• Nokia makes its mapping play: Nokia buys Navteq for $8.1 billion. (But that’s in US dollars, not Canadian dollars, so it’s relatively cheap for a Finnish company:-) As the race to form the best human sensor web hots up, The coming together of gadget makers and content producers continues apace: Apple and Google form a team when it comes to mapping on the iPhone, TomTom snapped up Tele Atlas, and now Nokia buys Navteq. Which leaves Garmin with… Microsoft? And where is Yahoo!’s strategy? They had some clever mobile technology prototypes 18 months ago…
• Phylogenetics2KML: Those phylogeographers sure are a resourceful bunch. If you’re an evolutionary biologist, you may do your analysis with Mesquite. iPhylo flags an update to Mesquite’s cartographer module, which lets you automatically map genetic mutations using trees. The update now lets you export the results as KML. (Previous efforts were home-grown.) iPhylo has the screenshot eye candy.
• TITAN does (more) KML: Leica TITAN, a tool for sharing GIS content on a virtual globe, gets an update, and gains the ability to draw polygons on the terrain that can be saved as KML. (From an email to subscribers on September 26 — I can’t for the life of me find a mention on the website. Somebody please help Leica with their corporate communications.)
• Census explorer: Free Geography Tools flags and reviews the nifty GE-Census Explorer for Windows.
• Local Outreach: On October 9, the Net Tuesday San Francisco meetup will host Steve Miller, Product Manager, Google Earth Outreach.

This is just weird: The Korea Times reports that Samsung has adopted Google as its role model, because of, well, Google Sky:

Google’s newly launched virtual telescope service might have impressed Samsung Electronics chief executive as he looked for a way to explain the reforms taking place in the company.

Yun Jong-yong, CEO and vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, said Monday in his monthly speech that Google Sky, a free navigational package of celestial images, was a product of a “creative corporate culture” – a theme that he and Chairman Lee Kun-hee has been stressing all year.

“Vice chairman Yun stressed that the company should create new values with unique products and services that can fulfill the customers’ potential needs, and he took Google Earth’s Sky service as an example of this,” the company said in a release on Monday.

Unless Samsung is aiming to get out of the gadget-building game and into the information-organizing game, I’d seriously recommend looking up to Apple, not Google. Not surprisingly, Apple and Google collaborate as equals (See Google Maps for iPhone), whereas Samsung is just being starstruck, and fixating on the wrong star to boot.

There is more anecdotal evidence of US-imposed censorship of Google Earth in certain countries. A commenter with an IP address in Syria reports that attempts to download Google Earth in Syria now meet the same fate as those in Sudan, due to US export restrictions and economics sanctions. Meanwhile, blogger Macu at Milfuegos reports that a slew of Google products is not available in Cuba, including Google Earth. I’m trying to get confirmation in both cases.

It’s not clear in either (likely) case whether this enforcement of US-imposed sanctions laws is a recent change — I suspect not. That doesn’t make it any less stupid. If I lament the fact that users in Morocco (such as today’s commenter) continue to be prevented by their own government from using Google Earth, I certainly can’t applaud the US government doing it pre-emptively for the Syrian, Sudanese and Cuban governments. Google and Google Earth help level the informational playing field between political elites and the masses in those countries where democracy is lacking, which makes it easier for those citizens to demand accountability. The US sanctions regime in each of these cases is badly targeted: By prohibiting access to a software application that is actually a browser of georeferenced information, the US is effectively censoring this information among those people who could use it most.

Meanwhile, those who live in Morocco, Sudan, Syria or Cuba can use Tor to spoof their country of origin to Google’s servers. The only problem: It is very slow, so not optimal for Google Earth’s streaming data.

Burma has been in the news this week, but the human rights abuses being perpetrated by Burmese government forces have been ongoing for a generation. In one region, a separatist movement by the Karen people is habitually repressed by attacking and displacing civilian villages on the grounds that they provide support to separatist fighters.

Such tactics are evident on satellite imagery, and now an initiative by Lars Bromley at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has commissioned before-and-after imagery to show the effects of this ongoing ethnic cleansing program.

The AAAS has written a news release linking to the detailed report containing the imagery, which in turn link to a KML file that georeferences those images on top of Google Earth:

Before (Ikonos, Nov 11, 2000):

After (Quickbird, June 24, 2007):

This isn’t the first time that geospatial technology has been used to document human rights violations. Back in June 2006, the AAAS documented the razing of villages in Zimbabwe, and later also the effect of the 2006 war in Lebanon and the ongoing crisis in Darfur. In April 2007, a layer documenting the Darfur crisis prepared by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and others became a default layer in Google Earth. North Korea has also been extensively annotated. What all these initiatives make clear is that when it comes to documenting the effects of human rights abuses on large populations, satellite imagery can do valuable service in lending credence to reports of violations and in raising public awareness.

The AAAS report on Burma makes for interesting reading, especially regarding what’s next:

AAAS also is investigating the possibility of developing a Web-based geospatial information portal of the Burma conflict. This portal would, to the extent possible, summarize attack-related information and provide access to satellite imagery to a select group of NGOs. Lastly, AAAS will begin making available, via a Web site, its tools for roughly matching village name spellings with coordinates and available satellite imagery. Ideally, all these tools together will improve information-sharing regarding the conflict in Burma, and improve collective understanding and planning efforts. […]

Other organizations are encouraged to consider this content as available for any future media project using Google Earth. For example, a Burma Google Earth product modeled after the Darfur layers released by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum might be ideal.

Matching village names as used by their inhabitants to the transliterated names on maps was also one of the main challenges in making the USHMM Darfur layer. Having such collaborative tools exist on the web would greatly facilitate the work of human rights organizations everywhere.

