Interesting Snippets

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the giant network of cities, roads, rivers and sea lanes that framed movement across the Roman Empire. It broadly reflects conditions around 200 CE but also covers a few sites and roads created in late antiquity.
The model consists of 751 sites, most of them urban settlements but also including important promontories and mountain passes, and covers close to 10 million square kilometers (~4 million square miles) of terrestrial and maritime space. 268 sites serve as sea ports. The road network encompasses 84,631 kilometers (52,587 miles) of road or desert tracks, complemented by 28,272 kilometers (17,567 miles) of navigable rivers and canals

I kept in my head the images of the town I grew up in, the streets I used to wander and the faces of my family, I treasured those memories,” he said. The memories helped him track down his family. For the past 10 years, Mr Brierley has scrolled the internet for clues. “Using Google Earth, I spent so many hours zooming in and out looking for something I recognised,” he said. He remembered the Khandwa train station and surrounding area, which he eventually found on Google Earth. He then joined a Facebook group for his home town Ganesh Talai and managed to piece together the details by emailing members of the group. He booked his plane ticket and went to the town, scouring streets until he found his family.

An amiable, 35-year-old Yale University librarian, Mugaburu spends his spare time mapping the world. He might, for example, outline the boundaries of a hospital in Haiti, while waiting for his bus. Or he might map his dad’s old neighborhood in Peru after dinner.

You don’t have to thank him. It’s what a citizen mapper does…. At this point, he’s completed more than 62,000 edits of digital maps around the world.

“Little by little, our maps are becoming more coherent,” he says. “All you need is a laptop. I help whenever I have a free moment.”

This Google Earth presentation animates the 3D model of a ship as it follows the track of the Endeavour, and is accompanied by a reading of Cook’s journal. The circumnavigation of North Island is divided into sections which have significant start and end points. In Google Earth terminology, each section is known as a ‘tour’.

U.S. insurance company State Farm has developed a creative campaign that allows users to blow up their home. After users enter their address on the website, they get to see a giant robot roam the neighborhood before arriving at the house number and finally blowing it up.

In India, Google has used the landmarks people enter in Map Maker to improve the driving directions it gives.

The theory is that Indians are much more likely to say, “Take a left after the petrol pump” than, “Go two miles and take a left.”