Election maps

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I rolled out the first of a series of election maps Friday for Global. These showed all (70-something) ridings which went for single-digit margins in the last election, broken down by region. This was a purely statistical exercise, ignoring personal factors that might make a local race competitive or not.

The North, unavoidably, looks very strange, a result of the way Mercator distorts in high latitudes.

One thing the maps show is that while much has been said about the Conservatives’ targeted riding strategy, they will be on the defensive in a number of areas that they won by narrow margins last time.

The boundaries are based on a shapefile I downloaded from the Elections Canada site, converted to KML and coaxed down from the original 44MB. It displays reasonably in a series of regional maps now, with no regional .kmz file exceeding 1MB.

More to come this week.

Animating transit

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Like the CASA blog, I’m taken with this animation of the flow of transit in London over a 24-hour period. Like the Toronto equivalent, it’s obvious when the city wakes up after 6am or so:

Public Transport flows, London from Joan Serras on Vimeo.

Here’s another one from the same author covering all of the UK (and including air traffic):

Public Transport flows, UK from Joan Serras on Vimeo.

Click on the links for larger versions.

Catching up

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I started producing breaking news maps for Global after the tsunami/earthquake/atomic catastrophe in Japan. I also have longer-term projects in the pipe, but news happens.

Here’s a map of the evacuation zones around the Fukushima reactor, which were tricky to produce. I ended up using a radius generator to create the 20km and 30km circles, then tracing the parts of the circles that fell on land in Google Earth, then using the tracing as the new polygon.

This one is just an exercise in pulling in two USGS KML feeds on to our map. The nice thing here is that the feed is updated on their end. The map is zoomed to show Japan, but has data covering the whole world.

A roundup of recent maps:

  • The Globe’s story last Saturday mapping numeracy by census tract showcases a lot of detailed data, though the online display was limited to the images that appeared in print, with no interactivity. (It’s perfectly feasible to map census tracts in KML up to the regional level with no loss of performance.)

    Vancouver is below:

  • The Post maps Toronto homicides. The Star abandoned its homicide map last July – a pity, since it had been maintained since the beginning of 2005. The presentation looked kind of 2005, but there was nothing wrong with the information. The Post’s version is based on a decent-looking large .jpg with major streets indicated, and though not interactive, gives the reader enough orientation to get by.
  • The Hamilton Spectator maps lots of demographic information for greater Hamilton by census tract. Hamilton has very rigid socioeconomic divisions, so the maps are kind of depressing taken in bulk, which is perhaps the Spectator’s point.
  • The Atlantic crunches U.S. county-level socioeconomic data to create an interactive map putting counties in a dozen categories, from Emptying Nests to Mormon Outposts.
  • Jonathan Crowe points to an article in The New Scientist which is worth a read in full:

    (GPS jammers) can be bought on the internet, and tend to be used by say, truckers who don’t want their bosses to know where they are. Their increasing use has already caused problems at airports and blocked cellphone coverage in several cities. One jammer can take out GPS from several kilometres away, if unobstructed. No surprise, then, that researchers across the world are scrambling to find ways to prevent disastrous GPS outages happening.

    … An event last year at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey showed that it only takes one jammer to cause disruption. Airport controllers had installed a new GPS-based landing system, so that aircraft could approach in bad visibility. But it was shutting itself down once or twice a day. It took several months to find the culprit: a driver on the nearby New Jersey Turnpike using a portable GPS jammer to avoid paying the highway toll. This trucker was cruising past twice a day, crippling an airport as he went.

    … “The biggest risk is probably complicit spoofing, where someone deliberately misleads their own GPS,” says Humphreys. For example, unscrupulous fishing boat captains could spoof GPS to fake their location and fish in forbidden waters.

    Serves them right if they need rescuing.