffers, no outside commission, but rather councilpeople themselves pointing and clicking away.  Having such a direct say in redrawing their own re-election prospects evokes the dynamic of the famous Marshmallow Experiments.

But given the optics of the decisions above and the dramatic shift of the city’s political geography that’s been in place for forty years, surely there would be a conversation to thoroughly air the issues as to why a minority population making up 30% of the city manages a plurality in only 18% of the city’s districts, right?

Nothing To See Here, Please Disperse

At the suggestion that the redistricting plan on the table was less-than-kosher with respect to Latino voting power, the reaction was less “this is something we need to take a look at” and more that polite decorum had been rudely breached.  Not only does Denver have a black mayor, but our progressive, forward-looking city is no place for the messy racial politics of the past. So sayeth our white politicians and political insiders, anyway.

Even the city’s flagship newspaper took pains to reassure the readership.  In a Sunday editorial it expressed “concern” with this race talk, then gravely noted this factoid:

Let’s keep in mind what the demographic trends in Denver truly are. The city is getting whiter.

Now let’s assume that you read your Sunday morning paper in slippers with coffee in hand, but regrettably without Census statistics within arms-reach.  What would you infer the numbers to be behind such a statement?  Would they look something like this?

Lazy or disingenuous?  It’s so hard to tell in a one newspaper town.

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Beyond the minutiae of local politics, the plethora of maps, and the mind-numbing calvacade of Census statistics what’s been notable is the energy expended to declare that the political discussion is not a discussion about race and class.  After all, they’re merely one subset amongst a vast array of “communities of interest”, right?  (As an unaffiliated  voter, I look forward to the local Democrats shaking their own Etch-A-Sketch as they pivot from declaring that the Latino vote is just another interest group for redistricting purposes, but then lavishing attention in seeking their energetic participation to swing a key battleground state in the November election.)  While minority candidates being elected mayors and President are surely markers of progress, can we now claim to be “post-racial”?  As for social class–for which Americans have never had an accessible vocabulary besides the throwaway that we’re all generally “middle-class”–the economic indicators all point in the direction of increasing stratification.  All of which begs the question why we’re so eager to banish these issues from our politics.

—Brian Timoney

It was a post of narrow import: QGIS now has more native SQL Server 2008 support. While I was happy to note the participation and support of folks I both know and like, I was nonetheless slightly irritated by a nagging thought.

“Why didn’t Microsoft do this itself already?”

A few years back I remember talking with others in the industry who had no direct interest in Microsoft one way or another, but were nonetheless excited when spatial capabilities were added to SQL Server 2008.  The idea was it would ignite fresh interest in geo analysis and visualization among those who already had SQL Server but were outside the traditional GIS constituencies–they would gladly open their wallets for additional mapping magic.  All boats would rise and we would happily buy beers for comrades from Redmond who finally persuaded the mainstream that geo-in-the-enterprise doesn’t mean “Enterprise GIS.”

Hasn’t quite worked out that way, has it?

So if I were a vendor of databases with spatial capabilities and I knew I wasn’t  going to bother with the desktop GIS market myself, wouldn’t it be savvy to look for cost-effective opportunities to reach new users with my product–especially if I already have a free express edition with that sole purpose?  I know, there are high-level vendor relationships to maintain.  But really, run the funding through a re-seller or better still a non-profit (tax deduction!) and, if confronted by a business partner, express passable wonderment that the open source community has devoted resources to interoperating with your proprietary technology.

Let’s continue the thought experiment. Imagine a slick, usable cartography tool for making  web maps that happens to be open source.  As it stands, it (predictably) only offers database connections to PostGIS.  But why not Oracle or SQL Server connectivity? If Microsoft or Oracle reached behind their sofa cushions, I’m sure they’d find enough loose change to convince DevelopmentSeed or a freelance developer to make it happen.  You might piss off partners, you might piss off internal dev teams, but if the ROI of your geospatial investments is lagging who can blame you for leveraging the open source community as, what the GeoInt folks would refer to, a force multiplier.

