Ubikcan

New blog

2006-11-27T11:34:00.000-05:00

Ubikcan is dead!

Long live ubikcan (at its new location)

Veterans Day 2006

2006-11-11T15:36:00.000-05:00

Today is Veterans Day in America and Remembrance Day in Europe. Poppies are used to symbolize the fields of France and the trench warfare of WWI. In Britain a major observance will also take place on Remembrance Sunday (tomorrow).

In the UK most people wear special paper and plastic poppies in the lapel, some with a sprig of leaf on them. Even school children buy them (whether by choice or not), and usually all figures in the public eye (soccer managers, newscasters etc.).

Veterans Day marks the anniversary of the coming into effect of the Armistice during WWI (technically an armistice is a cease-fire so the war did not end until the signing of the peace treaty at the Paris Peace Conference* in June 1919, but most people disregard this and count the war as lasting from 1914-18).

The Armistice came into effect (on purpose) on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day or the eleventh month, but had actually been agreed earlier that morning around 6am in the Compiègne Forest, just north of Paris. It was signed by General Foch for the Allies and a guy called Matthias Erzberger for the Germans at a special railroad siding in the forest.

Interestingly enough while writing this entry I learned that the armistice for WWII was also signed in the same railroad siding!

*This wikipedia entry is not that great, but maybe will get better over time.

Upstate: downstate?

2006-11-09T15:49:00.000-05:00

The map above (from the Washington Post by Nate Kelso, NACIS member) shows how Virginians voted in the Senate election on Tuesday.

The CW on Virginia is that it is split, upstate/downstate, but the map, while not denying that, does add in a few extra things worth noting.

1. You can find solid Dem districts downstate and solid GOP districts upstate.

2. According to the statistic provided by the WaPo, just 16% of voters in N. Va. are in exurbs, while 84% are in urban or suburban districts. The exurbs have recently been touted as a rapidly rising and largely Dem group. But what is the split between suburban--exurban?

3. To avoid larger, but less populated precincts from overwhelming the viewer visually, Nate uses a colored circle.

4. Norfolk, site I believe of a large military base, voted for Webb (D).

5. Plenty of places which aren't exactly rural (eg Fauquier County) still voted for Allen. It would be interesting to overlay this on a population density map.

Is Tradesports accurate?

2006-11-09T12:47:00.000-05:00

So we used a few numbers from Tradesports before the election to get a feel for how the "market" was assessing outcomes (eg see here, and here).

Tradesports works differently in that it goes up or down according to how many people are buying shares in particular outcomes (such as Dems taking the House or the Senate). It's not magic, because where are people getting information from upon which to make their purchases? Well, polling data of course just like the rest of us.

The difference is that in theory Tradesports reflects what people prefer, as a whole. I'm not sure that that's correct though. When real money is involved, even if you prefer a GOP victory, but think that the Dems will win, which way do you bet? I would think you'd go with your expectation, not your preference.

Do people therefore hold unrealistic expectations? That's really the question for market-based numbers.

Atrios rightly pans Tradesports for not being "magical" and posts this image showing how it blew the Senate call.

I would argue that this shows that the market reflects what people think will happen (ie it's just a reflection of polling) not what they wish or desire to happen. Even Atrios admits he didn't expect the Senate to go Dem.

Therefore it's really just another form of polling.

Allen to concede?

2006-11-09T11:30:00.000-05:00

George Allen is having a press conference in about 3.5 hours--is he anouncing his concession?

AP, NBC and a number of other places have already called both VA and MT races for the Democrats, so this wouldn't necessarily be anything more than recognizing reality. But since that has been in short supply since about 1994, it should be welcomed anyway.

Update: 1:03pm. Hotline has it.

Post election analysis

2006-11-08T17:01:00.000-05:00

Well, in short, yesterday's predictions did come to pass and I didn't need to cry into my beer. On the contrary, a good time was had by all at the Thinking Man!

There were some remarkable gains in long-shot seats, which the liberal blogosphere is partly credited with (not only fund-raising, but consciousness raising as well, see this post for details).

So, on to the predictions.

I predicted: +25 seats
Actual: +29 (CNN: 10 undecided)

I predicted: +4 Senate seats
Actual: +5/6

The VA is the hold out right now and Jim Webb has declared victory, although Allen has refused to concede (forgetting, perhaps, his calls in 2000 for Gore to concede, stating that to delay is unpartiotic and bad for the country). I'd say Webb has won though. Dems take Senate. Obviously this was my biggest miss, I just didn't see the Dems taking the Senate. And it was sure close.

More races below.

I predicted: GA-08, GA-12 go Dem.
Actual: both went Dem.

I predicted: MD-Sen: Ben Cardin (D)
Actual: Cardin (D)

I predicted: NJ-Sen: Bob Menendez (D)
Actual: Menendez (D)

I predicted: OH-Sen: Sherrod Brown (D)*
Actual: Brown (D)

I predicted OH-15: Mary Jo Kilroy (D)
Actual: not yet called, but looking like Pryce

I predicted: OH-18: Zack Space (D)
Actual: Space (D)

I predicted: PA-Sen: Bob Casey (D)*
Actual: Casey (D)

I predicted: RI-Sen: Sheldon Whitehouse (D)*
Actual: Whitehouse (D)

I predicted: TN-Sen: Bob Corker (R)
Actual: Croker (R)

I predicted: VA-Sen: Jim Webb (D)*
Actual: not yet called but trending Webb

I predicted: WA-Sen: Maria Cantwell (D)
Actual: Cantwell (D)

Off to Thinking Man

2006-11-07T17:38:00.000-05:00

Off to the appropriately named Thinking Man Tavern (affectionately known as the "Drinking Man") for election results!

They're going to set up a large screen with live election results. So I'll be able to either cry into my beer (literally) or celebrate as the occasion demands!

Realtime voting problems mapped here

2006-11-07T10:07:00.000-05:00

Problems with voting are being reported in realtime on this map (the site is rather slow, I had to reload several times).

Ohio (!) is leading the pack at the moment, as this report from Columbus indicates:

Franklin County phone system returns to service

By Barbara Carmen

The Columbus Dispatch

Tuesday, November 7, 2006 9:50 AM

Franklin County's phone system was returned to service about 90 minutes after it collapsed today under a crush of calls from voters and poll workers.

The volume of calls “overwhelmed the system,” Franklin County Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said.

Phones returned to normal about 9:30 a.m. The system also went down during the May 2 primary, delaying final returns until 2 a.m.

Election Day: George Michael does "Freedom"

2006-11-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

Today is election day: please vote!

Here's a little Youtube video to get things going.

ubikcan predictions

2006-11-06T13:50:00.000-05:00

OK, here are the ubikcan predictions for tomorrow's midterm elections. I don't have any special data or insights so of course this is just my opinion based on all the polling, the pundits, and especially the blogs at the local and national levels.

Overall
House to go Democratic, gain of 25 seats (15 needed)

Senate to stay Republican; Democrats gain +4 (6 needed)
PA, RI, OH, and 1 of MO, MT, VA (wimp!). OK, if pushed I predict VA.
No GOP pickups.

Specific races
GA-Gov: Purdue (R) (duh)
GA-04: Hank Johnson (D)
GA-05: John Lewis (D)
GA-08: Jim Marshall (D)
GA-12: John Barrow (D)

CT-Sen: Joe Lieberman (I)

FL-Sen: Bill Nelson (D) (duh, sorry Katherine)

MD-Sen: Ben Cardin (D)

NJ-Sen: Bob Menendez (D)

OH-Sen: Sherrod Brown (D)*
OH-15: Mary Jo Kilroy (D)
OH-18: Zack Space (D)

PA-Sen: Bob Casey (D)*

RI-Sen: Sheldon Whitehouse (D)*

TN-Sen: Bob Corker (R)

VA-Sen: Jim Webb (D)*

WA-Sen: Maria Cantwell (D)

*Pickup

Interestingly, polls can be quite wrong in that there may be 2-3 point difference between the poll and the actual result due to GOTV. Here's an insightful post by Kos for example. He's talking about the recent poll numbers in Virginia:

In 2005, the Democratic ground game swamped the GOP's -- even with Rove's full attention and stewardship. I have no reason to believe that this year should be any different.

Let's go back to the open 2005 governor's race in Virginia:

Rasmussen 11/4/05. Likely voters. MoE 4.5% (10/27 results)

Kaine (D) 49 (46)
Kilgore (R) 46 (44)

Mason-Dixon 11/2-3/05. Likely voters. MoE 4% (10/18-20/05 results)

Kaine (D) 45 (42)
Kilgore (R) 44 (44)

Surprisingly comparable numbers, both heading into the election with the narrowest of 1-point leads. The final results? And remember, the GOP went to the hilt with their 72-hour program.

Kaine (D) 51.72
Kilgore (R) 45.99

So final polls showed 45-44 but actual numbers were 51.72-45.99, and Kos attributes this to GOTV. So races, such as VA which are close, can be determined by the GOTV.

Tradesports update, Nov. 6: 20.5%

2006-11-05T20:22:00.000-05:00

Well the smart money estimate that GOP chances of retaining the House of Reps. tomorrow is:

20.5%

There are also some new betting opportunities, namely on combo Senate and House possible outcomes:

As you can see the biggest bet is that the House will go Dem. but the Senate stay GOP. That is what I'd estimate as well, the day before the polls.

Later today I'll make full predictions, including all the Senate races and selected House races!

New districts and my house

2006-11-05T18:56:00.000-05:00

I downloaded the new districts from here and made a quick GIS map of how the district shifted. sorry about the map quality, ArcMap is hard to design in.

The map shows that my house was in district 4 (shown by the dotted line) but is now in district 5 (shown in green).

Wow, exciting.

Redistricting in Georgia

2006-11-05T18:30:00.000-05:00

As anonymous notes in the comments below, the Georgia redistricting is already in effect. The map I presented of GA-08 is therefore the one for the current Congress. If you live in Georgia, who you vote for on Tuesday will be determined by this map:

Colors indicate likely winner (reddish = R, bluish = D).

UGA also has an online interactive redistricting system (plugin required). Here's their version:

I zoomed in on my road and found that I'm already in GA-05. Their reapportionment center with maps is here.

District 4 is to the right, Cynthia McKinney's old district. The straggly line down the middle is the newly adjusted boundary, putting me just over into district 5 on the left.

Ohio!

2006-11-05T17:15:00.000-05:00

As they used to say on the Drew Carey show.

Remember when Ohio was the swing state in the last election? And finally went to Bush by119,000 votes? (It wasn't the closest; New Mexico was decided by 5,988 votes.) How the (Republican) Secretary of State oversaw extensive voter disqualification? (In a come-uppance, this man, Ken Blackwell, will probably lose his race for governor, a position held by Repubs. for over 16 years.) There's even a book on the multiple election irregularities that may have tipped it toward Bush.

Now two years on and it's all change in Ohio. Every race shows leads, some of them huge, for Dems. Two-term GOP Senator Mike DeWine will only be the most noticeable casualty.

Even the initiatives favor liberals: a tobacco-sponsored initiative to "wipe out" no-smoking bans is behind, while an American Cancer Society sponsored one on banning smoking in public is ahead.

All this depends on getting out the vote (GOTV). No Dem. GOTV, then maybe Joy Padgett (Bob Ney's hand-picked successor) will prevail (although CQ is now rating this as "leans Democratic," ie toward the nicely named Zack Space).

Ohio District 15: Pryce (R) v. Kilroy (D) shows Kilroy leads 53-41%. Pryce has represented the district for 14 years, but looks like she's on her way out.

Is this a gerrymander?

2006-11-05T16:12:00.000-05:00

CW is that GA-08 is the GOP best chance of a House pickup. GA-08 was redistricted in mid-decade (it's usual to only redistrict following the decennial census, but Republican controlled states redistricted an extra time in both Georgia and Texas). The shape of the district sure looks funny to me.

A Dem. poll last week showed even this possibility fading. But the Repubs. may not be too worried. The Dem. candidate, Jim Marshall, is extremely conservative, opposes stem-cell research, abortion, gay marriage and gun control, all top level social issues. He better not show up 'round here!

This redistricting by the way means that I wouldn't be in Cynthia McKinney's district, GA-04 (even if she hadn't lost the primary). I would be put into the downtown Atlanta district, GA-05, by just a few streets. A district so Democratic that the Democratic candidate is running unopposed... this is not Georgia here!

New John Snow book reviewed

2006-11-03T09:19:00.000-05:00

Steven Shapin has a long review of a new book on John Snow in the New Yorker. Shapin is a well known respected historian of science, and his review gets most of the story right, including the prominant role of the map in Snow's efforts to convince the authorities that cholera is spread through infected water:

As it turned out, the critical evidence came not from this study of commercially piped river water but from a fine-grained map showing the roles of different wells...

What Snow needed was not the biological or chemical identity of the “morbid poison,” or formal proof of causation, but a powerful rhetoric of persuasion. The map Snow produced, in 1854, plotted cholera mortality house by house in the affected area, with bars at each address that showed the number of dead. The closer you lived to the Broad Street pump, the higher the pile of bars. A few streets away, around the pump at the top of Carnaby Street, there were scarcely any bars, and slightly farther, near the Warwick Street pump, there were none at all.

Over the last ten years the story of John Snow has been repeatedly told. The story has gone from the straightforward one of the map being the way that Snow realized the Broad Street pump was contaminated (eg., in Tufte's 1983 book) to a realization that Snow used the map to powerfully illustrate his already-developed theory of contagion (then a minority opinion):

Maps like Snow’s allowed the modern city to remake itself and to understand itself in a new way. They collected different sorts of knowledge, represented them vividly on the scale of a tabletop, and made that representation available as a resource for urban reform: a plan and a plan of action.

This latter version, if more complicated, is more interesting. As Shapin points out, science does not proceed neatly from one idea to another but often involves highly contested competing claims, and the ones we now think are right don't always win out straight away.

Anti-surveillance through total surveillance

2006-11-03T08:26:00.000-05:00

Read this fascinating description of the life of Hasan Elahi, a conceptual artist and professor at Rutgers University, who has put his total movements online after mistakenly falling afoul of the FBI in 2001.

Elahi, an American, was detained by the FBI at Denver airport. Through a series of mix-ups and over a period time lasting several months, the FBI subjected Elahi to 9 back to back polygraph tests and required him to report in to a FBI monitoring agent.

Elahi decided that if he had to be subject to this kind of monitoring, why not put his whole life online? So he hacked his cell phone to connect to an ankle bracelet to continually record his position on a map. He put up photographs online--hundreds of them, so that he couldn't be accused of digitally altering any of them.

Basically he is responding to the request for surveillance by providing total surveillance: the meals he eats, his bank records, his daily journeys from one place to another. In a way, this both satisfies and defeats the purpose of his monitors--a brilliant act of resistance.

The People's Map project

2006-11-02T09:29:00.000-05:00

Back in the Spring, the UK paper The Guardian wrote an influential article called "give us back our crown jewels" about access to geographical data. If you as a citizen pay (through taxes) for data collection and mapping why do you then have to buy--often at enormous cost--for that data again? And why is it under copyright so that you will be prosecuted for using it without permission?

The Ordnance Survey, the UK's national mapping body, has just such a cost structure in place in order to recover all its costs. The USGS by contrast recovers just 3% of its costs (approx.). US federal maps are also not copyrighted which means other companies can take them and repackage them--and sell them. It also means individual users don't need to worry about posting USGS maps online in blogs or wherever.

But the Guardian article is part of a growing movement--call it the People's Map project--to provide alternative, copyright free versions of the same data. The paper set up a website that documents some of this activity. For example, some people are using GPS and the web to recreate the UK's system of post codes. Other people are carrying GPS receivers on London Underground trains in order to map the whole system (LU are well known for protecting their famous map and sending cease and desist letters).

In geography we have the academia-based People's Geography project, a great idea that has never really taken off. But this emerging series of People's Map projects, being widely distributed and done by thousands of people has a much better chance of changing the data landscape.

Another example is the Counter Cartographies group. These guys are interested in providing alternative ways of showing landscapes and places. They recently made a "disorientation map" that was given out to incoming freshmen at UNC Chapel Hill. The map challenges students' beliefs and gets them to look at their campus and local environment through a slightly disturbing lens. For example, ways in which the economy is based on SLJs (shitty little jobs) and lack of a living wage. Must have been quite a surprise for these students!

Disorientation map zoomify version

The People's Map project is just a name for all these efforts, and while they're not necessarily connected or even aware of each other's existence, they nevertheless share similar goals and hopes. Nobody's in charge of it; it's self-organized.

If the netroots can have an effect on the modern political landscape, can the People's Map project have an effect on the actual landscape?

Micro-politics, micro-voting, micro-geography

2006-11-02T07:46:00.000-05:00

In these last few days before the election on Tuesday, all the talk is of micro-politics. Going door to door to get out the vote. Having micro-maps down to the household level. I was reminded of this again by a story on NPR Morning Edition this morning, which looked at a close race in Iowa.

Micro-politics is all about having fantastically detailed maps of the neighborhood which indicates whether someone is likely to vote, and if so, whether they will vote for your candidate. We're talking block-level politics here, not the usual maps you see online, which only go down to the voting district level.

