An article in Danish PC World highlights YaWah.com, the Danish company that helped NASA serve the gigabytes of imagery that its Blue Marble project demands. NASA bought one of their eRez imaging servers, according to the article.
YaWah.com also has their own version of Blue Marble up, as part of a demonstration — but for their viewer, all you need a browser, which makes this link a must-see.
An absolutely fascinating article by Declan Butler for Nature.com shows how public availablility of high resolution imagery actually saves lives in disaster areas such as Kashmir — and how in the aftermath of the Kashmir quake the Pakistani government is directly hampering relief efforts by banning free access to such imagery, because it is afraid of revealing military secrets that India can in any case already see with its own satellites.
It’s a stupid and tragic demand by the Pakistani government, but aid agencies need its cooperation, and thus have been forced to comply by removing the availability of the images.
Google to the rescue?! Yes, since late last week as part of Global Connection, but with a major caveat — the imagery they have access to is not the best available, because Google’s provider, DigitalGlobe, has had bad luck with the weather when its satellites passed over the quake zone (according to Declan, who spoke with them). The best data currently is by SpaceImaging.com, apparently.
[Update 16.32 UTC: Declan just emailed the following: “I’ve just confirmed that a note went round from the UN to its parners this morning, noting that after negotiations with India and Pakistan it was reversing its decision of 10 October to ban publicly-accessible images, so images are now starting to appear on UN and partner websites…” That’s a whole week in which aid was needlessly hampered, but at least reason prevailed in the end.]
[Update 2005-10-19 20.00 UTC: Declan reports more fully on the denouement. Via Kathryn Cramer)]
The Dutch are no slackers when it comes to using Google Earth in the classroom. Via this page I found several links to how-to articles in Dutch on using Google Earth as an educational tool. One site in particular might appeal to English speakers: Earthquest.nl contains “assignments” for the classroom akin to treasure hunts, one of which has been translated into English (click on “Earthquests” on the left). Educators might want to check it out to get some ideas.
Another Dutch page of note is google-earth.pagina.nl, which contains heaps of links to Google Earth-related sites. Most of the links are to English-language sites, and also to some sightseeings sites I was not previously aware of, such as Aliensview (in English) and earth.web-log.nl (in Dutch).
Also of interest is the official answer by the Dutch government to the parliamentary question that was asked by 2 lawmakers regarding the ostensible security risks Google Earth might pose. For the record, then, because some articles on the internet are making it sound like it is the Dutch government’s position that Google Earth is a security risk (which is not its position), the government’s response is as follows, in part (translating now):
The images shown by Google Earth and Maps are already publicly available. The internet is a low-threshhold medium for accessing publicly available information. Currently there is no reason to start an investigation into the security risks of these applications.
Just as in the Netherlands, the US does not have a concrete policy regarding such applications on the internet. We asked the Australian government regarding Google Earth and the implications it saw for the privacy of its citizens. In its response the Australian government said that satellite imagery and aerial photography have been publicly available for a long time via companies both in Australia and abroad.
Liberal democracies are a wonderful thing.
In today’s installment, Times of India reports on India’s science and technology secretary V S Ramamoorthy’s entry into the fray. More interesting is the last part of the article, where you’ll find the best defence yet of Google coming out of India, by none other than India’s military. Quote:
Yet, only last month, the armed forces had said that they had factored into their operational plans the threat of the satellite imagery of their military bases being freely available on the Net.
One senior officer had stated that, ‘One can even buy satellite imagery in the international market. If we have satellite pictures of Pakistani military bases, so do they. Modern day warfare is more about tactics, speed and deception. Moreover, satellite pictures available on the Internet are not real-time and serve no operational purpose’.
As for frontline IAF bases, they have ‘adequate protection systems’ in place, with even measures to thwart hostile attempts at ‘thermal imagery’ through ‘decoys’. Similarly, it does not matter if a satellite captures aircraft carrier INS Viraat berthed at Mumbai. ‘Ships are mobile platforms here today and somewhere else tomorrow,’, a Navy officer had said.
It looks like we’ll have to start following World Wind Central as well: The Blue Marble: Next Generation add-on for NASA World Wind turns out to also exists as a KMZ layer (scroll to bottom). What does it do?
Blue Marble: Next Generation offers a year’s worth of monthly [MODIS] composites at a spatial resolution of 500 meters. These monthly images reveal seasonal changes to the land surface: the green-up and dying-back of vegetation in temperate regions such as North America and Europe; dry and wet seasons in the tropics, and advancing and retreating Northern Hemisphere snow cover.
Erwin Nikkels from Google Globe writes in about his recently launched Earthbooker.com, which integrates Google Earth with an 80,000-strong hotel database from Interactive Affiliate Networks, a division of Hotels.com. You can search, or else browse hotels in Google Earth via a network link. Instructions and details here. Because Google Earth is a browser, not a web app, it lends itself perfectly to commercial services like this one. After real estate and tourism, what industry will be next to take advantage of Google Earth?
Here is a nice network link worth keeping: Aeronautical Sectional Charts of the United States, uploaded to Google Earth Hacks by Forkboy2. He (she?) writes:
Improvements include much smaller image files for better performance (and no loss of image quality), changed the icon from a generic push pin to an airplane, changed it to a network linked KMZ so that any future improvements will update automatically on your system, and some other surprises.