Computers, Society, and Nature

Okay, it’s been awhile. I’m enjoying my sabbatical in the Netherlands so blog activity has slowed way down. But with my recent upgrade of wordpress I’m ready to get started again. Here’s an interesting presentation on a piece of software that has amazing potential for landscape analysis, scenario planning, and participatory planning.

Let’s say, you’re concerned about the impact on erosion of a particular clearcut. You delineate the area, “build” the bulldozer, run the model, and then measure the siltation. Voila, you see your impact.

The project description is here, although the video players are better at veoh and at youtube.

According to the creators,

Since refining the FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) sensing technique, we’ve been experimenting with a wide variety of application scenarios and interaction modalities that utilize multi-touch input information. These go far beyond the “poking” actions you get with a typical touchscreen, or the gross gesturing found in video-based interactive interfaces. It is a rich area for research, and we are extremely excited by its potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and intuitiveness. It’s also just so much fun!

Our technique is force-sensitive, and provides unprecedented resolution and scalability, allowing us to create sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accommodate both hands and multiple users.

The video shows a great example of how the interface could be used with cartography and GIS (e.g., think of how it could be integrated with Google Earth!). I think it has enormous implications for environmental modelling, simulation, presentation and group work. Just think about how it could be used in describing the impacts of climate change or exploring future scenarios in community planning.

NOAA just announced a new projection system that shows rotating spatial data on a sphere. It’s called Science on a Sphere. Four computer controlled projectors (one computer per projector, plus a fifth coordinator computer) project images that appear to move on a six foot spherical movie screen.

Science on a Sphere takes flat, two-dimensional images and data taken from spherical objects like planets and moons, and synchronizes and blends them into animated presentations. Most of the almost 100 presentations created so far are silent displays meant to illustrate lectures.

This is something you have to see, so the NYTimes has a short video on the subject. The NOAA site has the best video, though. My favorite is the x-ray sun. The 500-year CO2 simulator is pretty scary and in-person it must be one of the best visualizations of climate change available.

The system costs a whopping $180,000 for the hardware and software. I’m sure it could be done for cheaper and it could be better as well. Start with a weather balloon for the screen. The stick of gum-sized Linux machines could function as the “computers,” although I wonder if this couldn’t be done on a single computer (if necessary, could we do it with virtual machines?). Projecting the 2-D to 3-D data (that’s geographic projections, guys) is the mathematical stumbling block but most GIS software can handle it now. The specs state that the software accepts most graphics formats, but these are static .gifs, .jpegs, etc. Integrating the system with a GIS platform would allow the user to add/modify layers and create annotations on the fly (think of a sketch map, except rotating and 6 feet in diameter). I’ve simplified some of the details, but it’s doable.

Of course, this division of NOAA probably worked out a very nice GUI and, of course, they’ve managed the coordination of the projectors. The site mentions that they’ve developed an API and they adopted an Open-Source Software License so perhaps we will shortly be able to download the source code so we can create our own applications.

(The oblate spheroid is a geography reference. Planets tend not to be spheres. Most are oblate spheroids. That’s why in addition to projections, you also need to worry about things called datums too.)

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has made its satellite images and environmental data on coral bleaching available on Google Earth. Now you can watch the coral reefs disappear on your laptop!

MIT researchers has developed a new way to find fish in the ocean. Using modified sonar, the device can map fish at much greater depths and distances than traditional techniques.

The NYTimes article says the device is a boon for conserving fish because scientists can use it to better understand the behaviour of shoals of fish. Let’s hope the technology is not so cheap that the big trawlers also can use it.

A movie of the modified sonar is here. Warning: it’s a BIIIG file.

