The Memory Leak

Been looking through Digipede and wondering if it would be possible to take a grid based approach to map tile generation. Unlike most other grid solutions, this one is based on .NET, which means grid based ArcObjects apps should be possible. Since ArcSDE would likely become the bottleneck, seems like each node could cache a geographic area into an InMemory workspace, and generate tiles from that.

While I never bought into the view that the military operates at the direction of the oil industry, I began to have second thoughts this morning. I was looking for a particular software vendor with whom I had an appointment in one of the exhibit halls of the convention center. Booth after booth showed all sorts of high tech military surveillance systems. ESRI had a booth, so I figured I must be in the right place. Wrong. Turns out it was a conference for the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. The registration desk staff in military uniforms had given me an exhibit hall pass, no questions asked, after I handed them my AAPG invitation. I’m not sure what sort of registration system they were using. It was electronic though.

After realizing I was in the wrong hall, I headed next door, where the American Association of Petroleum Geologists were holding their meeting. I missed hearing Ray Hunt deliver the keynote speech the previous evening. You may have heard of him. He’s an oil man from Dallas who’s on the board of directors at Halliburton. Also coincidentally, he was appointed by Bush in 2001 to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. I’m not sure if he was also speaking at the military conference.

What is striking about the AAPG exhibit hall, is that among the booths of high tech hardware and software vendors are many booths selling beautiful stone jewelry. The ammonite fossil jewelry seemed to present extinction as an art form. Ammonites look a lot like the Chambered Nautilus, in Oliver Wendel Holmes’ poem. While the poem celebrates unlimited growth, the ammonite fossils suggest limits.

From Jess Strykers’ Landscape Sprinkler Design Tutorial

MyHouse is a concept I’ve been thinking through for a while. It is an idea for an internet site that allows a person to spatially organize their life, using their house as a starting point. This article examines a use case for water sprinkler system design.

Suppose the user has bought a house from a seller (builder) that was smart enough to include georeferenced parcel boundary, building footprint and underground utilities for the house on the MyHouse website (a big selling point!). Pipes have been tagged with diameters. 3D trees have been placed around the yard. The user would now like to install a sprinkler system.

Landscape Design (Bring Me a Shrubbery!)
The user logs into his MyHouse account and draws plants onto a map of his yard. MyHouse has links to nurseries where the user can browse, drag and drop things like shrubbery. Each plant placed on the map can be tagged with its water requirements and height. The user marks off barriers (areas/lines) where laying pipe is not allowed.

Design the Pipes
The user submits a job, specifying whether the design should minimize water usage or material cost. The job runs on a server in the background. The user does not care if it uses a monte carlo method, a genetic algorithm, or cheap overseas labor. The job may request one or more designs to be generated. Each design includes a bill of materials. The design takes into account the barriers for underground pipes, as well as potential spray blockage by trees/shrubs.

The user can check on the status of his job, along with an option to cancel the job.

Design Review
When the job is completed, the user receives an email with a link to a 3D design showing spray patterns and how the shrubs/trees block the spray pattern. An operation plan is provided that times each section of the system to assure different plants receive proper water amounts, including maps of “rainfall” levels.

The user then looks over the alternative designs and selects his favorite. He then clicks on a button that says “request quotes”. Competing sprinkler system installers are sent an invitation to bid on the project.

Construction
As the system is built, the design is updated to reflect actual materials used.

Calibration
The user can choose to calibrate his sprinklers. The system instructs the user locations where rain gauges are to be placed around the yard, along with an operation schedule. The user places the gauges, and records water levels collected at each gauge. The system then creates an observed rainfall map, and generates a refined operational plan intended to meet stated watering requirements. The user may re-calibrate the system as many times as he wishes.

The service is free to the user. Advertisers pay to place ads for sprinkler heads, plants, fertilizer, etc. Installers pay to receive invitations to bid.

See also Sunshine maps.

While they do have slick maps, I don’t think HotPads should refer to them as heat maps. (via The Map Room).

