Author: Ed Parsons

We solved our shortage of space for our engineers in London by building a starship in geostationary orbit over the UK. Turned out to be cheaper than central London office rents… Beam me up Boris!

Happy Thanksgiving! Here's a fun video based on Google StreetView from my friend +Elise Urbanek:
http://flowingdata.com/2011/11/24/touching-google-streetview-stop-motion/

Aaron's cincemasapes are beautiful artistic workings of original Street View images.. very atmospheric

donkey confronts a google street car in mexico. cinemascapes – Google Street View Edition in search of enchanted and remote lands typically only reserved for the eyes of it's inhabitants, but now …

Once again the Google SketchUp team are running a Competition for 3D modellers to build a model of their local neighbourhood. It’s not necessary to add every building of course but do as many as you can to represent what makes your local town or neighbourhood special. From past experience the real driving motivation here seems to be civic pride and the wish to put the places we love “on the map”

To take part..

1. Make 3D models of the buildings in your neighbourhood using SketchUp.
2. Upload your models to the Google 3D Warehouse.
3. Create a 3D Warehouse collection to contain your models.
4. Complete the Competition Entry Form.

The motivation to add user generated content remains an interesting area in this era of mass participation mapping, while some communities focus on the development of tools and processes, others such as many in the 3D warehouse community strive to produce the most detailed and accurate representations of the world as possible. An increasingly important community are the casual users of mapping products who want to provide “quick fixes” to the errors they come across using them.

These different motivations of course lead to the development of different mapping applications and platforms, as historically there has never been a single universal map of the world, so in the future we will continue to have the choice of geospatial content reflecting more closely the needs of different user communities, as they now have a hand in creating them.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

The UK launch of Google Earth Builder at the Science Museum.

This is a interesting article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which discusses the use of GPS to monitor Nuclear weapons testing. It appears that even underground weapons testing causes major atmospheric disruptions which result in GPS timing and hence location errors.

Initial results from analysis of North Korea’s second alleged nuclear test in 2009 produced not only seismic waves as expected, but created an atmospheric shockwave in the region which impacted the GPS reception of GNSS receiving stations in Eastern Asia.

The article seems to suggest another role of the rapidly expanding network of GPS stations used for local RTK networks.. Test Ban Treaty monitoring ?

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)