When I was younger, my father ran for city council a couple of times. We would make this large, extremely detailed map of the voting district and mark off houses that we had canvassed. Likely voters would be colored in two or three colors depending on which party thay had said they would vote for. On election day we could visit these houses and make sure they had voted (offering rides for example to the elderly if necessary).

My father died about nine years ago and I wish I had that map today. As I remember it, it was huge, the size of the whole desktop and colored in by hand in pencils. It had (to me) cryptic annotations and notations. I suppose it had been obtained from the city planning office. Of course, it was all on paper, not computer. There's a certain physicality to maps that can't be replicated on the computer. In fact, their bulkiness and size is part of that, not an inconvenience. So if you can't fold a map ("shut" it), don't worry, you're having a genuine mapping experience!

Well I guess this entry has veered a bit from my original point. Never mind!

New Scientist: Computer learns "mapmaking"

2006-10-31T07:51:00.000-05:00

New Scientist is carrying a report that a computer can learn mapmaking:

Walter Bischof and Jun Zhou, computer scientists at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and Terry Caelli from the Australian National University in Canberra, created the new computer program, which learns to detect and track new features such as roads on standard aerial photographs.
Initially, a human mapmaker proceeds manually, using mouse clicks to trace a road on a photograph. The computer program tracks the operator's steps and compares them to its own analysis of the aerial image.

It's interesting that the report calls what is essentially digitizing "mapmaking"! Whatever happened to all the other aspects of mapping, such as design, projection choice, scale, generalization, etc, just to name a few of the technical issues?

Also, if maps are essentially propositions, as John Krygier and Denis Wood argued at last week's NACIS meeting, can a completely computer-made map still be a proposition? A little devil's advocate question for Halloween!

BBC: Power of maps

2006-10-29T11:03:00.000-05:00

BBC posting about the power of maps notes how useful mapping and aerial imagery can be, as well as the usual worries about invasions of privacy.

One police department in the US would like to superimpose GPS coordinates of its officers on maps.

"We have found what we believe is just the right balance between being able to see the things we need to see to save lives, and not being able to invade privacy in any way," said Dante Pennacchia from Pictometry.
"So we can't see faces, we can't see number plates, we can't identify a person. And we don't want to."

I have been arguing for a while that opposing privacy to functionality/security is a losing battle but you do notice that that's the way it's always framed.

NACIS video

2006-10-29T10:39:00.000-05:00

A bit of a Ubikcan experiment... here is Susan P. from NACIS as Glenda the Good Witch!

Tradesports update, Oct 29: 36.3%

2006-10-29T08:47:00.000-05:00

The latest Tradesports figures indicate a hold at about the same probabality as last time:

36.3%

As always, this means the chances that the GOP will retain control of the House of Representatives are 36.3%.

Interestingly, they are now offering bets on the number of seats to be gained by the Democrats. For example, will the Dems. win over 15 seats? Closing price: 67% (the market says there is a 67% chance they will gain 15 seats or more; the number required to achieve control of the House).

NACIS pics!

2006-10-24T19:49:00.000-05:00

Finally, here are the NACIS pics.

Click the sleeping Executive Director picture!

Tradesports Update: 35%

2006-10-24T13:32:00.000-05:00

Tradesports update for October 24.

Chances of GOP retaining the House of Representatives:

35%

"Axis of Evil" projection

2006-10-24T10:31:00.000-05:00

Back from NACIS, but where are the pictures? Still to be uploaded and sorted. I also got some footage of Lou Cross, the Executive Director snoring in a chair.

Anyway, on the way up we were discussing a new projection which should be made, but, as far as I know has not yet been done.

This is the "Axis of Evil" projection. A close approximation is given above, but on the proper "AxE" projection, the line connecting the three evil states (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) should be absolutely straight.

Furthermore, the "Outposts of Tryanny" should be placed on either side of the line. Unfortunately, the "Outposts" include Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe and Myanmar (Burma) so this would be quite a distorted map.

It would be nice to see it though.

Off to NACIS

2006-10-12T10:21:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I leave for the NACIS conference, held this year in Madison WI. This will be my 20th anniversary of attending NACIS conferences (my first was Philadelphia in 1986) although I haven't gone to all 20.

I'll try and take some pics of famous NACite people, let you know the "state of the beer" in Madison and attend something called a "fish-fry" on Friday...

Geowankers gather in San Francisco

2006-10-12T10:15:00.000-05:00

Heh. When I saw this headline from Adena I thought she was referring to the upcoming AAG meeting.

Tradesports update for Thurs Oct. 12: 39%

2006-10-12T09:42:00.000-05:00

Conventional wisdom on the GOP retaining the House of Reps. is currently trading at

39%

on Tradesports.

Cyberspace shock horror! Blogger and Ubikcan go down!

2006-10-12T09:38:00.000-05:00

Shockwaves spread through cyberspace today as Google-owned Blogger went down for over three hours! Ubikcan and many other blogs were knocked out.

Google later blamed the outage, which affected Ubikcan and many of the blogosphere's most popular blogs on a database error.

ESRI losing out to open source?

2006-10-09T15:35:00.000-05:00

As I blogged about a year ago (here, and later here and here) open source software represents a potentially more democratic and well, open means to pursue mapping.

In this context James Fee's post today stating that four ESRI "MVPs" are turning from ESRI web-related software to open source software is significant. He seems pretty clued in to the inside story of ESRI usage. Although 9.2 has some interesting features it seems it's just too late and people have gone open source, or people are actually finding open source to be better. (They've not rejected ESRI, just the web 2.0 stuff, ArcIMS etc.).

So here we have a data point about GIS being behind the curve on the new mapping trends; open source, map mashups etc.

More examples and discussion of this would be good.

Tradesports update for Sun. Oct 9: 44.3%

2006-10-08T13:25:00.000-05:00

Between now and the election it might be fun to have a Tradesports update on Dems taking back the House of Representatives. Last time (Sept. 19, 2006) there was just over a 50% chance of GOP retaining control.

Today that's down to 44.3%. Anything below 50% indicates a Dem take-over of the House:

The fall-off started on Sept. 30th, before the Foley (R-FL) sex scandal, and continued through it:

There's a slight uptick yesterday.

I also noted several weeks ago that odds on GOP retention of the Senate were at 80%, where they've been all year, and wondered if anything could break that. Well looks like Foley has:

The Senate is now at 71.7%

(They've also started a line of whether Hastert will resign before the election: 10% chance right now if you want to get in!)

Does it matter where you get your news?

2006-10-08T12:15:00.000-05:00

How much does it matter where you get your news? Aren't all news outlets equal in the grand scheme of things--providing reporting and facts while we make up our own minds about things from an informed perspective? This is the common view of many people, but it's hardly true at all.

Most media markets provide only one choice of newspaper these days, which in turn are usually part of a larger chain. And those chains are themselves owned by an even smaller group of mega-corporate companies (eg., Viacom, Bertelsmann, News Corp.).

For example, the Atlanta Journal Constitution is owned by Cox Enterprises, a private company owned by two of Cox's daughters (and two of the richest women in America, worth over $10 billion each). It also owns 15 TV stations (ABC, Fox, CBS, NBC etc.) and of course cable/Internet (Cox Communications).

Well, perhaps like me you don't subscribe to a newspaper. What about TV/cable? There's more choice here right? Yes, to some extent. But there are two problems: 1) not all TV is watched equally (ratings) and 2) we find the same damn companies again (GE, Viacom, AT&T)!

An interesting article in yesterday's Independent provides some insight into the most popular TV news stations, Fox News. As you know, Fox plays a little game whereby they claim to be impartial while actually being ideologically Republican (their anchor on election night 2000 was Bush's first cousin!). Fair enough, most press follows some line or other (although unlike Fox they don't usually try to dupe their viewers).

Turns out though, that Fox News viewers are not only getting an ideological slant, but they're not even getting informed:

The Fox News formula may be good for ratings, but its effect on the public has been little short of toxic. A University of Maryland poll taken six months after the Iraq invasion demonstrated that Fox News viewers were more ignorant about world affairs than any other category of news consumers, but also had a stronger belief than anyone else in how well informed they were.

It's this kind of thing of course that gives legs to John Stewart and Stephen Colbert (who invented the idea of "truthiness"--things that aren't true but should be, such as a link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda--as a direct outcome of Fox's style). So if you watch Fox News, you're actually becoming relatively dumber and less competitive on the job market.

There's a small bit of hope however:

Interestingly, the pendulum is now starting to swing against Fox – both the style and the content of the station. Its ratings are down 28 per cent on last year, and its hard to conclude that its hard-charging ideological support of a now deeply unpopular President Bush is not at least partly to blame....
The zeitgeist has moved against Fox in other ways, too. Its non-stop cheerleading for Bush has made it an easy target – almost too easy – for a new generation of news satirists who have popped up on another cable station, Comedy Central. First Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show, and then his acolyte Stephen Colbert, who has broken out on his own and also delivered a brilliantly subtle anti-Bush routine at this year's White House Correspondents' dinner, have made regular and merciless fun of the most prominent Fox News hosts.

(To paraphrase Katha Pollitt in the Nation: "live by Jesus, die by Jesus".)

So not all news is equal--and not just in perspective, but in quality and informational content. Even if Fox News does go in decline (as one would hope) we're still left with the problem of the narrow overall range of the major news providers.

While the Internet obviously provides a much wider range of perspectives (just about as wide as the number of people with access to the Internet) there are no equivalents to big media (of course this may be a good thing). While some sites do attract major league numbers of visitors (Daily Kos for example attracts about 16 million people per month), most are in the infamous "long tail" pulling in maybe dozens of visitors (this blog included!).

Those enamored of the long tail like to argue that it is the collectivity that counts. While no single blogs attract large numbers, collectively they do. And presumably collectively they can influence political opinion. This might be true, or it might not be. How many people read blogs, and of those people, how many confine themselves to the meat of the long tail, to the top blogs such as Daily Kos, the Huffington Post or on the other side, Instapundit?

I'd also like to see a study of how much the top blogs remain constant. Daily Kos has been a leader since I've been looking at ranking sites such as Technorati, but Instapundit seems to have fallen down (now at #27 from a place in the top ten). Also, left and liberal blogs seem to dominate the list more than right or conservative blogs.

I love blogs and think they represent a powerful potential change in the way politics is carried out. I especially love the "people powered" notion of more realistic choices of politicians, ones who aren't run by consultants and, on the left, not just being Republican-lite (eg Lamont and Tester).

But I think this is a potential change, and even if it happens may be more like the insertion of additional perspectives rather than a wholesale sea change. I hope it happens. But there's a lot of institutional weight stacked up against it, not least because of the flabby opposition offered by the Democratic Party, so that blogs can't leverage much support there, they have to do it all themselves. Romantic, perhaps, but also way, way more difficult.

Keeping track of developments in Washington DC

2006-10-07T10:27:00.000-05:00

If you find it difficult to keep up with all the news coming out of Washington DC, there's a great website you can use.

It's called Talking Points Memo and is run by Josh Marshall and a small staff. They have good contacts in DC and focus unabashedly on "muckraking" and uncovering wrong-doing (as you can imagine they have their hands full). Think of them as aggregating news just like Planet Geospatial does!

I've been reading it for about a year and their liberal perspective and balanced approach make them very attractive. They also have a site covering the latest polls and developments in elections (Election Central).

Mapping the War on Terror: Social Design and Trevor Paglen

2006-10-03T07:34:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Crowe at the Map Room notes that the Social Design website (see previous entry) has another entry in its "Mapping the War on Terror" series. This one is a billboard mapping selected CIA flights of the process known as "extraordinary rendition" which is the process where the USA transports people for interrogation to foreign countries where torture is legal.

The billboards were made along with Trevor Paglen, a PhD student in geography Berkeley. Paglen presented at the AAG Philadelphia meetings a few years ago, in a session organized by Derek Gregory (UBC) on 9/11 and terror. Paglen engages in something called "limit telephotography" in which he gets as close as he can to secret military installations and takes pictures.

He compares this process to taking pictures of Jupiter (the same kind of equipment is involved), but more difficult:

The cliché “out of sight, out of mind” often applies to human activity. And this is why many interesting sites are in exceptionally remote areas, often buffered by miles of restricted land. Some sites are so well hidden or cordoned-off that they are simply impossible to see with the unaided eye.

Paglen's work appears in two recent books, one of the CIA flights called Torture Taxi, and one in an edited volume by Gregory and his colleague at Berkeley, Allan Pred.

Why Democrats are Wrong

2006-09-24T14:20:00.000-05:00

Interesting post by georgia10:

But on those issues which cut to the core of our democracy--on illegal wiretapping, signing statements, torture, etc.--Democrats in general have let us down. Whether it's being AWOL and letting faux "infighting" between Republicans define the debate, or whether it's failing to explain an issue properly to the American public so that we can get those poll numbers on our side, it's a sad fact that we have all but abandoned several issues of huge constitutional and social significance.

I agree. Where are Democrats on warrantless wiretaps? Surveillance of Americans? Why did so few align themselves with Russ Feingold earlier this year when he proposed censuring Bush for lying to Congress? Where were they this week when the administration succeeded in getting the right to torture? Why haven't they tried to widen the debate, and resisted the framing of Iraq as being part of the war on terror? (I don't mean Clinton, he's not in office.)

Being in the minority, what they used to call the "loyal opposition" means bringing an alternative view that you can lay out. It means, well, opposing the administration. It doesn't mean being weak and scared, it means speaking out and resisting.

What's so difficult about saying "I oppose torture"?

Clinton on Fox News

2006-09-24T13:17:00.000-05:00

They're calling this the "Clinton smackdown." Whatever your opinions of Clinton (and personally, I think he squandered many opportunities and adopted too many neoliberal policies) it's interesting how effectively he deals with the questions thrown at him; many of them stemming from the misleading ABC program The Pathway to 9/11.

His replies are bold, even aggressive, and have certainly energized a lot of people (nearly 500 comments after the transcript). Poor old Chris Wallace!

Clinton's comments are a timely reminder of facts that are often conveniently forgotten or obscured by the current administration. For example, Clinton highlights Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies, and its central charges that President Bush dropped the ball on terrorism prior to 9/11, and that after 9/11 Bush immediately diverted attention toward Iraq, even though there was no evidence of a connection to Al-Qaeda. Clarke was national security advisor for Bush when 9/11 occurred.

Clinton's appearance on a conservative tv channel is not likely to be often repeated, nor of course will it translate into equal representation on Sunday morning politics shows, nor aggressive questioning of administration officials. As a former president, Clinton can widen the debate, but don't forget that it is still extremely narrow.

For instance, the big news this week on the National Intelligence Estimate which concludes that the Iraq war has fueled terrorism (a story picked up around the world) directly contradicts the White House narrative. This is not some random finding; it was undertaken by the US's own intelligence agencies in April (16 of them). Presumably as Commander-in-Chief Bush is allowed to read this report, yet since April Bush has repeatedly claimed that things are going well and Al-Qaeda is being dismantled. He has not acknowledged the contradictory official findings of his own intelligence agencies. The Times observes that "Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field."

Yet the narrative is that we're doing fine, just stay the course, re-elect Republicans.

The Clinton interview, if it shows anything, shows how desperately we need to face up to reality on Iraq and terrorism. As Clinton said, read Clarke's book.

Screening for HIV

2006-09-23T11:10:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's news that the CDC is recommending HIV screening for people aged between 13-64 tended to overlook one key factor: the false positive rate.

No test is perfect, and the more people you test, the more false positives it will generate. A false positive is when the test indicates you have an infection, when really you don't.

Yesterday's recommendation will exacerbate this because it recommends testing for low-risk groups, where true positives are presumably rare. The rate of false positives to true positives will therefore be higher in this group. This means many healthy people will be told they have HIV.

Where the base rate of infection is low (say 0.01% as it is for women), it could be the case that for every truly identified person with infection, there will be 50 times as many identified who don't have HIV:

Interestingly enough, this situation is analogous to warrantless wiretaps. These wiretaps are a form of "data mining" which listen to our phone calls to find terrorists. They too will turn up thousands if not millions of false positives, that is, false leads that have to be traced down and dealt with--perhaps by forcibly conducting people to other countries to be tortured, perhaps just by using time and resources to check each lead.

To see why, let's do the numbers (this is based on an example developed by John Allen Paulos, and the New England Journal of Medicine article from which the graph above was taken. I'm not a mathematician so I hope I've interpreted things correctly).

Let's say that the HIV test is 99.5% accurate. So people with HIV will be found 99.5% of the time. That's great, it's pretty sensitive. Let's say out of every 200 people tested 1 person without HIV will also show positive (false positive rate of 0.005).

We also need to know the prevalence of a disease. Well, HIV varies by risk group. The CDC is proposing to test the entire adult population. I don't know the prevalence of HIV (although it is low).

Let's see. There are an estimated 1 million people with HIV/AIDS in this country. There are about 200 million people aged 14-65. If we test this age group, we will find 995,000 of the people with HIV if it is 99.5% accurate. But for every million tested it will indicate 5,000 people have HIV who don't. In a population of 200 million that's 1 million false positives. Too many.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine raised the issue of false positives as long ago as 1987:

Plans to test low-risk populations for HIV antibody generally ignore the possibility of false positive results. ... But before we establish a public policy of widespread screening, we should consider whether testing that is justified in the blood bank is also justified in other settings. If the false positive rate is not virtually zero, screening a population in which the prevalence of HIV is low will unavoidably stigmatize and frighten many healthy people.