To me, heat maps are rasters created using an inverse-distance-weighting method, or something similar. Geochalkboard has an example of a true heat map.

There’s an interesting article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a few weeks ago. The researchers found a strong correlation to ducks and rice fields for the spread of avian flu. I wonder if this suggests closer monitoring of large poultry farms located near rice fields here in Texas would be useful.

Mapping H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza risk in Southeast Asia

I see news that Microsoft is rolling out ClearFlow. When I search for INRIX and ClearFlow I don’t get any hits. Microsoft spun off INRIX a few years ago to do realtime traffic modeling. Washington Post has a write-up on INRIX here.

Note that INRIX is essentially a crowdsourcing (or VGI) scheme.

So is Clearflow competing with INRIX, or is it using it somewhere behind the scenes?

Sean’s response to Ed’s mention of “I’d like some cheese.. but I’d rather not know how it’s made” got me thinking about the role of standards.

Suppose I follow Sean’s suggestions and make a batch of cheese. I can’t really call the cheese Stilton unless it’s been blessed by the Stilton Cheesemakers’ Association. Consumers discover a resource using it’s name - in this case a name under control by a standards organization that assures all cheese labeled Stilton follows a strict code and is produced in Derbyshire, Leicestershire, or Nottinghamshire.

Certainly a standards body can overreach itself. I heard somewhere that Monty Python’s Cheese Shop sketch was an allusion to unintended consequences that arose from government policies aimed to regulate retail cheese. There must be some middle ground, where a standard can instill consumer confidence without burdening retailers.

This also applies to geodata. For example, almost all appraisal districts here in Texas use GIS to store parcel data. There is likely a well defined legal definition somewhere for what constitutes a parcel. As far as I know, however, there is no standard (RDF or otherwise) describing how parcels can be published. If such standards were available, appraisal districts could publish their parcels to the GeoWeb where they could be discovered and analyzed by others. But getting consensus from a standards committee would take forever. That leaves us with companies like Google calling the shots.

I bet Google is looking to do with parcels what they’ve already done with the Google Transit feed specification. I don’t think any sort of grass roots movement could have evolved a standard for transit, much less an agency like the Federal Transit Administration.

When Ed says this:

Perhaps a new approach is needed where standards are defined at the same time as new applications and functionality developed, so that the standards process is driven by individuals and organisations implementing new functionality which is standardised once demonstrated to be both stable and useful !

What he really means is this: once it has been demonstrated that Google can monetize a feed, they will support the standard.

Let’s hope the result is better than velveeta.

IBM’s EPA problems seem to have spread, resulting in a GSA suspension on any new Federal work.

Because of the suspension, GSA told its acquisition staff members they can’t solicit offers from the company, award new contracts, place task, delivery, or purchase orders, or consent to subcontracts with IBM.

UPDATE: The glass dome place over IBM has now been removed.

This graph is from a paper on Amazon’s Dynamo. I suspect other months (not during shopping season) would look quite different.

With a name like “Elastic Compute Cloud”, I would expect the price for EC2 to reflect the supply of available compute capacity - isn’t this what elasticity of supply is all about? Currently pricing does not reflect time of use. I wonder how much performance degrades for EC2 users during Christmas shopping season.

Amazon relaxes the Consistency part of the DBMS ACID requirement in order to achieve availability. Maybe another rule could be relaxed, the one saying keys should not have any meaning beyond their use as an ID. If we did this, maybe Peano keys could be used, providing a spatially enabled Dynamo-like system.

America’s Promise Alliance is getting a lot of press for a report they recently published on high school graduation rates. While the report itself contains many analytical maps, none of the news reports I’ve seen include any. I like to see reports recognizing the influence of geography. But I wonder if there may be other explanations. For example, would the rates in different cities still differ that much after adjusting for race/ethnicity?

Too bad GeoCommons is not up and running, otherwise the data could get posted there and we could do further analysis.

Cities in Crisis - A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation