May

24th 2007

Eighth Grader wins Geography Bee

Filed Under Games, General | Leave a Comment

Only the second female to win the National Geographic bee, Caitlin Snaring won the competition by knowing which Vietnamese city, split by a river with the same name, was an imperial capital for more than a century. (Answer: Hue.)  Quoted in USA Today, Caitlin said “I hope that by winning today, I inspire other girls to try geography, because the world is the greatest subject I’ve ever learned.”

Learn more at: Girl Wins Geographic Bee — First in 17 Years

May

03rd 2007

Online Mapping Scrambles after Tanker Spill

Filed Under Google Maps, Internet, Map Servers | Leave a Comment

The recent disaster that melted a critical portion of San Francisco’s highway infrastructure had more than just commuters scrambling. Within two days, many of the major online mapping sites had modified their driving directions to circumvent the now closed overpass. Rachel Konrad from the Associated Press reported that:

Yahoo took nearly 39 hours to suggest new routes. Google Maps was updated late Monday night. MapQuest Inc., a subsidiary of Time Warner’s AOL, began suggesting detours late Tuesday night.

While not exactly real-time and up to the minute, the hasty scramble to update the maps to reflect real world conditions is a promising sign as mapping companies work to respond quickly to events that affect commutes.

“I’d say overall we were very successful — we fixed the routing but didn’t break anything in the process,” Yahoo Maps director Jeremy Kreitler said Wednesday. “This has been an interesting challenge — an example of how we put into practice our attempts to provide real-time traffic information.”

Read more at Online maps updated after highway disaster

May

02nd 2007

Plotting Terror

Filed Under Current Events, Google Maps | Leave a Comment

(Via All Points Blog) - NPR hosts a series descriptively called “On the Media” and they recently interviewed Morgan Clements, founder and publisher of the Global Incident Map on why he maps out terror incidents.

From NPR:

Plotting Terror ~ April 27, 2007
From bomb scares to stolen radioactive material to rebel attacks, alarming things happen around the world, all day, every day. Morgan Clements, founder and publisher of the Global Incident Map, talks about why it’s important to map them.