Is a test rate of 99.5% realistic? If a positive result is obtained it is usual to carry out a second test. This can lower the false positive rate. But obviously even if it is cut to 100,000 or 10,000, we're still talking about huge numbers of people who will go through the worry and anxiety of being told they have HIV.

Wise words from the President on torture

2006-09-21T09:01:00.000-05:00

Former Pres. Bill Clinton, that is.

Yes, the "big dog" himself was interviewed on NPR this morning.

I think it's interesting that whatever you think of his politics, he has the effect of widening the debate and showing that we have an extremely narrow range of perspectives in politics (and the media) today.

On torture for example, he pointed out that not only is it against American values, but that it doesn't actually work because people just tell you what they want to hear. Ultimately of course it also endangers Americans captured overseas who might be subject to the same kinds of torture that the Bush administration has favored.

Certainly a breath of fresh air in the current confused debate.

Map mashup on corrupt members of Congress

2006-09-21T08:52:00.000-05:00

An interesting use of Google maps shows where the corrupt members of Congress come from.

The mashup was created by CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) on a new website. According to their website CREW acts in legal cases and seeks more open accountability through FOIA investigations.

The site, "Beyond Delay" has a list of the top 20 most corrupt members (17 Republicans and 3 Democrats). Both Senators and Representatives are included.

The map itself is pretty straightforward, but you can click on each tab and pull up the details on each person. For example, zooming to Montana gives us Sen. Conrad Burns (R). If you click on his tab, you can download a 9-page report where you can learn about his associations with Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff (who has himself pleaded guilty to bribing public officials, including at least one member of Congress).

The most corrupt state? California, with 5 corrupt members in the top 20! (4 GOP, 1 Dem.). Hey Cali! What's going on?

The democratization of cartography

2006-09-21T08:22:00.000-05:00

(Updated below)

Interesting blog from the University of Wisconsin-Madison observing that recent developments in cartography have brought about a "democratization" of the discipline.

Meaning, that map-making is gaining a populist appeal because its "powerful new tools" (they provide a link to Professor Mark Harrower's home page, shown above) allow more people to deal with spatial data.

What's interesting here is that this goes beyond just saying there are more map-making programs for everybody (map mashups and such). Harrower says that there are easy to use tools that help you deal with specific aspects of spatial data. The argument is that in the same way blogs have changed publishing, then these tools will change mapping. He mentions:

1. Data filtering (helps with the huge influx of spatial data out there)
2. Various design modules, eg ColorBrewer for choosing colors on the map
3. How to tackle dynamic change in your data
4. Generalizing data

All these tiny little tools do one thing. We're not talking ArcGIS here. Yes, they're all free. But I wonder if they can crack the attraction of getting one piece of software that does everything. At least that way you only have to remember one name and one way of doing things!

The potential of open-source mapping is high, but as yet unproven. I mean, some people don't even accept that blogs have changed anything (much less actually read them!).

Update. A similar article "New Directions in Mapmaking" in the Washington Times discusses the difference between traditional paper-based mapping and newer developments. It quotes a bunch of cartographers including Tanya Allison, professor and program coordinator of applied geography at Montgomery College in Rockville, Allen Carroll of the NGS, and John Hebert, chief of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress.

US kidnaps foreign citizen, sends to Syria to be tortured

2006-09-19T08:20:00.000-05:00

A Canadian panel has revealed that a Canadian citizen was abducted by the US while changing planes at JFK and sent to Syria where he was tortured and beaten with a metal cable.

The Canadian, who was held in a small cell in Syria for a year, has been exonerated. He was never charged or brought to trial. The report is scathing about the incident.

...its conclusions about a case that had emerged as one of the most infamous examples of rendition — the transfer of terrorism suspects to other nations for interrogation — draw new attention to the Bush administration’s handling of detainees. And it comes as the White House and Congress are contesting legislation that would set standards for the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.
“The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar’s case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion,” Justice O’Connor wrote in a three-volume report, not all of which was made public. “They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar’s case in a less than forthcoming manner.”

As usual, the lawyer Glenn Greenwald has pertinent commentary. This case in well known in Canada, yet I can't recall it ever being discussed in the US.

Polls: 9/11 politics of fear fizzles

2006-09-19T08:12:00.000-05:00

Apropos the previous entries analyzing the political exploitation of fear in this country, new polls indicate the public have rejected that argument after a brief 9/11 uptick.

The graph above is from the online betting site Tradesports, and shows the likelihood of the GOP retaining the House has resumed a months-long free-fall, with a closing price of just 50.6 (ie., there is a 50.6% chance of retaining the House). Tradesports correctly called the electoral votes in all 50 states in the last election, as well as 33 of 34 Senate races (source).

You can see this more clearly if we look at the trading for the last month which has almost all been below 50%:

Heavy trading starting ~~9/22~~ 9/12 pushed it upwards but that has since fallen off.

(However, the Senate is currently trading at around an 80% chance of GOP retention as it has been all year. It will be interesting to see if there's a break in the odds there.)

And a bevy of polls, notably Rasmussen put Bush below where he was before 9/11. He now has a 0.71 favorability/unfavorability rating (anything below 1.0 indicates unfavored: 41% approve, 58% disapprove).

Rasmussen also moved three state Senate races out of the toss-up category into the Democratic column: Ohio, Rhode Island, and Montana. They now peg it as 49 GOP seats and 48 Dem. seats with just 3 in play.

If you believe in rejecting the politics of fear, these developments are good news. But there's still 7 weeks till election day!

Security Letters

2006-09-17T20:25:00.000-05:00

How's this for some political analysis. Which country is referred to here:

There was no difficulty in obtaining the counter-signature, since the psychiatrists regarded themselves not so much as doctors--in the sense we understand it today--as civil servants concerned with public hygiene: that is, their job was to supervise whatever was in a state of disorder, whatever presented a danger. In the end it is this notion of "danger," which was introduced at that time, theorized in psychiatry and criminology...that you find again in Soviet legislation. This legislation may say: you're claiming that a patient is being put in prison (or a prisoner put in hospital), but that's not at all the case! Someone is being confined because he has been "dangerous." They even reached the point of describing as an offense in the penal code the fact of being perceived as dangerous...

We haven't reached that point here yet. But in the British, American, Italian, German and French practice of psychiatry and of penal law, we see that the notion of "danger" is still the guiding thread. And all these things--police, psychiatry--are institutions intended to react to danger.*

Emphasis in original. Actually it's the French writer Michel Foucault talking about 19th century France and something called "lettres de cachet" which people could write to get other people (eg., family members who were bugging them, or your enemies) put away in institutions.

I like the twist at the end. If you're perceived as dangerous you're breaking the law. And dangerousness is judged by what group you are deemed to be a member of. There is a keen relevancy of this political thinking in America today. Lettres de cachet were originally only issued by or on behalf of the king, the sovereign.

So what happened? Well instead of committing an offense against the sovereign, you were now deemed to commit it against society. The end of pure sovereignty meant its replacement by society, by a "people" living together and sharing in its benefits and disadvantages. It also meant a switch from trhe criminal as someone who has committed a crime, to a criminal as someone who has not committed a crime, but is risky. Modern society must be protected then, from, well, from risk and dangerous people, either as individuals or increasingly as members of certain risky groups (the mad, bad, deviant, abnormal). Risky groups threaten homeland security (security of the group's territory).

This meant the need for surveillance in order to monitor these potentially risky groups. Surveillance is therefore a necessary invention of the modern state. But whereas we get most bent out of shape by the thought of tracking individuals, the greater impact of the modern logic has been in surveillance of groups, populations, and races.

This is one explanation for the development and persistance of racism, anti-immigration legislation and speech, the incursion of security procedures into everyday life, the politics of fear, and of course warrantless wiretaps and other mass surveillance.

*From the book Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p.188.

(See previous entry).

Immigration raids

2006-09-17T09:51:00.000-05:00

As a resident of Georgia, the following Associated Press (AP) story hits close to home and captures the competing feelings we have about immigration, small towns, low salaries, and employment.

AP:

STILLMORE, Ga. (Sept. 15) - Trailer parks lie abandoned. The poultry plant is scrambling to replace more than half its workforce. Business has dried up at stores where Mexican laborers once lined up to buy food, beer and cigarettes just weeks ago.
This Georgia community of about 1,000 people has become little more than a ghost town since Sept. 1, when federal agents began rounding up illegal immigrants.

The sweep has had the unintended effect of underscoring just how vital the illegal immigrants were to the local economy.

Here is a photo they provide that cites the "12 million" illegal immigrants figure that has already been questioned by John Allen Paulos (because it's based on a dubious claim that 3 million additional illegals enter this country every year).

Click for larger picture

One of the comments that struck me is how the local community, despite being Republican, recognized the contribution of the workers:

The B&S convenience store, owned by Keith and Regan Slater, the mayor's son and grandson, has lost about 80 percent of its business.

"These people come over here to make a better way of life, not to blow us up," complained Keith Slater, who keeps a portrait of Ronald Reagan on the wall. "I'm a die-hard Republican, but I think we missed the boat with this one."

The other issue, quite frankly, is the appalling low wages offered by the main local employer, a chicken canning factory. They pay $6.75 an hour, while a local Wal-Mart (exercising its typical monopoly practices) pays only $5.60 (barely above minimum wage). Many of the commentators on this story repeat the charge that immigrants drive down wages.

Georgia's response? Increase anti-immigration leglislation in the Republican-controlled state government. Increase the difficulty of voter ID.

Here's an interesting perspective putting it into a more global context, a talk by Dr. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco of New York University:

One of the biggest issues that arises in the immigration debate is that immigrants are bad for the economy because they drive down wages, but Suarez-Orozco said that economist have found that, “The cities that have done best, in terms of wages, are the cities that have had large flows of new arrivals. The cities that have done the worst in terms of wages are the cities that don’t have immigrants.”

It’s a problem of supply and demand, the professor contended, because if the U.S. economy demands it the laborers will come, whether through legal or illegal means.

This view is close to the structuralist view I discussed in an earlier post, regarding neoliberalism. Whether Suárez-Orozco operateds within the neoliberalist philosophy or critiques it I can't say from this article.

New device lets drivers communicate wirelessly between cars

2006-09-16T18:36:00.000-05:00

Unintended consequences dept:

Japan is user-testing a new device that lets drivers send messages wirelessly to other cars. This doesn't appear to be the "geddout of my way you idiot!" kind of message though, but using GPS and in-car navigation systems to let you know a car or hazard is coming up nearby.

This apparently is thought to be a good idea in Japan because half of all cars there have GPS, compared to 10% in the USA & Europe.

I see this hasn't prevented the driving masses from suggesting their own, well, rude things they've apparently been waiting to say to other drivers!!

Muslim candidate asked if he "associates with terrorists"

2006-09-16T09:09:00.000-05:00

MN-05

A candidate for Congress who is an African-American Muslim was asked if he "associates with terrorists" in a debate with his opponent.

Keith Ellison won the Democratic primary (DFL) this week in a safe Dem. seat and would be the first Muslim in Congress. His opponent, Alan Fine, has unleashed a barrage of attacks saying that he (Fine) is "offended as a Jew" by Ellison, and putting it about that Ellison associates with terrorists.

Apparently just a few weeks ago Fine was reasonable enough to get the respect of local journalist Doug Grow, but now Grow says that Fine has "lost any claim to moderation, thoughtfulness or originality" (a reference to the fact that Fine might be parroting GOP talking points).

Whoever is responsible for these statements, it is sad to see them reproduce stereotypes and ethnic/religious profiles. This is not an isolated comment or slip of the tongue from Fine. In general if a candidate does say something racial or offensive, look if there is a pattern of such remarks or behavior. If not, take it with a pinch of salt. But with repeated, extremist comments, as in this case, well, the game is up.

A related issue this week comes from the comments made by the Pope. Although the Pope seemed to imply that Islam has spread itself through violence, he has since issued a semi-apology:

"The Holy Father is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers," Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in a statement."

But the larger issue is that Catholicism has very favorable official doctrine on Islam from Vatican II, as Juan Cole points out. Cole quotes the following:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself, merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth (5), who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes great pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgement when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this Sacred Synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

These are fine "catholic" sentiments. The BBC website provides a clue that this Pope is very much against violence in religion. And that's fine. But sometimes you have to clearly recognize (and state) that few religions can historically claim to be free of violence. That being said isn't it better to decry all violence, as well as not incidentally to recognize that violence comes in many forms (including economic violence, which kills just as assuredly).

On the other hand, people like Fine (or, as Minnesotans suspect, Karl Rove) are doing the opposite and are stirring hatreds for political reasons. They can only deserve our condemnation.

Culture of corruption dept.

2006-09-15T14:09:00.000-05:00

Who said this about which Senator:

"[T]he congressman is more confident than ever that he will be vindicated in this matter. . . . the congressman will not under any circumstances plead guilty to a crime he did not commit"...

"Congressman X has said from day one that he has done absolutely nothing illegal, improper or unethical." (May 8, 2006).

Your answer: It was said by Brian Walsh, a spokesman for Congressman Bob Ney (R-Ohio). Ney pleaded guilty today to corruption arising from the Jack Abramoff Republican lobbyist scandal and faces up to ten years in prison (update: although prosecutors are asking for 27 months).

Ney, a six-term Congressman represented OH-18, but resigned in August. The district has gone from safe Republican to toss-up. The replacement Republican candidate by the way, state Senator Joy Padgett, was "handpicked" by Ney, and won her runoff election yesterday.

Fear of a BlackBerry Planet (redux)

2006-09-15T08:38:00.000-05:00

Fear of a BlackBerry Planet

Risk and hazard assessment are integral parts of geography as evidenced by this recent job announcement from the Geography department at Durham University in the UK:

Durham University seeks to appoint SIX, five-year RCUK Fellows to join the newly established Institute for Hazard and Risk Research (IHRR), a major University interdisciplinary research institute led by Durham’s RAE5* Geography Department. The appointments may start on or after 1st November 2006, subject to standard probationary conditions, will be converted into
permanent lectureship positions at the end of the fellowship.

Applicants are invited for fellows in the following fields:
Risk and Technology Risk,
Security and Terror
Volcanic Hazards and Risk
Landslide Hazard and Risk
Hazards and Risks of Climate Change (x2)

As I mentioned in a recent post however it turns out we are bad at assessing risk 1) because it gets politicized, 2) because we're poor odds thinkers , and 3) because governments depend on security threat assessments in order to function.

Here's a follow-up. After the London incident with the threat from liquids, several experts have stated that the threat was over-stated. According to a new essay in Salon:

1. The allegations were "substantially" exaggerated
2. The plot's leaders had been under surveillance for over a year
3. They had not even succeeded in making explosives from the liquids
4. An expert on explosives at the University of Rhode Island observes that the creation of the kinds of liquid bomb sought is extremely difficult and hard to produce on an aircraft (it takes several hours for example and gives off noxious fumes, as well as requiring precise temperature controls). Here's a paper on this, which I don't have the training or background to interpret.

But that's my point. A lot of our view of such matters is based on Hollywood movies and the kinds of car chase scenes that end in an immediate fireball when the cars crash. (When I was a teenager I was a witness to a small motorbike accident--the guy was knocked off and broke his arm. My overriding fear was that the motorbike, lying on its side by the road, would somehow explode, even though it was not on fire.) It's given to very few of us to make an informed interpretation of the odds of this threat, and so we accept what we're told.

With the information now coming out (not just in Salon but in the New York Times and from British officials saying it was all exaggerated) we might reasonably ask why passengers and the American public have not reacted against the new regulations banning toothpaste and causing fear of a a BlackBerry. As Salon asks, where's the outrage? We're flying in basically the five-hour equivalent of a medium-security penitentiary.

The Salon article (by Patrick Smith) is one of the few I've seen that does any kind of critical, independent thinking about these issues. Perhaps the Durham Fellowships, which were posted on a critical geography listserv, can help encourage more of it.

But I'm not sure we can wait that long. We need to take up the issue of security and threat for ourselves, not to mention on November 7.

Electoral-Vote site back in operation

2006-09-14T14:12:00.000-05:00

In 2004 the Electoral-vote site was one of the most popular places to go to for information and maps on the presidential race. Now it's back, predicting the 2006 Senate races.

He has a handy little icon you can stick on your blog:

Social design: mapping the war on terror

2006-09-14T08:41:00.000-05:00

Via atlas(t), a link to a site calling itself "social design." What is social design? It has relevance to cartography. Social design projects:

are affordable and sustainable
are made of renewable materials
use energy from renewable sources and increase energy efficiency
reduce consumption and waste, are reuseable or recyclable
are produced and developed locally
are universally accessible to people of all ages, abilities, and physical conditions
facillitate mobility, communication, and participation in civic life
decentralize political power and facillitate transparency and accountability.

As far as I can make out then it is design that affects or changes the world -- a political intervention. In some recent postings the site has had entries on "mapping the war on terror" such as this samizdat poster, originally from 2003. The icons are made form cut out pieces of paper pasted on to a found map of Manhatten.

Fear of a Blackberry

2006-09-13T06:35:00.000-05:00

First it was an unclaimed bottle of water, now a Blackberry PDA left behind by a passenger.

Flights in the US are being diverted for both reasons. Yesterday a United Airlines flight to California from Atlanta was diverted to Dallas after a Blackberry was found on board. A spokesman for SFO airport said the plane was searched and nothing unusual was found. It was just a precaution.

I wonder by what calculus does a Blackberry constitute an actionable threat? How do you get to that point where it seems reasonable to respond by diverting a jet plane? When you have had fear instilled, you're afraid of ordinary events.

One of my memories of the days following 9/11 is of a news story of a woman who worked in a cafe in Georgia who called the authorities after two men "looked at her" suspiciously, and were dark of skin. After the men had been tracked down and detained it turned out they were med students on their way to a conference in Florida. Yes, that's right, they were our future doctors (they didn't even recall the woman).

What tools or avenues of understanding do we have that could account for our situation? What would happen if we assembled our best minds and asked them to explain risk, threat and fear? While I'm no expert, it seems to me that there are three possible categories of explanation:

1. The political explanation. In John Dean's new book, Conservatives without Conscience, he argues that fear is constructed or manufactured by politicians seeking to strengthen their power. (Dean you may recall was in the Nixon administration.) For Dean this is particularly true of conservatives who have displayed alarming tendencies over the past 15 years toward an authoritarian policy and way of life. Dean writes:

Frightening Americans...has become a standard ploy for Bush, Cheney, and their surrogates.
They add a fear factor to every course of action they pursue, whether it is their radical foreign policy of preemptive war, their call for tax cuts, their desire to privatize social security, or their implementation of a radical new health care scheme. This fearmongering began with the administration's political exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy, when it made the fight against terrorists the centerpiece of its presidency (p. 172).

Former vice-President Al Gore has made similar remarks in a keynote speech he gave in 2004 (printed in Social Research, vol. 71(4), 779-793). Noting that terrorism has the aim of instilling fear, Gore addressed the question of whether the Bush administration has deliberately leveraged that fear for political gain--accusing Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, of being unpatriotic, for example, and of diverting attention away from a poorly performing economy (and government).

Inasmuch as politics is a discourse, if this is where our fear comes from, then it can be resisted and countered, both by those at the everyday level (found a Blackberry? well, losers weepers, finders keepers), and by those with a pulpit. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC yesterday had sharp words for this administration's politicizing of 9/11:

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.
The President -- and those around him -- did that.

Similarly, Dan Froomkin, writing in the Washington Post--again, on 9/11--observed:

What's also telling, as usual, is what Bush didn't say yesterday, and doesn't say, period.
He doesn't say we won't allow ourselves to be terrorized, and we won't be afraid. (That would run counter to the central Republican game plan for the mid-term election.) He doesn't say that in our zeal to fight the terrorists, we won't give up the qualities that make America great. He acknowledges no mistakes, he calls for no sacrifice, he refuses to reach out to those who disagree with him.

2. The cognitive/statistical/evolutionary explanation. Perhaps we have evolved a cognitive system that is terribly bad at assessing risk and threat, at least in terms of judging relative uncertainties. In experiments conducted during the 1970s and 80s, the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people are pretty bad at making judgements where probability is involved.

Unfortunately this covers a lot of ground, and includes scientific judgements of statistical likelihood as well.

Kahneman and Tversky showed, for example, that people tend to ignore or be unaware of the prior probability or "base rate" likelihood of something occuring. Let's say we are given the information: "Steve is very shy and withdrawn, helpful, but not very interested in people." Is he more likely to be a farmer, a librarian, an airline pilot, a salesman, or physician?

The fact that there are many more farmers than librarians (say; K&T provided base-rates in their empirical studies) enters into the probability of which job he has. But people don't think like that. They construct a cognitive "frame" or scenario in which the qualities given are adduced to be more "librarian-like" than "farmer-like."

Similarly, today it was announced that the CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb would step down. Apparently the Justice Department is moving to investigate whether the company prevented a generic equivalent of one of its big money-makers from coming on to the market. In two separate news reports on this story it was also pointed out that the CEOs of Merck and Pfizer had also stepped down or been forced out in the last couple of years. In one story these developments were used to conclude that big pharma is currently in trouble.

But is that a justifiable conclusion? Not until we know the base rate of CEO turnover. Also reported today for instance was the story that HP is losing its CEO.

Another thing we tend to do is misunderstand chance. In coin tosses of a fair coin, which is more likely:

a). H-T-H-T-T-H
b). H-H-H-T-T-T
c). H-H-H-H-T-H?

Most people say a). is more likely than b). is more likely than c). In fact, because these are small runs (sample sizes) they are all equally likely. (A related phenomenon is the gamber's fallacy.)

It can also be shown that we assess likelihood or risk of something by how easily it is to bring instances of it to mind. So if you know of someone who died of heart failure, you are more likely to elevate the risk of heart failure more generally. In like manner, if you can bring to mind a terrorist attack, you are more likely to accept that terrorist attacks are likely.

Another bias in thinking occurs when we are given an initial number or attribute and we get fixated on this number even when we are allowed or encouraged to change it. So in an experiment where people had to judge the percentage of African nations in the United Nations, for example, a random number was generated with a roulette wheel. People were then asked to say if this number was too high or low, and allowed to change it. People for whom the roulette wheel had assigned a high number also resulted in a high estimate of the percentage. And vice versa. The initial number "sticks" even when we reject it as wrong and can change it.

These findings indicate that for a lot of the time people think heuristically and with "biases." This can be the case for trained statisticians as well as lay-people. For example, in a 2000 study, people recognized and accepted that the estate tax, if rescinded, would benefit only the top 1% of earners in this country. However, 39% of them thought that they were already in the top 1% or would be there "soon" (source)!

In summary, people seem to make judgements based on heuristics that capture an overall "frame" of the problem, rather than strict statistical probabilities. If the predominant frame is changed, their judgements could perhaps also be changed.

3. Radical-structuralist explanation. In this explanation deep-seated structural changes are identified as the causes of risk, threat and fear. For example, the ever-present need for capital to colonize new domains in order to make higher profits (just maintaining productivity is insufficient, profits must actually always grow--nobody wants stagflation). There is a fear that the money will no longer be coming in as fast as it needs to. This leads to a general nervousness which is reflected in the stock market. Notice how performance is actually less about production anymore, but about the finances--the financialization of the economy (stock value for instance, see Enron).

However, a stronger explanation, related to the first explanation (that fear is useful to sustain political advantage for the right) is that concentrating on threat and dangerousness is easier for government to operate. This idea, developed by the French thinker Michel Foucault and colleagues in the 1970s, is part of a political philosophy that is sometimes called "governmentality." In this case however, fear is not the exclusive strategy of conservatives but rather is inbuilt into the modern (neo)liberal state.

A related idea was suggested by Ulrich Beck in the early 1990s in his book Risk Society. Beck argues that modernity itself is one dominated by a philosophy of risk. If risk is threat, then we need a bevy of experts, preferably technical experts, to tell us about it (a point also made by Foucault).

A key component of this philosophy (adopted at various times according to Foucault, but increasingly from the 17th century onwards, so that it is actually a constitutive part of modern societies--take insurance for example) is that instead of dealing with subjects -- individuals -- government now dealt with groups or more accurately with "populations."

Along with this therefore came a suite of tools and techniques (including mapping) that dealt with the population. Statistics, for one (invented in the 19th century for reasons of political economy, I paraphrase a bit). The thematic map, for another. And surveillance for yet another. Birth rates, death rates, age of marriage, number of children (collectively known as biopolitics) -- all of these became of interest in order to gain the security of the state.

Now the state could look at groups and assign them a risk factor (eg., Muslims and mosques, which the FBI looked at after 9/11). If you were a member of a group your dangerousness could be assessed. Note that this reverses the assumed practice of the criminal justice system. We assume that we are of interest to the criminal justice system to the extent that we have committed a crime, that is, we come of interest after wrongdoing. That is, we are marked while guilty.

In the dangerousness/risk mode of government however, we become of interest before any wrongdoing. That is, we are marked while innocent. This is the same practice as stereotyping and profiling (racial profiling for example).

Of course a lot of people reject profiling but there is no doubt that it is used in many areas of our lives, from geographical profiling (market segmentation companies for example, committing the ecological fallacy with every zipcode lookup!) to our .insurance rates -- not based on our personal attributes but the group (zipcode or age group or whatever) that we "belong" to, to the police pulling over drivers of a certain racial profile on the New Jersey turnpike ("DWB").

* * *

These three explanations of our current climate of fear, risk and threat are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For all I know they could all three be working. If they are at all relevant, I hope that they can provide us with insight into changing the current climate of fear. Unfortunately they don't come with instructions on how to do that.

The geography of life expectancy

2006-09-11T21:13:00.000-05:00

A new study (pdf) shows that there are marked geographical differences in your life expectancy. The differences are not solely attributable to race, income or health alone.

The map above shows differences in life expectancy according to the study. The upper two maps show life expectancies for blacks and the lower two for whites, by county.

This kind of study is interesting in that it shows that a health outcome is caused by multiple factors. Second, the authors concentrate on what they call the "eight Americas" (that is, where differences are most extreme. In this case, it is not surprising that there are differences when you look at the extremes (there usually are in any distribution), so I find that aspect less valuable/surprising.

What I think we can conclude is that health is not equally available to Americans, and that indeed it tends to be concentrated into the hands of a few. The majority of Americans outside this elite class are confined to shorter, less healthy lives.

The authors are admirably frank about discussing shortcomings in their data and methodology; shortcomings that are inherent in a large study such as this. They are realistic that for example, Asians may "return" to their country of origin if they are unhealthy and that this may lead to under-reporting of death rates in first generation Asian-Americans. A proportion of their data are therefore based on models and estimates.

Ellen Churchill Semple

2006-09-10T10:51:00.000-05:00

Semple in 1914

People of the Inquiry: Ellen Churchill Semple (1863 - 1932)

Ellen Churchill Semple was a well-known geographer who is often associated with the theory of environmental determinism, or the idea that human behavior was caused by the environment.

Semple's legacy continues to attract attention from geographers. This AAG session for example, takes issue with her characterization as (only) an environmental determinist, and suggests that she played a much richer role in geography (training many geographers, for example).

It's little known that Semple was one of the few women to play a role in the Inquiry, where she worked on the Austro-Italian border frontier, as well as Mesopotamia. She wrote a least four substantial reports for the Inquiry (#s 500-503):

#500 June 17, 1918: "An Abridgement of the Partition of Asiatic Turkey"
#501 June 3, 1918: "Report on the Partition of Asiatic Turkey"
#502 February 1, 1918: "Report on the Geography, Climate, Commerce, Transportation, Agriculture, Livestock, and etc., of Mesopotamia"
#503 March 13, 1918: "Report on the Strategic Character of the Austro-Italian Frontier"

(Inquiry reports are available from NARA.)

The Austro-Italian border was of course a major controversy at the Peace Conference, and Semple seems to have taken a largely pro-Italian position (that is, the one that eventually won out when Italy was awarded large tracts of territory at Austria's expense).

Semple was hired in late December 1917, when she was at the University of Chicago as an assistant to Douglas Johnson at a salary of $150 per month. She was 54 years old at the time.

One of her co-workers, for whom she had just completed Report #501 above penned this ps on a letter to Isaiah Bowman: "Dr Bowman, Miss Semple has done some remarkably good and quick work." Bowman wrote to her directly a few days later saying "may I add to his good words my own appreciation of your report [on Asiatic Turkey]...I read [it] through carefully and I think it is a splendid piece of work." Bowman followed up this personal letter with an internal one to the Inquiry Executive Committee (which he headed): "She is one of the most important members of the geographic team."

Semple did not work continuously for the Inquiry, but she was re-hired to work for Mark Jefferson in early September 1918, again at the salary of $150 a month. Jefferson was working on a population map of Europe (one of his interests; Jefferson was something of a pioneer of population mapping) and he set Semple to collecting data on city sizes--a somewhat lowly task.

In November, Bowman wrote a letter to Semple telling her rather obliquely that she had been cut from the Inquiry and would be traveling to Paris along with the rest of the team. In fact, the Paris contingent would consist entirely of men. Here are excerpts from this letter from which you may be able to judge Bowman's rather officious nature:

November 9, 1918
We have to begin immediately making our final arrangements. The staff of the organization must be cut down at once very considerably -- to at least a fourth or a fifth of the organization that we have maintained up to this time. So little time remains [the Inquiry would sail on December 4, 1918] that I have to act rather quickly, and I am therefore writing this letter at once so that you may make whatever adjustments are required under the circumstances.

It is not the thought of the Inquiry that its people should have their services discontinued immediately without making an adjustment in salary, and I am glad to state that the powers that be concur in this thought. Your salary will be continued until December 15th...your own part has been a large and important one, and for this I am authorized to express the thanks of the government authorities.

Believe me,
Sincerely yours
Isaiah Bowman

After the war, Semple was the first woman to become President of the AAG (in 1921). There is an annual Semple Day at the University of Kentucky which is now in its 34th year (Semple was from Kentucky).

In 1974 it was revealed that Semple had suffered from salary discrimination while at Clark University. In an article in the Professional Geographer, Mildred Berman printed an excerpt from Churchill's will, in which she revoked a clause promising a bequest to Clark on the grounds that her salary was deliberately reduced because she "was a woman without dependents." Semple estimated that by so reducing her salary compared to her less distinguished male colleagues, Clark saved $2,500 on her salary.

Innes Keighren, a Ph.D student at the University of Edinburgh, is currently do0ing a doctoral dissertation on Semple and her 1911 book, Influences of Geographic Environment.

When did abstract thinking begin?

2006-09-10T09:47:00.000-05:00

Ocher stone with coloring scraped out

Mapping involves abstract thinking of course; for example that one thing can represent another. A lot of scientists believe that in order to use things like color symbolism it must be attached to language.

Some recent work by Lawrence Barham of the University of Liverpool has pushed back the date at which humans might have started thinking abstractly to 200,000 years ago, double the previously accepted date. The exciting implication of this work is that perhaps this means language is equally as old.

You sometimes hear it said that mapping as an activity is almost a human universal, and some (eg., Brian Harley) have even said that it predates (written) language. While for many scholars the earliest known map is only 5000 years old (a clay tablet) or perhaps a wall painting from Turkey, this is obviously far short of 200,000 or even 100,000 BCE.

If you include paleolithic art such as the famous Lascaux caves that takes you back to around 15,000 BCE even if this could be considered a "map."

.
Lascaux cave paintings

Barham's work--if accepted--would force a reinterpretation of the earliest use of symbolic and abstract thought by humans. Perhaps it would also lead to a much older origin of mapping as well?

Edney's huge annotated bibliography of the history of cartography

2006-09-10T09:17:00.000-05:00

I'm finding this a little late, but it's well worth a notice. Matthew Edney (Director of the History of Cartography project) has published a massive annotated bibliography of the history of cartography (also available as a pdf).

The fun part of this is Edney's acerbic comments and opinions. For example:

With the failure of the models of cartographic communication, of the parallel to spoken language, and of the psychophysical approach to map design (effectively moribund by 1983), academic cartographers who were not hypnotized by digital technologies increasingly turned to semiology/semiotics (the study of sign systems) as a means to conceptualize maps.

In fact, a (small?) number of people would not quite accept that cognitive experiments with maps has become moribund, although with the retirement this year of two of its leading practitioners (Bob Lloyd and Ted Steinke) it is easier to make the case (though why 1983?).

Bad-boy Denis Wood gets his own section which produces the following observation from Edney:

In these three studies, Wood set out to puncture what he understands to be academic cartography’s fatuousness. With his consciously un-academic (even anti-academic) prose style, he skewered the academic field’s self-imposed restrictions concerning, respectively, map design and map design research (too dry, too stultifying), the relation of the map to the world (too dry, too pseudo-scientific), and map reading (too dry, too factual). In its place, Wood advocated a discipline that is truly engaged with its subject matter and not intent on defending some parody wrung dry of all color and poetry.

An excellent summary!

This is an updated bib. from his earlier hard to find 1998 version.

The present culture of fear

2006-09-06T10:36:00.000-05:00

Update: Arianna blogs her experiences that night, particularly citing Max Cleland as a hero.

When you sow the seeds of fear, then the result is likely to be a country made supine and weak. We should count up the number of stories such as this one in which we have now sunk so far to our knees that we react irrationally to a bottle of water:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- Air passengers from Charlotte to Little Rock, Arkansas, had to hurry off their plane Friday after someone found a suspicious liquid on board.
The flight landed at Little Rock as scheduled Friday afternoon. But about seven miles before it landed, a crew member reported two passengers with two bottles of liquid. Police, firefighters and the bomb squad were called in, but the liquid turned out to be water.

On Friday I was feeling well enough to walk up to our local highly regarded women's college, where Arianna Huffington was giving a talk about her new book On Becoming Fearless. It was very nice to be able to walk to such a cultural event and made me feel quite proud of my neighborhood. I don't live in a big city such as New York, Chicago or LA. Huffington is a good speaker, she had a positive message, and she spoke without pretensions. Her message was not that we can get rid of fear, but rather that fearlessness is the mastery of fear. At the start of her talk she cited the example of senator Max Cleland, and then surprise! Out he came and gave a short extemporare introduction for her.

