Slashgeo

Mapperz offers a Nokia N97 Ovi Maps review with multiple screenshots. From the entry: "What is New? * The map (vector) data has been completely updated * Current weather forecast information. * Speed Limit Warner * Saftey Spot Warner * Travel time or Time of Arrival option * Automatic 'Re-route' due to traffic option * Walking Directions has the option of straight-line distance to the destination. * Automatic 'Day/Night Time' Map mode. * Maps Improvement option. * *Compass mode (N97) Map rotates with you touch dragging (pan & zoom) * Search Nearby - vastly improved and more details available to users * Synchronisation with Ovi Maps Online. (confirmed this works very well) * Performance has been much improved (panning the map) * bugs fixed and is now a more stable application. * Better support and help - on phone or online option." Some previous stories copied below.

Fortius One offers a long and informative article named The Repercussions of Being Addicted to Oil: Geospatial Modeling of Supply Shocks. The abstract: "In a world addicted to oil and the prodigious infrastructure that produces it there are distinct spatial variations in oil dependence and vulnerability. Depending on a countries location they have dependencies of different sources of oil. Disruptions in any one source of oil will have differing impact in both magnitude and breadth of countries affected. To begin to understand such a volatile landscape this paper will review pertinent literature surrounding oil shocks and propose a model of how they can be geospatially modeled. Specifically the modeling will calculate an oil import vulnerability index, oil dependency index and the percent reduction in import diversity for 63 countries." See also several previous related stories below.

The FTG blog informs us about a newly and freely available book on biomapping and emotional cartography. From the book: "This book is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists brought together by christian nold to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising people’s intimate biometric data and emotions using technology." This topic has been covered a few times in the past, see related stories below.

This has been a crazy week for me. Here's a batch of recent geonews that you may find interesting. There's a biased review of QGIS 1.0 with a top 5 favorite features: "Dockable windows, Python plug-ins, GRASS toolbox, Mapserver and WMS layer and The community". QGIS is also amongst the 20 OSGeo projects that got funding for Google's Summer of Code. Autodesk announced Topobase 2010. Vector One discusses the geospatial potential of the purchase of Sun by Oracle. Google now have My Location in their Toolbar, you can also now save and share directions with My Maps. The Map Room shares another map of U.S. job losses, an entry on true orthophotography and a singles map for the U.S., differentiating women and men. Spatial Sustain informs us Japan plans to launch as many as 100 mini-satellites, offers an entry named How can geospatial solutions capture more of the IT budget? and finally a map of the most remote locations on Earth. Mapperz informs us Via Michelin is revamped and that 140,000 miles of African roads has been added to OpenStreetMap. The FGT blog provides two entries on more free MacOSX GIS software. All Points Blog has an entry on GPS to assist guide dogs, another one on the new agenda for the U.K. Ordnance Survey, another one on the "GIS Alley" in Colorado, another one of an interesting Tokyo subway touchable interactive map. Ok, I'll stop there... but I still have over 400 entries to catch up :-/ Have a nice weekend! See also related stories below.

It's been almost three years since the last mention mention of OpenJUMP here. Mapperz just shared a short 'review' of OpenJUMP, a free, Java-based and open source Geographic Information System: "OpenJump GIS is one of the better all round 'Free GIS' programs because: 1. It supports common GIS formats (.shp, .tif, .gml etc). 2. You can EDIT the data - lots are free but this one you can fully edit the data. 3. You can do some GIS Analysis!" Here's the official OpenJUMP website. We mentioned other open source GIS software such as Quantum GIS, GRASS GIS, uDig and gvSIG amongst others.

Not specifically news but sharing my enthusiasms about Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" (on Amazon) and "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (on Amazon), two books making strong relations between geography and the fate of civilizations. Of course, the presented theories are only part of a larger answer, read the criticism section of the Wikipedia article and why not the geographical determinism article. From the GGS article: "Diamond argues that: the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences amplified by various positive feedback loops; and that, if cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example Chinese centralized government, or improved disease resistance among Eurasians), it is only so because of the influence of geography." The only previous reference in the geoblogs that I found is this entry on SS about Jared Diamond on Consumption. A quick search found four related entries on Slashdot.

The FGT blog links to the new MapAction.org 'Field Guide to Humanitarian Mapping', which is actually a good 118-pages introductory guide to GIS and GPS. From the preface: "The guide contains tutorials on the use of two alternative mapping toolkits: Google Earth (Chapter 3) and an open-source GIS software package called MapWindow (Chapter 4). There is also a section on using a GPS to collect data (Chapter 2)." See also related stories below.