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Next week geospatial open source will be on center stage at the FOSS4G-NA conference in Washington DC.  While following quickly on the heels of the international FOSS4G conference in Denver last Fall (due to a unique set of logistical circumstances), the leading organizational role of OpenGeo (they offer Enterprise-level service and support for a pure geospatial open source stack) has drawn some criticism snark. To which I say: kudos to OpenGeo for taking the initiative.  Being on the Denver organizing committee I can assert that at a certain scale relying on pure volunteerism isn’t viable.  To pull together an event on short notice in such a key market will no doubt be a big win for the broader community.

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Chatting with Autodesk’s Geoff Zeiss at FOSS4G in Denver, he opined that the next step for geospatial open source was its embedding in vertical-specific applications.  Paraphrasing Geoff, we’re beyond the defensive-sounding “it’s just as good as <insert closed-source vendor equivalent here>”. The major software packages are proven–let’s solve specific domain problems and create much larger value for end-users than merely the licensing terms of the components underneath the hood.  I recalled this conversation in the context of this week’s release of PostGIS 2.0: raster and vector stored in the same database and available for cross-dataset analysis via SQL commands, 3-D distance measure, topology, and 3D and 4D indexing.  In Oil & Gas, one of the premier desktop analysis packages in the industry runs on top of the Borland Database Engine: legacy would be the most polite descriptor. The potential for these new capabilities to overhaul non-intuitive workflows is enormous and I hope someone makes a ton of money doing so, because right now there are plenty of incumbents complacently collecting maintenance fees for only marginally improving 10-15 year-old codebases.

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The innovative maturation of open source geospatial software has been powered by the efforts of developers around the world often working for below-market rates.  It may strike one as counterintuitive, but  having this core community ripped off by the suit-and-$100-haircut crowd is probably more difficult given both a development process made more transparent through tools such as GitHub as well as the soft policing powers of social media.  The way I see it, the costs of potential free riders is microscopic compared to the opportunity costs of our most powerful and innovative tools not being used in the service of solving society’s biggest, gnarliest, and yes, most expensive problems.

—Brian Timoney

Of course you’re special.

I merely invite you to consider the possibility that it’s your project goals that may not be terribly…unique.

And that the smartest guy in the room is the room.

Because the room is smarter than both you and your developer,  it’s worth investigating whether someone has largely solved your problem already and made it (freely) available.  Of course there will be custom tweaking; it’s the wholesale wheel-reinvention many of us see every day that is objectionable and so often the product of tunnel-visioned project management and/or feckless developer-think.

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A long-time client was pondering whether to replace their 10-year old website that is a mountain of crufty legacy PHP code, partly to become smarter about serving up content to different user types and partly to liberate them from the burden of a custom-everything codebase that I’ve assured them no new developer really wants to dive into and figure what is going on.

Hence a CMS.  Having developer friends working to good effect with Drupal, we quickly determined it met the core needs of the client and was as plug-and-play as could be expected.  While the client certainly dug the ‘free’ aspect of Drupal being an open source, the clincher was the assurance that any time they could find ten Drupal developers in Denver off of Craigslist who could quickly troubleshoot problems, extend functionality, etc., without the delay and cost of wading through ten years of accumulated one-off code.  (With DrupalCon in Denver this week we can only hope a few more users/developers will have a look around and decide life next to the Rocky Mountains is sweet indeed).

            Harnessing code backed by a community bestows Walden-esque serenity

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Another interesting dimension of the community code story appeared this week in a post on the FCC blog.  Like a number of .gov sites, it too runs on Drupal, and includes a number of maps created with TileMill and served up by MapBox.  All to the good, but in creating a specialized module to integrate these maps into their Drupal site, they’ve contributed said module back into the Drupal community.  (The range of FCC mapping efforts utilizing geospatial open source software will be prominent at the upcoming FOSS4G-NA conference coming up in a couple of weeks in Washington DC.)