When you live by fear, everything is a risk, and you feel the need to eliminate the risk. The alternative is to accept that life is indeed risky and not to let it run your life. Being fearless is an acquired skill (she cited the fact that she was at dinner last week and her daughter was at the beach with a friend and was supposed to call her. When she didn't she called her daughter's cell phone, her daughter's friend's cellphone and her daughter's friend's mother's cellphone--all without result--before realising that she was being driven by fear. Of course, her daughter soon called her).

Just as fear can be reduced, so it can be increased (she didn't say this, in fact her talk was explicitly non-political, but I think it follows both from what she was saying and from common sense). One powerful way to increase fear is to characterise certain things as dangerous. If those things are common (types of humans, say Muslims, or types of objects, say liquids) then it is likely that not only will fear be increased when those types or categories are encountered, but we will also tend to see and notice those categories of things more frequently, again, increasing fear.

These specific fears can be supplemented by authorities by non-specific and just general background fears, the causes of which we are not informed about, but asked to take on faith. the color-coding system is a good example of this, as is the output of local and national news programs purporting to examine fear, but in fact just providing more reminders of it.

What are some of the tricks for reducing your feelings of fear? One surprise: Huffington says she always makes sure she gets enough sleep. Huffington also said that you can gain strength from past denials of fear, once you do it (for example, in her case leaving her lover of seven years, the prominant British critic Bernard Levin) and coming to the USA. She also gave tghe example of writing, where you are your own worst critic and reconsider each and every sentence that you write. She finally adopted a technique where she would write a sentence, and if her internal fear-critic judged it badly, simply wrote a red question mark next to it and continued writing, coming back to the sentence if necessary later. In this way she acknowledged the fear, but was not incapacitated by it, and reassessed it later when the emotiuon wasn't quite as hot.

I'm sure there are other common sense techniques like this you can imagine (her talk was not really about these techniques but about examples of mastering fear, nor was it one of those useless self-help guides you see in the stores). The point is that the country right now is mastered by fear. Our leaders share the blame for this due to the way thay have deliberately produced and generated fear in this country. But they will only be successful if we allow them to continue to instil fear in us.

How we have fallen

2006-09-05T07:54:00.000-05:00

Most people may be aware that productivity has steadily increased over the last half century or so. In 1960 for example, the productivity index was just half what it is now.

But did you know that wages have steadily fallen since the early 1970s? In 1973 for example, real wages were $15.73 and in 2000 they were just $14.15 (per hour, in 2001 dollars).

The map above shows how incomes have dropped over the last six years, state by state. Only four states saw an increase, and some states saw drops as large as 12% in just six years.

In David Harvey's new book (A Brief History of Neoliberalism) he accounts for this with the so-called "Volcker shock." Paul Volcker was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank under President Carter and Reagan, and it was during the 1970s that the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began to assume prominance. Volcker radically raised interest rates. New Deal policies of full employment were dropped in favor of anti-inflationary policies, paid for with high interest rates.

Couple this with the deregulation that Reagan pursued (breaking the unions who had previously protected workers' income) and you've got the explanation. For example, the minimum wage was on a par with the poverty level in 1980 but was 30% below it in 1990 (it was last raised in 1996).

Those are some of Harvey's arguments. It's a very good (and brief) introduction to the shift to neoliberalism we have experienced in the US and UK, not to mention neoliberal trends in China and South America. It does leave one wondering how neoliberalism might be combatted or countered, though.

Men of the Inquiry: Armin Lobeck

2006-09-04T13:34:00.000-05:00

(This is one of an occasional series on the men and maps of the American Inquiry.)

Background.
Lobeck was one of the first men specially targeted to join the Inquiry in the early days (November 1917), the same year he got his PhD at Columbia (where Douglas Johnson was). His salary was to be a reasonably competitive $183 a month (Ellen Churchill Semple by contrast received $150 a month). Lobeck became professor of geology at Columbia in 1919 and stayed there the rest of his career.

Papers.
Lobeck's papers are held in at least three archives. Columbia University holds papers relating to his journey to Paris with the Inquiry, the National Archives contain his correspondence, maps, and papers relating to the inquiry and the American Commission to Negotiate Peace (the official name of the Inquiry in Paris), while the American Geographical Library in Milwaukee contains papers about his career more generally, including some correspondence while at sea on the way to Paris.

Joining the Inquiry.
After graduating with this PhD Lobeck was ordered through the Selective Service law to perform military service at Camp Dix, which caused some problems for the Inquiry. Bowman wanted him, and Walter Lippmann (the famous journalist) and Inquiry member was tasked with extracting Lobeck as quickly as possible. Copying Bowman's words, Lippmann telegrammed Ralph Hays at the War Department:

[Lobeck] can make a kind of map which we absolutely need to have made and there are only four men in the whole country who can make these maps. We shall need all of them. Try to arrange [his release] immediately as these maps are basic to all our work (Lippmann - Hays, 16 Nov. 1917).

Hays was reluctant to let Lobeck go by "imperial edict" as he put it, but was willing to have Lobeck detailed or furloughed to New York for the duration. This would allow the army to gain Lobeck's service after his return from the Inquiry. The War Department further queried Lippmann's request by stating that they "supposed map-making was a rather easy job for topographical engineers, and that there were welters of competent people in the country doing it" (Newton D. Baker-Lippmann, Nov. 17, 1917).

Here Lippmann was drawing on his extensive network of colleagues in high places, as he would throughout his career (Lippmann was an assistant to Baker when he was appointed to the Inquiry himself and addressed him familiarly as "NDB").

Lippmann and Bowman sat down and drafted a response that would explain their need for Lobeck's skill in drafting block diagrams. It was, they said "a highly specialized and accurate form of drawing and is not ordinary map construction which can be done by almost any trained engineer or draftsman. It is display in perspective of the relief and hydrography of a region with all the geometrical accuracy of a map." Bowman signed it as Director of the AGS.

Lippmann added that the Inquiry planned to use Lobeck for about six months, although this would in fact turn out to be woefully wrong; the number seems to have been chosen merely as something the War Department would accept. Lippmann and Bowman wanted these maps for the ÂWestern Front from the Alps to the sea, carefully arranged to show mineral deposits, water ways, etc. We shall make similar maps for the belt of territory from the Baltic through Mesopotamia, so that the wholeBaghdadd corridor as well as the end of the Adriatic will be displayedÂ (Lippmann-Baker, Nov. 21 1917, Lobeck files). Although the Adriatic and Italy were mapped in this way, thereÂs no evidence that the Mesopotamia region was ever mapped like this, but I must admit I have not explicitly yet checked if there are any files on this region.

If we look at LobeckÂs Istria map we can see the level of detail involved.

Meanwhile, Lobeck was whiling his way at Camp Dix, where the order to extract him was taking a little while to be processed. The plan was to have him enlist in a kind of reserve enlisted reserve (the Engineers Reserve Corps.) which would take him off active duty status. Lobeck kept a positive spirit about it all, despite a few complaints about the amount of paperwork needed to get him away.

In a letter to Bowman he wrote that Âthe barracks are cheerful and comfortable and I sleep wonderfullyÂThis week in spite of the very bad weather we have been on the big rifle range learning how to use the new Enfield pieces with high power ammunitionÂyou know we have to march 51/2 miles to the range. Many of the men had frozen ears and it was necessary to bring them back to camp by ambulance.Â (Lobeck to Bowman, Dec. 13, 1917).

Lobeck also commented on his fellow reservists and their lack of training. ÂAn infinitely small percent of the men are technically trained. Most of them are of the laboring type and many of them are of foreign origin and can hardly speak, let alone write English.Â (Lobeck to Bowman, Dec. 13, 1917). Lobeck finally made it to New York City on Boxing Day, 1917.

Work for the Inquiry.

In the summer of 1918, after working on the Italian area all spring, Bowman, who was spending Independence Day in New Hampshire, directed that Lobeck should begin work on a block diagram of the Guatemala-Honduras border region. It was an urgent job; Lobeck would have just two weeks to complete it, but he could have the help of Dominion.

Leon Dominian was originally from Turkey, although he had lived in the USA since 1912. As a member of the AGS staff, he was an obvious candidate to become a member of the Inquiry, where he worked for Clive Day on the Balkans. In 1913, shortly after Dominian arrived in America, he was involved in a strange controversy concerning a theory put forward by a Marshall B. Gardner that the earth was hollow. This was around the time that the earthÂs poles were first being explored, and leaving all sorts of strange phenomena unexplained (frozen mammoths etc.). After Gardner had published his book, the Pittsburgh Leader decided to take him seriously enough to contact the AGS for a rebuttal. Dominian was deputized to refute this theory, which he did, at least to the satisfaction of the newspaper (Gardner believed he in turn counter-refuted Dominian). Probably every academic gets these requestsÂI remember when I was grad school I was contacted about whether an egg can stand up on the equinox (IÂm not sure how they got my name).

Dominian had written a survey book on EuropeÂs languages in 1917, which demonstrated its susceptibility to racist arguments by the fact that it carried a foreword by Madison Grant. GrantÂs own book, The Passing of the Great Race, lamented the falling from rightful power of white people. Nevertheless, despite these racist tones and the fact that Grant helped agitate for racist quota-based immigration laws in the 1920s, he remained a Councilor of the American Geographical Society for many years, including while Bowman was Director. In another footnote to history, the well-known Berkeley anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, gave an immensely positive review to DominianÂs book: Âan introduction by Madison Grant emphasizes the prevailing lack of race consciousness in Europe and the circumstance that language is the essential factor in the creation of national unity and nationalityÂ (Am. Anth. 20(3).

LobeckÂs maps were not puny affairs, but rather large scale sheets, often five feet by five and done at tthe regional scale (eg., 1:300,000) with a vertical exaggeration of four times. In this way he could show in detail the area of interestÂthe border between Guatemala and Honduras is no less than two feet long for example.

While LobecksÂ block diagrams were certainly attractive and easy to use, one problem with them was that it was hard to get a sense of absolute height. They dealt more with the relative relief, what one ridge looked like compared to another. An ordinary map however such as a topographic map in common use in the military, had the advantage that absolute heights could be determined, so that for example it could be seen whether one ridge was visible from another one, or if one portion of the map was higher than another portion.

Lobeck wrote excitedly to Bowman on July 7, 1918 with a proposal for an Âentirely new wayÂ of showing relief that would solve this problem. His suggestion was to combine his block diagrams with contour lines shown in perspective. The result Âis simply a bold rounded outline of the mountain rangesÂ with the contour heights labeled.

History of Cartography exhibition at Field Museum, Chicago

2006-09-03T08:57:00.000-05:00

An exhibition called "Maps! The History of Cartography" will be mounted at Chicago's Field Museum in conjunction with the Newberry Library later this year:

The Field Museum, in partnership with the Newberry Library, will offer an unprecedented exhibition of some of the most rare and historically valuable maps ever created. Visitors will see, assembled for the first time, maps and artifacts drawn from collections around the world. This collection of maps will challenge our views of the world by emphasizing that maps tell us not just where we are, but who we are. Any map, no matter what else it shows, also conununicates how the people, nation, government, or organization that made it viewed their worlds. Each section will feature a wide variety of map types, formats, and functions. The exhibition will also utilize a variety of media to explain to visitors how maps were made in the past and are being made today. Curators. Dr. James R. Akerman, Dr. Robert W. Karrow, Jr., The Newberry Library. For more information, please contact: Todd J. Tubutis, Senior Project Manager, Exhibitions, The Field Museum, 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive Chicago, IL 60605-2496. Many of the maps will go to an exhibition at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore when the exhibit closes.

I found out about this because of a piece in the Chicago Tribune on Milwaukee, which apparently has a large J.R.R. Tolkien collection, and which is contributing some Tolkien maps.

Sick

2006-09-01T16:38:00.000-05:00

Interesting to see that loyal ubikcans are still visiting the site even when there are no posts!

Sorry, but I've been laid out with bronchitis this week. I feel like the old man at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey when he's lying in bed, breath rasping, and the monolith appears at the foot of his bed. About all he can do is weakly raise his hand (yearning? expectation? greeting? warding off?) before he's transformed into the Star Child.

(Yes, there's a fever that goes with B. which helps explain such lurid dreams...)

Anyway, according to the figures, there were over a 1,000 visitors last month. Thanks for your interest and I hope to be back again in a few days!

OH-Gov: Strickland (D) 57, Blackwell (R) 32%

2006-08-27T20:32:00.000-05:00

Rasmussen poll.

I'm going to Ohio in October and I'll be glad to see it gain a Dem. governor for the first time in 16 years, what with it being a swing state in the presidential elections and all. NYT has this one firmly in the "leaning Dem" column.

Hurricane maps from Weather Underground

2006-08-27T08:37:00.000-05:00

One of the other comments to the piece on science mentioned in the previous entry was on the maps produced by Weather Underground.

The map shows the current location and strength of tropical storms and hurricanes, as well as the predicted location over the next few days. A circle of increasing diameter shows where the storm might go.

Strength is shown using different colors. Other features include a map showing all the storms since 1851 that passed within 300 miles of the current storm (Ernesto, this season's first hurricane) and where they went:

As everyone probably knows by now, this is the one-year anniversary of hurricane Katrina. We had a significant number of refugees from New Orleans come to Georgia and the Atlanta metro area last year. I wonder how they are doing.

Science and politics

2006-08-27T08:15:00.000-05:00

Interesting post at Daily Kos from their science correspondent, attacking the notion put about by some that science is dead. Apparently some dude on a right-wing blog made the claim that science has been dead since say 1850. DK responds:

I recommend you do not read the actual post on the Blogs for Bush site (That Jon is referring to), unless you're a masochist. The rant goes downhill from there, some of the comments are worse. The dingbat author's thesis is that science is 'dead,' that in fact science has been 'dead' since roughly 1850. Nothing to see here folks, ignore relativity and the atomic bomb, refuse that useless antibiotic and don't look at that flat-screen ...
Witty snarkisms aside, for rational conservative and centrist readers: I understand we may have profoundly fundamental differences in some matters of ideology, but I hope we can agree that this kind of shit is dangerous when and if it infects the powers that be. If the Blogs for Bush guy was just a lone wolf hysterically barking at the moon, it might be funny, it might be sad. Problem is, Bush and Rumsfeld and James Dobson and a third of the nation are out there with their eyes fully dilated yelping at the night sky with him.

The thing is, flat screen TVs, the atomic bomb etc. are technologies, not science.

And technology affects people in complex, multifaceted ways, not all of them desirable, even if we all could agree that science is desirable. As one of the comments to this post even points out:

In the forties, fifties and sixties there was excitement about things like space travel, men on the moon, James Bond high tech gadgetry, computers, and especially automobiles and other things that went really, really fast.

I can remember when people believed in science with a religious zeal. Guys read popular mechanics and tinkered with things in their basements, and in general we trusted our academic institutions to be like some sort of flawless priesthood, above the coruption of government and corporate funding and able to resist the corruption of the military industrial complex turning everything science came up with into some sort of weapon.

Then came "The Silent Spring", Earth day and concerns about overpopulation, polution, and war. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the Challenger disaster began to give people second thoughts about where science was taking us.

Those things cost us our faith in science in the same way pedophilia in the priesthood makes some people a little more cynical about the advoce of their religious leaders.

An awareness of Global Warming and Nuclear Winters begain to turn perceptions of bright shiny science into something that always corroded its pipes and blew up its lab.

Most people have become dissillusioned with science. They think of it as something only a few really smart people understand and thus nothing to do with them.

Finally we got the corporate ludites who didn't want science messing up the bottom line. Industrial design has become all about the packaging and whats on the inside has become more or less irrelevant as long as somebody can sell it.

So no wonder people are skeptical of "science." Scientists have not only delivered a rather mixed bag of results (3 Mile Island, global warming). Add to that the claims that scientists have made that turn out to be misleading (such as on race-based drugs for example) and dispiriting ("evolution shows we live in a world without meaning or necessity for religion"--Richard Dawkins) and its likely that people will turn away from science, or at best learn the bare minimum they need to get through college.

A student said to me just last week "science is based on faith" (a mantra the creationists have used for years). There's nothing I would say that would persuade her of the truth of natural selection and descent with modification, mutation, genetic drift etc. But I know brow-beating her with the claim that science is the only way to know the world, and that it progressed from myth-religion-science surely won't do it. (Anybody feel we have left all myths and superstitions behind?)

We need a more realistic assessment of science as a human exercise of the creation of knowledge.

Geography teacher reprimanded for... teaching

2006-08-25T21:03:00.000-05:00

A geography teacher was reprimanded and put on paid leave after hanging up foreign flags:

Eric Hamlin said the flags were part of a world geography lesson plan at Carmody Middle School and refused to take them down. The school's principal escorted Hamlin out of class Wednesday morning after he refused to remove the flags of China and Mexico.The school district placed him on administrative leave for insubordination, citing a Colorado law that makes it illegal to display foreign flags permanently in schools.

He has now decided to leave the school, saying the issue has divided the community. Apparently Colorado has a law:

District officials feared Hamlin's display violated a state law prohibiting the display of any flag but the American, Colorado or local flags on public buildings, including schools. Temporary displays for instructional or historical purposes are exempt, but the school principal did not consider Hamlin's display temporary enough.

Hamlin however has stated that he was just doing his job:

"It's much along the lines of a science teacher who puts up a map of the solar system. They may not spend every day and every lesson talking about Mars, but they want the students to see that and to see the patterns of the planets and the order, and the students will observe that and absorb that learning visually," Hamlin said.Hamlin said that the school district is not only depriving him of a teaching tool but also taking away from his students' education."The major problem I see here is with the law that limits educators," Hamlin said.

Some commentators tried to make this out to be part of a leftist plot. Meanwhile comments on the local TV news station bulletin were largely in favor of Hamlin:

"Our daughter was in Mr. Hamlin's 7th grade class last year. Mr. Hamlin is one of the best teachers our family has ever encountered. He does not have a right or left wing agenda, but a desire to educate 7th graders. He is very knowledgable in the subject matter that he teaches and highly skilled and effective as a teacher. The fact that there is a law like this is wrong. The school is wrong for standing by this "letter of the law" type argument. Let him teach, the kids will be better for it."

Thin House districts

2006-08-25T16:03:00.000-05:00

A thin House district is one where the current incumbent had a thin margin of victory in the last election and thus is a prime candidate to be knocked off. Here's a map of all the districts that went GOP last time and which voted for Bush, but the margin was less than 5%:

This is really useful if you're targeting certain races, such as these "top" 30 House races. The danger of incumbency: only 4 of the most likely seats to be overturned are Dem.

In order to change hands this November, the Dems need pick up only 15 seats.

Election maps: messing and assessing

2006-08-25T08:37:00.000-05:00

Here's the NYT election map I showed in an earlier post. This time I've set it to display the close races in Governor's races, and the one in Ohio in particular. The current governor, Bob Taft (R) is term-limited, but even if he could run again it's not likely he'd win due to his ethical transgressions. The WaPo's "The Fix" designates this race the second-most likely to switch parties in the midterms (from R to D; NY is the most likely, also R to D).

The NYT has the easiest and best map to use to get an overall handle on the races. Here's their map of House races, which they show as districts of equal size:

GA-04 is my district, previously held by Cynthia McKinney (D). However, the state Republicans heavily redistricted this district and McKinney lost badly in the primaries, and will not be returning to the House.* It's not likely to switch parties though as GA-04 is a strong (D).

The Washington Post also has an interactive election map:

Very similar in some ways to the NYT, but it takes a different approach in that less information is delivered on the map, but there's more linked textual information. If you click on a race it takes you away from the map to a text page which discusses the race and provides socio-economic data. But unlike the NYT map, you can't configure it to show those races where say the district voted for Bush but went with the Dem House candidate in urban areas... The NYT map is much more flexible and allows you cut the data in many ways. OTOH, the WaPo analysis is more up to date. NYT still hasn't got the August 8 primary winners up.

The winner here: The New York Times. Cartographers at the Post need to get back in the game.

*As of this writing, four incumbents are out (lost in primaries); 1 governor (AK), 1 Senator (CT), and 2 Reps (GA-04, MI-07).

Do these guys look like terrorists?

2006-08-24T11:10:00.000-05:00

Or Bollywood film stars?

These are the two lads who were flying from Malaga to Manchester (they're actually students) and were thrown off because the other passengers thought they looked like terrorists (see earlier story).

How easy is it to tell who they are just by looking at them? Well we can use stereotypes, or as they say themselves:

"We might be Asian, but we're two ordinary lads who wanted a bit of fun," Mr Ashraf told the Daily Mirror.
"Just because we're Muslim does not mean we are suicide bombers."
The pair were marched off the jet at gunpoint after fellow passengers alerted officials on the flight back from Malaga, Spain.

Or maybe they're just litigants in a wrongful detention case.

Finding out where a blog is based through its visitors

2006-08-22T17:43:00.000-05:00

If cyberspace has no geography how can you explain this map? (Sorry about the obvious Mercator projection.) Map produced in Google Analytics.

This blog gets several dozen visitors on a good day and the map above shows where they come from. The most striking thing to me is that they center on SE United States, even though my blog is not about the SE, nor have I discussed where I am located, apart from in the blog description.

Is it because I've blogged about Atlanta in the past? But the above map only shows visitors in the last few days and other data I have shows that visitors have not been reading older blog entries.

So what explains this pattern? Here it in more detail:

Yes I am in the SE but why are visitors coming mostly from the SE but not reading any SE related articles? How is there, in effect, a big target over my location from the pattern of visitors?

Update: The commentator below asks how many are from myself. Bingo. That must be it. I've excluded my own visits from the sitemeter counts, but didn't do that for the Google analytics. I've tried to do that now and we'll see if it makes a difference (the two places do it in very different ways. Basically with Google you have to exclude a specific IP address. I think sitemeter uses cookies).
But still, it's a good surrogate measure of where a blog is located in real space.

Do polls matter?

2006-08-22T08:00:00.000-05:00

Perhaps I should say, how do polls matter? Polls are a form of data collection and have interesting geographical patterns.

Exit polls in an election are generally accepted to be very accurate because they record how people actually voted.

Other polls are more variable. If you ask people over 18 how they would vote "if the election were held today" you may or may not get a good prediction. First, longer time periods before the elction are less accurate than taking polls nearer the election, not just in the samer sense that it's harder to predict the weather in 3 weeks, but also because people exercise free will and the right to change their mind. Though interestingly, taken as a whole, these polls are better than you might think at making accurate predictions (though they might not predict particular winners and losers in tight races). A rolling average of say the last 3 months is quite good at recording overall conditions.

Second, pollsters use various "models" and don't actually just ask people of voting age. It's more accurate if you can get either registered voters or likely voters or at least a good proportion of these in your sample.

All this being said, a widely reported poll by CNN now shows that 61% of Americans--a new high--are opposed to the war in Iraq. It would be interesting to see how this breaks down at a more local level, and to see, for example, how it plays in places that are likely going to be important in November. The trouble is we don't know for sure ahead of time which places that will be (apart from generalities like "Ohio").

General polls however are only useful as far as they go, similarly general geostatistics characterize the population as a whole. Moran's I for example, is a general statistic and does not speak to local variation. Most of the interesting stuff however are the local differences--we live in that sense "locally."

This does not invalidate "global" polls, particularly when the President tries to characterize those against the war as Democrats (unless he accepts that 61% of the country is a member of the Democratic Party). But it does show we need to know the local situation on the ground before we make inferences about any given place.

The politics of fear

2006-08-20T10:08:00.000-05:00

This has implications for those geospatial approaches that rely on profiling and serves as a warning about the consequences of stereotyping:

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed. The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic...
It also raised fears that more travellers will take the law into their own hands - effectively conducting their own 'passenger profiles'.

We saw this already after 9/11 when many Americans expressed a fear of "Muslims" and the FBI started compiling a database of mosques. The current political climate in the US and the UK produces a politics of fear based on the construction of a group of people. Thus guilt is assigned not based on actual actions but deemed membership of this group. This is exactly the same logic as racism and the hysteria about immigration (see previous post).

Apparently this story has been applauded by some commentators. Glenn Greenwald puts it forcefully when he says:

But it is the irrational fear here that is so striking, and really quite pitiful. They have whipped people into a state of such intense paranoia that they quiver at the sight of two Arab males on their plane. There is roughly one billion Muslims in the world, including some countries which have more than 100 million. The U.S. alone has 10 million. Enormous numbers of Muslims are not Arab and do not reside in Arab countries. There are 320 million people living in Arab states, and it should go without saying that only a tiny handful of them are "terrorists" (and that many terrorists reside elsewhere). To start refusing to fly or take buses or trains or be in the same room with the males in that population -- which is clearly the path we are on -- is just stupid, hysterical, and counter-productive from every perspective.

The fear is not actually irrational, imho, but a product of the deliberately instilled politics of fear in which we now live. The task is to defy that politics by a refusal in the geospatial community to use geoprofiling in the same way that the New Jersey police no longer perform racial profiling.

Innumeracy and immigration

2006-08-20T09:30:00.000-05:00

How many illegal immigrants are there in this country? This question has relevance not only for those of us who use population data but it is also a warning against uncritically accepting numbers just because they are frequently repeated.

During the immigration debate over the summer leading to the mass protests on May 1, the number "3 million" was constantly repeated: there are 3 million illegal immigrants coming into this country every year. A moment's thought should reveal why this number is problematic.

First, the total number of illegal immigrants is also often cited as being around 11 million. Both numbers can't be right.

Second, the figure has its origins with the border agents who say they apprehend about 1 million people annually, and estimate that three times as many actually make it across. As the mathematician John Allen Paulos (author of Innumeracy) this number is based on the number of apprehensions they make, and this includes many people who try repeatedly to cross the border. Additionally, their estimate that 3 times as many go unapprehended is of course just that--an estimate.

Numeracy in GIS is as important as graphicacy, and like maps numbers are political. It's advisable to always ask "in whose interest is this number produced? Under what circumstances was the number produced?"

Yale library dispute

2006-08-19T08:56:00.000-05:00

Ed Dahl (who should know) takes offense at the story cited below that the Yale map library "languished" after the "dollar a year" man (love that phrase) retired. Dahl defends Barbara McCorkle's work at the library in a post on map-hist:

EXCUSE ME!, as they say.
Vietor may well have been a wonderful collector, passionate about maps and wealthy enough to afford to buy them for the map collection. Much of the value of the Yale collection was directly due to his efforts. But he was not an administrator, and the collection was badly in need of attention when Barbara McCorkle arrived -- one of the reasons she was hired. Those of us who visited her at that collection know that the place certainly did not "languish" after her arrival, but was rehoused, put in usable condition, and was much used. Her thirteen years there are misrepresented by Ms. Martineau's article.

Other people add that McCorkle was tied to the help desk and wasn't able to devote enough attention to the collection.

I've only visited Yale once and not the map library so I can't say, but I've heard McCorkle's name enough times to feel she is well respected. Why would the paper make the assertion that the library languished though if they hadn't heard that from someone there--maybe it's a move by the library administrator to push for more funds?

Did we evolve?

2006-08-18T12:46:00.000-05:00

The NYT reports on a new survey of opinions about evolution with an amusing headline:

"Did humans evolve? Not us, say Americans"

(Original article in Science).

These surveys tend to reflect the same findings as the ones that find Americans way down the list of geographical knowledge.

In his book What it means to be 98% chimpanzee, Jonathan Marks offers an interesting explanation for these kind of findings. He says that it's not surprising when you present evolution as soulless and ridden with fatalistic overtones ("we are our genes"). Interesting for an anthropologist, anyway. By contrast the authors of this study argue that it's Americans own fault: the rise of fundamentalism and the politicization of science are their causes.

These two different interpretations suggest two very different solutions. Marks: scientists (esp. geneticists), get over yourselves! Science: Americans, become more secular and believe that science occurs without politics!

The scientist says: "Science has explained many things about the universe. Your life has no meaning. Have a nice day." And then he is surprised and appalled at the public rejection of that philosophy. (Marks, p. 283).

Support for Marks might come from the fact that the only country below the USA is Turkey, presumably because of Islamic fundamentalism. Also, Marks will no doubt groan at the interpretation of the scientists.

However, many of the other countries on the list above the USA presumably also hear the soulless-fatal view of science and they haven't rejected evolution.

Marks suggests that a better approach against the aggressiveness of science is to teach people "a humanistic, anthropological approach to science...to present science not so much as the one true answer in opposition to the many false ones (which has a famuiliar evangelical ring to it) but as an answer constructed within a particular cultural framework" (284-5).

Mapping the polls

2006-08-18T08:06:00.000-05:00

Can polls predict electoral outcomes? Take a look at these maps:

Gubernatorial polls as of May 30, 2006

Polls as of Mid-August, 2008

On these maps red = Democratic, blue = Republican. 14 Republican seats are up for election, 13 Democratic and 9 open (1 was Democratic, 8 Republican). The current totals are 22 D, 28 R

Comparing the most recent situation to the one 3 months ago shows a trend toward the Democratic Party--instead of 5 pickups, they show 7 pickups (MD and CO have been added, along with AK, while MN has been taken away. AK may switch around however, depending on who runs).

How accurate will these polls be? A 3-poll moving average is obviously less sensitive to minor fluctuations, and supposedly reflect the deeper underlying feelings in the country. But the supposed "terror bump" that Bush was supposed to pickup after the London terrorist plot last week has not occurred either, so it may be that the electorate is not reacting to news any more, but slowly drifting in its opinions further toward the Democrats.

On the other hand, the NYT has a different scenario. Here's their map of Republican seats (incumbent or open), showing 2 pickups for Dems and 7 toss-ups:

However most of their toss-ups are really D gains or holds (eg., MA, where the latest polls puts Dems ahead by 10 points).

But the NYT site is good to mess around with to show different scenarios.

Eg., show me all the states with a median income over $50k.

However, I wish they would have a different criteria for "toss-up" as I don't think most of them really are.

Judge: Bush's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional

2006-08-17T12:11:00.000-05:00

Extraordinary news:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.
U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy as well as the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

No doubt this will be appealed, but you know it is not that long ago that the Bush administration claimed that even reporting on this practice was aiding and abetting terrorism. Guess they've got some 'splainin to do.

Glenn Greenwald, as usual, has the scoop.

Note his comment that the opinion does not rule on the constitutionality of data-mining, on the grounds that it has not been publicly confirmed (Bush confirmed the existence of the warrantless wiretapping program himself). This is disappointing. Data-mining is an incredibly invasive means of surveillance because it sifts through everybody's data, whether guilty or not, in order to find the guilty. This takes time and resources, and subjects the vast, vast majority of innocent people to scrutiny at the expense of the 1 in a million who are possibly guilty, as well as giving rise to "false positives."

John Allen Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University explains:

Even if the probability that the purported terrorist profile is accurate were an astonishing 99 percent (if someone has terrorist ties, the profile will pick him or her out 99 percent of the time, and, for ease of computation, if someone does not have such ties, the profile will pick him or her out only 1 percent of the time), most of the hits would be false positives.
For illustration, let's further assume that one out of a million American residents has terrorist ties — that's approximately 300 people — and the profile will pick out 99 percent, or 297 of them. Great. But what of the approximately 300 million innocent Americans? The profile will also pick out 1 percent of them, “only” 3 million false positives, innocent people who will be caught up in a Kafkaesque dragnet.

How many planets are there?

2006-08-17T10:22:00.000-05:00

This post at the ever-stimulating Atlas(t) prompts the question: how many planets are there?

An easy question, right? After all, I think we should be able to tell if we bump into a planet! They're pretty big.

So is Pluto one? A planet that is. This illustrates an interesting question because while it might appear straightforward (Pluto either is or isn't a planet) it shows that what we know is actually dependent on our categories for things. Kant said this way back. He said that while we have no direct knowledge of the real world, what we do have is knowledge of our categories for things (try thinking without any categories--it's not possible).

So "planet" is not a natural object, it's a human category. And as the category changes or is challenged, some things may no longer belong to it. Mapping of course is another activity where we don't just take the world, but put it into categories. The trick is to know what categories are operating at any given time.

Bottom line: we may have just lost a planet!

Big gift to Yale University map library

2006-08-17T07:42:00.000-05:00

This is good:

A rare books dealer who has been using Yale University's map collection since his undergraduate days has pledged to give his alma mater $100,000 to help bring the massive collection into the modern era.

Furthermore, Yale will match the gift. Apparently the collection was managed by a "dollar a year" man (basically a volunteer). The head librarian today, Alice Prochaska, said the library hopes now to endow a map curator position.

The geography of terror

2006-08-16T07:58:00.000-05:00

OK, first we have "the axis of evil" (David Frum via George Bush)

Then it was the "outposts of tyranny" (Condi)

Now we have the "central front of the war on terror."

These are all very geographical and I got to wondering if it was even possible to map these out. Sure enough, someone has done so.

Axis of evil (and beyond)--Wikipedia

Outposts of tyranny

There isn't one yet for the "central front" so the location of that is unknown. We don't normally think of the "war on terror" as having traditional fronts and coherent geographical locations so these characterizations are more than metaphors, they're part of a new map of the world.

These geographical put-downs reveal a highly geocentric perspective. An outpost, after all, is something that is far away from you, as well as out of the mainstream. On the map above, you can see the outposts are far away... from the USA (although some are perilously close to Britain supposedly the US's strongest ally on the WOT!).

Probably the most explicit new map from this perspective is the one in Barnett's book The Pentagon's New Map:

(Map by William McNulty)

As you can see if you click through to the web site or the bigger image, Barnett characterizes the world into two zones; the good or the "functioning core" and the bad or the "Non-integrating gap." This is an update on Mackinder, or Mackinder-lite you could say, and reflects the old core-periphery models of high school geography in the 1950s cold war.

Barnett is triste on the cold war; he misses it. The cold war provided a vision for the USA, one we don't have today (well, that's true!). If you examine the map you see that there is a simple logic at work; that of western-style globalization. Any country that doesn't align with this capitalist mode of production is out of it (non-integrating). If you thought Tom Friedman was keen on globalization, wait till you see what this guy says--never mind that globalization hasn't worked even in the "core" or in places such as Iraq where Barnett's military superiors are warning of civil war.

If you take the core-periphery model (and Barnett needs a new map because his non-integrating gap is visually in the core; perhaps an oblique projection would fix it?) as it was developed in the 1960s (eg., by J. Friedmann) it was part of a series of stages that led to complete spatial integration. Barnett has dusted off these old geopolitical ideas and given them a new look for the 21st century. For example, what is to say that the "core" needs a periphery in order to sustain itself and exploit disparities in income (outsourcing or immigration as labor)? What we have observed is actually an increase in the concentration of power and wealth in the "core" rather than a decrease.

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong"
H.L. Mencken "The Divine Afflatus", in Prejudices: Second Series p.158

OK, what does "geospatial" mean?

2006-08-15T15:20:00.000-05:00

We all use the word, but what--exactly--does "geospatial" mean?

It's kind of an odd word anyway, surely "geo" and "spatial" refer to the same thing, namely, well space and geography. Can you have a geo-geography? How about a non-geo spatial? What's the difference between regular spatial and geospatial?

Is it an industry word? People in academia don't seem to use it.

Glenn at anything geospatial says he's been doing geospatial and GIS for 15 years, but I thought the word was only a few years old. What's the difference between GIS and geospatial then?

Is it a good word? Should we promote it? Should we replace "GIS" with "geospatial" when we speak to other people?

What does it mean?

Targeting immigrants

2006-08-15T12:57:00.000-05:00

Today seems to be national immigrant day, according to all the news stories around that discuss the new Census ACS release. The Census Bureau released a new set of data as part of its ongoing
American Community Survey. A lot of stories focus on the growth of immigration however.

Here are the memes:

1. They're here and they're growing fast

2. They're in the suburbs

3. OK, they bring some economic benefits

Notice anything? Yes, it's "us" and "them" again, or even "us" and different thems (divide and conquer baby!). Here's a local paper's take:

Few people need official numbers to tell them a dramatic demographic shift is under way from Lilburn to Lawrenceville and Duluth to Dacula. Gwinnett is now 19 percent black, 16 percent Hispanic and 10 percent Asian.

Non-Hispanic whites, 90 percent of the population in 1990, accounted for 54 percent in 2005. Their raw numbers dropped for the second straight year, even as the county's overall population jumped by more than 25,000.

This is one reason why people are opposed to collecting data by race!

See Targeting Immigrants by Jonathan Xavier.

GIS in the classroom

2006-08-15T11:31:00.000-05:00

Does GIS belong in the classroom? If so, how should it be taught?

I was thinking about this because of the news item in the Vancouver Sun about Nick Hedley's class which uses "augmented reality" tools:

As a specialist in geographic visualization and spatial cognition, Hedley developed an augmented reality tool designed to give students the ability to test their hypotheses and interact with the geography they're studying in a virtual environment.
The tool superimposes rendered images of three-dimensional graphics onto a view of the real world shown on a screen.

This sounds way beyond anything I had in the classroom and a lot of fun to boot.

Educators know though that learning should be more than fun. This new book, Learning to Think Spatially makes the case that geospatial learning revolves around 3 things: concepts of space (spatial data models I guess would be a GIS equivalent), spatial representation (maps and GIS); and spatial reasoning.

Here's the executive summary.

History of race mapping

2006-08-14T12:58:00.000-05:00

Do we have any good histories of race mapping?

Such a history should cover the attempts to map out races such as we see in the 19th century, and at first sight we'd be limited to that time period when the modern meaning of race was in use (in the west); that is, as a small number of natural groups occurring over large, continental territories, since say the 18th century.

On the other hand, it is worth including the early encounter maps produced by Europeans during the 15th and 16th centuries, which effectively mapped (or pictured around the margins anyway) indigenous peoples. That's more indirect and would shade into mappings that attempted to claim territories within Europe, or the Monarchs, Ministers and Maps stuff.

Also you'd want to show how even in 19th-20th century Europe and America that smaller groups of people within a continent could be mapped (for example, by language) and to what extent this was race-based. Today we certainly map populations of one sort or another but the distinction would be whether the claim is that these show natural groupings (ie., race is innate in the peoples) or are a human construct done for convenience, one of many such groupings.

Are we nature with a layer of culture, or culture all the way through?

2006-08-14T10:38:00.000-05:00

Having finished Jonathan Marks' book (see previous post), it's clear that he strongly advocates a science that can deal with its social implications as a form of knowledge. Any science--or scientist (including presumably GIScientists) that tries to confine itself to purely technical issues will not only come a cropper, but will miss the most pertinent aspects of their work.

For example, he says he is sometimes asked by students in his class "whether a human could successfully mate with a chimpanzee?" He says one can take a variety of responses to this (ethical, technical, even humor) but the one he prefers is to ask: assuming we could, what would we do with the baby? Would it be raised as a human or a chimp? How would you protect it/him/her from the spotlight of publicity? Would you send it/him/her to school? What are your responsibilities to that baby?

His point is that: "'Could it be done' is not simply a biochemical question, it is a social and ethical question." And today's scientists have to incorporate that thinking in their work--it's truly part of science.

As an extension of this observation he articulates an understanding of humans as cultural and he rejects attempts to deal with a substrate of purely "natural" qualities. These have historically occurred for example in the idea of the "noble savage" who was closer to nature than "we" are, or the great chain of being where different races were given different evolutionary hierarchies (that is, some "less" evolved). We reject these now, he says, but have instead replaced it with another being who supposedly is "man minus culture;" namely the chimpanzee.

The other view you sometimes see articulated is that we are "natural" creatures with an overlay of culture. This comes up a lot and was widely popularized in the 1990s by Camille Paglia's book Sexual Personae (1990) in which she argued for this position. It also comes up sometimes even among well-meaning anthropologists who want to separate race into a (now rejected) genetic component and a socio-cultural or political component. People confuse the two, they say. Yes but we have to be careful here. Biology or a gene by itself has no meaning, but when we study it we do so in a system of meaning (science). If you look for a gene for something (left-handedness, say) you might find one, but that doesn't explain the meaning of left-handedness eg., what to do about it. Genetics certainly has a cultural component in this sense.

This is what his book is about. He says that just because we share say 98% of our genes with chimps doesn't mean that we are chimps. We share about 40% of our genes with fish, but that doesn't make us fish-like. And so it's wrong to think of chimpanzees as "like us, only without the culture." Culture is about using symbolic systems in a widespread way.

Systems such as language and maps.

So a study of maps without the culture is not really a study at all, certainly not a good study.

The map communication model and critical cartography

2006-08-13T15:24:00.000-05:00

(Updated)

The theory that prevailed in cartography until the advent of critical cartography was known as the "map communication model" (MCM). Actually it still persists as a kind of naive folk wisdom today. I say naive because it is accepted as an unexamined assumption, particularly among GIS practitioners and some cartographers. Here's the basic outline as it was prevalent in the 1960s and 70s:

This diagram, taken from Alan MacEachren's 1995 book How Maps Work derives from his earlier work in cartography, which endorsed the MCM. MacEachren, known today for his work on geovisualization, admits in the book that he now rejects the MCM, and goes on to explain his about-face (and his embrace of geovisualization).

The MCM is a processual model that characterizes mapping as a process of transmitting information (geographic information) via the map from the cartographer to the end-user. In order to see what's wrong with that, we have to first make a distinction between information and knowledge. Information is data that lets you make a decision, and since Claude Shannon's classic work on information theory in the 1930s we can define the lowest possible unit of information as two binary digits (0, 1) or bits. For example, if you're waiting in the gas chamber to hear from the governor whether to execute the prisoner, the phone can ring with a "yes" or "no" message. That's information.

This insight allows us to measure information and compare how much information was successfully transmitted via the map. So the focus is information and its transmission, and it lead to a whole subdiscipline of studies that investigate how well maps are communicating their information.

This work was doomed to eventual failure however because unlike computers we don't live in a world of information, we live in a world of knowledge. Knowledge here can be defined as information that has been interpreted in a meaningful way, usually using theory-based assumptions (that is, "categories"). And the map communication model cannot provide any account of knowledge.

Update: Why not? Because knowledge is information in a cultural context. What is a meaningful information signal to one person is meaningless to another. The Greeks, for all their knowledge couldn't understand what foreigners were saying--it was all just "bar, bar, bar." So of course they called them "barbarians." The MCM doesn't account for this context-dependent meaning of information, so to ask generations of college students if they received the information transmission of the map was always going to fail. What was needed was an understanding of maps and mapping in a cultural context.

The second issue problem with the MCM is that it posits a clear distinction between the cartographer and the end-user with the cartographer the source of information. Today we understand that mapping is increasingly done by the user (as in map mashups), especially in thematic data or analytical-GIS contexts. Location maps and atlases however may still be somewhat accurately described as being produced by a professional cadre of cartographers. For example, the maps in your GPS are often extensively road tested by the company.

By far the most interesting work done in cartography however, probably since the great age of surveying ended in the late 18th and 19th centuries, has been thematic. Even many locational maps (say an environmental map of Canada) has thematic purposes. Thematic mapping really took off in the 19th century, although you can find some examples prior to that.

Critical cartography is the investigation of map use from the perspective of maps, knowledge and their socio-political contexts. It often invokes "social theory" in order to examine the categories of knowledge (such as race, territory, boundaries, or identity) that are produced or reproduced by maps. This is a much richer and more satisfying account of mapping than the MCM, and it is also in my opinion a much more accurate one.

Today the MCM can only be considered a relic of a previous time, a kind of evolutionary dead-end of knowledge. Either that or the MCM will come to be incorporated into some much richer account. We now know that maps really don't work like this, as MacEachren recognized in 1995. Critical cartography is emerging as the strongest contender but has yet to prove itself a coherent theory (and its proponents often explicitly reject the idea of a coherent theory so it may never have one) or a definitive set of new practices. This is due more to a surfeit of ideas and approaches than a lack of them however. And at the least we can say that all critical cartography shares a broad acceptance of the politics of mapping; that is, that mapping is a political act or has political outcomes.

Race and maps

2006-08-12T16:06:00.000-05:00

I'm reading What it means to be 98% chimpanzee, by the anthropologist Jonathan Marks, who I met earlier this year at a symposium (he signed my book "100% human"!). Marks is an authority on race and genetics and his recent work has covered the intellectual history of race as a cultural construct.

In the book Marks compares the different approaches taken by Linnaeus and the comte de Buffon on the question of classification of species. Linnaeus favored a hierarchical structure of species--genera--orders--classes (or families). Now all life could be placed within this structure. Linnaeus had three special cases where he subdivided species into subspecies and humans were one of these (the others were dogs and sheep, showing perhaps what breeds were important in the 17th century!).

Buffon however spoke in a very different way. He rejected the classification of nature into units and instead emphasized its continually varying diversity. Where Linnaeus saw difference and discrete boun daries, Buffon saw continuity and variation.

Aha! This is like the two major approaches to mapping thematic data, one based on discrete boundaries and the other on continuity. In other words, like the choropleth map and the isopleth map. The two naturalists are emblematic of the way that we approach our problems today. While Linnaeus didn't use the term "race" for his subspecies, later scholars did, and it was around this time that the modern concept of race as a small group of well-defined peoples was invented. The parallel concept of the choropleth was not invented until the early 19th century (1826 to be precise). The conjunction of these concepts (race and discrete geographical units or race mapping) also came to prominance in the 19th century.

The trouble with both the Linnaean system and choropleth maps (despite the fact that they are both very popular) is that they take a continually varying phenomenon and apply a category over the top of it.

Take this cancer cluster for example (shown in red):

If we see this cancer through the grid of a choropleth map, say using counties (gray lines) we would likely conclude that 3 of the 4 counties have a high cancer risk and 1 of them has a negligible risk. We would be justified in making this conclusion and yet it is misleading. Even in those 3 high risk counties the risk is not everywhere and yet no doubt the public health message would be that people in those counties are at risk, when clearly many are not. Also even in the county with negligible risk (on the left) there are some people who are at risk and yet no doubt again the public health message would be based on the county as a whole (because that is what our data would show in the choropleth map).

This is analogous to the fallacy of race-based medicine, by the way (eg., sickle cell anemia) where the message goes out that blacks are at risk from it. Well no, it's got nothing to do with race, it depends on your hereditary exposure to malaria. Many light-skinned African peoples in North Africa, and others around the Mediterranean are also at higher risk from it. And of course not all blacks are at risk from it. Yet this becomes a "black" disease, unnecessarily worrying many people and not worrying others enough.

Marks also offers an interesting insight into why we are "mammals" which I hadn't heard before. On what basis did Linnaeus choose the mammae as his defining criterion? Mammals have lots of features that distinguish them from other species, including hair and the fact that we only have one bone in the lower jaw. Why didn't he choose those? It turns out that in the 17th century there was a controversy over breast-feeding. Many richer families were sending out their newborns to wetnurses. Linnaeus was an active opponenet of this and he called us mammals to underline the fact that we should be breast-feeding our own young. (Marks credits Schiebinger's book Nature's Body for this account.)

So the lesson is that while we use categories to order things these very categories are constructs to help us order the world and do not exist in nature itself. This can lead to insights--or equally to mistakes and obfuscations when we believe the categories are natural. This goes both for race and for the choropleth map.

Philip K. Dick and drugs (again)

2006-08-12T12:43:00.000-05:00

Today's article in The Guardian by Philip Purser-Hallard about Philip K. Dick's drug use repeats the myth that Dick was a consistent and avid consumer of drugs, and that this is the key to his success as a writer:

Many of Dick's writings contain such pharmaceutical themes, with their protagonists (usually cops) suffering catastrophic changes in perception, often brought about by exotic substances. These "reality shifts" generally lead to an understanding of the true nature of the universe - an effect that Dick, whose drug intake was as prolific as his fiction output, believed he had experienced personally...
His writing had always been fuelled by vast quantities of amphetamines, but he soon branched out into marijuana, mescaline, LSD, sodium pentothal and even PCP...

Dick's relationship with drugs is far more complex than Purser-Hallard suggests. By highlighting, even glorifying, the drug use it gives the impression that Dick's life was primarily oriented around drugs, and rather cheekily suggests that his fiction was inspired by drugs.

What's funny is that this is a comment on Dick's most moving work, an anti-drug novel, A Scanner Darkly. This book, published in 1977 is often cited as a turning point in Dick's relationship with drugs. It's a pretty dark book, about how a drug (Substance D for death) can fry your brains.

According to his biographers, Dick's main drug was speed or uppers, which he started using early in his career to produce enough wordage to support himself (early sci-fi magazines in the 50s and 60s paid by the word). By the 1970s he had had enough of drug use and often volunteered at anti-drug meetings and talks to youth groups. Writing to the county drug abuse program in late 1972--five years before the publication of A Scanner Darkly, Dick said:

Street drugs--especially heroin--are the most serious problem in this country, and perhaps the world, today (source)

"Heroin was one drug Dick never did mess with" according to Lawrence Sutin, his biographer (p. 192). "Never again did Phil take speed on a regular basis" (p. 194).

Dick also wrote to his former doctor that Fall that since his treatment in a Canadian drug clinic he was "without any chemicals; I take no legal drugs either, no tranquilizers or anything. We don't even have an aspirin in the apartment" (Letters of Philip K. Dick 1972-73, pp. 67-8). A Scanner Darkly was written during late 1972 and 1973, exactly at the time then when he was clear of drugs, and as far as I know never again seriously did drugs. In fact his most stunning and visionary work such as VALIS, The Divine Invasion, his Exegesis etc. in other words all the 2/3-1974 stuff, occurred after his rehabilitation at X-Kalay. Well OK, there was one drug that he took in large quantities--snuff.

Reducing the story of Dick's work and life to drugs is I think just lazy and facile. There's more than enough of interest in the work itself to keep people busy.

Scanner Darkly (the film) is now going into wide release. It's a fairly close adaptation of the novel but suffers from the rotoscoping technique somewhat, but more importantly manages to dilute the impact by concentrating too much on stoner-hippie yucks (Woody Harrelson is particularly guilty here, and Keanu Reeves' laid back style is infused with it). A lot of this is played for straight laughs where Dick played it for dark comedic perspective on how drugs fry your brain--the number of gears on the bike scene for example.

It's this scene which in the book first alerts the authorities that the protagonist, Bob Arctor, is in cognitive trouble, because he's there and can't figure out the gears either. In the book they all traipse outside and ask the first person they meet--a 17-year guy--where the "missing" gears are, and he calmly explains it to them. The contrast between the young man "driving an incredibly beat-up old transportation-type car" and the group is written by Dick as a sad commentary on their confusion and child-like intelligence:

"None of you could look at the bike and perceive the simple mathematical operation involved in determining the number of its very small system of gear ratios." In the deputy's voice Fred heard a certain compassion, a measure of being kind. "An operation like that constitutes a junior high school aptitude test. Were you all stoned?"
"No," Fred said.

The other key scene in the book is where Arctor wakes up and sees his one-night stand morph into his girfriend, Donna. The fact that this is recorded on tape and later viewed by Fred (his alter ego) shows something deeply troubling that raises all kinds of Dickian possibilities. It's not just Arctor having a drug episode because the morph (and here the rotoscoping does come into good effect) can be viewed by Fred the cop persona. But is therefore Fred also under the influence? Or did somehow reality change in some way? To reveal some deeper reality?

