Visualising earthquake data

I'll just capture some selected visualisations for earthquake data. Many earthquake visualisations employ heat maps to capture a cumulative representation, displaying geographical location, occurrence, intensity, depth and related earthquake specific data. Because earthquakes are temporal events timelines, play-animation, and time-sliders are often used to represent the dynamic aspect. However, because earthquakes are geologically dispersed the more interesting visualisations are at continent/region level. Earthquake occurrence is temporally sparse i.e. for much of the time significant seismic activity is not evident and therefore makes for relatively static and uninteresting real-time visualisation unless you speed the representation of time or you include the whole global field.

USGS visualisations of the 1906 California earthquake (link http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/virtualtour/) and the United States Geological Service current earthquake list, map, page.

Link http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/

Quake map of New Zealand. Colour and size indicating magnitude, indicators cumulative, sequence list.

Link http://quakemap.co.nz/

Wunderground fault indicator and seismic risk map overlay.

Link http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/

Google Earth plug-in for visualising earthquake data and Google Maps visualisation (link https://developers.google.com/maps/tutorials/visualizing/earthquakes).

Commercial risk visualisation company IDV Solutions (link http://www.idvsolutions.com/Demos/).

Camara: some initial observations

Camara is an organisation driven by three ideals: Poverty is wrong. Education is a human right. We use Technology to address both.

The organisation is dispersed across a growing constellation of locations, connecting classrooms, communities, Government agencies, partner organisations, individual volunteer's social orbits and beyond. Camara refers to its bases as 'hubs'. They have hubs in Africa (Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Ethiopia, and South Africa), Europe (Ireland and the UK), the US, and the Caribbean (Jamaica and Haiti).

The computers in classrooms project, running now for nearly a decade, provides refurbished computers running the open source Ubuntu Linux distribution configured with educational programs (a local copy of Wikipedia, Scratch, Stellarium, and many others. A classroom pack consist of 10-20 computers, teacher training for the computers and the curriculum, curriculum development that integrates with national departments of education goals, establishing mutual support groups, follow-up in local hubs that enable on-going training and sharing knowledge. The mode of organising is hope to be self-supporting, self-annealing; it is not highly centralised and it seems entirely possible that diverse national hubs exercise influence. I think it might be considered to be a "de-centered" organisation.

They are designing curricula for Languages, Literature, Maths, Art, Geography, History, Science, Economics, Computing etc. that leverage classroom computers effectively in ways that engage students in a cumulative organic process of incremental learning to reach the highest possible academic standards.

This is a mutual social contract between Camara and its clients. It is not charity. It is an investment in our shared future. The mutual, social responsibility extends to the computers provided by Camara. The anticipated additional working life of a refurbished computer in a Camara teaching centre is 5 years, after which Camara manages the machines proper end recycling. It is not a dumping ground for end-of-life computer hardware from the West. Rather, powerful, useful machines realise their designed working potential in a crucially important role, making a real difference to people.

The project is continuous, needing to constantly evolve as the tech landscape changes, as our understanding of education improves, as we learn how to organise and operate sustainably, and grow.

The hub in Dublin has a volunteer programme, educational programme development, a hardware group that manage the refurbishment process (along manufacturing lines), a technology group that take an integrative view of the software/hardware offering (meeting fortnightly on Thursday evenings)

What makes this approach to innovation special?

A question; what makes this approach to innovation and technology special? What distinguishes this particular arrangement of knowledge, of theories, of histories, as more substantial, relevant, actionable, and meaningful? What ideas link what we have selected as the themes and subject matter that matters to the people who have come together in this research area and that inspire our teaching?

Aesthetics

Ethics

Organising

Interfacing

Innovation

Digital

Where do our visitors come from?

Demographics is a way of identifying and grouping a broad population into smaller, more relevant, and hopefully addressable, target audiences. Profiling target audiences is 'bread and butter' marketing work; a population or audience can be grouped in any number of ways: by gender, age, education, occupation, income, political preference, language, ethnicity, etc.

Internet interactions offer a way to automatically infer some, but not all, of the traditional demographic categories. They also present some new categories and also offer the potential of responding to detailed individual preferences and establishing interactions with customers/audiences in real-time.

Internet interaction data like this can reveal where a population of visitors/customers/audiences come from. The IP address and IP routing path for a connecting session with a website (via a computer, tablet or mobile device) can be mapped in fine detail to reveal the geographical location of an originating client machine. This is possible because ISPs and intermediary routing services employ well-known internet host addresses (and assignments to their sub-nets) that map directly onto physical devices, networks and sub-networks.

The originating device (computer, tablet or mobile) will also often reveal basic configuration and preference information from the connecting software system (e.g. browser, OS, language, device type). The free availability of this information is desirable for the connecting software client/device combination as it allows both client and server to optimise data presentation and minimise internet capacity utilisation. All of this makes for new and useful demographic information. The following figures illustrate how well the location of a client device connection can be identified.

Visitor locations: San Francisco, California

In the first example specific zones in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area account for the bulk of the web traffic originating from California. 

The example below shows that web traffic from Ireland mainly comes from Dublin but there are also significant interactions from Limerick, Cork, Galway, Kenmare, Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford etc. We can infer that these connections come from customers in these specific locations.

Visitor locations: Ireland

Just knowing where our visitors come from can then help focus our marketing, market analysis, sales, customer support, and other activities.