Set aside the particular use case for a moment.  As a taxpayer, having government entities efficiently use proven community-based technologies and contribute their own custom extensions back into the commons strikes me as very much in the spirit of the public good.

Whether the setting is public or private, the odds of pulling off a successful IT project have always been longer than either software vendors or consultants would ever cop to.  With the maturation of the online commons it would be foolish not to do your homework investigating whether there is not already a well-trod path laid down by others in the direction of your project’s goals.

—Brian Timoney

During the late 15th century heyday of Portuguese exploration, King John II forbade the open distribution of any map or navigational chart pertaining to New World discoveries under pain of death. Locked in a global land-grab race with neighbor Spain, cartographic intelligence was critical to expanding political power and exploiting the riches of the spice trade. While the link between this knowledge and economic advantage persists, in the last 500 years we have at least evolved to where transgressions aren’t enforced by the sword but rather the small-print legalese of the modern day end-user license agreement.

The small print was very much on my mind last week as I read “Empowering Citizen Cartographers”, a piece penned by World Bank official Caroline Antsey that appeared in the New York Times.  It begins as a paean to the wonders of crowd sourcing, especially in response to disasters such as the Haiti earthquake where Open Street Map shone as the de facto source of authoritative cartography. But then a new agreement between Google and the World Bank is described, whereby the latter actively promote and disseminate cartographic information from Google’s Map Maker platform. While Ms. Antsey indeed intended to praise Open Street Map, she seems singularly unaware that the actions of her organization may well bury Open Street Map in the developing world.

Because the license is clear: all of the data, all the fruits of the labor of those citizen cartographers, is the property of Google.  To be viewed through Google mapping interfaces with source data available under conditions specified by Google alone.  By contrast, Open Street Map data–yes, the raw data itself–is easily available to any and all, for purposes both non-profit and commercial.

Sure, nothing here explicitly prevents Open Street Map from continuing its work, but let’s get real: the deep pockets of Google paired with the imprimatur of the World Bank that effectively steers its partner governments, universities, and NGOs towards using the Map Maker platform may very well overwhelm Open Street Map’s more grass-roots efforts.  Google has shown an eager willingness to appropriate the tactics and rhetoric of community mapping, and of late, admitting to a bit of dirty pool in Africa against local startup Mocality.

(Google courageously pointed the finger not at its own employees but rather outside contractors it had hired.  Interestingly, if we were talking a violation of its own Map Maker terms, the old blame-the-contractor shtick wouldn’t play as this choice bit of Google language makes clear:  ”If you are an entity, you acknowledge and agree that you are jointly and severally liable for the actions of your employees, contractors, agents, and other representatives. ” What’s good for the gander isn’t good for the goose, apparently.)

What’s in it for Google? Nothing more than a huge competitive advantage in the exploding smartphone market (and the concomitant local advertising revenue) in the developing world.  Imagine the commercial benefit of having exclusive access to the most detailed local cartography, collected for a pittance on the backs of “citizen cartographers”?  Even Tom Sawyer would blush.  It’s neocolonialism-meets-neogeography, only this time the shiny trinkets being dangled are laptops and Android phones.

If the World Bank was so impressed with the role of Open Street Map in Haiti, why throw its considerable weight behind the profit-seeking Google?  Who knows?  There have been collaborations in the past, and there appears to be a certain degree of chumminess in those circles. For those assuming Google is the only entity with the technical expertise to pull off the management of the crowd sourcing effort at this scale: please, stop.  Not only does Open Street Map have a platform and a track record, it also has the cooperative support of not-small-entities Mapquest and Microsoft.  So let’s put away the image of Google nobly shouldering a digital white man’s burden in bringing the developing world into the technically enlightened 21st century.

Make no mistake, Google has been the primary accelerant in the web mapping explosion of the last six years and they have spread the fruits of their innovation far and wide.  But the grating self-regard, borne of ideals that are never acknowledged to be driven by a motive so base as profit, has very much reached its sell-by date. It’s a 30,000 employee company hurtling towards middle-age whose growth has lately disappointed Wall Street: the potential profits in the fast-growing developing world figure largely in its future prospects.

