Mapping the Detectives

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It's time to board the Orient Express as we set out on a journey to discover the most well travelled fictional detective - in the case of THE MISSING FICTIONAL DETECTIVE MAP.

SUSPECT No.1: Agatha Christie

The British crime writer Agatha Christie probably has one of the best claims at having provided the most well travelled fictional detectives. Her output included 66 detective novels and more than 15 short story collections in which she created more than 6 fictional detectives, including Miss Marple and the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot. 


The Agatha Christie website's Christie Map is a Google Map showing the locations used in the crime writer's novels.

It is possible to refine the results shown on the page by individual Agatha Christie detective or by individual novel. For example, the screenshot above shows the locations in Poirot's 'Murder on the Orient Express'.

SUSPECT No.2: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Probably one of the most well known fictional detectives is the legendary Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation is famous for his astute logical reasoning and his use of forensic science skills in solving the various mysteries brought his way.


We all know that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221b Baker Street, now, thanks to The Londonist, we can follow all of the great detective's known movements on Google Maps, with The London of Sherlock Holmes.

The Londonist have used Map Channels to plot every London location mentioned in Conan Doyle's famous novels.

SUSPECT No.3: Raymond Chandler

The American writer Raymond Chandler may have only written seven novels but the seemingly endless movie productions of his stories mean that his protagonist Philip Marlowe is well known to all of us.


GPSing Raymond Chandler is a collection of KML files showing the location of Chandler residences and locations used in Chandler's short stories and novels. The KML files can be viewed in Google Earth or you can and paste the links into the search box on Google Maps to view the locations.

SUSPECT No.4: Ian Fleming

James Bond, code name 007, may be a spy and not really a detective but his shadowy role in the British Secret Service has taken him all over the world.


The Guardian's James Bond Film Locations Map is a Google Map of locations used in the James Bond films.

Licensed to Kill, the ultimate James Bond fansite, has also created a Google Map for James Bond. The James Bond Location Map is a map of Bond's many travels and adventures.

SUSPECT No.5: Hergé

Tintin may be a reporter and not a detective but this didn't stop him solving a number of dangerous cases, many of which took him on a journeys around the world.


Tintin in Brussels is a Google My Map that should prove useful to any Tintin fans visiting Brussels. The map shows the location of the Tintin shop, a Tintin fresco, a Tintin sign and the location of many of Tintin's adventures in the Belgian capital.

A Game of Thrones on Google Maps

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The Interactive Game of Thrones Map is a Google Map of the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos from George Martin's series of fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire.

As well as including all the locations in a Game of Thrones the map allows you to view the paths of all the characters as the story progresses. To view a character's path select their name from the map sidebar and use the timeline slider control.


The map used in this Google Map was drawn by TheMountainGoat based on previous work by Tear of the Cartographer's Guild. TheMountainGoat website includes files to view the map in Google Earth.


Westeros Map is another Google Map of the fictional continent of Westeros from George Raymond Richard Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels.

Westeros is the great continent in which the Seven Kingdoms resides and the map shows the location of important places in the novels. Clicking on a link in the map sidebar will zoom the map to the selected location.

New Year's Weather on Google Maps

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Before heading out to watch any fireworks tonight you might want to check the latest weather from wezzoo.

The wezzoo social weather application for iOS and Android allows users to share the current weather conditions where ever they are. This means that the wezzoo desktop Google Map shows the real-time weather conditions throughout the world.

Users of the mobile app can submit a weather report and upload a photo to accompany their weather report. The wezzoo social network also allows users to follow other wezzoo members, either geographically to ensure they get up-to-date nearby weather reports, or friends far away to keep in touch with the weather conditions across the world.

Via: GeoInWeb

'Facebook for Animals' Tested On Wild Great Tits

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How animals associate in groups can have important consequences in terms of the health and survival of both individuals and whole populations; influencing factors such as the spread of disease and the ability to find food or mates.
But revealing the networks underlying animal societies is a challenge when a large amount of fieldwork data consists of a long stream of automated observations of the times and locations of individuals, leaving scientists to try and reconstruct the 'big picture' of how individuals are connected.
The new approach can automatically identify periods of intense social activity within a large number of observations -- in this example around one million observations of wild great tits (Parus major). This makes it possible to examine these periods in greater detail and calculate which individuals are real 'friends', rather than random passers-by, and even which are looking to pair up and mate.
A report of the research is published in this week's Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
'If you think of the data about you in Facebook it records things like who you are friends with, where you've been, and what you share with others,' said Ioannis Psorakis of Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science, who led the research. 'What we have shown is that we can analyse data about individual animals, in this case great tits, to construct a 'Facebook for animals' revealing who affiliates with who, who are members of the same group, and which birds are regularly going to the same gatherings or 'events.''
They team tested the new technique on data from two breeding seasons of wild great tits (August 2007-March 2008 and August 2008-March 2009). The data came from transponders attached to thousands of birds and sensors that logged when individuals appeared at any one of 67 bird feeders spread throughout Wytham Woods, Oxford.
The researchers found that their predictions from this data about which birds were 'friends' that regularly foraged for food together, as well as which birds were starting the process of pairing up or were already in a pair, matched visual observations made by zoologists.
'What we've shown is that our technique can extract information about the networks that bind individuals together by sampling and analysing their mobility patterns,' said Ioannis Psorakis. 'Our approach makes it possible to look at huge amounts of data without having to decide what time resolution is best to extract meaning -- the model evaluates this automatically. This is just the first exalple of how zoologists are beginning to use our method to explore social networks of animals in a 'big data' context.'
Early results from the work with great tits suggest that individual birds do not participate in flocks at random, but have a bias towards other members of the population they interact with. The majority of networks extracted using the approach are strongly clustered, and in such tight bird communities, individuals forage together and interact with their current or future mating partner.
This approach is being used not only in great tits, but also in a mix of wild-bird social networks, exploring the animal sociality at an inter-species level. Some of the most important future steps in this work are to combine the 'social' information available through this method, with other types of information: for example combining it with genetic data is enabling researchers to explore the genetic basis of sociality: do genetically similar individuals attract each other, or is it the other way round? Can we find specific areas of the genome that account for gregariousness?
The work could also help researchers understand how information spreads through animal populations. Tits are a famous exemplar of social learning: for instance, the habit of pecking open milk bottles on doorsteps to get access to cream spread rapidly through England in the mid 20th Century. The new approach is helping scientists to test how specific social structures help or hinder the spread of novel information from individual to individual.

