Final Map Not Done - Review Only

Super Typhoon

Map of Super Typhoon Haiyan that depicts the population density of the areas it hit as well as the maximum wind speeds of the typhoon for each area. The winds over the main islands of the Philippines seems to have been extremely high and definitely caused some damages.

http://www.businessinsider.com/map-of-super-typhoon-haiyan-path-2013-11

Bivariate Map

Bivariate map showing poverty levels and levels of insufficient access to hygienic services in Nicaragua. I think the most interesting thing about this map is that some of the areas with the highest levels of lacking access are areas that have no data on income. As I am not familiar with Nicaragua I can only speculate as to what that reason may be. I chose this map because of the interesting disparity between income and hygienic services in some areas

http://andersolson.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/multivariatemap1.jpg

Lab 10

Lab #9

Final Project

For my final project I am looking to map all major terrorist attacks by Al Qa'ida from 1992 - 2011. The interest in the topic stems from my goal to work in the intelligence community utilizing GIS and Remote Sensing and a good place to start seemed to be practicing data synthesis with map making. 

The map is mainly to be a general informative map and as such it does not have a particular audience but if one does have to be specified it would be for those who work in the intelligence community as visualization to the data to help spot trends or a lack thereof. 

I envision the map to be a graduated symbol map but that may change. 

The scope of the map is on a global scale.

The Source will be the global terrorism database provided by the University of Maryland.
http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd

The base map will likely be exported from Arc Map but I may use an already existing illustrator base map if I can find one.

The production will begin with collecting and filtering the data. All subsequent steps will be related to applying the data to the base map

The biggest challenge will likely be defining what constitutes a major terrorist event with deciding how exactly I want to map the phenomena a close second.

 
This is an example of a map that displays the same theme that I want to map although I feel like it is not well done.

Dot Density

Dot density map that shows the location of commercial wireless towers across the U.S. I chose this map because it is interesting to see that a majority of the towers reside on the eastern portion of the U.S.

http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/wireless.html

Isoline Map

Pretty neat contour map showing the thickness of the Earth's crust in various portions of the world. The most interesting part is the large spatial difference between the two largest areas of thickness. I chose this map because it is interesting to see the varying thickness of the Earth's crust on major fault lines around the world.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/structure/crust/

Lab #8

Apologies professor for being a few minutes late. This was the first time I used illustrator on a mac and i had a heck of a time trying to export an image that would work on blogger as it would not read the image files created by illustrator. This version was made by exporting a pdf and then exporting that to a jpg.

Lab #7

Lab #6

The most obvious differences are in the colors when comparing the digital version to the printed version. The color scheme for the states appear darker on the printed version for the most part with the exception of the background. The background actually seems to be lighter on the printed version. There is a color shift when comparing the two maps and it becomes far more noticeable as you move towards the darker colors. The lighter colors appear most similar between the two copies. When I look at the web version, though I liked the background color at the time of creation, I think that would be something I would explore more to setup a better feel between the map color scheme and the background.

Blog #5

I chose this picture because it is amazing the amount of trouble the disaster in Fukushima has cause. The color scheme basically depicts the percentage chance that the vegetation in the area has levels of 0.24Bq/kg of Cesium 137, essentially radioactive waste from the fallout. While these levels have been shown from Chernobyl studies to not be of major detriment to humans, a loss of vegetation may have a large impact on the population.

http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/1012/modeling-contamination-using-empirical-bayesian-kriging.html

Blog #4

This is a choropleth map showing changes in mortality rate for women in the United States. It is interesting to note that there seems to be a solid trend line that moves from the northwest of the U.S. through the Central U.S. down south and then back up a little. Metropolitan areas seem to be seeing improvement more than worsening which is an interesting note.

 http://www.pophealth.wisc.edu/research-news/2013-03-12-0

GGS 310 Lab #5

Interesting to see how the data changes when using different data classification. Natural breaks is a more accurate measure in this case. The even distribution of quantile makes the map seem more diverse if only because of the number of data sets per classification.

Lab #4 Weeee

GGS 310 Lab#3

GGS 310 Blog #3

 I selected this map because I found it really cool. The way the author used typography to create a world map is something I haven't seen before.

http://vladstudio.deviantart.com/art/Typographic-World-Map-Night-197837014

GGS 310 Lab #2

Blog #2

This map uses a Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area Projection. The coloration of the map displays population density across the U.S. (km^2). The main idea behind the map is to help study the phenomenon of social mobilization. The red circles indicate locations of balloons that were placed around the U.S. with the challenge presented to researchers of finding all of the balloons the fastest using social networking and simulations. I found this to be a very interesting point of study as volunteered geographic information is becoming a much bigger topic.

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-root-limits-social-mobilization.html

GGS 310 Lab #1

GGS 310 first post

Map depicting the popularity of teams in the 2013 NCAA Mens basketball tournament Southern Region. I am a big sports fan and love college basketball. Go Heels!

Link to original - http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/5149fd50ecad04f55f000018-900-574/ncaa-fandom-map-south-region.jpg