Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Cartograms, Country Facts and Satellite Images


This posting reminded me of this map (from Espacial.com as used on the Dr. Kiran C. Patel Center for Global Solutions webpage), a night view of the earth. Very easy to see who keeps their lights on the most... (and who doesn't even have lights...)

Anyway, check out these sites for some cool visual and research sources:

Mark Newman’s cartograms

Newman provides some interesting alternatives to "normal maps." As he writes, [i]t's possible, however, and sometimes very useful, to redraw the map with the sizes of countries made bigger or smaller in order to represent something of interest. Such maps are called cartograms and can be an effective and natural way of portraying geographic or social data.
(from his Images of the Social and Economic World webpage)

For example, here is a cartogram depicting "energy consumption (including oil)." Look at the size of Japan! (But are you surprised?)


See more at the following link:

Link to Mark Newman's cartograms
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cartograms/


Index Mundi - Country Facts, Statistics, Satellite Images, etc.

Welcome to Index Mundi, home of the Internet's most complete country profiles.
This site contains detailed country information compiled from multiple sources.
For your browsing pleasure, we have organized countries by the geographic region where they are located.

(from Index Mundi Homepage)

Link to Index Mundi
http://indexmundi.com/


Much of the information comes from the CIA World Factbook; this site claims to be an improved version of the CIA source. Convenient related links give you data from the United Nations, U.S. Library of Congress, Amnesty International, etc. To get to the satellite images, click on your preferred continent, then country. Once you are on the country page, click on "All Population Centers" in the green Related Links box on the right side of the screen. Click on the city and then enjoy the (visual) images. Can you find your house?

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