When A Tweet Can Change The World

Fifty years ago, Amnesty activists fought to free prisoners of conscience by putting pen to paper. In 2011, our goal is still the same, but things have gotten a little more high-tech. The pen is still a powerful tool, but now we’ve also got email and online actions in our arsenal. And now we can add another medium to that list: Twitter.

Rafiq Hakeem 14 

In early February, 14-year-old Faizan Rafiq Hakeem was arrested in Jammu and Kashmir for throwing stones. The police detained him under the controversial Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act (PSA). Under this act, he was held for over a month without trial—and could have been held for up to two years. Despite the fact that he was a minor, authorities claimed that medical tests proved he was old enough to be treated as an adult.
Amnesty called for Faizan’s release, and this call was answered by activists on Twitter. On April 1, Alaphia Zoyab, Amnesty’s Online Communities Officer for India began tweeting from the @aiindia account, and was joined by Govind Acharya—who posts on this blog—in the US. #freefaizan became a hashtag and Twitter users from all over began tweeting for Faizan’s freedom.
Activists tweeted directly to the Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah @abdullah_omar, asking him to “free Faizan.” He replied to the tweets, saying “We are looking at his case sympathetically & will decide in the next couple of days” and eventually reconsidered the case.

Tweets from Omar Abdullah responding to #FreeFaizan messages

A few days later, on April 5, Faizan was free.
Thanks to social media, the world we live in is getting smaller and smaller—and the more interconnected we are, the harder it will be for human rights violations to go unnoticed. Faizan’s story is proof that enough voices speaking up about injustice are too loud to be ignored, especially on a public medium such as Twitter, where both action and inaction by those responsible can easily fall under scrutiny.
If you could launch a Twitter campaign to free a prisoner of conscience or promote human rights, who or what would you tweet for?

Location Intelligence: Leveraging the Power of Canadian Postal Code Mapping

In the business world, location is the new intelligence. Providing a location based view to helps businesses maintain a competitive edge. Today, a postal address means much more than just sending mail. Businesses are able to use location intelligence to leverage Postal Code data to better address market opportunities and risks in an effort to grow their business and make more efficient.

When defining Location Intelligence, it is often described as the ability to visualize geographic and spatial data to gain vital business insights and make better business decisions. Location intelligence software allows businesses to view detailed color-coded maps and work with interactive analytics. By consolidating a geospatial database enterprise, businesses are better able to leverage location based data such as postal codes to gain a more insightful view when they evaluate their competitors, profile customers and potential customers, manage their marketing budget assets, and identify new business opportunities.
Location intelligence services help a business better target marketing potential, reduce risk, and streamline operational efficiencies. By using Address Recognition and Address Geocoding web services and software, a business is better able to leverage address recognition where they have the ability to correct, standardize, and verify addresses. Utilizing address geocoding gives businesses the ability to visualize a validated address while also geocoding other places in the area using postal codes such as streets, nearby businesses, competitors, supply routes, intersections, and more, with the highest level of accuracy. Location intelligence databases provide access to real-time updates of reliable location content. The database contains a wealth of not just addresses, but also address-related content. The result is reliable information about a potential market that allows for better addressing of risk and opportunity.
Geocoding is an essential component of location intelligence. The process of geocoding an address involves assigning a unique latitude and longitude to a physical location. It can pinpoint the location down to the building rooftop. By leveraging location intelligence using postal code mapping, businesses can integrate data about policies, terrain, geographical boundaries, routing, and demographics. They have the ability to visually and identify their risk exposures, and mitigate those risks.
In terms of sales, marketing, and distribution, location intelligence using postal code maps helps businesses leverage such vital business operation areas. Such knowledge and benefits that can be extracted include: optimize sales processes, identify areas of market potential, and match networks, sales, and marketing, in order to make the most out of that market's potential. As well, businesses can utilize demographics, consumer buying trends, and lifestyle information to better understand their customers and develop better customer service programs in order to realize the highest sales potential.
Today, more businesses are realizing the benefits and necessity of using location intelligence solutions to grow and expand their business while maintaining competitiveness in such a highly competitive world. Using such solutions as postal code maps allows businesses to gather vital data to help them make better businesses decisions that ultimately leads to success. Using postal code maps definitely improves a businesses bottom line.

Google's citizen cartographers map out the world

Google on Thursday revealed that an army of citizen cartographers is behind its widely used mapping service, helping the Internet search giant chart the world, including often inaccessible places.

Volunteers from various countries post updates on their neighbourhoods or travel to remote places to map the area before uploading their findings to Google Map Maker, the company said at a conference in Singapore.

Contributors can add new roads and landmarks or debate with neighbours about the names of streets on the virtual map, which is constantly updated with new information.

Google Map Maker allows people to add or edit features, such as roads, businesses, parks and schools, and give detailed information about the locations.

"You are now the mapping agency of the world, and many of the mapping agencies are recognising that fact," Google's geospatial technologist Ed Parsons said at the Google Geo Community Summit attended by contributors from different countries.

