Luke Dittrich dismisses the uproar over Palin's use of Canadian healthcare back in the '60s:
Whitehorse General Hospital, where my own daughter was born three years ago, remains, to this day, the closest major hospital to Skagway. When Chuck and Sally chose to take their kids there, it would have been a choice dictated strictly by geography, not politics. There are many things one could criticize about Sarah Palin's views of health care in the United States. That she once participated in cross-border medical tourism to Canada is not one of them.
Juneau is roughly the same distance away, of course. The problem, however, is that - surprise! - she has previously said the Palins did not take their kids for care to Whitehorse, Canada, but to Juneau, Alaska:
Her brother burned his foot badly jumping through a fire, and her mother had to take him down to Juneau on the ferry to the hospital. “All these years later, that’s still what people have to rely on here in some instances,” she said.
Maybe this is just an innocent memory lapse, and her father says it was Whitehorse, not Juneau. But that would make Palin's previous statement objectively and trivially, er, untrue.
NY’s Regent exams have been administered since 1865, but this year, in light of penny pinching measures throughout the Department of Education, some of the tests may be eliminated or drastically scaled back. Next week the board of Regents may decide to trash many subject tests that measure achievement among the state’s high schoolers, including ones for foreign languages, math, science, global history, government and geography. According to the Times Union, the board may also choose to stop translating the tests, keeping Spanish, but getting rid of Chinese, Korean, Russian and Haitian Creole versions. Sources estimate the cutbacks could save $13.7 million in preparation costs.
The reductions, which may affect 13 out of 17 total subject tests, come as a surprise, since the Regents board has consistently pushed to increase mandatory testing. "Our understanding is that this is a worst-case scenario," added David Albert of the NY School Boards Association.
"It was not something I was anticipating, but when you go back and consider what the department is facing ... it's not surprising," said Robert Lowry, of the state Superintendents Council. Facing a $9 billion state deficit, Gov. Paterson’s latest budget proposal suggests $4.7 million in cuts from the Department of Education and $1.5 billion more in school aid.
"Space is no longer in geography - it’s in electronics. Unity is in the terminals. It’s in the..." http://tumblr.com/xt876q4rj
[Direct Link]Illinois And Wisconsin Do Not Mess Around When It Comes To Drinkin' - http://bit.ly/d3gJKA
Say what you will about the heart of the Midwest, it's certainly not hard to find a bar. Geography blog FloatingSheep took a look a the bar-to-grocery store ratio in different parts of the country and it became immediately apparent that Illinois and Wisconsin (and part of Iowa) team up to form the beer belly of America.
Starting in Illinois, the beer belly expands up into Wisconsin and first spreads westward through Iowa/Minnesota and then engulfs Nebraska, and the Dakotas before petering out (like a pair of love handles) in Wyoming and Montana.We wonder if this information will help improve tense Illinois/Wisconsin diplomatic relations.The clustering was so apparent that we wanted to check how it compared to the "official" data on this activity. So we gathered 2007 Census Country Business Pattern on the number of establishments listed in NACIS code 722410 (Drinking places (alcoholic beverages)) and divided by Census estimates for state population totals for 2009 and found remarkable correspondence with our data.
On average there are 1.52 bars for every 10,000 people in the U.S. but the states that make up the beer belly of America are highly skewed from this average.
Alisa, the tipster who sent this in, says, "I am from Wisconsin, and I would say this is accurate!" Well, I am from Illinois, and I would have to agree.
Have to say I'm disappointed in Chicagoland, however. Guess that's why we have to vacation in 'Sconsin. Or maybe they're just counting Binny's as a grocery store.
The Beer Belly of America [FloatingSheep]
Illinois And Wisconsin Do Not Mess Around When It Comes To Drinkin'
- Chuck ReynoldsFrom Flowing Data:
FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.
When it comes to economic indicators, none may be more abstract than GDP per capita. It is the measure of all goods and services a country produces, divided by its population. Take two countries that seem alike in almost every important way, from geography to climate to colonial history to government structure, but one had a much lower GDP? The differences between Jamaica and Barbados are striking.
