Hackers of the world unite!

Check out the projects that hackers are working on around the world. This is a collaborative, full-access, wiki-style map, so you can add yourself or any programming clubs and robotics groups by signing into Google maps and clicking the edit button.

Link.

By attaching GPS devices and lie detector sensors to volunteers roaming around cities, Christian Nold creates "emotional maps":

First, he outfits volunteers with global positioning system devices and the sensors used in lie detector tests. Then, he sends his subjects out to wander their neighborhoods. When they return, Nold asks them to recount what they saw and felt when the polygraph recorded a quickened heartbeat or an elevated blood pressure.

"Tried to stomp on some pigeons," one tester recalled after a stroll through the chic bohemian Mission District of San Francisco, California.

"House right here, it reminded me of flowers at a funeral," another said of what he saw a few blocks south.

"Security guard at a business giving lollipops to kids. I think I wanted one," still another volunteer observed.

Nold, a London-based artist, calls his work "emotional mapping." Having mapped settings as varied as industrial areas of Bangladesh and the red light district of Brussels, Belgium, he recently arrived in San Francisco for his first U.S. project.

He's the first to acknowledge that the intimate portraits that result from his endeavors won't help a confused tourist get from Fisherman's Wharf to Golden Gate Park.

Can anyone explain this strange landscape I found in Afghanistan this evening?

Those are some substantial craters, but they are in the middle of nowhere - so I'm thinking it's not the result of some bombing campaign. Some of the lines of holes will have a small stream at one end, which makes me think this is a method for irrigation. But why so many, and why so huge?

Need to find a last minute gift for your Valentine and need a creative way to say "I love you"? 



Head over to geoGreeting and type in your message of love.  geoGreeting finds buildings in the shape of the letters you type in.  Click the 'heart' icon and get an island in the shape of a heart. 

[via Hackszine]

I use the Gallery 2 software to display a large number of photos on the web. The other day I was wondering what it would take to integrate google maps into the site. So I pulled up google and found the Gallery2 Maps Module. Being a .5 version, it does work pretty well. The one major thing I think that needs to be added is the ability to edit multiple photo locations at the same time, or apply the same location to an entire album.

You can check it out at junster.com/gallery.

Now all I have to do is get a camera that automagically encodes the GPS location into the photo so that I don't have to update all 8000 photos by hand.

Someone has taken the time to put together a cool website to help out pilots using google maps.

He has taken weather data, aviation charts and google maps and put it all together. This makes it easy to get the general weather situation in an area.

Anyway, check it out at http://www.runwayfinder.com/

-Ryan

Anders over at The Random Show created a really interesting video using Google Earth combined with spatial information for video bloggers around the world.

What I love about videoblogging (or video in general as a medium) is that if I get an idea, I can visualize it in almost no time at all because the tools available are so easy to work with, and I get some result immediately.

This video is a good example of how quickly we're approaching the point where the same can be said for mapping and GIS tools.

The data was supplied by the folks over at vlogmap.org who recently released a vlogger dataset for google earth.

Anyone want to post a list of their favorite video blogs?

[via makezine]

I was talking with some friends of mine yesterday about how Minneapolis has just set up a number of automated systems that send tickets to red light runners. Don't get me wrong, I really would like to see people get nailed for running lights, but the automated, big-brother system really freaks me out.

There is so much circumstantial information that is missed by a mere photograph. To not have a human involved to make a judgement call is a real step in the wrong direction. A lot of information is stripped away from the event when an automatic ticket is served.

What's really awesome is when new technologies are used to actually assist justice, not simply increase the number of ticketable offences.

In this story, Google Maps and a spur of the moment WiFi connection successfully assisted a defendant charged with running a red light in NY. He was able to prove to the judge that the officer had mistaken the facts and the violation was dismissed.

[via Make Blog]

I just came across a Google Maps hack that geocodes the home towns of Iraq war casualties and displays a visual timeline of the progression of U.S. soldier casualties throughout the war.

This is the most recent in a whole slew of Google Maps hacks, where the service has been tweaked and augmented to map things such as housing, cheap gas, crime occurances in chicago, and sexual predators in Florida.

Barb Dybwad put together a nice howto for using Google Maps to create your own annotated maps. If you want to dig a little deeper, you can check out the work being done to disect the more dynamic aspects of the maps code. There is an initial reference for the various javascript classes and functions, and a howto for embedding map data into your own page.

There's a lot of creative stuff happening here. Make sure to post your favorite map hacks in the comments area, or send me a tip!