Dick says in an afterword that the book has no moral: "it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were." But it's clear the price is too high:

In this particular life-style the motto is 'Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,' but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

Poll: Bush at new low

2006-08-11T15:17:00.000-05:00

CQPolitics map

There was a lot of prognostication (particularly from the Republicans) following the Lamont victory in CT that this spelled trouble for Democrats in the forthcoming midterms. The idea was supposedly that there are "leftist" elements in the Democratic party (not "Democrat Party" as Republicans like to slur) which pushed/manufactured this win, which are therefore of course out of step with the country as a whole. Unfortunately for this line of reasoning it falls down in two main ways: 1. The voters of CT behind the Lamont win were pretty widespread throughout the state and not an elite urban core, and in this they are in step with most Americans--62% of whom disapprove of the way Bush is handling Iraq, and 71% of whom think the country is heading in the wrong direction; 2. The clear majority of Americans (by 2 to 1) disapprove of Bush in a new AP poll, and a Fox News poll shows Dems with the largest lead since 1982 in the House.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll conducted this week found the president's approval rating has dropped to 33 percent, matching his low in May. His handling of nearly every issue, from the Iraq war to foreign policy, contributed to the president's decline around the nation, even in the Republican-friendly South (AP).

Those are the only two possible bases for the Republican argument, but reality pretty much destroys it.

In fact, the Center for Politics recently updated its overall assessment to predict that Democrats will pick up 12-15 House seats (15 needed), 3-6 Senate seats (6 needed) and 4-6 governorships. CQPolitics meanwhile also reassess favorably for Democrats and their prediction map is shown above.

More on GOTV and micro-politics

2006-08-10T14:46:00.000-05:00

Following the Lamont victory in Connecticut on Tuesday, there has been some analysis of the different characteristics of the places that favored either Lamont or Lieberman.

The report shows that Lamont's support was not geographically isolated, but spread throughout the state. The map is not really "micro-politics" in the sense I've used it previously (precinct level or very fine geographies if done by raster) but the analysts expect to do that level of analysis later.

Places that went for Lamont:

• Rural areas
• Areas with a high median household income
• Areas with a high housing value
• Areas with a higher percentage of voters with college degrees or graduate degrees
• Areas with a high percentage of owner-occupied housing
• Areas with a high percentage of married couples
• Areas with a high percentage of children in private schools
• Areas with low turnover in housing
• Areas with high percentage in white-collar occupations
• Areas where many voters have long commute times
• Areas with high concentrations of veterans

Places that went for Liberman:

• Urban areas
• Areas with high numbers of single women
• Areas with high numbers of unmarried partners, including same-sex partners
• Areas with a high percentage of renter-occupied housing
• Areas with a high property tax burden
• Areas with a high percentage of voters working in blue-collar occupations
• Areas with a high percentage of voters working in service sector occupations
• Areas with a high concentration of people receiving social security
• Areas with high concentrations of individuals currently serving in the armed forces

This kind of analysis is tricky because you may be confounding variables; eg., Lamont did well in rural areas, rural areas are where agricultural workers are, but agricultural workers may or may not be significantly on Lamont's side. Similarly with gay voters and urban areas (gays are predominantly in urban areas). There is more than a whiff of the ecological fallacy in this stuff.

Here's a company that does a geographical text search

2006-08-10T09:02:00.000-05:00

Here's a company that does a geographical text search and displays the results on an interactive map: Metacartography. I hadn't heard of them before, but they sound like a recent startup. As usual with these things the people involved have little or no formal cartographic/GIS training, but rather stumbled upon geographic visualization. Here's the blurb about the founder:

John founded MetaCarta in 1999 while beginning work on his Ph.D. in physics as a Hertz Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While studying the microclimates of forests, John encountered a need for a new way to view collections of documents: geographically.

Well, geography isn't exactly new, but whatever. Here's what they do--their software "ingests" a ton of different kinds of documents (including web pages and Word docs) and finds all the geographic references (explicit and somehow implied) and then tags them with a locational reference. These can then be produced on an interactive map. So presumably (I haven't played with it) if you type your city name in or perhaps even your street name you could find all the documents that refer to it; maybe even an obscure planning permission from the basement of city hall).

This is another step toward the vision in Mapping Hacks:

Imagine a world in which we can move about physical places, accessing not only what is stored in our brains but also multiple layers of information that have previously been inaccessible: experiences of friends, colleagues and complete strangers in the same space; information about who lives and works in the place...perhaps their political affiliations; crime statistics, the history of community events...This is precisely the physical landscape we will likely inhabit in 10 years"
"The physical landscape we move in will become "deep" with vast amounts of digital information--in text, images, and other sensory forms"

Mapping Hacks, Schuyler Erle, p. xxii, 2005.

Erle will be Guest of Honor at this year's NACIS conference, October 2006.

New online GIS of medieval towns

2006-08-10T08:36:00.000-05:00

A team at Queen's University, Belfast has released an online GIS of several medieval towns based on archaeological fieldwork:

Using mapping as a medium, the project examined how urban landscapes were shaped in the middle ages, the project furthers an understanding of the forms and formation of medieval towns. It is the first project to have used spatial technologies – Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) – as a basis for mapping and analysing medieval urban landscapes...

The project focused on a group of ‘new towns’ situated in Wales and England and established in the reign of King Edward I. The towns were all founded between 1277 and 1303. The project looked at thirteen of them in detail: Aberystwyth, Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Caerwys, Conwy, Cricieth, Flint, Harlech, Holt, Newborough, Overton, Rhuddlan, and Winchelsea.

This project combines several of my favorite things, including the overlaying of historic maps in GIS (a la the David Rumsey site) and the characterization of urban areas in terms of its population. You can also download historic data files in shapefile format for offline analysis.

Via the History of Geography listserv

the end of cartographic information or just the beginning?

2006-08-09T13:57:00.000-05:00

OK, here's something that confuses me.

There are two grand theories out there right now that relate to maps and cartographic information. You've heard of both of them, but I've never seen them compared. They promise almost exactly opposite results.

The first and most trendy is the so-called "long tail" of information. Adena's recent article summarizes it well:

The "long tail" coined by Chris Anderson (editor of Wired, who followed up with an article in that publication recently and published a book by that name this week, which was referenced in The New York Times) refers to the phenomenon whereby there's lots of demand for a few popular products (movies, books, albums/songs) and hence they produce a lot of revenue for companies (NetFlix, Amazon, iTunes), but there's little demand for lots of other similar products. For example, many people are going to want to rent Stephen Spielberg's Munich (like my brother and my parents and others), but only a few will want to rent Running on the Sun, about a long race through the desert (like me and other crazies who think that's interesting/fun).

So, Blockbuster will make a lot from Munich and other "blockbusters." It'll make less from Running on the Sun, but… and this is the key thing… it doesn't cost Blockbuster (NetFlix, Amazon, fill in your favorite Business 2.0 company here) that much to stock those films that are in "less demand." In fact, by making available all of those "long tail" films for a long time and serving them to the few who want to see them, it can make a pretty penny.

(Actually the key idea here isn't so new; it was invented by the economist Pareto in 1906, you can read about him in Wikipedia here. His principle is more commonly known as the 80:20 rule or the Pareto law.)

On the other hand we have an even more trendy idea known as "globalization." As it relates to maps and mapping, globalization will reduce the choices that we have through corporate integration, the replacement of smaller, diverse stores with gloobally international ones, and the homogenization of world culture. This was recently discussed in the context of WalMart in last month's Harper's (available online here). The author, Barry C. Lynn, argues that Walmart is a latter-day Standard Oil. A staggering 1 in 5 of every retail purchase in America is done at a Walmart's, and they delibaretely and successfully reduce choice:

The idea that Wal-Mart's power actually subverts the functioning of the free market will seem shocking to some. After all, the firm rose to dominance in the same way that many thousands of other companies before it did -- through smart innovation, a unique culture, and a focus on serving the customer. Even a decade ago, Americans could fairly conclude that, in most respects, Wal-Mart's rise had been good for the nation. But the issue before us is not how Wal-Mart grew to scale but how Wal-Mart uses its power today and will use it tomorrow. The problem is that Wal-Mart, like other monopsonists, does not participate in the market so much as use its power to micromanage the market, carefully coordinating the actions of thousands of firms from a position above the market.

So on the one hand the long tail will provide us with tons of choice and different types of maps, and mappings, while on the other globalization will do exactly the opposite. Which is the real story here?

Brian Harley and the Middle East map

2006-08-09T08:27:00.000-05:00

An interesting article from Zaman Online, a Turkish news source discusses the influence of Harley's work in the context of the Middle East, specifically Turkey and the Kurds.

According to the new global imperial regime, the Middle East map will be defined once again; geographies will be erased and cut out again, and borders will shift in accordance with certain objectives. Just as at Brest-Litovsk, just as at Sevres, and just as at Versailles and Yalta, the maps on our desks will quickly be tossed into the wastepaper basket. In other words, once again the maps aren’t real; they will show what the boss wants. The jolting insight of the indefatigable map decipherer of our age, J. B. Harley, comes to mind: “The history of the use of maps shows us that they never show the truth; they only serve to produce a different truth”...

Today the name of the workshop where the draft is feverishly being made is just under our nose – the “Great Middle East Project.” First we learned its name from the American press, and then we heard statements from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that they wanted to make Diyarbakir the center of this project, and we gave credit to Harley one more time. The map-makers have got to work. Who could have prevented it? The Middle East map grows and shrinks; countries, peoples, and cultures enter and exit.

Armin Lobeck (1886-1958)

2006-08-03T18:08:00.000-05:00

NARA April 06 032
Originally uploaded by ubikcan.
Source: NARA RG256, Entry 52 Folder 1-37

Detail of Armin Lobeck's block map of Albania, prepared for the American Inquiry in 1918. A particularly beautiful piece of work, Lobeck was renowned for his perspectival maps such as this example.

His work was so good that he taken by the American government to Paris to make maps for the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. He was a good observer and an evocative writer. Here is an extract of a letter he wrote while on board the ship with the president. It gives a good idea of daily life on the ship and the time it took to cross the Atlantic:

Dec. 12, 1918. [On board the USS Washington].
How are we idling our time at sea? With numerous and distinguished guests on board, all willing to talk of interesting experiences and fascinating topics, with the beautiful sea spread before our eyes and the finest of semi-tropical weather to tempt us always on deck, with three libraries of books, with a large Conference Room filled with maps, with the President and Mrs. Wilson, and Secretary [of State] and Mrs. Lansing, and Ambassador Davis, and ex-Ambassador White and Jusserand, General Churchill, Colonel Ayers, George Creel and others bobbing around and demanding attention, with three good meals a day and a frequent salt water shower, with an interesting ship filled with interesting machinery, coal bunkers, stoking rooms, troop quarters, bakery shops, all to be looked over, with the experiences of 1200 sailors to be listened to, with boxing and wrestling matches, pie eating contests, depth-bomb exhibitions by the convoying destroyers, target practice by the Pennsylvania, with two band concerts a day and a moving picture show every evening, with crew song recitals and a crew vaudeville, with the Azores relieving the journey by the anticipation of seeing them, the charming reality and the delightful memory of looking back at them, with the official photographer continually at work taking large groups and singles and moving pictures of all of us in little groups, with games of chess and discussions of affairs, with a long wireless report to be read every morning, and the need of brushing up on French, with an odd job or two now and then, there remain but few unoccupied moments on this momentous journey...

The French soldiers say France went into the war to win back Alsace-Lorraine, the British to get the German African colonies, and the Americans to get souvenirs...

His classic book Things Maps Don't Tell Us, is still in print.

Princess Margaret's Face Lift

2006-07-02T22:37:00.000-05:00

The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an eclectic terrain of limousines and bodyguards, private helicopters and state functions. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends.

Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures offer us. How did Garbo brush her teeth, shave her armpits, probe a worry-line? The most intimate details of their lives seem to lie beyond an already open bathroom door that our imaginations can easily push aside. Caught in the glare of our relentless fascination, they can do nothing to stop us exploring every blocked pore and hesitant glance, imagining ourselves their lovers and confidantes. In our minds we can assign them any roles we choose, submit them to any passion or humiliation. And as they age, we can remodel their features to sustain our deathless dream of them.

--J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 111.

Check out atlas(t)

2006-06-30T17:59:00.000-05:00

Just discovered this fantastic new blog, atlas(t), on maps and ways of defining (lots of stuff on naming; several posts on Monmonier's new book). From their opening statement:

We will be explicitly and unapologetically political; we will speak/write from our own cultural context and perspective and not pretend to any impossible journalistic objectivity; we will rant and complain all we like.
We will behave as if this blog is in itself a political act, and furthermore as if the "real estate" or virtual space occupied by this blog is of socio-political and cultural importance ... as if, in fact, our being here mattered.

Wish I'd said that! Mucho cool stuff, check it out.

Study: Cell Phone Users as Bad as Drunk Drivers!

2006-06-30T09:10:00.000-05:00

I knew it!

Even using the hands free option, cell phone drivers drive as poorly as those legally over the limit. What's also interesting is that cell phone users deny being affected and think they are driving just fine.

Anybody read this or know about it?

2006-06-25T13:28:00.000-05:00

A new book: The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and History by Arthur Klinghoffer at Rutgers (Camden) University?

The Amazon page doesn't have much info, but the description looks interesting. Klinghoffr is apparently a prof. of political scince.

New Method for Dating Maps

2006-06-21T08:46:00.000-05:00

Cool. Perhaps this will allow dating of all those controversial maps!

A new and relatively simple method for discovering the date when centuries-old art prints and books were produced has been developed at Penn State. The method could reveal long-sought information about thousands of undated works printed on hand-operated presses prior to the development of modern printing methods in the mid-19th century, including works by Rembrandt and Shakespeare.

Hedges, a world-renowned biologist whose hobby involves Renaissance prints and maps, developed his "print clock" method by first measuring time-related changes in 2,674 Renaissance works. He found that the number of breaks in the lines of images printed from woodblock carvings increased over time, while the image intensity became more pale in copperplate prints...

Hedges' woodblock studies involved four editions of Bordone's Isolario, an atlas containing maps of islands. The print date was known for three of the editions, published in 1528, 1534, and 1547, but the age of the undated book has been debated for nearly 200 years, with estimates ranging from 1537 to 1570...

In addition, Hedges used his print-clock technique to calculate the day on which there were no cracks in the wood, revealing the date when the artist finished carving the woodblock. "This estimate of the date the woodblock was carved seemed odd because it was ten years before the date of the first print, but it turned out that the carving date agreed with the historical records, which place the cartography in that earlier decade," Hedges says.

Red State, Blue State

2006-06-04T09:36:00.000-05:00

Digby has an important post about political values and the red state-blue state divide. While at first sight it appears to have nothing to do with maps, it's actually really about the thing that maps are about themselves: namely the political scene itself.

The immediate context is Josh Marshall's post about the New Yorker piece decrying the fact that Democrats are liberals and keep nominating obviously unwinnable candidates:

I think I've read this article one hundred times -- both in its pre-2006 versions and the new-and-improved 2006 editions.
It goes something like this.

President Bush is very unpopular these days and Democrats think they may win back the Congress because of it. But is hating President Bush enough? Or do Democrats need a positive agenda as an alternative to the Republicans? It is thought by some that it might not be enough. Those somes are right to be worried because there aren't as many liberals in the US as conservatives. So trying to frame the election around torture and warrantless wiretaps may not be a good idea. Another reason to be worried is that the white working class, farmers, suburbanites and deeply religious are no longer all reliable Democratic constituencies. But there are some candidates trying to reach out to these ignored constituencies. But will those centrists be forced to cater to the party base and its philosophy of pessimism? It is feared by some that they may be forced to cater.

That's Josh's parody/summary of the New Yorker. Don't nominate a candidate who caters to the progressive base, avoid those values, move to the center, there aren't enough supporters ("liberals") to win.

Both Josh and Digby reject this approach on the following grounds:

1. Digby says that this approach has been tried and it doesn't work: conservatives still hate the southern/centrist/religious Democratic candidates (their names were Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton). One was impeached and the other is being attacked with censure, 25 years after leaving office.

2. Here's where the geography/maps come in: the point is that there's no such thing as red state/blue state. Maps sometimes make it look like that, but what is really out there is a bunch of people with varying views and we can draw lines around them in any number of ways. Also not to mention that elections take place at all levels of geography (federal, state, local, urban, suburban, exurban, rural...). So the key is not to see a red state and say it's unwinnable, but to see it as diverse and without stereotyped values. In this regard the argument by Ruy Teixeira on whether the suburbas "are" really Republican or a mix of values is very exciting and one of the pieces that got me thinking about mapping and politics. If you could map that diversity more closely and less stereotypically, perhaps at precision mapping levels, you would I think see the diversity. But how to reveal the diversity--that's my interest.

3. Finally, it's still the case that holding to your values is a good thing. Conservative values are on the wrong side of history, especially socially. As for the mood of the country being conservative:

The "mood of the country" is an extremely complex, ephemeral thing with many permutations, not all of them political. But if the the elite press and its GOP string pullers have decided that the political mood is conservative, the last thing I want to do is accomodate it. I want to change it.

Dem's fighting words!