Serious flooding in buildings and subways around the southern tip of Manhattan, here’s One New York Plaza the morning after the surge. Our building flooded as well, though the only thing that was really terrifying was the sound of water flooding our elevator shafts… sounded like Niagara Falls all the way up on the 9th floor.
Mapping Hurricane Sandy
I’m hunkering down today waiting for Sandy to arrive here in NYC, and i thought I’d take a quick look at who’s mapping it. Here’s a quick cartographic countdown as the storm approaches (click on any image to launch link).
MSNBC
A pleasant surprise from our friends at Stamen, nice clean design with some animation and wind infographics.
Esri
Esri has a couple Sandy maps up and running, including their Public Information Map and a whole gallery of additional maps. Nice limited set of layers and social media.
Google Crisis Map
Lots of data, high performance, and well design for a large public audience.
The Weather Channel
Built on Bing with a set of quick vital statistics on the top. I had a tough time negotiating layer visibility as i zoomed into NYC, but do like the wind speed chart on top.
MEMA
I stumbled onto the Maryland Emergency Management Agency webmap, and as you can see it’s built on Esri Flex and has tons of layers available. It’s a bit kitchensink for me, but for Maryland residents it lots of important data to drill through.
New York Times
Very clean minimal aesthetic from the folks at NYTimes, this map does a great job of conveying key forecast information without hitting you over the head with TOC layers.
NOAA
Here’s the gold standard for Hurricane forecast from NOAA, and while it may make our eyes bleed it does effectively serve the purpose. Their static cartography publishing approach means it doesn’t get overwhelmed like NYC’s Evacuation Zone Finder did yesterday.
Because the storm is mostly in track-mode currently we haven’t seen much activity on the Ushahidi/Crowdmap front yet… but guaranteed that will follow in Sandy’s aftermath.
Let me know if there’s any cool ones i’ve missed…
My most valuable Product lessons came from a Vegetable Peeler
I was walking through Union Square Greenmarket this weekend and was reminded of one of the most important Product lessons i ever learned: find your Vegetable Peeler.
This particular lesson came from a guy who was a fixture around NYC for decades, the enigmatic Joe Ades. An old-school grafter born in Manchester, Joe spent years pitching his wares all over the city, from his usual spot in Union Square all the way down to Wall Street and Brooklyn.
His pitch was incredible!
He always sat low to the ground which drew in crowds to see what was going on. Impeccably dressed, he kept a singsong banter going throughout his demonstration and usually had newspaper clippings of himself in the background to add to his credibility. His feature-focused demonstration was somewhat Ogilvy-esque, showing how you could do make everything from french fries to veggies for kids. Just as quickly as he’d started he’d pull out a wad of cash and start selling them… and i can tell you firsthand that people
Contoured Intensity
Remember the first time you saw @mraad’s heatmap of MBTA card swipes? Ok well i do, and every so often i see something that generates that same ‘dude that’s so cool’ nostalgia. Enter they guys at Vizzuality who made me grin with their recent CartoDB traffic intensity map. They created this in collaboration with the Change Administration and Tomorrow Lab and it maps out the data from their DIY traffic counter. The Red is the most busy area and each line of the contour represents 10 meters and 10% decay in traffic.
File this under awesome! You can read their whole blog post here .
Treadmills, Tides, and the Staten Island Ferry
Like many, exercise is one of those essential activities to keep me going… so a couple times a week i wake up way to early and drag myself to the gym. I used to pass this time watching the morning news , but over the years i’ve learned to zone out and just think… a practice which i’ve found produces some of my most creative unpredictable thinking.
My gym happens to look out over the Staten Island Ferry, and I love watching the waves of people pouring into lower Manhattan every morning as the Ferries arrives. Counting down the minutes on the teadmill clock i’ve noticed that it takes almost 4 minutes after the Ferry docks to see the first people trickle out of the building, then the floodgates open and a massive crowd charges up Whitehall towards Wall Street. It only take 7 minutes for this mad dash to to run its course, and then it’s quiet again. Everyday over 60,000 people pass through this narrow channel to and from the Ferry in these short bursts.
Another thing in my workout view is the New York harbor. Anyone that’s ever spent time around the waterfront has witnessed the tides that rip back and forth, making it treacherous for watercraft and surfriders. These tides are incredible in their power and fluctuation, and the connected waterbodies around Manhattan generate many ‘hydraulic currents’ . There have been projects to try and harness this energy in the East River, and earlier this year the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission actually approved the first commercial license for a U.S. tidal energy project there to Verdant. Lots of potential, and if you’re interested here’s an interactive map of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams across the Country.
So, what does running on a treadmill have to do with the Staten Island Ferry and Tidal Energy potential?
One of those exercise induces ideas that keeps coming back to me is concept of the Energy Production Potential of those waves of commuters. Crowd-harnessed energy of some 60,000 people a day. Obviously there are lots of challenges in the capture method, storage, and transmission of this energy but I think there’s some really interesting approaches both passive and interactive. While it’s not a new idea (see Pavegen and PowerLEAP ), there’s huge potential for innovation around the way we approach capturing it, and how it supports the community around it.
Election Map Magic – 10 Maps that rocked the 2008 results
Every election we see a bunch of red and blue patchwork maps, usually displayed as states are being called, and of course on the front page of the paper the next morning. This election however, interactive maps were used in a bunch of new ways to help display and query election results, exit polls, and projections. The volume of these tools was suprising, but here are a few that really wowed us…
The New York Times Election Results Map – link
Ability to visualize results data at the state and county level, as well as graduated symbols for county specific results. A very intuitive and well thought out interface with easy drilldown capabilities.
Tunnel to Towers Run - 2008
On September 11th 2001, off-duty firefighter Stephen Siller abandoned his gridlocked pickup truck at the mouth of the Brooklyn Battery tunnel and ran the 3.5 miles to the World Trade center with 70lbs of gear on his back. He was one of the brave souls who made the ultimate sacrifice that day, perishing as he searched for his Squad.
Every year a growing number of people gather to run that same route as a tribute to Stephen’s ultimate sacrifice, and raise money for his charity.
Height of summer in central park
Spatial Search takes a voyage to the desktop
You know that neurotic data czar down the hall that’s always bragging about his GIS data organization skills… yah, get ready to blow his mind. Modern-day mapmakers and classic cartographers alike can now bring search 2.0 to their neo-spatial production workflows: introducing Voyager.
Voyager is a desktop crawler designed specifically for indexing a wide array of spatial data formats. Let it loose and it catalogs everything from feature classes to layer files, giving you a holistic list of raster to mxd and everything in between. Think Google Desktop designed specifically for spatial data.
got stuck on the 4 Train for over an hour this morning… and had to listen to this guy the whole time.
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