Simple Mathematcal Pattern Describes Shape of Neuron 'Jungle'

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Neurons look remarkably like trees, and connect to other cells with many branches that effectively act like wires in an electrical circuit, carrying impulses that represent sensation, emotion, thought and action.
Over 100 years ago, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, sought to systematically describe the shapes of neurons, and was convinced that there must be a unifying principle underlying their diversity.
Cajal proposed that neurons spread out their branches so as to use as little wiring as possible to reach other cells in the network. Reducing the amount of wiring between cells provides additional space to pack more neurons into the brain, and therefore increases its processing power.
New work by UCL neuroscientists, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revisited this century-old hypothesis using modern computational methods. They show that a simple computer program which connects points with as little wiring as possible can produce tree-like shapes which are indistinguishable from real neurons -- and also happen to be very beautiful. They also show that the shape of neurons follows a simple mathematical relationship called a power law.
Power laws have been shown to be common across the natural world, and often point to simple rules underlying complex structures. Dr Herman Cuntz (UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research) and colleagues find that the power law holds true for many types of neurons gathered from across the animal kingdom, providing strong evidence for Ramon y Cajal's general principle.
The UCL team further tested the theory by examining neurons in the olfactory bulb, a part of the brain where new brain cells are constantly being formed. These neurons grow and form new connections even in the adult brain, and therefore provide a unique window into the rules behind the development of neural trees in a mature neural circuit.
The team analysed the change in shape of the newborn olfactory neurons over several days, and found that the growth of these neurons also follow the power law, providing further evidence to support the theory.Dr Hermann Cuntz said: "The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to understand how the impenetrable neural jungle can give rise to the complexity of behaviour.
"Our findings confirm Cajal's original far-reaching insight that there is a simple pattern behind the circuitry, and provides hope that neuroscientists will someday be able to see the forest for the trees."

2012 Top 10 Google Maps Mania Posts

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Yesterday I posted a list of the top five most read posts on Google Maps Mania in 2012. Here are then next five most read posts.

The most popular posts included a surprising number of maps of fictional worlds. One other surprise to me was that a post about the U.S. election didn't make it into the top ten but a post about the French election results did just creep in at number ten in the list.

No. 6: The Last Voyage of Costa Concordia Mapped


In January the live ship tracking website Marine Traffic showed the track of the cruise ship Costa Concordia just before it crashed into the island of Giglio in the Mediterranean Sea.

I'm not sure if the track still exists on Marine Traffic but amazingly you can now see the wreck of the Costa Concordia on Google Maps (click on the screenshot above).

No. 7: A Game of Thrones on Google Maps


Westeros Map is a Google Map of the fictional continent of Westeros from George Raymond Richard Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels.

No. 8: Real-Time Tracking via Google Maps


Track on the Map is a handy Google Maps based application that allows you to quickly and easily share your real-time movements with the world.

To use Track on the Map you just need to view the application with a GPS enabled device, such as your smart phone. You can add a user name and select an appropriate icon and that's all you have to do.

No. 9: Mapping the World of Minecraft

Mindfold is a service that provides unlimited on-demand servers for the game Minecraft (10 hours a month free - subscribe for unlimited play). Anyone who creates a Minecraft world in Minefold gets an interactive Google Map of their world. Checkout the 'Explore' page to browse through all the maps created so far.

You don't have to join Minefold though to create a Google Map of a Minecraft world. Minecraft Overviewer and Tectonicus are Minecraft world renderers that allow users to create a Google Map of their Minecraft game.

No. 10: French Election Results Live on Google Maps


The Google Politics and Elections website featured a Google Map that displayed the results live for each electoral department in the French elections in April.

Take a Walk on Street View

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After all that Christmas excess it is time to take a little exercise to burn off all the added weight gained over the holidays. Alternatively you could just sit back and relax and take a little stroll with Google Maps Street View.

Here are a few applications that can even help you to avoid having to tire out your fingers by constantly pressing the forward arrow in Street View:

Street View Drives

Here's an old one from me. Street View Drives lets you choose from a number of different locations and view an animated Street View tour. Street View Drives is different from most other Street View animations as it actually allows you to change the camera view as the tour plays.

