Mapping Power Outages in Kiev

The Map of Power Outages in Kiev visualizes power outage schedules in the Ukrainian capital. Due to Russia's ongoing attacks on power stations in Ukraine the electric power company Yasno has to schedule times of planned power outages. The Map of Power Outages in Kiev uses this schedule to provide an interactive map at the individual building level of these scheduled power outages.

It is important to note that this is not a real-time map of actual power outages in Kiev. The map is for informational purposes only, and shows only scheduled power outages, not the possible actual situation at individual addresses. However it is possible to use the day and time controls provided on the map to see when the power is scheduled to be on or off at individual addresses throughout Kiev.

The Map of Power Outages in Kiev was created by Vadym Klymenko. His blog post on the Kyiv Electricity Map provides an interesting account of how he was able to get the individual building address data from OpenStreetMap using Geofabrik. The address data used by the power supplier Yasno comes in a different format than that used by OSM and Vadym also provides an interesting description of the problems that this caused in creating the Map of Power Outages in Kiev.

Your Daily Map Trivia Game

TripGeo Trivia is a new daily geography quiz which requires you to identify ten cities based on a number of clues. Every day ten new random cities from around the world need to be identified. To help you in this task you can view three clues as to the identity of each city.

Every day you get to identify ten new cities. For each city you get three clues and a choice of possible answers. Using the clues you simply need to click on the correct city's marker on an interactive map. There are 30 points in total to be won in TripGeo Trivia. If you guess a city correctly on your first attempt you score 3 points. If you require two clues then you score two points. If it takes you three clues to identify the city then you only score 1 point.

Every day there are 30 points to be won and 10 new cities to be identified on a Google Map. The clues for each city have been generated by ChatGPT. At the end of the game you can explore each of that day's ten cities in more detail. Select a city that you are interested in and you can learn about a number of the city's most popular landmarks and venues, as chosen by ChatGPT, and view their locations on a Google Map.

The Catalan GeoGuessing Game

Developer Toni Vidal has released a new GeoGuessr inspired game featuring photographs of the stunning and diverse landscapes of Catalonia. His Geoendevina game simply requires you to guess the locations of a series of photos taken in the Catalonia region of Spain.

The rules of Geoendevina are very simple. In each round of the game you are presented with a different photograph, each of which depicts a unique location somewhere in Catalonia. From the bustling streets of Barcelona to the serene beaches of Costa Brava, or the majestic peaks of the Pyrenees to the historic landmarks in Girona, each image is a window into the rich tapestry of Catalonia.

Your task is to pinpoint the exact location of each photograph by clicking on the map within 60 seconds. The more accurately you identify the location, the better your score. At the end of each game, you will receive a summary showing the total distance between your guessed locations and the correct positions. The closer your guesses, the better your score.

Toni's game is loosely based on my own Backdrop game, which requires players to identify the locations in famous paintings. Toni has adapted the code so that the game works a lot better on mobile devices and introduced a 60 second time limit for each round.

Tracking American Spies in Germany

Bayerischer Rundfunk and netzpolitik have carried out a joint investigation into how our location data is for sale across the world. These days nearly everyone voluntarily carries around their own personal tracking device in the form of a smartphone. These devices record our movements all day long. 

What most people don't know is that their location data is openly being sold by global data brokers.

Journalist Sebastian Meineck from netzpolitik was given 3.6 billion datapoints, containing location data on around 11 million people, free of charge by a a U.S. data vendor called Datarade. The data was given as just a sample of the data that Datarade was willing to sell to the journalist.

Bayerischer Rundfunk and netzpolitik both carried out their own investigations into the personal information which was contained in the Datarade data. In Under Surveillance Bayerischer Rundfunk reveals how the data includes location data of US spies working in Germany. By exploring the location data of people who spend most of their working hours at a US military base in Germany the broadcaster was able to identify an individual working in the 'Tin Can' - a building used by the US for internet surveillance. Using the location data provided by Datarade it was then just a simple task to determine this US spy's home address in Germany. They are also able to work out other personal details of the individual from the data "including family relationships, preferred supermarket and weekend activities".

This is just one example from the 11 million people's location data provided by Datarade to netzpolitik. According to netzpolitik the "location data comes from mobile phone apps that pass on GPS data for advertising purposes". This data is most often provided by popular apps such as weather, navigation or dating apps.

Both Bayerischer Rundfunk and netzpolitik have written a series of articles on their investigations into the Datatrade location data. In How data brokers sell our location data netzpolitik lists and links to 17 of these articles.

Via: Quantum of Sollazzo

The Retro Gamer's Map

The Retro.Directory is an interactive map which shows the locations of venues related to retro gaming. These include gaming museums, arcades, cafes, bars, clubs and repair services. The map is designed to help retro gaming enthusiasts discover retro-themed locations nearby and around the world.

I am so old that I can actually remember a time before computer games. I can remember the amazing excitement of playing Pong for the first time on a television set (via an Atari games console) and the sudden appearance of arcade games cabinets such as Space Invaders and Galaxians in arcades, bowling alleys and cafes.

I get a visceral thrill every time I stumble upon a retro computer game from my youth. So an interactive map which lists the locations of venues devoted to retro video games ticks a lot of my geek-gamer boxes. What makes the Retro.Directory even more appealing is its deliberate retro computer aesthetic, redolent of an early Yahoo. The sidebar collapsible menus for example allow you to filter the results shown on the map (by events and different types of retro gaming venue).

If there is one thing I enjoy more than playing computer games it is playing pinball. To this day one of my proudest lifetime achievements was clocking the pinball machine in the student union bar at Reading University.

Thanks to Pinball Map it is very easy to track down the locations of nearby pinball machines. Pinball Map has been mapping the locations of pinball machines around the world since 2008. From Soho down to Brighton the Pinball Map must have mapped them all. It currently shows the location of over 43,000 machines. You can even use Pinball Map to find the locations of your favorite pinball machines by name.

Virtual Reality OpenStreetMap

osm4vr is a virtual reality world built using OpenStreetMap map tiles and building footprints. Using osm4vr with a VR headset you can explore the world in virtual reality. Alternatively, if you don't have access to a headset you can simply fly around the world in your browser instead.

Most of the 3d buildings are created using OSM building footprints with building heights, so the graphics can be a little basic. In VR you can flap your arms and fly around the world. In the browser you can use your arrow keys and mouse to navigate around instead. osm4vr also has a search box so you can quickly transport yourself to any location in the world.

You can also explore OpenStreetMap in virtual reality using VR Map. VR Map displays OpenStreetMap data as a virtual reality environment with 3D buildings and trees. You can move around this demo VR Map using your keyboard's arrow keys (or the W,A,S,D keys) and by using your mouse to pan around the scene.

Currently VR Map allows you to explore only a few select locations around the world (including Vienna, San Francisco and New York). However if you fork VR Map on GitHub you can change the initial map coordinates to any location in the world. The virtual reality environment uses an OpenStreetMap tile layer as the ground layer. Buildings tagged in OSM are extruded by their height tags (or to 15 metres if the building doesn't have a height defined). Trees are rendered using the OSM tags for height, circumference and diameter_crown.

osm4vr was inspired by VR Map. However, while VR Map works only in limited areas (thanks to geographical data pre-downloaded from OSM), osm4vr loads the OSM map tiles and buildings dynamically so you can freely move around the whole world.

10 Million Street Views

Street-level imagery such as Google Maps Street View panoramas has become a pivotal resource for many researchers as it can provide a unique perspective on built environments. The ability to access and analyse comprehensive street-level imagery provides researchers with a powerful tool for exploring and understanding urban environments. 

Accessing comprehensive street level imagery at scale can be difficult, expensive and time consuming. Which is why the Urban Analytics Lab at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has introduced the Global Streetscapes project. The NUS Global Streetscapes project provides extensive coverage of urban street level imagery, with 10 million street-level images across 688 cities worldwide, enriched with over 300 attributes. 

The dataset includes images from both Mapillary and KartaView, two crowdsourced 'street view' platforms that offer a diverse range of street-level imagery. Each image in the dataset is annotated with attributes, such as the type of road, weather conditions, and the mode of transportation used to capture the image. These annotations enable researchers to filter and select the images that are the most relevant to their specific studies, for example for evaluating walkability or mapping the levels of urban greenery.

The Global Streetscapes project has even pre-computed some of the evaluations of street view imagery that researchers commonly use, such as the green view index, which ranks the ratio of vegetation pixels in an image to the total number of pixels. 

The NUS Global Streetscapes project is free to use. The project provides open access to a comprehensive dataset of 10 million street-level images enriched with extensive metadata, as well as the code and documentation necessary for using and extending the dataset. All the code and documentation for the project can be found on the Global Streetscape GitHub page and the dataset itself can be accessed on the project's Hugging Face page.

Hat-tip: Map Channels

30 Days of Crashes in New York City

Between June 16th and July 15th, 149 people were injured by cars in the planned New York congestion zone and 4 people were killed.

At the beginning of June New York Governor Kathy Hochul canceled New York City’s planned congestion zone. Under the planned congestion zone vehicles traveling into or within the central business district of Manhattan would have been charged a fee. 

In response to Huchul's cancellation of the congestion zone scheme Transpo Maps has begun mapping all the crashes in the planned congestion zone area. The map plots the locations of vehicle crashes over the last 30 days using data from NYC’s open data portal. Apparently the map is updated as new data is made available on the data portal.

The NYC Congestion Zone Live Crash Tracker shows the locations of crashes where people were injured using orange markers. Pink markers are used to show crashes where there was a fatality. If you click on a census tract on the map you can view data on the number of crashes in the block during 2023, and data on the number of cyclists, pedestrians and car drivers injured and killed in car crashes last year. You can also view data on the number of 'vulnerable residents' and car-free households in the selected census tract.

The 2024 European Election Map

Zeit has created an interactive map which visualizes the results in the 2024 European Union elections in 83,000 municipalities. The map in Explore Europe's Most Detailed Electoral Map colors each electoral area in Europe based on the politics of the leading candidate in the election.

The map allows you to compare the 2024 European Union election results with the results from 2014 and 2019. By switching between the 2014 and 2024 results you can see that there has been a general shift across much of Europe to more right-wing parties. The far-right in particular have made huge gains in France, Austria, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Latvia and Germany.

Zeit's accompanying article (in German) explores some of the most interesting results to emerge in June's election. For example the article explores a pattern across much of Europe where inner-city areas tend to vote for more left-wing parties than those in rural areas, who tend to favor parties of the right. 

The newspaper also notes that Poland once again seems politically split along a 100 year old border. In August, 1772, Russia, Prussia, and Austria signed a treaty that partitioned Poland. Poland regained its independence and reunited as the Second Polish Republic in 1918 after World War I. However, the pre-1918 geographical divide seems to re-emerge in the results of every Polish election. Zeit notices that in this European election 'In the western and northern regions that were once German, people vote differently (usually more liberally) than in the former Russian regions.'

The German newspaper also points out the political differences between the Wallonia and Flemish regions in Belgium and the split in Germany along the old West and East German border.

Battles of World War II & American Wars

HistoryMaps has been very busy in the last few weeks, releasing new interactive maps visualizing the:

• Battles of World War II
• Battles of the American Revolution
• Battles of the American Civil War

Nono Umasy's HistoryMaps website is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in world history, offering hundreds of interactive timelines and maps that explore historical events across the scope of human civilization.

The latest three interactive maps on HistoryMaps provide a mapped guide to the battles of World War II, the American Revolution and the American Civil War. On each of these individual maps the locations of important and significant battles are displayed on an interactive map and listed chronologically in the map sidebar.

You can click on the individual battle markers on the map to read the battle's synopsis in the sidebar timeline (each of which includes a link to the battle's Wikipedia entry). The map sidebar also includes a timeline control which allows you to filter the battles shown on the map by year. Other controls allow you to filter the battles by 'Naval', 'Land' and 'Sieges' (and on the World War II map by 'Aerial').

On the cartography side the underlying maps seem to use chronologically accurate borders. For example the country borders for the World War II map includes Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, East Prussia and other historical geopolitical entities which no longer exist.