CRRI’s 'Hawk Eye' on Indian roads

At first sight, one can mistake this vehicle to be an ultra tech robotic remote-controlled vehicle, but it is the country's first 'Hawk Eye' that is surveying almost 50,000 kilometres of country's highways and roads to gauge their quality and see if they are fit for freight movement and travel. The database will be used to create GIS maps of highways in the country. The project is being undertaken by Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) and GIS survey and global positioning system (GPS) will help better navigation across the country. 

Mounted on a jeep, the Hawk Eye's instrumentation system includes a laser profiler along with pavement view cameras to measure road surface, collect and process digital images of pavements and other roadside elements. The vehicle has been used in countries like China, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand. Hawk Eye requires high-speed paved roads for operation and is sensitive to rough weather conditions like dust storms and heavy rains. It can gather data while travelling at a speed of 30 to 100 km per hour. 

An advantage Hawk Eye enjoys over other instruments with CRRI is its ability to look at the surface of the road and measure cracking areas. Any area with a crack of above three centimetres is detected by the vehicle's sensors and a preventive measure is suggested by the computers. This helps improve life of highways, which is normally around 20 years in the case of bitumen roads.


Source : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com

A global view of HIV infection

To mark World AIDS Day on December 1, GfK GeoMarketing provided a map that illustrates the global distribution of HIV cases (data source: WHO/GfK GeoMarketing; map: GfK GeoMarketing).

According to the latest statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), the highest rates of infection occur in southern Africa and the Russian Federation.

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Wealth map of the world

When you look at the map of the world, what do you see? Probably a cosy agglomeration of nations that is imprinted on your brain – reinforced time and time again from its pride of place on everything from classroom wall to newspaper graphic to in-flight magazines. 

This projection of the Earth – a great mass of Russia across the top, a slightly oversized UK on the edge of Europe, impenetrable China and Mongolia on the right, the expanse of America on the left, with Africa centre-bottom – is an image as strong as the Union Jack, the London Underground logo or the Olympic rings. Except it represents only a basic truth about the world, one that has been with us in essentially the same form since the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator created his Mercator projection in 1569. 

Now, though, three academics – a professor and research assistant from Sheffield and another professor from the University of Michigan – have produced The Atlas of the Real World, a book that at first glance looks like a whole bunch of world maps on acid. 

Except, you could argue, that these warped representations come closer to the truth about our planet than the originals on which they’re based. 

Daniel Dorling, professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield, Mark Newman, assistant professor of physics and complex systems at the University of Michigan, and Anna Barford, research associate at Sheffield, have created the website www.worldmapper.org, on which the book is based, which bends and twists our continents according to statistics such as the number of elderly, international immigrants, grocery imports and even ¬demonstrations against the war in Iraq. 

“Because we’re confident people, we think we know what we’re seeing; you see a map and you think you understand it,” says Professor Dorling, 40. “But if you take a normal map of Britain and colour it by how popular the Labour Party is in each area, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was going to win the next election. Although you might know Britain very well, you don’t know it well enough to know the areas with high population density.” 

It was to overcome these problems that Dorling and his colleagues set about creating cartograms that offer up an image of a new world order in which the distribution of the planet’s rich and poor, drinking water, weapons and trade can be seen at a glance. 

He and the www.worldmapper.org team who published The Atlas of the Real World identified regions – but not exact continents – from Western Europe to Japan to South Asia to northern Africa and colour-coded them, with the nations within them given different shades of that colour. Then, using statistics, principally from the United Nations but also other bodies including the World Bank, the CIA and the World Health Organisation, they manipulated the images so that regions expanded and contracted in relation to each other.

So when figures on net immigration, for example, are inputted to the worldmapper model, the USA and the UK become huge and bloated, while Africa and China almost disappear. Conversely, on a map of absolute poverty, Europe is all but invisible while Asia expands massively. 

The book contains 366 cartograms – the last one, almost charmingly, illustrating invertebrates at risk – that not only show us what we’d expect in the divisions in wealth, but also ignite surprising flares of unexpected social phenomena. 

So the map depicting decline in wealth, for example, showing the decline in GDP from 1975 to 2002 adjusted for local purchasing power, has the US, Western Europe and Japan all but invisible, but a hugely inflated Eastern Europe. 

While we might think that the end of Communism brought about huge increases in some ex-Soviet satellite nations, countries such as the Ukraine, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland actually lead the way in the largest declines in wealth. (China, surprisingly, hasn’t been affected in the same way.) 

These images then allow us to draw what might otherwise be hidden conclusions about the world in which we live. A refugee map, for example, won’t, as you’d expect, display a greatly enlarged West. “Most refugees go over national rather than international borders,” explains Dorling. “The implication is that the burden on Africans to look after refugees is as great as it is for us.” An obvious contemporary example would be Zimbabweans in South Africa. The maps have applications in advocacy, too. A map showing how many votes nations get in the International Monetary Fund was used by African countries who wanted greater representation. 

Interestingly, when you zoom in on an area, it reverts to how it would look on a regular map, with its normal place on lines of latitude and longitude.

It is only as you pull out that those lines distort and the reader is given this vision of the world. 

“Although land mass is important, people are probably more important than area,” says Dorling. “In a map by population, a sixth of the world would be Chinese. You could have a world atlas where the Sahara just wouldn’t appear.” 

Source 

SatGuide launches 'Citizen Mapper’ in India

India - SatNav Technologies, a Hyderabad based IT Products Company; the pioneers of GPS Technology in India, today announced the launch of 'Citizen Mapper' – a GPS Enthusiast centric initiative aimed at rewarding the users for suggesting additional Points of Interest (POI’s) and also sharing updates on what changes occur in their city. POI’s are important landmarks such as Hospitals, ATM centers, Malls, Theaters which help in navigating easily to the end destination.

Users can visit www.roadsofindia.com and seek information on routes by filling the From and To fields. The website will then provide the route from the present location to the end destination. 

This route will have several Points of Interest. In case, the user notices or knows that some additional POI’s can be added to the route to make it easier to navigate, the user can send the input in the form of a mail to customerfeedback@satnavtech.com. Other customers who already have SatGuide software on their Phones, Computers or Navigation devices can just send the feedback whenever they have anything to share. For example a new building that has come up, some new one ways that have been announced, a road that has been recently closed, etc. 

The feedback ensures that the user automatically gets registered on SatNav’s website and company then rewards the user by crediting Rs. 5 into that account, for every POI that gets incorporated in the map. Users can accumulate the rewards in units of Rs.5 and can then exchange the accumulated amount for various SatGuide products. This amount can also be transferred to family or friends who wish to purchase SatGuide products.

Another attractive package under the Citizen Mapper scheme is that once a user gets to 50 credits, he can also avail a free upgrade of SatGuide with maps for his PND, PDA, Phone, Laptop or Desktop. If he does not have the navigation software the upgrade will be available along with the next purchase, a value of over Rs 2000. 

Commenting on this, Mr. Amit Prasad, CEO and Founder MD of SatNav Technologies said, “Our pioneering effort in GPS has enabled us to provide the maximum number of POI’s giving the user greater detail for reaching the required destination easily. With this win-win scheme we have introduced, not only will we be rewarding the users for their inputs but also make our maps the most robust in the industry with regular updates. 

Additional POI’s and vicinity information coming directly from the users will ensure that our products become more relevant to every individual.” 

Source : http://www.satnavtechnologies.com/

World's Biggest Atlas

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Magnetic Declination

Magnetic declination is the difference between true north (the axis around which the earth rotates) and magnetic north (the direction the needle of a compass will point). It is usually printed on the map to the left of the scale bar at the bottom of a USGS 7.5' quadrangle. After finding the declination on the map, you need to transfer the information to your compass before you ever take it into the field. If you fail to do this, any readings you get from your compass will be in error and you may wind up far from where you want to be (in other words, LOST ! ! !).

Magnetic north is determined by the earth's magnetic field and is not the same as true (or geographic) north. The location of the magnetic north pole changes slowly over time, but it is currently northwest of Hudson's Bay in northern Canada (approximately 700 km [450 mi] from the true north pole). Maps are based on the geographic north pole because it does not change over time, so north is always at the top of a quadrangle map.


However, if you were to walk a straight line following the direction your compass needle indicated as north, you would find that you didn’t go from south to north on the map. Howfar your path varied from true north would depend on where you started from. The angle between a straight north-south line and the line you walked is the magnetic declination in the area you were walking. In the example figure, if you walked 1.25 miles toward magnetic north(i.e. you followed your compass without adjusting for magnetic declination) you would end up 1/3 of a mile away from where you would be if you walked 1.25 miles toward true north.

Fortunately, magnetic declination has been measured throughout the U.S. and can be corrected for on your compass (see below). This map shows lines of equal magnetic declination throughout the U.S. and Canada.
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