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In 1494, Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, whereby under the auspices of the Pope Alexander VI, the New World was split between the two Catholic powers ad majorem Dei gloriam. One fears that the institutional favor the World Bank is granting to Map Maker will very much work to the greater glory of Google in the developing world, but at the expense of the full, free, and open access to the valuable information created by its own citizen cartographers.

—Brian Timoney

With the extra reflection that comes with any new year, I’ve been pondering a peculiarity of the presumably exciting geospatial industry: no one likes their business model.  Forget the giddy enthusiasm of 4-5 years ago, with the promised federal cutbacks at DoD/Homeland Security, along with the in-progress shrinking of state and local budgets, many shops are wondering how to keep treading water, let alone surf the wave of the next, ‘new’ thing.  How to explain this dissonance between a “cool” technology becoming more mainstream and the disquiet of not knowing how to profit from it?

Even though the Internet specializes in amplifying Moral Outrage, I’ve been taken aback by the public relations backlash against Google for having the temerity to charge its heaviest users of Maps. Well, more like reassured, since if Google (and Bing) has trouble explaining its pricing structure, then those of us who sell web-based services are allowed to cut ourselves some slack:

Reason #1:  No One Knows What Stuff Is Supposed to Cost on the Web

It’s been interesting to observe how the dominant vendor ESRI is playing their cloud-based offering. Since no one knows what things are supposed to cost on the web, using shrink-wrapped software analogs with which customers are already familiar helps…a lot. If you’re paying ‘x’ for an ArcServer license, then being able to do replicate the same end-user experiences using their online service for 60-70% of ‘x’ seems like a good deal.  A pronounced advantage to be sure, but competing on pure web experience is a punishing game, and so it’s even more important to lock in customers by any means necessary (including prodigious amounts of marketing).

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There’s this upscale-ish farm-to-table place in my neighborhood where the wait-staff has been trained to regale first-time visitors with their ‘story’.  I’m hungry, I’m ready to drop coin, and your story is delaying my eating experience.  My enthusiasm has been converted to the singular wish that the wait-person just shut up right now.  I think we in technology are too often like that wait-staff, excited to overwhelm our customers with technical minutiae that fails to address their fundamental needs…

Reason #2: We Like Technology and Read Obscure Blogs; Our Customers Like Beaches, Kids’ Soccer Games, & Napping (and Don’t Read Obscure Blogs)

As an enthusiastic user/promoter of open source software, effusively digging into minutiae and wondering about business models is second nature.  Indeed, I recently received an email asking for advice on “open source business models” and my immediate thought was…I wish I had one. Luckily, someone much brighter than myself, Paul Ramsey, gave a great talk on this very topic at FOSS4G last year.  While Paul does a great job unpacking the complicated relationship between price and value, and how those signals can sometimes get very crossed, let me add a more general observation…

Reason #3: We Get Excited by Free, Cutting-Edge Technology; the Words “Free” and “Cutting-Edge” Make Middle Managers Very, Very Nervous

A couple of weeks back 60 Minutes profiled Alex Honnold, a guy who “free-climbs” cliff faces without any kind of safety equipment.  Brushing aside questions of safety and living with no margin for error, one was left aghast watching him calmly negotiate one life-threatening obstacle after another. Where he enthusiastically talked of future challenges, the viewer is unable to shake that this young man will meet a grisly, premature end.

Unfamiliar technology with unfamiliar licensing terms take many managers out of their comfort zone, without a safety net. Paradoxically, in a tough economy when their own positions are more tenuous, the appetite for anything resembling risk is minimal indeed.  I know, the availability of source code is the ultimate safety net. Have you seen the average manager’s pupils dilate in fear and confusion the first time you show them GitHub?