There are a few blank tours on here. Where Google have updated the Street View imagery and I (shamefully) haven't updated the tour the animation won't work. However you can easily tell which tours are broke from the blank thumbnail images on the home screen.

Google Maps Street View Player

The advantage of Brian Folt's Street View application over mine is that here you can create your own Street View tours.

Just enter a starting address and a destination and the Street View Player will create an animated tour for you. The Street View Player also includes controls that allow you to pause, speed up or slow down the animation.

Map Channels Street View Driver

Map Channels Street View Driver includes even more functionality. This application allows you to take a little more control over the Street View animation by including 'left' and 'right' steering buttons.

As the animation plays the user can turn left or right onto other streets simply by clicking on left and right. You can also jump to another location by simply clicking anywhere on the map.

Book a Flight and Hotel with Google Maps

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Southwest Airlines have used Google Maps to create two useful applications to help passengers find and book the cheapest flights and hotels.

The Southwest Airlines GetAway Finder tool helps users to find flights for specific dates and then choose and book a hotel. The application takes the customer through a number of short steps that involve picking the starting point and destination, the dates of travel, selecting a hotel and the flight before allowing the user to book their selections.

If the user is only interested in booking a flight, without a hotel, they can use the Southwest Airlines Flight Guide. The guide allows the user to pick a starting point and then shows the cost of flights to destinations across the USA. If a destination is selected from the map the user can view all the available flights for the dates that they wish to travel.

'Facebook for Animals' Tested On Wild Great Tits

To contact us Click HERE
How animals associate in groups can have important consequences in terms of the health and survival of both individuals and whole populations; influencing factors such as the spread of disease and the ability to find food or mates.
But revealing the networks underlying animal societies is a challenge when a large amount of fieldwork data consists of a long stream of automated observations of the times and locations of individuals, leaving scientists to try and reconstruct the 'big picture' of how individuals are connected.
The new approach can automatically identify periods of intense social activity within a large number of observations -- in this example around one million observations of wild great tits (Parus major). This makes it possible to examine these periods in greater detail and calculate which individuals are real 'friends', rather than random passers-by, and even which are looking to pair up and mate.
A report of the research is published in this week's Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
'If you think of the data about you in Facebook it records things like who you are friends with, where you've been, and what you share with others,' said Ioannis Psorakis of Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science, who led the research. 'What we have shown is that we can analyse data about individual animals, in this case great tits, to construct a 'Facebook for animals' revealing who affiliates with who, who are members of the same group, and which birds are regularly going to the same gatherings or 'events.''
They team tested the new technique on data from two breeding seasons of wild great tits (August 2007-March 2008 and August 2008-March 2009). The data came from transponders attached to thousands of birds and sensors that logged when individuals appeared at any one of 67 bird feeders spread throughout Wytham Woods, Oxford.
The researchers found that their predictions from this data about which birds were 'friends' that regularly foraged for food together, as well as which birds were starting the process of pairing up or were already in a pair, matched visual observations made by zoologists.
'What we've shown is that our technique can extract information about the networks that bind individuals together by sampling and analysing their mobility patterns,' said Ioannis Psorakis. 'Our approach makes it possible to look at huge amounts of data without having to decide what time resolution is best to extract meaning -- the model evaluates this automatically. This is just the first exalple of how zoologists are beginning to use our method to explore social networks of animals in a 'big data' context.'
Early results from the work with great tits suggest that individual birds do not participate in flocks at random, but have a bias towards other members of the population they interact with. The majority of networks extracted using the approach are strongly clustered, and in such tight bird communities, individuals forage together and interact with their current or future mating partner.
This approach is being used not only in great tits, but also in a mix of wild-bird social networks, exploring the animal sociality at an inter-species level. Some of the most important future steps in this work are to combine the 'social' information available through this method, with other types of information: for example combining it with genetic data is enabling researchers to explore the genetic basis of sociality: do genetically similar individuals attract each other, or is it the other way round? Can we find specific areas of the genome that account for gregariousness?
The work could also help researchers understand how information spreads through animal populations. Tits are a famous exemplar of social learning: for instance, the habit of pecking open milk bottles on doorsteps to get access to cream spread rapidly through England in the mid 20th Century. The new approach is helping scientists to test how specific social structures help or hinder the spread of novel information from individual to individual.

Simple Mathematcal Pattern Describes Shape of Neuron 'Jungle'

To contact us Click HERE
Neurons look remarkably like trees, and connect to other cells with many branches that effectively act like wires in an electrical circuit, carrying impulses that represent sensation, emotion, thought and action.
Over 100 years ago, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, sought to systematically describe the shapes of neurons, and was convinced that there must be a unifying principle underlying their diversity.
Cajal proposed that neurons spread out their branches so as to use as little wiring as possible to reach other cells in the network. Reducing the amount of wiring between cells provides additional space to pack more neurons into the brain, and therefore increases its processing power.
New work by UCL neuroscientists, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revisited this century-old hypothesis using modern computational methods. They show that a simple computer program which connects points with as little wiring as possible can produce tree-like shapes which are indistinguishable from real neurons -- and also happen to be very beautiful. They also show that the shape of neurons follows a simple mathematical relationship called a power law.
Power laws have been shown to be common across the natural world, and often point to simple rules underlying complex structures. Dr Herman Cuntz (UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research) and colleagues find that the power law holds true for many types of neurons gathered from across the animal kingdom, providing strong evidence for Ramon y Cajal's general principle.
The UCL team further tested the theory by examining neurons in the olfactory bulb, a part of the brain where new brain cells are constantly being formed. These neurons grow and form new connections even in the adult brain, and therefore provide a unique window into the rules behind the development of neural trees in a mature neural circuit.
The team analysed the change in shape of the newborn olfactory neurons over several days, and found that the growth of these neurons also follow the power law, providing further evidence to support the theory.Dr Hermann Cuntz said: "The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to understand how the impenetrable neural jungle can give rise to the complexity of behaviour.
"Our findings confirm Cajal's original far-reaching insight that there is a simple pattern behind the circuitry, and provides hope that neuroscientists will someday be able to see the forest for the trees."