Worried about reduction of the Earth’s cryosphere? At least you can see the coolest animation of it on the web. This video from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is an amazing combination of geo-visualization, temporal modeling, and 3-D modeling. All in a single shot of cruising over Antarctica (replete with roving annotations) to settling on sections of South and North America to moving to the Arctic and finally on to Greenland. It’s also a seamless blend of very different models (e.g., movements of glaciers and changes in mountain snow cover). The site mentions the importance of continued collection of data. I hope that viewers get a sense of the enormous quantity of spatial data needed to produce this seven minute animation.

No GIS is mentioned, however. Sigh.

The Australian government is looking to computing technology to curtail water-borne pollution, which is destroying the Great Barrier Reef. The government intends to wire the reef network with a network of sensors that will relay information on water quality. Wiring will start with the Davies Reef and will build on the weather station already at the reef. Reef-based sensors will initially measure salinity, humidity and light. Rivers that open onto the reefs will contain sensors that will measure non-point source pollutants such as fertilizers.

Wiring the reefs is not easy:

Creating a wireless sensor network is challenging. An added difficulty in this project is the deployment of sensors in a marine environment: saltwater is corrosive and tropical waters encourage the growth of biological life on surfaces.

Data from the sensors will be used as inputs to computer models to project impacts on the corals, fish and overall reef quality.

For other instances of wired habitats, see the post on wired woods.

Archaeology provides us with a historical timeline of human life and development that dates back over one hundred thousands years. The discipline is a means by which we can track changes in various aspects of human culture, making it a two-dimensional field of study, comprised of both a spatial and a temporal aspect. There has been increasing interest in integrating GIS, remote sensing and GPS into archaeology. These tools can be used for large-scale research and data processing, acting as a means to combine results of different archaeological studies into an integrated database.

One such way GIS is applicable to archaeology is in something called “aerial archaeology”. Aerial archaeology encompasses satellite imagery, whether it be from SPOT or GPS satellites, color aerial photography or high-resolution height data, that are then used to generate digital terrain models (DTM) of archaeological sites and monuments. With DTMs, GIS provides a form of landscape management through an easily accessible computer database, which allows for analytical purposes.

The initial stage of aerial archaeology involves digitizing. A scanner digitizes the surface of an artifact or monument in the form of x, y, and z co-ordinates. A connectivity list describes the relationship of the points to each other. Through computer aided design (CAD), the DTM of the archaeological site or object is created. After RE (reverse engineering), which is the process of acquiring point data from the surface of the artifact, the point co-ordinate data is then converted into a physical prototype using an RP (rapid prototyping) technique. The final digital 3-dimensional replication of the object or monument can then be accessed, altered, or analyzed with ease by archaeologists. Here’s an example of modelling artwork and archaeological forms.

This is one example of how GIS can be used as an interactive tool for modeling and analyzing archaeological information. Who knows, maybe in the future this will replace traditional archaeological methods.

Thanks to MP for the post.

For another instance of GIS and the social sciences and humanties, see the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, a spatially catalogued digital library of cultural and historical resources.

New satellite imaging techniques have revealed that the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed twice as fast as previously thought.

Scientists have discovered that previous satellite photographs of the Amazon have missed a form of surreptitious logging that is equally destructive, but not as apparent from space.

Now a team of American and Brazilian specialists have for the first time been able to assess from space the damage done by “selective logging”, when one or two trees are removed leaving surrounding trees intact.

More on the imaging:

Scientists have been working for eight years to find a way of detecting the large-scale damage caused by selective logging. From this work emerged the Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLAS) which processes data from three Nasa satellites. The information is fed into a powerful supercomputer which can spot changing patterns within each image pixel.

“For example, the signals tell us how much green vegetation is in the canopy, how much dead material is on the forest floor and how much bare soil there is,” said Dr Asner [, head of the study]. “Extracting those data has been a Holy Grail of remote sensing. With CLAS, we’ve been able to obtain a spatial resolution of 98ft by 98ft for the Brazilian Amazon Basin. That’s huge.”

I don’t know whether to call this positive technological innovation or not, considering how depressing the findings are.

Click here and here for more info on the Stanford work.