But let’s not make the managerial class the target of our animus, but rather evaluate honestly whether we’re opting to spend too much time in the World-As-We-Wish-It-To-Be instead of the World-As-It-Is.  Our clients and potential clients managed to stay in business before we showed up on their door step, so let’s temper the perma-sugar high of techno optimisim with a measure of old-fashioned humility.

In next week’s post I’ll discuss my best guess as to the key components of the still-elusive 21st Century Geospatial Business Model.

—Brian Timoney

End-of-year summaries and next-year predictions are the web’s way of helping you pass time during the most unproductive work week on the calendar. Or save you from continued contrived conversation among those with whom you share little except a similar genetic imprint. Rather than go the solipsistic blogger route and explain why The Decemberists put out the best album or that Incendies was my movie of the year, I’ve chosen a tack in which I’m more heavily invested. For “hotness” here refers not to PR buzz but tools that can solve both my clients’ current problems and their soon-to-be problems.

The next great GIS isn’t a “GIS”–but rather the statistical package R.  It’s the nexus where modelling, statistics, and graphics meet.  An open-source project with a large community and big developer momentum, there’s a critical mass of know-how such that you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a quantitative challenge that hasn’t already been tackled by the R community.  For mapping, the obvious starting point is the maptools package, but there are also hooks to familiar tools such as GDAL (RGDAL) and PostGIS, as well as the recently released GUI DeducerSpatial.

Let’s be clear, it isn’t about trying to replace your trusty GIS with statistical software. It’s about acquiring a more robust quantitative toolset to wrestle with a multi-variate world. Statistical clustering (spatial and non-spatial), principal components, multi-dimensional scaling, etc. will all be go-to techniques in a world that can no longer be explained by a single variable displayed on a map.  We all laugh at “red-dot fever” where lazy analysts overwhelm a map by displaying every coffeeshop, every bank, every whatever, creating visual confusion instead of anything approaching meaning. But the crashing of the tides of “Big Data”, the “sensor web”, and the “Internet of Things” upon our shores is imminent, and wrestling with those datasets with advanced statistical techniques will be the prerequisite for making meaningful maps.  A small taste of what’s possible in R is one of this year’s most compelling maps:  the Facebook map.

A lot of mapping shops will be scratching their collective heads this year figuring out how to serve a public that uses everything from Internet Explorer 6 to the iPad, as well as your preferred smartphone. With the mobile web leaving the worlds of Flash and Silverlight behind, where to turn for interactive vectors in the browser. Why not plunge into the future and go pure HTML5/SVG? Because the mapping community, with the large presence of government agencies at all levels has a disproportionately high use of older versions of Internet Explorer. Recent stats from ESRI suggest that visitors to ESRI.com use IE 6-8 at a rate roughly double that of the overall web user population.

Raphael is a javascript library that bridges the gap by rendering vectors natively as VML in Internet Explorer 6-8, and as SVG in the newer web browsers. Hence you get “live vectors”: rollovers, tool tips, click events, etc. without requiring plugins such as Silverlight or Flash.  Of course, rendering tens of thousands of vertices won’t go so well in older browsers, but for everyday thematic maps, such as this example of US States, it is perfectly serviceable. With 2012 being a Presidential election year in the US, expect many news organizations to move away from Flash to Raphael for their choropleth-ing of results.

Some of the most innovative work of 2011 came from Washington DC-based Development Seed. First, their open source TileMill cartographic studio is a much-needed tool that enables the making of visually compelling maps without GIS. This is a huge boon to the geospatial sector where too many of us, present company included, have been all too content to crank out always utilitarian, sometimes ugly, maps for our clients. Better still, the styling specifications use the CSS-inspired Carto language, making for easy re-use and sharing of styles.

And that’s not all. Using the very clever UTF grid approach, maps created with TileMill and served up via TileStream (also open source), feature interactivity that is also cross-browser–from Internet Explorer 6 to the iPad.  And because the interactivity is pixel-based, it can handle many, many thousands of features without killing your browser.