The 100 Best Google Maps of the Year

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Around this time of the year I normally look back at the best Google Maps that have been created in the previous twelve months. Each year, as the quality of applications created with the Google Maps API gets more and more impressive, it gets more and more difficult to single out just one or two maps from the hundreds of amazing maps reviewed on Google Maps Mania.

This year I therefore decided to pick the 100 Best Google Maps of the Year. Because 100 screenshots are a lot of images to display on one page I'm splitting this into two parts and (perversely) I'm starting with Part Two picked from the maps reviewed from July to December.

Part One of the 100 Best Google Maps of the Year will come tomorrow!

Spain's Jewish History on Google Maps

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Spain's Red de Juderías de España has partnered with Google to release a new website highlighting Spain's Jewish history.

Caminos de Sefarad uses Google Maps and Google Maps Street View to allow users to visit and tour Spanish cities and discover Spain’s Jewish past. Clicking on a map marker opens an information window with historical information about the selected location and the option to view a 360º panorama using Street View.

The mapped locations can be explored by category, type, geographic zone and date. In total, 523 sites, 910 dates, and 1,667 pictures have been mapped.

Via: Google Europe Blog

Also See

• The Jew Map - important landmarks in Jewish history 
• Jewish Women on the Map - a guide to physical landmarks in Jewish women’s history

The Cost of Two Turtle Doves on Google Maps

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On the second day of Christmas my true love sent to me two turtle doves. - The cheapskate! According to the PNC Christmas Price Index the cost of two turtle doves is the same in 2012 as it was in 2011.

Every year PNC Bank shows the current cost of each of the gifts mentioned in the song The Twelve Days of Christmas and compares the cost to previous years. This year the PNC Christmas Price Index has created a fun Google Maps Street View game to explore the current cost of the twelve gifts.

The game takes the user on a journey around the world using Street View. For example, to find out the cost of two French doves you need to visit the Eiffel Tower on Street View and find and feed two hungry birds before this year's price of two French doves is revealed.

The Google Maps of the Year - Part One

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Having illogically posted Part Two of The Google Maps of the Year yesterday, today we get The Google Maps of the Year - Part One.

The Google Maps of the Year - Part One is a round-up of some of the best maps produced with the Google Maps API during January to June 2012. It includes links to some great maps and in conjunction with Part One (July-December 2012) shows both the power and the flexibility of the Google Maps API.

Test Drive a Car with Street View

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BMW i Born Electric allows you to take a virtual test drive in the BMW i8 Concept or the BMW i3 Concept with Google Maps and Street View.

After you select which car you want to drive and the route you wish to take you are placed in the driving seat of your car. Through the windshield you have a great view of your route, thanks to Street View. A small map shows your current location and how much power you have in your electric battery.

If you select the 'Interior 360' option you can pan around inside the car and get a 360 degree interior view of the car and a 360 exterior view of your location in Street View.

Create City View with Google Maps

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Open City Agora is a new Google Maps based application that allows users to create map views that mix several layers of location information from a number of different sources.

Users can create map views from the available layers and save and share their views. The available map layers include a crime heat map layer, film locations, bike lanes, bike parking spots and pubic transit. Users can also add stores, restaurants and points of information to the map using Google Places.

You could therefore use Open City Agora, for example, to create a map that shows the location of Chinese restaurants, bike parking spots and bicycle lanes to help find Chinese restaurants that you can bike to and park your bike nearby.

Users can save their created map views and get a URL for their map to share with friends. Open CIty Agora is currently available in San Francisco and New York.

Bam - It's Google Maps Friday Fun

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Bam - You Come to Another Light

I hear that the new Google Maps iPhone app has rather impressive turn-by-turn navigation. Here is some secret video of Google testing turn-by-turn directions for the iPhone, using the voice of Larry Williams aka Dickeman.

Bam - Along Come Eleven Subs All at Once

Isn't it always the way. I've been waiting ages to catch a nuclear sub on Google Maps and then Bam! eleven come along all at once.
Bam - Ingress on xkcd
Google's Android game Ingress seems to have made its mark with its first appearance on xkcd.

Bam - 360 Degree Video

I've always been a big fan of interactive 360 degree video. The Sphericam is an affordable, GPS-enabled, live internet streaming, 360º video camera which has a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to go into production.

I know I want one!

The video above can be seen in its full interactive glory here.

Spanish Startups on Google Maps

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Spain Startup Map is a Google Map of Internet startups, investors and tech events in Spain.

Markers on the map are categorised by type and the map can be filtered by category. So, for example, if you just want to view the location of upcoming tech events on the map you could switch off all the other categories of marker.

Individual companies and events can be searched by name and the map also contains quick links to major cities on the map.

Also See

• Startup Genome Madrid
• Startup Genome Barcelona

'Facebook for Animals' Tested On Wild Great Tits

To contact us Click HERE
How animals associate in groups can have important consequences in terms of the health and survival of both individuals and whole populations; influencing factors such as the spread of disease and the ability to find food or mates.
But revealing the networks underlying animal societies is a challenge when a large amount of fieldwork data consists of a long stream of automated observations of the times and locations of individuals, leaving scientists to try and reconstruct the 'big picture' of how individuals are connected.
The new approach can automatically identify periods of intense social activity within a large number of observations -- in this example around one million observations of wild great tits (Parus major). This makes it possible to examine these periods in greater detail and calculate which individuals are real 'friends', rather than random passers-by, and even which are looking to pair up and mate.
A report of the research is published in this week's Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
'If you think of the data about you in Facebook it records things like who you are friends with, where you've been, and what you share with others,' said Ioannis Psorakis of Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science, who led the research. 'What we have shown is that we can analyse data about individual animals, in this case great tits, to construct a 'Facebook for animals' revealing who affiliates with who, who are members of the same group, and which birds are regularly going to the same gatherings or 'events.''
They team tested the new technique on data from two breeding seasons of wild great tits (August 2007-March 2008 and August 2008-March 2009). The data came from transponders attached to thousands of birds and sensors that logged when individuals appeared at any one of 67 bird feeders spread throughout Wytham Woods, Oxford.
The researchers found that their predictions from this data about which birds were 'friends' that regularly foraged for food together, as well as which birds were starting the process of pairing up or were already in a pair, matched visual observations made by zoologists.
'What we've shown is that our technique can extract information about the networks that bind individuals together by sampling and analysing their mobility patterns,' said Ioannis Psorakis. 'Our approach makes it possible to look at huge amounts of data without having to decide what time resolution is best to extract meaning -- the model evaluates this automatically. This is just the first exalple of how zoologists are beginning to use our method to explore social networks of animals in a 'big data' context.'
Early results from the work with great tits suggest that individual birds do not participate in flocks at random, but have a bias towards other members of the population they interact with. The majority of networks extracted using the approach are strongly clustered, and in such tight bird communities, individuals forage together and interact with their current or future mating partner.
This approach is being used not only in great tits, but also in a mix of wild-bird social networks, exploring the animal sociality at an inter-species level. Some of the most important future steps in this work are to combine the 'social' information available through this method, with other types of information: for example combining it with genetic data is enabling researchers to explore the genetic basis of sociality: do genetically similar individuals attract each other, or is it the other way round? Can we find specific areas of the genome that account for gregariousness?
The work could also help researchers understand how information spreads through animal populations. Tits are a famous exemplar of social learning: for instance, the habit of pecking open milk bottles on doorsteps to get access to cream spread rapidly through England in the mid 20th Century. The new approach is helping scientists to test how specific social structures help or hinder the spread of novel information from individual to individual.

Simple Mathematcal Pattern Describes Shape of Neuron 'Jungle'

To contact us Click HERE
Neurons look remarkably like trees, and connect to other cells with many branches that effectively act like wires in an electrical circuit, carrying impulses that represent sensation, emotion, thought and action.
Over 100 years ago, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, sought to systematically describe the shapes of neurons, and was convinced that there must be a unifying principle underlying their diversity.
Cajal proposed that neurons spread out their branches so as to use as little wiring as possible to reach other cells in the network. Reducing the amount of wiring between cells provides additional space to pack more neurons into the brain, and therefore increases its processing power.
New work by UCL neuroscientists, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revisited this century-old hypothesis using modern computational methods. They show that a simple computer program which connects points with as little wiring as possible can produce tree-like shapes which are indistinguishable from real neurons -- and also happen to be very beautiful. They also show that the shape of neurons follows a simple mathematical relationship called a power law.
Power laws have been shown to be common across the natural world, and often point to simple rules underlying complex structures. Dr Herman Cuntz (UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research) and colleagues find that the power law holds true for many types of neurons gathered from across the animal kingdom, providing strong evidence for Ramon y Cajal's general principle.
The UCL team further tested the theory by examining neurons in the olfactory bulb, a part of the brain where new brain cells are constantly being formed. These neurons grow and form new connections even in the adult brain, and therefore provide a unique window into the rules behind the development of neural trees in a mature neural circuit.
The team analysed the change in shape of the newborn olfactory neurons over several days, and found that the growth of these neurons also follow the power law, providing further evidence to support the theory.Dr Hermann Cuntz said: "The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to understand how the impenetrable neural jungle can give rise to the complexity of behaviour.
"Our findings confirm Cajal's original far-reaching insight that there is a simple pattern behind the circuitry, and provides hope that neuroscientists will someday be able to see the forest for the trees."

Where to Move on Google Maps

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BlockAvenue has graded every neighborhood and city block in the country for the quality of life it provides. The grade for each block is based on a number of factors that are important in determining the quality of life in an area, such as crime statistics, the availability of public transit and the number and the quality of local restaurants and stores.

The BlockAvenue Google Map uses lettered map markers to show at a glance the grade for each city block. If you like the grade given to a particularly block you can zoom in on the neighborhood and discover the locations of local cafes, restaurants and other points of interest.

Users of BlocakAvenue can even leave their own comments and ratings for blocks and rate local businesses, schools etc.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

Send a Google Maps Xmas Card

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A Holiday Message is a neat little WebGL and Google Maps application that lets you create your own Street View Christmas card.

Creating your own holiday message is very easy - you just need to enter your address or, to create an instant message, just share your location with the app. The app then uses the Google Maps Street View of your location to present a short pan around your street before presenting a Christmas greeting on top of the Street View of your location.

Users can change the wording of the Christmas message shown on the card and when they have finished they can grab a link to the card and share it with their friends. Because the app uses WebGL you might need to use Google Chrome.

Hairy Noses on Google Maps

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Clean Air Asia is a guide to air pollution in Asia with a handy info-graphic guide to how much nose hair you need to live safely in different Asian cities.

If you select a city on the Clean Air Asia Google Map you can get a quick overview of the air quality in the city and a handy little nose hair graphic shows how long your nose hair should to be. Clean Air Asia claim that "the more dirty air you breathe, the more nose hair you need".

After checking out how much nose hair you need for where you live you can upload a photo of your face and superimpose different styles of nose hair on your picture to see how you would look with the safe amount of nose hair.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

'Facebook for Animals' Tested On Wild Great Tits

To contact us Click HERE
How animals associate in groups can have important consequences in terms of the health and survival of both individuals and whole populations; influencing factors such as the spread of disease and the ability to find food or mates.
But revealing the networks underlying animal societies is a challenge when a large amount of fieldwork data consists of a long stream of automated observations of the times and locations of individuals, leaving scientists to try and reconstruct the 'big picture' of how individuals are connected.
The new approach can automatically identify periods of intense social activity within a large number of observations -- in this example around one million observations of wild great tits (Parus major). This makes it possible to examine these periods in greater detail and calculate which individuals are real 'friends', rather than random passers-by, and even which are looking to pair up and mate.
A report of the research is published in this week's Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
'If you think of the data about you in Facebook it records things like who you are friends with, where you've been, and what you share with others,' said Ioannis Psorakis of Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science, who led the research. 'What we have shown is that we can analyse data about individual animals, in this case great tits, to construct a 'Facebook for animals' revealing who affiliates with who, who are members of the same group, and which birds are regularly going to the same gatherings or 'events.''
They team tested the new technique on data from two breeding seasons of wild great tits (August 2007-March 2008 and August 2008-March 2009). The data came from transponders attached to thousands of birds and sensors that logged when individuals appeared at any one of 67 bird feeders spread throughout Wytham Woods, Oxford.
The researchers found that their predictions from this data about which birds were 'friends' that regularly foraged for food together, as well as which birds were starting the process of pairing up or were already in a pair, matched visual observations made by zoologists.
'What we've shown is that our technique can extract information about the networks that bind individuals together by sampling and analysing their mobility patterns,' said Ioannis Psorakis. 'Our approach makes it possible to look at huge amounts of data without having to decide what time resolution is best to extract meaning -- the model evaluates this automatically. This is just the first exalple of how zoologists are beginning to use our method to explore social networks of animals in a 'big data' context.'
Early results from the work with great tits suggest that individual birds do not participate in flocks at random, but have a bias towards other members of the population they interact with. The majority of networks extracted using the approach are strongly clustered, and in such tight bird communities, individuals forage together and interact with their current or future mating partner.
This approach is being used not only in great tits, but also in a mix of wild-bird social networks, exploring the animal sociality at an inter-species level. Some of the most important future steps in this work are to combine the 'social' information available through this method, with other types of information: for example combining it with genetic data is enabling researchers to explore the genetic basis of sociality: do genetically similar individuals attract each other, or is it the other way round? Can we find specific areas of the genome that account for gregariousness?
The work could also help researchers understand how information spreads through animal populations. Tits are a famous exemplar of social learning: for instance, the habit of pecking open milk bottles on doorsteps to get access to cream spread rapidly through England in the mid 20th Century. The new approach is helping scientists to test how specific social structures help or hinder the spread of novel information from individual to individual.

Simple Mathematcal Pattern Describes Shape of Neuron 'Jungle'

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Neurons look remarkably like trees, and connect to other cells with many branches that effectively act like wires in an electrical circuit, carrying impulses that represent sensation, emotion, thought and action.
Over 100 years ago, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, sought to systematically describe the shapes of neurons, and was convinced that there must be a unifying principle underlying their diversity.
Cajal proposed that neurons spread out their branches so as to use as little wiring as possible to reach other cells in the network. Reducing the amount of wiring between cells provides additional space to pack more neurons into the brain, and therefore increases its processing power.
New work by UCL neuroscientists, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revisited this century-old hypothesis using modern computational methods. They show that a simple computer program which connects points with as little wiring as possible can produce tree-like shapes which are indistinguishable from real neurons -- and also happen to be very beautiful. They also show that the shape of neurons follows a simple mathematical relationship called a power law.
Power laws have been shown to be common across the natural world, and often point to simple rules underlying complex structures. Dr Herman Cuntz (UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research) and colleagues find that the power law holds true for many types of neurons gathered from across the animal kingdom, providing strong evidence for Ramon y Cajal's general principle.
The UCL team further tested the theory by examining neurons in the olfactory bulb, a part of the brain where new brain cells are constantly being formed. These neurons grow and form new connections even in the adult brain, and therefore provide a unique window into the rules behind the development of neural trees in a mature neural circuit.
The team analysed the change in shape of the newborn olfactory neurons over several days, and found that the growth of these neurons also follow the power law, providing further evidence to support the theory.Dr Hermann Cuntz said: "The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to understand how the impenetrable neural jungle can give rise to the complexity of behaviour.
"Our findings confirm Cajal's original far-reaching insight that there is a simple pattern behind the circuitry, and provides hope that neuroscientists will someday be able to see the forest for the trees."

The Future of Paris on Google Maps

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The Pavillon de l'Arsenal is a Paris museum and the center for information, documentation and exhibition for urban planning and the architecture of Paris. To highlight and showcase the architectural projects currently planned and under construction in the French capital the museum has created a Google Map called Metropole 2020.

The map shows the locations of the city's architectural projects. It is possible to search for projects by category and, if you select the Google Earth browser view, you can also see 3d models of the planned projects in situ.

If you select a marker on the map you can view photographs and a detailed summary of the selected project.

Get the Latest Weather with Uber Weather

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Uber Weather is a new Google Maps based weather service that provides the current weather, weather forecasts and a wealth of other weather related information.

The map includes a real-time cloud layer, using data supplied by weather.com. It is also possible to view a temperature layer (pictured) that displays a heat map of current temperatures. To get a forecast for a particular location the user can enter a town or city name and switch to 'city view'. It is then possible to get your local weather information and a four day forecast.

Uber Weather can also be used to get information about global ski resorts, snow reports and even view the locations of ski lifts. The application also contains a number of other layers to view current traffic, nearby cafes, bike paths and much more.

Uber Weather is available as an application on the Google Chrome Web Store.

Mom & Pop's Shopping Tips on Google Maps

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Just in time for Christmas The Guardian has released the Local Shopping Map, a Google Map of readers' tips on local shopping.

The map shows tips about the best places to shop that have been submitted by The Guardian's readers using the #LocalShopping on Twitter or Instagram. To submit a tip to the map shoppers just need to turn location on and take a picture & post their tip to Twitter, Instagram or N0tice.

The map uses an interesting marker clustering system with some very smart information windows. When you click on one of the clustered markers the map doesn't zoom into display the individual markers, as is the now usual practice with most marker clustering solutions. Instead it opens an information window listing all the clustered tips.

This doesn't work particularly well when the clustered marker has 90 tips to display but does work well when there are only a few tips clustered together. This is because the listed view in the information window is interactive. If you select an individual tip in an information window the list slides out of view and the individual tip slides into the window. The user can then read the individual tip and scroll through to read other nearby submitted tips.

Google Maps at Night

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Last week NASA released a spectacular 'Black Marble' image of the Earth from space. The image differs from NASA's famous Blue Marble image of the Earth in that it shows the world at night. In this view only the lights of the Earth's cities can be seen.

Earth at Night 2012 overlays the Black Marble image on top of Google Maps. The map is illuminating in more than one way. It helps to show the location of Earth's major urban centres, it is useful to astronomers in showing areas with high levels of light pollution and it also glaringly shows how much more light pollution there is in the northern hemisphere than the south.

One thing missing from the map is the ability to link to specific locations. NASA's Earth Observatory wrote an interesting article on the lights that can be observed in sparsely populated North Dakota (search for Williston, ND on the map). The reason for all those lights is that the area is home to the Bakken shale formation, where oil production is booming.

Architecture and Sculpture on Street View

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Arti-Fact is great collection of architecturally important buildings and sculptures that can be found on Google Maps Street View.

It is possible to search the collections by either 'architecture' or 'sculpture' and then search by country or by city. It is also possible to view collections of featured artists and architects. For example, you can view a map of links to Street Views of the buildings of the recently deceased Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.

If you select a marker on any of the collection maps a Street View of your selection will load, with details about the sculpture or building displayed and the responsible artist or architect.

Building a Better Google Map

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Improved map for Parque del Retiro in Madrid

Google Maps has released updated maps for 10 countries and regions in Europe: Andorra, Bulgaria, Estonia, Gibraltar, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain. These improved maps will appear immediately on all Google Maps API sites, with no code changes required.

In announcing these updated maps Google has also revealed a few interesting facts about Google Maps and the Maps API: 

• More than 800,000 web sites use the Google Maps API 
• More than a billion people use Google Maps each month 
• More than 27.9 million miles of road appear on Google Maps

In addition to this new map data, Google has also added the 'Report a problem' link to all maps that use the API for each of the 40+ countries where this tool is available on the consumer version of Google Maps. Now any visitor to a Google Maps API V3 site can submit corrections and feedback directly to Google.

Mapping the Blitz

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Where I live in the East End of London you can view the effect of the London Blitz on the landscape and architecture of the city almost everywhere you look.

My street alone was hit by four bombs during the Blitz during World War II. The effect of this is very evident and you don't really need a map to know where the bombs landed. In effect you just need to look at where the rather attractive Victorian housing ends and instead uglier, post-war red brick town houses, begin.