Less encouraging, once again, is how the media reported the AAAS announcement of the report this Friday. Because it was timely, the mainstream media gave it welcome prominence (See the NYT, MSNBC) but once again, every online news item I read fails not only to link on to the KML layer, but also the detailed report. The geoweb is not going to be transformative until the average news reader starts consuming georeferenced information published to a geobrowser, and that won’t happen until and unless news organizations start linking to such content. Bloggers link to source material all the time; why can’t journalists, especially if the “story” is about the release of georeferenced satellite imagery?

Any story headlined “Astronomers Find Mysterious Radio Burst” gets clicked on by me faster than you can say “colliding neutron stars”. Space.com reports on the research paper published today in Science Express (ArXiv.org has the whole paper for free). Space.com’s article also has an accompanying image pinpointing the burst’s location in the sky, near the Small Magellanic Cloud in the southern hemisphere:

Because that image exists, and because Google Sky exists, these two had to be mashed up. Voila:

As usual, play with the opacity slider to compare the overlay with the, erm, underlay.

Some caveats: Google Earth/Sky’s image overlay tool still uses polar coordinates only; real-field-of-view images get difficult to position near the poles, especially at larger scales/wider angles. Still, the fit is quite good, especially when considering that the location of the radio burst is somewhat vague.

Just as geographers have begun to append their papers with KML files containing the relevant overlays and data, I hope that astronomers and astrophysicists start doing the same soon. After all, 250 million computer screens can now display such a discovery accurately, and in the wider context of the sky. Surely science outreach doesn’t get any easier than this?

Over at RealityPrime, Avi Bar-Zeev riffs and speculates on the strong hint that Google is building a social network application with a 3D component. What could it possibly entail?

Imagine it more concretely: repurpose the GE sidebar for social networking functions, “friendmarks” instead of (or adding to) placemarks, “stuff to do” instead of (or adding to) layers to view. And then let people populate and build this new fictional world however they wish, using SketchUp as the main modeling tool.

Read the whole article.

Which installation did the Israeli bombing raid in Syria on September 6 target?

That question has been been on the minds of quite a few pundits since news outlets began reporting on the night-time raid by Israeli jets deep in Syrian territory. At first, very little was known, as sources were uncharacteristically mum. Slowly, it became apparent that there was a nuclear angle, and a North Korean angle.

Meanwhile, can we figure out from the available piece-meal evidence what precise location this raid might have targeted?

Blake Hounshell of Foreign Policy’s Passport blog was the first to have a go, using Google Earth, no less. His georeferencing hints came from this Times of London article:

An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way. […] The target was identified as a northern Syrian facility that purported to be an agricultural research centre on the Euphrates river.

Hounshell then extended a line 50 miles from the border along the Euphrates on Google Earth. The line ended in Al Mayadin, which alas is not in high resolution. Hounshell’s thesis was that an area of interest to western intelligence would have been imaged by the likes of DigitalGlobe, and that it would therefore be in high resolution in Google Earth. Because Al Mayadin wasn’t, Hounshell felt that his speculation was likely wrong.

I too went looking for the possible location, and found a good candidate, but didn’t feel there was sufficient circumstantial evidence to back up my speculation. Until tonight. Hounshell was closer than he thought.

What did I do? I triangulated three pieces of information.

1. I turned on the default Google Earth layer showing where DigitalGlobe’s imagery was taken in 2007. This most recent imagery is not yet in Google Earth, but you can tell from the layer what area was covered:

2. I assumed the 50-mile line was an approximation, probably converted from kilometers, and that the line from the border doesn’t have to follow the course of the Euprhates:

Putting these two pieces of information together, it looked like there was indeed a region about 50 miles from the border on the Euphrates where DigitalGlobe imagery had recently been taken.

3. I then turned on the full Google Earth Community layer and went looking for “agricultural research centers” in the area that might have been annotated by one of the 900,000+ contributors. I was surprised to find precisely what I was looking for:

Yes, there is an agricultural research center at Dayr az-Zwar, 50 miles from the Iraqi border, on the Euphrates, underneath a strip of recent DigitalGlobe imagery. Being the skeptical type, however, I felt that this was just too speculative, so I refrained from blogging it. But tonight, the Times of London actually names the town near where the raid took place:

Israeli special forces had been gathering intelligence for several months in Syria, according to Israeli sources. They located the nuclear material at a compound near Dayr az-Zwar in the north.

This latest article doesn’t mention agriculture (and nevermind that Dayr az-Zwar is not really “in the north” of Syria) but the ensemble of information I think now makes a pretty good case the the place that was bombed was a research center of Al-Furat University’s faculty of agriculture in Dayr az-Zwar.

(Bonus Syrian WMD geography lesson: Charles Levinson at Conflict Blotter links to a Jane’s Defence Weekly report about an explosion a few months ago at a “missile installation for manufacturing chemical weapons southeast of Aleppo”, at As Safirah. Interestingly, he notes:

I was surprised while reading today’s coverage to learn that [Israeli tabloid] Yediot Aharonot actually hires the Digital Globe, a commercial spy satellite, to photograph Syrian and Iranian military installations. Apparently they’ve been doing this for years.

That’s probably why you can see the location of this munitions factory in Google Earth in high resolution here.)

[Standard disclaimer: As much of the information above comes from intelligence sources leaking to the press, any or all of it may be wrong and intentionally misleading. Read critically!]

PS: I just thought about phoning the agricultural research center in Dayr az-Zwar/Deir EL-Zoor and asking them if they’ve had any bombing raids recently, but it’s very late there right now, and besides, that would be tantamount to actual reporting, which would go against the bloggers’ ethic:-)