The coup de grace is the MapBox iPad app. All your great cartography created in TileMill with the full experience available in disconnected settings. In important ways, I see the iPad (and, hopefully, future tablets that can match the user experience) as a great second chance for mapping on the web. Because the first time around we as an industry failed our users by insisting on a desktop-GIS-inside-the-browser metaphor that was utterly foreign to anyone except fellow professionals. I’d love to see the default standard be a well-designed, informative basemap plus once “clickable” layer: enough information for 85% of your users without introducing the confusion of dozens of layers (tucked within layer “groups”!). And my observation tells me that there’s an intimacy users have with their iPad that is very different that their relationship to their desktop machines. Simple to use, informative, and aesthetically thoughtful is the big win here.

So the excitement about these new tools and capabilities would naturally lead to a conclusion that “it’s never been a more exciting time to be in geospatial.” But there’s also an underlying lesson in highlighting projects that don’t come out of the traditional group of GIS vendors: geospatial is attracting significant outside attention and people are getting things done using tools and methods that are unfamiliar to many industry veterans. Combine that with the contraction of the public sector that is a huge component of GIS employment, and the more sober conclusion is that our little niche traditionally off-to-the-side is more mainstream and much more competitive. So think about and spend time with some of these new technologies not for the “cool” factor, but to ensure the continued relevance of your skill set.

—Brian Timoney

“Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You’d be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts.”

–Father Paulus confesses to Nick Shay in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, pt V, ch 3

 

Or, alternatively, looking out your window and cataloging what you see.

I started this blog invoking Halford Mackinder, discussing his evangelization efforts on behalf of an analytically robust Geography that would no make apologies for standing astride the physical sciences and the liberal arts. However being neither-fish-nor-fowl has not served Geography well as it has been found ill-suited for both the abstraction-heavy model of education imported from aristocratic Europe  as well as the hyper-specialization of academia. In one of those ironies in which the Internet excels, geographic reasoning has its own platform on one of the web’s most popular blogs.

 

    Locating window views brings out everyone's Inner Geographer

Blogging politics, religion, and pop culture, Andrew Sullivan began posting reader photos of the view from their window as a mere diversion, which led to a book , which in turn led to a “where in the world” contest to give away copies of the book.   And people got into the contest.

Way into it.

And a much-anticipated ongoing weekly ritual was born.

Architecture, landscape analysis, license plate styles, and sun angles are all grabbed in an effort to piece to together the riddle of Where.  The best part are the excerpts of user submissions and their line of geographical reasoning.  And boy can that reasoning be wildly off-base.  Take this scene:  people forthrightly place it continents away. At the other end of the spectrum are the Google Maps commandos who are 3-letter-acronym levels of scary in their ability to track down exact buildings and windows using familiar consumer mapping platforms. (Ed. note: author has only guessed correctly once, a scene from Cartagena, Colombia).

But what makes it particularly fun are the personal stories people share that are attached to their memories of place, accurate and otherwise: Geography as a trigger of memory and the sharp edges of lived experience too easily dulled by the passage of time. While there is indeed an intellectual rigor to piecing the clues together, the peculiar connection of location with emotion–which we all feel intuitively–is less categorizable but no less powerful, terrain navigated by few but most compellingly by Yi Fu Tuan.

At the risk of killing your productivity for the next couple of hours, here is a link to the Google Search page for past View From Your Window contests.

Returning to DeLillo, let’s give Father Paulus the last word:

“Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren’t important, we wouldn’t use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it,” he said.

“Quotidian.”

“An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace.”

 

 
—Brian Timoney

This week many of us in the geospatial community have been deeply troubled by news that our colleague Atanas Entchev, along with his wife and son, have been detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a for-profit “Community Education Center” (read: prison) in Newark, New Jersey.  Prominent in the online world with his blog, articles in professional publications, and reliably droll tweets, I enjoyed meeting up with him when on the East Coast for wide-ranging conversation over lunch, comparing notes on the life of freelance GIS consultant.  Among others, John Reiser, James Fee, Adena Schutzberg, and Bill Dollins have helped spread the word about Atanas’ plight and the support fund set up for his family.

It's a lot of things, but certainly not "justice": US Government is spending your tax dollars to deport law-abiding immigrant entrepreneurs in order to meet internal quotas.

A native of Bulgaria, Atanas came to the US in 1991 in the wake of the turmoil in Eastern Europe following the disintegration of the Iron Curtain, etc.  The winding road of the 20-year legal saga can be found here. To a layman, it reads as a story of differing interpretations of perceived threat in a chaotic political climate and a litany of motions, counter-motions, and paperwork deadlines.  Amid these gray areas of interpretation, there is no accusation of any type of criminal behavior on the part of Atanas or his family members during their 20-year stay here. Given that Atanas became firmly established professionally and his family lived the life of the educated middle-class, the question of “why deportation now?” lingers.

By coincidence, Frontline this week is broadcasting a feature, ‘Lost in Detention’, outlining the increasingly aggressive measures to deport immigrants.  The key clip begins at the 17-minute mark outlining the arbitrary goal of 400,000 deportations, including “Non-criminal removals”. So like school test scores and police CompStat metrics, deportation goals seemingly have unleashed their own set of nasty counter-productive consequences.  And is it any wonder in our time of federal budget cutbacks that agencies re-double efforts to protect their slice of the pie, invoking “security” whenever possible?  Further, with an election year coming up, neither party wants to be seen as anything but tough on immigration, happily playing on the fears of economically downtrodden voters.

But here’s the funny thing about immigration:  economically, it’s a net positive.  And when you’re talking educated professionals fluent in the language with an entrepreneurial bent it’s utterly self-defeating to turn them away. In our time of expending trillions in the hopes of stimulating the economy, that the inarguable financial benefits of immigration can’t be acknowledged speaks volumes either of the ignorance or moral cowardice of the political class.  Hell, even Tom Friedman gets it.

Having little faith in the efficacy of appealing to the better nature of politicians, I would nonetheless urge you to, in addition to the methods of support listed above, drop a line to Atanas’ Senate and Congressional representatives asking why taxpayer money is being wasted on imprisoning a non-criminal immigrant entrepreneur and his family members–

                     Congressman Frank Pallone (Atanas’ office is in his district)
                     Senator Frank Lautenberg
                     Senator Robert Menendez

 
Like so many whose formative years were spent elsewhere, Atanas is notably well-mannered: I’m utterly confident that whatever effort you can expend on his behalf would earn a lifetime of gratitude.

—Brian Timoney

So how have you been celebrating the 5th anniversary of the launch of Internet Explorer 7? For tens of thousands of public sector folk here in the US, they celebrate everyday as IE 7 is the only browser they are allowed to use on the job*. For comparison’s sake, the best-selling mobile phone in 2006 was the Nokia 1600. Now imagine if every mobile app had to be backwards compatible with the most popular cellphone of 2006?

And now you being to understand the rage web developers feel towards Internet Explorer versions 6-8 and the thousands of programming hours spent weekly accommodating their quirks and the 20-25% market share they continue to hold on to in 2011.  And knowing that the more standards-compliant alternatives, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, are freely downloadable makes the despair all the more wail-inducing.

         Contemporary web mapping continues to be haunted by the GIS-in-a-browser approach

The cool kids, of course, don’t give a thought to those left behind in IE-land and happily embrace the HTML5 future. But we in the mapping world have no such luxury as the very entities most likely to be using retrograde browsers are the traditional users of GIS (read: guv’ment). So there was a big embrace of Flash and Silverlight plugins as cross-browser “solutions”, whose viability ended when Apple decreed no plugins on the iPhone and iPad. The inside joke is that “RIA”, the self-designated acronym for “Rich Internet Application” now stands for “Rich Intranet Application.”

Now let’s indulge in a bit of counter-factual fantasy: it’s August, 2001 and Microsoft announces the launch of Internet Explorer 6 that will support Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C standard for drawing vectors in the browser using ordinary mark-up inside an HTML page. Because of performance limitations, the maps made with SVG are limited in the number of features displayed, but nonetheless we start seeing lots of choropleth (thematic) maps especially on election night. Further, the visibility of SVG mark-up via the trusty “View Source”  command enables non-programmers to copy professional examples and make their own web pages with custom maps. Personal online diaries, subsequently called blogs, start embedding their own maps and the democratization of cartography gathers even more momentum.

None of this happened.

Instead, Microsoft foisted its own preferred standard–VML–and web mapping remained strictly the province of “heavy” server-centric solutions until Google Maps and the mashup revolution kicked off in 2005. With its predilection for over-engineered GIS-inside-a-browser apps, the industry combined evolving server resources with plugins (Flash, ActiveX, Silverlight) to push large volumes of both raster and vector data via interfaces that even today way too many users find bewildering. A side-effect of the industry embracing complex apps is that in too many shops, web mapping became the province of the hired consultant, with the GIS Analyst shunted aside for lack of programming chops. Recent online make-a-map services such as GeoCommons, Google Fusion Tables, and ArcGIS Online are a much-needed re-empowerment of the non-programming web mapper.

In future posts I’ll highlight two new-ish mapping approaches to bridge the worlds of Internet Explorer and the iPad:  MapBox and Raphael.js. But in the meantime, while the techno-optimists invoke William Gibson and a future that’s already here, just unevenly distributed, I fear we in the geospatial realm are more haunted by William Faulkner’s observation that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

 
—Brian Timoney

*Currently the case with my beloved City & County of Denver.  Colleague Bill Dollins speaks of DoD shops still using IE 6. Quelle horreur.

Proust had his madeleine, the rest of us have our parents’ basements and attics with the bric-a-brac that promises emotional transport to a different time and place. During my last visit home, I came across my grandmother’s diploma circa 1914: a fascinating document from an era where a couple years of high school was the terminus for her social class and a quite adequate preparation for being a seamstress, clerk, or housewife (the professions of her and her sisters).  Most interesting, the diploma listed the courses she took: catching my professional eye were entries for both Physical Geography and Political Geography.

In other words, two more geography courses than her grandson took in his “college prep” curriculum seventy years later.

Being curious as to what the kids are up to today, I delved into the Advanced Placement (AP) test data for 2011 to find out “whither Geography among our best and brightest?”  While the rigorous International Baccalaureate curriculum has gained traction in recent years, AP courses are more numerous and their test scores, which can command college credit, provide a hefty sample size from which to draw conclusions.

The good news?  Among subjects with more than 50,000 test-takers, Human Geography had the largest year-over-year increase with a healthy 22.6% bump to almost 84,000 students undergoing the 2-hour ordeal.

The bad news?  More than twice as many young American minds sat for the AP Psychology test.

(Editor’s note: pondering for more than 30 seconds what may lurk inside a high school Psychology text book plunges the author into existential despair.)

But that’s not the worst news. Because on a scale of one to five, over 31% of those taking the exam scored a “1″ i.e. utter failure. Adding to the ignominy, a bare majority of 51% scored a passing grade of 3, 4, or 5.

Taking a closer look at the scores and their distributions, one can make the broad claim that results in the social sciences are fairly mediocre.  To be sure there is a selection bias at work as well: completing the coursework for Calculus BC implies mastery of the material in Calculus AB, and the scores reflect that very few bumble through that progression.  (Full disclosure: I was one of those bumblers racking up a “2″ in AP Biology many moons ago.)

Cause for hand-wringing despair?  Maybe not.  More plausible to me is the suspicion that for those taking AP Human Geography as a junior or senior in high school, it’s most likely their first exposure to thinking geographically in any kind of a structured manner. If anything, it’s a call for more rigorous geography at all grade levels as analyzing one’s place in the world and the interrelationships with those near and far is too important to leave to a cram course at the end of high school.

Add that to the wisdom lost from back in Grandmom’s day that we so need to recover, 100 years later.

 
—Brian Timoney