Pre-WWII & post war housing often indicate where bombs fell

However, to verify the locations of where bombs fell in London during the Blitz you can now view a new digital map. Bomb Sight is a map showing the location of every bomb that landed during the London Blitz in World War II.

To create the map the original 1940s bomb census maps were scanned, geo-referenced and the geographical locations of all the falling bombs were digitally captured. The map was created using Leaflet and therefore uses OpenStreetMap map tiles.



Using OpenStreetMap means that the map tiles are perfect for finding and viewing the locations of where the bombs fell. However I hope that in the future a Google Maps Street View layer is added to the map. Yesterday I spent a few hours using Bomb Sight to find the location of bombs and then having to open Google Maps to view the actual location in Street View.

West End at War is another great website for anyone interested in the London Blitz. Their Bomb Incidents section includes detailed stories, photographs and documents about the impact of specific bombs during the Blitz. The location of each bomb site is also shown using Google Maps (again unfortunately with no Street View option).

Also See

• London V2 Rocket Sites - Londonist has mapped the locations of where V2 Rockets fell in London
• Historypin Blitz Collection - photos of the Blitz mapped by Historypin
• London Blitz - a mapped animation of bombs dropped on the first night of the Blitz

Mapping the Conflict Crisis in DR Congo

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The Democratic Republic of Congo is one African country that actually seems cursed by a wealth of economic and natural resources. Since independence in 1960 the country has been plagued by civil war and corruption. Some estimates suggest that over 5 million people have died in the country as a direct consequence of civil war and the frequent 'incursions' of neighbouring countries.

Crisis Group has created a Google Map to record and show the locations of recent army and militia violence in eastern DRC. The Kivu Map currently shows incidents that have been reported between April and November 2012 and the map will be updated in light of any new information from the area.

All the mapped reports on the Kivu Map are recorded in French. 

Place Photos & Radar Search on Your Maps

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The Google Places API has two new features, Place Photos and Radar Search.

Place Photos

The new Place Photos feature allows map developers to add photographs of venues to their maps. If you add the Place Photos feature to a map your users will be able to search for places and view photos of the venue directly on your map. Developers can define how the photos appear on the map by specifying the photo’s maximum width and height.

Radar Search

The new Radar Search feature allows map developers to provide heat map views of different types of place venues in a neighborhood or city. For example, developers could use the Radar Search view to show where the best streets in Paris are to find clothes stores.

Via: Google Geo Developers Blog

Using Paper.js with Google Maps

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Darren Wiens has been experimenting with Paper.js and the Google Maps API. You can view his posts and links to the experiments with Paper.js on Darren's Side Projects blog.

Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. In his experiments Darren has been overlaying vector graphics created using Paper.js as a canvas layer on top of Google Maps.

One of Darren's experiments is the Randomised City Map. On this map Paper.js is used to animate a line between two randomly generated locations. The Google Maps API Direction Service is then used to animate the driving route between the two locations.  Then another line between two random locations is generated and the driving route for that journey calculated and so on, ad infinitum.

The map then uses the Google Maps API Heatmap Layer to show the most heavily generated roads and intersections.The result of all this is a rather cool city traffic flow stimulator.


Another of Darren's Paper.js and Google Maps experiments is this Polygon Hit Detection Map. This map creates a number of polygons and a randomly generated moving line. Hit test detection is used to show when the moving line intersects with any of the polygons. In the screen-shot above the yellow stars show where the line has moved through a polygon.

This hit-test detection could be used in any number of ways. Darren gives the example of using it to highlight when GPS tracked elephants wander onto farmland. It could also be used to help create geo-location games, for example, to determine when a player has entered a pre-defined zone.

Australian Holday Rentals on Google Maps

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Stayz is Australia's most popular holiday rental property website. The site allows users to find and book holiday rentals throughout the country.

It is possible to search for properties on Stayz via regional Google Maps that show all the available properties within an area. Users can refine the results displayed on the map by the cost of accommodation, by rating and number of guests.

Stayz also allows users to view a pop-up Google Map in the listings view of search results. A 'Map' link under each property listing allows the user to quickly view the location of the property on a small Google Map without leaving the listings page.

Memories of Fukushima on Google Maps

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Shopping plaza in Maiya

Google Maps has released some haunting new interior Street View images of buildings in Northeastern Japan that were heavily damaged by the 2011 earthquake. The new Street View imagery enables you to walk through the buildings and even switch between floors to view the extent of the destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami.

These interior Street View images also feature in the Memories for the Future website. The website is digitally archiving buildings affected by the earthquake, showing their exteriors and interiors with Google Maps Street View.

So far more than 30 buildings have Street View imagery and Google is continuing to capture new imagery of other buildings which will also be added to Google Maps. The Memories for the Future website also features Google Street View taken before and after the earthquake and tsunami so you can get a first hand view of the damage and destruction caused.

Via: Google Lat Long

Finding Parks with Google Maps

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Waterloo Parks is a Google Map of parks and public spaces in Waterloo, Ontario.

Details about each park displayed on the map can be viewed by clicking on its map marker. You can then view the park's full address and discover what facilities are available. The facilities checked include washrooms, benches and types of sports facilities on offer.

The map includes detailed search options. It is possible to find parks on the map by name, by category or by facilities. So, for example, if you fancy a game of tennis you can filter the results to show only those parks with tennis courts.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny