Armchair mappers: Help prepare for the next humanitarian crisis

Screen Shot 2015-05-07 at 5.05.35 PMKathmandu before and after the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team dived in.

Just 48 hours after Nepal’s devastating earthquake, thousands of volunteers from around the world helped create maps that guided emergency response teams.

Many of these “digital humanitarians” came from OpenStreetMap, an open source mapping effort. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) in launched 2010 after the earthquake in Haiti, when the office safeguarding country’s maps pancaked in the 7.0 temblor.

_Schuyler Erle shows what happened to Haiti's mapping office post earthquake._

Schuyler Erle shows what happened to Haiti’s mapping office after the earthquake.

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Where in the world can you still send a telegram? [Map]

Telegrams may have gone the way of the steam engine, but there are number of places around the world, from Japan to Mexico, still sending them.

The news about India shuttering its 162-year-old telegram service sounded like the last, labored puff of a country making progress into a bold new era.

So I wondered where people are still using them as a swift, inexpensive means to send condolences and well wishes on important occasions. (An outfit called – what else? – iTelegram took over from Western Union for the U.S., though I can’t remember ever sending or receiving a telegram here.)
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Mapping where your iPhone got lost or stolen

I am not a psychic, but I have a good idea where you and your iPhone parted ways.

If you’re desperately seeking it on Craigslist, chances are you lost your device – or had it stolen – over the weekend, especially at night. And probably at some fun destination – shopping, the beach, a bar – or heading there on your usual means of transportation (the car, a gas station or parking lot, or bus).

Although your entire work life might be on it, you are pleading with the person who found it (or swiped it) to return your iPhone because those photos of your dog or kid or grandma can never be replaced.

This is the most common tale to emerge from Cult of Mac’s recent analysis of hundreds of iPhone lost and found ads on Craigslist blanketing the entire United States. (Here’s the backstory on how I did it using Python, if you’re interested.)

Stealing iPhones (“Apple picking”) now accounts for about half the crimes in cities like San Francisco and New York; it’s hard to say how many absent-minded drinkers leave them at bars, but if you find a phone and don’t return it, in many places that becomes theft by finding.

Police and Apple diverge on what to do about it. The Cupertino company advises you to notify police, while some authorities are urging phone makers and service providers to add a kill switch to curb thefts.

Apple’s “Find my iPhone” can help, unless the savvy crook pops out the SIM card or wipes the contents of your phone and starts over. This gray area has inspired some derring-do recoveries, like outing the thief or the finder-who-wants-to-be-keeper by staging a diabolical seduction. Not recommended.

stores

In the meantime, if you’re hoping someone will return your lost iPhone or realize they’ve bought stolen goods and do the right thing, you’re probably heading to Craigslist.

Generally speaking, you’re more likely to offer heartfelt thanks than a reward for the return of your phone. Unless you live in a place such as Washington, D.C. or Michigan, then you’re ready to bust out the cash.

After combing through these ads for the project, I bought an ugly white case for my black iPhone 4S to make it easier to see in the pitch of all of my dark bags and on taxi seats, etc. As a result, I am having fewer of those “where’s my goddamn phone?” moments.

Have you lost your iPhone? How did you recover it? Let me know in the comments.

First published at Cult of Mac.

Why journalists should bite the bullet and map with Quantum GIS

A view of Alameda census info over Stamen's terrain map.

A view of Alameda census info over Stamen’s terrain map in QGIS.

If you’re a novice mapper, tools like Google Fusion Tables (aka the WordPress of mapping) might make Quantum GIS look like rough terrain.

QGIS is an open source powerhouse for mapping that has a number of advantages. It’s free (as in free speech) runs on Mac or PC and you can import shapefiles, coverage data plus any personal geodatabases you may have on hand.

So get over yourself and try it, advised Len De Groot of Knight Digital Media Center in his recent online Intro to Data Mapping class.

“It’s not for the faint of heart. But there’s a lot of drag and drop, something most of us can do,” he said in the hour-long session to a group of around 60 global journalists. “You do have to build up some muscle memory on how this works, but it will make your data mapping much more robust.” Continue reading

Lessons from John Snow for the novice data journalist

A modern, color take on Snow's original.

An interactive take on Snow’s original map with color by andreit on umapper.

Dr. John Snow put cholera on the map. Well, to be more precise, he mapped the cholera outbreak of the 1854 in London’s Soho, stacking up the deaths against a contaminated water pump and saving an untold number of lives.

Snow’s bicentennial birthday happens this month, on March 15. They’ll be raising a glass to him at the Soho pub bearing his name as well as holding a free symposium in his birthplace of York.

His map is the stuff of textbooks, from design guru Edward Tufte – who even made a pilgrimage to the water pump – and was set before us in the MOOC Infographics and Data Visualization course and KDMC’s two-day seminar on data as a paragon of good information design.

In both classes, the clean, simple map elicited a whoosh of “ahh!” from the students – you look and immediately get it. (The back story of Snow’s map makes it even more powerful – the good doc was laboring against local authorities who still believed the miasma theory.)

A detail of a 1940s malaria map of Italy. LSHTM Library & Archives

A detail of a 1940s malaria map of Italy. LSHTM Library & Archives.

His legacy lives on in health maps everywhere. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is hosting an art exhibit in Snow’s honor – you can check out some of the items, including the above gem of malaria outbreaks in fascist troops in Italy, here.

One of the big takeaways for me, as a novice, is how working with data is often a group effort. (Journalism, though it does require getting people to talk to you, is largely a solitary pursuit. Scribbling away in a garret or blogging with your laptop at a cafe doesn’t take a village.)

In his excellent The Ghost Map  (public library), Steven Johnson recounts how Snow was helped out by local curate Reverend Henry Whitehead, one of the few people who kept knocking on doors and talking to people during the outbreak. Whitehead’s knowledge of those particular dark, odorous London streets proved invaluable, even though he first believed Snow was wrong.

It can be tempting to hover over your spreadsheets and tinker with your scripts, much like you might worry over the structure of an article, but involving the community makes a difference.