Loved geography at school? Why not bring home one of those globes if you don’t have one already? We would recommend you pick up the Magic Globes from IWOOT, where you can choose from Geographical and Classic Globe designs, where either one will set your pockets back by £24.99. What’s so special about these Magic Globes? Well, they will revolve constantly (to resemble a much scaled down version of our earth as much as possible, of course), where it will complete a full revolution every 18 seconds without any need for self-spinning. What powers it is not magic though, since it runs off a battery. Definitely something that will keep you mesmerized for hours on end at your cubicle if you’re stuck in a boring, dead end job.
I am truly excited to welcome Melanie Collins, formerly the top sales executive at Marketwire in Boston, as SHIFT’s new Director of Business Development.
Melanie is a master networker who eclipsed sales quotas during her tenure at the wire service. In her new role — which we created for Melanie — she will focus on attracting major B2B and consumer brands to SHIFT’s New York and Boston PR offices.
In this gloomy economic climate, where do we get off “creating new roles” for people? The answer is not dissimilar to the one I gave those skeptics who questioned our opening of the SHIFT-NYC office last month: we are investing in the downturn, positioning ourselves — via everything from “geography” to “talent” — so that SHIFT is among the first agencies to take advantage of the rising tide that’s sure to come.
As Jim Collins noted in his seminal business book, “Good to Great,” first you want to get the right people on the bus, and then figure out where to seat them. We are confident that with Melanie Collins on the SHIFT bus, we’ve mapped out a surefire route.
According to a Washington Post profile, Rahm Emanuel — hired as White House chief-of-staff for his legislative cunning — has been right on almost every issue from the Manhattan terror trial to jobs and healthcare. But no one listened.
Instead, according to the Post, many were caught up in the historic nature of Obama's presidency and thus overstretched somewhat. Emanuel, meanwhile, quietly blasphemed and raged to himself while getting behind whatever he was told to get behind.
Who knows what's really going on in the White House. We'll probably only find out in post-mortem tell-all books. But this sounds awfully plausible:
[Senior advisor David] Axelrod has a strong view of the historic character Obama is supposed to be," said an early Obama supporter who is close to the president and spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a frank assessment of frustration with the White House. The source blamed Obama's charmed political life for creating a self-confidence and trust in principle that led to an "indifference to doing the small, marginal things a White House could do to mitigate the problems on the Hill. Rahm knows the geography better.
Here’s the rare geography-based startup that apparently isn’t doing so well: Platial, which billed itself as the ‘people’s atlas’ and let people aggregate stories, reviews and multimedia on maps, which they could embed on their own sites, is closing down its service. The company had raised at least $2.4 million in funding from big nameinvestors including KeyNote Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Ron Conway, and Omidyar Network.
Platial had also purchased social mapping Frappr in 2007, saying that together the two companies would account for 25 percent of the map widgets on the web. Unlikely that statistic still holds, considering the popularity of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps’ My Maps, which was released in 2007 and lets users annotate maps and embed them.
In a post, headlined ‘Geographic Euthanasia,’ Platial says its service may go offline as soon as tomorrow. “We are painfully aware that this is an incredibly short amount of time to dump this on people,” the company says. “The only response is a sincere apology.” Platial says it will provide more information about what drove the decision later. (We’ve asked the company and will update if we hear back).
Oddly, the decision comes as investors have been rushing to put cash into location-based startups. To give just one specifically map-related example: CultureMap, which runs a local online magazine in Houston (and plans to launch others soon) has raised a “low seven figures” round for its site, which centers its news entries around maps.
Platial’s shut down was first reported by TechCrunch earlier today.
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Calling all inventors and robot creators! The US military wants the fruits of your labors, and not for the purposes of killing people. No, this time, they're looking for something a little more helpful and healing.
New Scientist reports that the military are looking for inventors to provide ideas for an autonomous robot that can be used to rescue wounded or injured troops on a battlefield. According to the magazine,
It should be capable of planning an approach and escape route without prior knowledge of the local terrain and geography. The army also wants the robot to be able to cooperate with swarms of similar machines for mass rescues.
Ideally, the robot will also have arms that can deal with "the large number of body positions and types of locations in which casualties can be found." Applications are welcomed until March 24th. We're hoping that someone can come up with a way to make Ratchet a reality.
Robots to rescue soldiers [New Scientist]
Google recently made search improvements as your roam around by adding the My Location option to mobile search. The idea is to help everyone find things that can be visited, used or accessed right then and there based on your location. While there is plenty of concentration on the mobile side of search they have not let the local aspect of search from the desktop get stale either.
Last year Google started to give Google map results even if there was no local qualifier in the search which moved local search to the next level. The latest enhancement allows you to look for things that are nearby but with a slightly different twist.
Starting today, we’ve added the ability to refine your searches with the “Nearby” tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding “Minneapolis” to your query and missing webpages that only say “St. Paul” or “Twin Cities.” Check it out by doing a search, clicking on “show options” and selecting “Nearby.”
This can come in handy in planning trips or a variety of ways. By creating more options on the geography that are not anchored to specific keywords this certainly adds more power to the local search capabilities of the search giant.
Here’s my question though. How many people does Google think will adopt this option? Most users of search are so unsophisticated that they will have no clue that this option exists. How many times have you seen someone type in a full URL into a Google search rather than into the browser?
I suppose these things are good to have as more people get educated regarding search but most people just type in their basic needs and either refine from there or get frustrated and move on. If I were Google I would work to educate the true masses about what they can actually do with Google. Right now I think that they feel that by telling the “industry” that it’s enough. Trouble is it’s not. If the ‘regular’ searcher doesn’t even know these things exist is Google missing the full value of these offerings? Just a thought.
Hey you! Be all that you can be! Help the U.S. military design an autonomous robot capable of ferrying injured troops from the front lines to safety with little or no help from a human hand:
It's no joke—direct from the Pentagon comes word that the Army wants someone out there, beyond its secretive five walls and uber secret underground lair, to develop a robot with powerful limbs and grippers that will be able to adapt to "the large number of body positions and types of locations in which casualties can be found."
Oh, and not that this is a surprise or anything, but the robot also needs to be able to enter, navigate and escape terrain "without prior knowledge" of the geography. Flying blind, so to speak. Finally, if the robot can perform as part of a hive mind, and cooperate with a swarm of other robot rescuers, that'd be just peachy with the military too. You have until March 24 to submit your life-saving ideas. [Pentagon via New Scientist]
Evolutionary history shows us that doubling-down on your defenses is effective against predators but useless against environmental change. Newspapers locking up their content in paywalls and trumpeting loudly against Google might be effective if Google were merely a predator. But this is the Internet, where copies are free, everyone could be a customer, your competitors are just a click away, and customer loyalty isn't merely a consequence of geography. To treat the Internet merely as just another competitor is to miss the point that it's a new medium which favours some business models and hurts others. To move your content behind a News Corp-style paywall is to be a dinosaur that knows the comet is coming but thinks, "I need thicker armor because I've heard that it has a big tail."
Newspaper Paywalls
- Ted Louieby Chris Bodenner
Lauren Goodrich and Peter Zeihan compare the vast, interconnected river system of the US to the large but sparse and isolated rivers of Russia:
So while geography handed the United States the perfect transport network free of charge, Russia has had to use every available kopek to link its country together with an expensive road, rail and canal network. One of the many side effects of this geography situation is that the United States had extra capital that it could dedicate to finance in a relatively democratic manner, while Russia's chronic capital deficit prompted it to concentrate what little capital resources it had into a single set of hands - Moscow's hands. So while the United States became the poster child for the free market, Russia (whether the Russian Empire, Soviet Union or Russian Federation) has always tended toward central planning.
Major Land Resource Areas (MLRA) and Land Resource Regions (LRR) are areas of the United States with similar geography (physiography, climate, geology, etc.), as defined by the US Department of Agriculture and the Natural Resources Conservation Service. These areas are used for large scale interstate planning. There are approximately 280 MLRAs in the United States, and its territories.
CIBC analyst Jeff Rudin has touted peak oil for years, and his price estimates have been dead on. Lately, he predicted $225 oil by 2012 and rising.
But don't blame peak oil on the U.S., where Rudin says consumption has peaked, or even China. Once again, blame OPEC.
"Last year OPEC, Mexico, and Russia consumed 14 million barrels a day of oil -- two Chinas!" Rudin railed at a recent speech.
"Have you ever filled your tank up in Caracas or Riyadh? If you did, you'll soon know. It's 25 cents in Caracas, it's about 50 cents in Saudi Arabia, but the point is it's 50 cents whether oil is $20 a barrel or whether oil is $200 a barrel, because that's just the way things are over there. OPEC is a very disparate place separated by history, religion, geography, but there's one common denominator: everybody has a God-given right to consume as much cheap fuel as they bloody well feel like it." (see 10:30)
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Shares of Autodesk (ADSK) are higher by $1.38, or 5%, at $27, after the company this afternoon beat the January-ending Q4’s revenue and earnings expectations comfortably, and forecast the current quarter in line.
Autodesk reported 30 cents per share in profit on $456.1 million in revenue, ahead of the $432 million and 23 cents expected. For the current quarter, the company sees $420 million to $440 million in revenue, and 18 to 23 cents per share in profit, in line with analysts’ 20 cents and $429 million.
The company didn’t offer a forecast for the full year, but said it expected operating margin on a GAAP basis would be well above last year’s level, and modestly higher on a non-GAAP basis.
The company saw demand for software licenses rise in every geography, it said, though revenue was dramatically weaker in the Americas than in the rest of the world, rising only 3% from the prior quarter compared to 18% growth in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and 6% growth in Asia Pacific. Emerging markets growth was also 18% from the prior quarter.
Autodesk is holding a conference call with analysts shortly, at 4:59 pm, which you can catch here.
– Tiernan Ray, Barrons.com
Last night I attended a lecture by Vincent Malmström who, in 1973, published a paper in Science proposing an answer to the mysterious (and still controversial) question: Why did the Maya use a 260-day calendar?
Malmström’s 1997 book Cycles of the Sun, Mysteries of the Moon, which he has also made freely available here, tells the whole story from his point of view. It’s a remarkable tale of geography, religion, culture, computation, science, and human foibles.
The Maya actually used three different calendars. The Tzolk’in ran on a 260-day cycle, and the Haab’ used a 365-day cycle. Then there was the Long Count, which counted days since a mythical beginning of time and also included the other two.
The Long Count’s start date was written, in its full form, like this:
0.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau 8, Cumku
The first five digits measure days in units of 144,000, 7,200, 360, 20, and 1. 4 Ahau is a Tzolk’in day, based on a cycle of 13 numbers with a cycle of 20 days names. 8 Cumku is a Haab’ day, based on 18 20-day months.
Today’s date is 12.19.17.2.3, which Wikipedia’s Long Count page helpfully computes for you using this markup:
Today, {{CURRENTDATE}}, in the Long Count is {{Maya date}} (GMT correlation)
(Here GMT doesn’t stand for Greenwhich Mean Time, but rather for Goodman-Martinez-Thompson.)
But today might be 12.19.17.2.2, according to this calculator. There has, evidently, been epic confusion and controversy about whether the mythical start date was 584,283 or 584,284 or 584,285 days ago. Thompson originally thought 584,285, then changed his mind and decided on 584,283.
Prof. Malmström likes 584,285, which fixes the start date as August 13, 3114 B.C. Why? Thompson didn’t think there was any astronomical basis for the 260-day calendar, but Malmström figured there had to have been. And he wondered where, in that part of the world, you might observe a 260-day astronomical cycle.
It turns out that at latitude 14.8 º N, the sun is directly overhead on August 13 passing southward, and again on April 30 passing northward, an interval of 260 days. August 13 is also the day after the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Malmström writes:
The signs were therefore unmistakable. First the heavens would give their notice. All night long the skygazer would watch as stars burst from behind the towering mountains to the northeast and flashed across the sky. And the following morning, as the sun arched higher and higher across the heavens, he would watch as the shadow it cast grew steadily shorter, until, as the sun reached its zenith, its shadow completely disappeared. This then, he decided, was the day for his count to begin.
Why count days? If you’re planting maize, you need to calibrate carefully to the arrival of the monsoon rains. The two solar passages correspond roughly to the beginning of the rainy season at the end of April, and the harvest in mid-August.
Note that these passages, and the associated latitude 14.8 º N, don’t apply to the Maya in the Yucatán Peninsula, but instead to an earlier Olmec civilization to the southwest, on the Pacific coast near what is now the border between Mexico and Guatemala. The Mayan new year was July 26, not August 13. But the 260-day calendar predated the Mayans by a millenium.
Just a few decades after its inception, the 260-day “sacred” calendar was augmented by a 365-day “secular” calendar. The problem was that the sacred calendar didn’t quite work. There were 13 20-day cycles — or 20 13-day cycles — during the sun’s southward passage, and what seemed like 8 more 13-day cycles during the northward passage. So when the calendar started running, things seemed to work out — albeit in a delightfully curious way.
Each time the zenithal sun passed overhead on its way south, a new 260-day cycle would begin on a day numbered “1″ but with a different name. Thus, the skygazer watched as the beginning of each successive cycle shifted from “1 Alligator” to “1 Snake” to “1 Water” to “1 Reed” and then to “1 Earthquake.”
That didn’t last long, though.
Where the priest had erred, of course, was in concluding that the cycle of the sun could be measured in 28 “bundles” of 13 days. This meant that he had equated its annual migration through the heavens with an interval of 364 days, when in actuality it took about a day and a quarter longer than that. Thus, after only four years had elapsed his count was already off by 5 days. This might go unnoticed by the commoners at first, but certainly, as the error increased with each passing year, it wouldn’t be long before “the cat was out of the bag.”
What a colossal screwup! I like to imagine the priests furiously backpedaling.
OK, wait, I know we said 260, but it’s really 365, but we’ll keep both, don’t worry, it’ll work out, trust us, we know what we’re doing.
Of course the fun never stops. We’re less than two years away from Y 13.0.0.0.0. That’s in 2012, on Dec 23. Or on Dec 22, or Dec 21, depending on which correlation constant you choose. On one of those dates the world will end. Or not. Prof. Malmström suggests you choose 584,285. That’ll give you two extra days to put your affairs in order.
For more on the endlessly weird human reckoning of time, see A literay appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database.
EveryScape, which provides “eye-level” images of major towns and cities around the world, has raised $6 million in a third round of funding. The company charges local businesses in order to build 3D, photo-realistic panoramas of their physical locations which are then featured on EveryScape.com and can also be embedded on the businesses’ websites. EveryScape pitches the virtual tours as a more effective way for businesses to advertise themselves than traditional yellow pages.
Of course, there are a number of other companies—including Google—which are also going after local ad dollars by combining advertising with geography (EveryScape counters that unlike the StreetView feature on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps it lets users actually go inside businesses).
With the funding EveryScape will have raised more than $13 million, most recently in a second round in March 2008. The latest cash comes from SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM), a big mobile firm in South Korea. EveryScape says the cash will boost its Asian market strategy and also propel its growth in the U.S.
More in the release.
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The web has made the world a much smaller place and geography plays a much smaller part in how someone uses a product, a service or just interacts with the ones around them. The laws of economics still hold though and, while anyone in the world can use Gmail, for example, providing it's not blocked by the local government, Goo... (read more)
At the end of January, Twitter introduced local trending topics to show what people in your geography are tweeting about. But some have hoped the service would go further, displaying trends only from those you follow. While that may be on the roadmap, Twitter hasn't promised this feature, and other services are filling the gap. One of the first is Cadmus, which I first profiled back in November as a real-time stream filter.
Cadmus Launches Personalized Twitter Trending Topics
- Adam Sherk
Someone over at NBC Sports is due to get a tongue-lashing over this. At the end of Sunday night's coverage of pairs figure skating, the network listed the leading pairs... but managed to get all of the countries and flags wrong.
Looking at the list, NBC got the order of the top 6 pairs correct. However, the countries and corresponding flags are displayed in reverse order.
Here's how it should have gone:
1. Shen/Zhao (China)
2. Savchenko/Szolkowy (Germany)
3. Kavaguti/Smirnov (Russia)
4. Pang/Tong (China)
5. Zhang/Zhang (China)
6. Dube/Davison (Canada)