"The large, top-down approaches to making maps that traditionally the industry has followed for many thousands of years are changing very rapidly," he added.

"They now go from a bottom-up approach, where local experts, people like yourselves are making maps, they are updating the maps, because you are the experts in your local neighbourhoods."

Parsons said Google maps have been used extensively to help relief efforts during natural disasters such as in the recent earthquake and tsunami that struck northeastern Japan on March 11.

Indian retiree CNR Nair spends about two hours daily updating mapping information on India. He travels to different places, and even checks if the latitudes tally from the ones on Google Map Maker.

But mapping out his homeland has not been entirely smooth sailing for Nair. Working without government approval, he initially met resistance from the local police who threatened to arrest him.

"Google Maps should serve the community," he told AFP.

"During the Indian (Ocean) tsunami, we mapped all these tsunami affected areas so that in the future at least people should be aware to get (people) evacuated from the possible tsunami affected areas or flood areas."

Other volunteers have travelled from Moscow to Siberia by rail, filming the entire journey from the train window and uploading it onto Google Map Maker, the conference heard.

Incorporating GIS, GPS and Satellite Data in Classrooms

TwiST Workshop

Teaching with Spatial Technology (TwiST) — Empowering Student Discovery Through GIS is designed to teach K-12 teachers and college faculty members in the United States how to teach with Geographic Information Technology (GIT) in the classroom. The TwiST Workshop started in 2001 as the Conference on Remote Sensing Education (CORSE). Due to changes in technology and devoting more time throughout the event to geospatial technologies that use and advance remote sensing data, the title was changed in 2008. Each year the TwiST workshop has been modified to incorporate some of the newest technolgies to enhance the individuals' experiences.
The focus for the 2011 TwiST workshop is on using geospatial technologies to conduct a commuinty mapping project. This year we are working with the Auburn Business Improvment District to improve tourists experience in Auburn. In 2010, we worked with the Owasco Watershed Network to map components of the Owasco Lake Watershed. It is through this project and activites covered in the workshop that participants learn how to use GPS and GIS software to develop and carry out their own community project. Aspects of the project are connected to state education standards to see how these technologies can be used in classes from science to history and the humanities.
The workshop will be held in Auburn, NY June 28 - 30, 2011. There will be a single track this year, with separate breakout sessions for those wanting to explore some more advanced geospatial topics.

Japan’s Tsunami Debris Heads for the West Coast

by Matt Ball on April 9, 2011

More than 200,000 buildings and countless other debris were washed out into the Pacific as a result of the recent tsunami. That wreckage is now being pushed across the ocean by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre with the debris headed toward Washington, Oregon and California, before circulating back toward Hawaii.
The average drift rate is five to ten miles per day, so it will take at least a year before the first debris makes landfall. These same currents have brought us the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is now set to get much bigger.
Click here for an animation of the debris spread that was created by the International Pacific Research Center using past trajectories of drifting buoys.

Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts Viewer

Interactive map is here, its well worth a click!

http://www.csc.noaa.gov/slr/viewer/#

Overview

Features

• Displays potential future sea levels
• Provides simulations of sea level rise at local landmarks
• Communicates the spatial uncertainty of mapped sea levels
• Models potential marsh migration due to sea level rise
• Overlays social and economic data onto potential sea level rise
• Examines how tidal flooding will become more frequent with sea level rise

Being able to visualize potential impacts from sea level rise is a powerful teaching and planning tool, and the Sea Level Rise Viewer brings this capability to coastal communities. A slider bar is used to show how various levels of sea level rise will impact coastal communities. The initial project areas include Texas’ Houston and Galveston coasts and Mississippi, with additional coastal counties to be added in the near future. Visuals and the accompanying data and information cover sea level rise inundation, uncertainty, flood frequency, marsh impacts, and socioeconomics.

Interactive Map Shows History of Warfare

by: Keith Wagstaff

Just how violent has human history been? Well, according to the new interactive timeline over at conflicthistory.com (built by Freebase, “an open, Creative Commons licensed repository of structured data of almost 20 million entities”), there pretty much isn’t a time in civilization’s history where several groups of people weren’t trying to kill each other.

Interactive map is here.

http://www.conflicthistory.com/#/period/1610-1614

Dragging the cursor from the earliest conflicts in history, like the Kurukshetra War in India in 3019 B.C., to the modern day war in Afghanistan can be a fascinating–and depressing–experience. Drag the adjustable cursor across the timeline and little red dots pop up on Google Maps wherever conflicts have taken place, with info on each provided by Wikipedia. It’s interesting to watch the frequency of dots increase the closer you get to the present day, although I suspect that’s more a result of historical record-keeping instead of an increase in the number of wars.
What’s also interesting is the shift in nomenclature; as time moves on and classic  military conquests become socially unacceptable, you start to see a lot more wars defined as operations, conflicts and skirmishes, something made all the more poignant with the White House’s recent “Operation Odyssey Dawn.” Semantics might change but the violence stays the same and, if thousands of years of human history have anything to say about it, things won’t change anytime soon.