Twitter Ticker-Tape Parade on Google Maps

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TwitterMap is an interesting Google Map of geo-located Tweets. The map displays the profile pictures of each Twitter user and animates the posted Twitter message, scrolling marquee fashion, above the Twitter user's name.

The map is an interesting way to view in real-time what people are saying around a particular location. The same developer has also created a Google Map that displays recently posted Flickr photos around locations.

FlickrMap displays thumbnail images of Flickr photos on top of Google Maps. Users can click on an individual thumbnail picture to view the photograph in a larger window. Using both maps in conjunction is a good way to view real-time media around a specific location and could prove particularly interesting during specific events and breaking news stories.

Go Karting on Google Maps

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A few famous motor racing tracks are featured in Google Maps Street View. Using Street View you can virtually drive a lap of the Laguna Raceway, the Thunderhill Raceway, the Infineon Raceway, Silverstone and Monza.

Now you can also take a spin around the indoor go-kart track in Ayslebury, UK.


If racing driving isn't your cup of tea then why not imagine being a matador instead by visiting the Plaza de Toros in Valencia.

Many other Sports Stadia around the world now include Street View imagery. Google Earth Hacks has a good collection of many of the stadia now featured on Google Maps Street View in their Sports Stadiums section. 

Good Roads for Bikes on Google Maps

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The Cyclist's Road Map is a crowd-sourced Google Map for cyclists that provides a handy guide about the quality of roads around the world.

Cyclists can submit reviews of roads based on the quality of the road surface, scenery and the amount of traffic on a road. Roads that have already been rated are color-coded on the map, green indicates roads that have been recommended by other cyclists and red indicates that the road has been deemed to be a bad road for cycling.

If a user selects an individual road on the map they can view the road's overall rating and also view the road's individual ratings for the road surface, scenery and traffic levels.

'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."

Explore the UK's Wildest Terrain

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Honda are promoting their CR-V compact SUV car in the UK using Google Maps Street View. In order to encourage potential customers that they could really use a SUV Honda has put together a wonderful collection of Street Views of the UK's wildest terrain.

Do More New allows users to enter a postcode and then shows a beautiful Street View of somewhere nearby that they can visit. Users can choose from a number of terrains, including mountains, snow, forest and urban.

Overlaid on top of the displayed Street View are the current weather conditions and the option to view places to stay overnight.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

What's Happening on Google Maps

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Google Maps applications that display upcoming events and concerts have been coming thick and fast this month. Two weeks ago Google Maps Mania reviewed HUGE city, a map that displays nearby Facebook events, and Concert Mapper, a Google Maps based application to find and book tickets for concerts, theatre or sporting events.

Now a new Google Map has been released that can help you find out what is happening nearby, using listings from Facebook events, Eventbrite, Meetup and Upcoming. Mapify.us uses categorised map markers to show from which listing service each event comes (using the initial letter of each service). The markers are also color-coded to show whether the listed event is happening today, tomorrow or this week.

The Man Responsible for Google's Non-Island

To contact us Click HERE
The Culprit

Last week you might have heard about the non-discovery of an island called Sandy that appears on Google Maps. There has been a lot of fun had at the expense of Google Maps for showing an island in the Coral Sea that doesn't actually exist but today I can reveal the true villain of this mapping error:

Captain J W Robinson, captain of the brig Velocity in 1876
The Back Story
Last week scientists from the University of Sydney revealed that they had sailed to where Google Maps shows a Pacific island called Sandy and had found no island and just a whole lot of sea. 

Today the Auckland Museum revealed that a trawl through their huge collection of historical maps turned up a 1908 map which shows the island. According to the map the island was discovered by the Velocity in 1876.



The Velocity

Searching on the National Library of Australia website I discovered that the Velocity was a whaling brig. Amazingly the library actually has photos of the ship. This one was taken at dry dock in 1870, six years before she 'discovered' Sandy.



Even more amazingly the library has a photograph of William John Maguire (see the top of this post), described as a 'sailor on the brig Velocity'. The photo is dated to 1870, so it is quite possible that Mr Maguire was actually on board Velocity in 1876 when it 'discovered' Sandy. However Mr Maguire is not the villain of our mapping error, that award must go to the captain of the Velocity, who in 1876 was one J W Robinson.

Here is a newspaper report from The (Hobart) Mercury, dated 11th March 1876, which names the Velocity's captain:

"THE whaling brig Velocity returned from an unsuccessful voyage yesterday. She brings 3 tuns of sperm oil. Captain Robinson reports that he sailed from this port on the 12th March 1875, and proceeded to Cato's Bank. After cruising there for some time without success he proceeded to the Middle Ground. Had seen only three whales during the voyage, one of which, a small one, yielded the quantity which constitutes the Velocity's take".

Sandy Island was not the only island 'discovered' by Captain Robinson. Captain Robinson also 'discovered' Heard Island. This island also features on Google Maps and actually seems to exist and is clearly visible in Google Maps satellite view.

The (Hobart) Mercury reported in 1929 that Captain Robinson, "in exploring, discovered that there was an island previously uncharted here, and named it Heard Island." Unfortunately however this seems to be another unfortunate 'discovery' for J W Robinson. According to Wikipedia Heard Island was actually discovered by an American sealer, Captain John Heard, who sighted the island on 25 November 1853 and had the island named after him.

The History of Velocity

Whilst researching Velocity I have managed to put together a brief history of the ship. The ship was originally built at Haldon, Devonshire, UK in 1827. In its early life it seems to have plied its trade carrying cargo back and forth between Britain and the Americas.

In 1830, when returning from the Americas with a valuable cargo, the ship was boarded and captured by a Portuguese ship. The Portuguese captain who took over the ship was one Maurico Jose-Alves. Another British captain approached the Velocity only to be met by a hostile reception. He reported that Maurico,

"made use of the most abusive and insulting language and ... the officer then threw a square kettle, which struck me with great force on the head."

Sometime after this date the Velocity sailed to Australia. The Australasian Chronicle has a report dated the 24th November 1841 that says the Velocity 'has arrived from England'. This may have been its first arrival in Australia.

As well as operating as a whaling brig the ship had a less illustrious career as a 'blackbirder'. Blackbirding was the recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work as labourers. The Blackbird website says that "blackbirding in Australia began with the first acknowledged Blackbirder Captain William Boyd in 1847 when his schooner Velocity landed sixty-five men from the New Hebrides."

It appears that the Velocity was bringing cheap (forced) labour from the Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Rotuma, Gilbert and Ellice Islands to Australia. It is in this general vicinity of the Pacific that in 1870 that the Velocity 'discovered' and mapped Sandy Island. 

The ship was eventually boughtat auction on the 28 August 1885, to be broken up. It was sunk at her moorings in the River Derwent, Tasmania.

Green Buildings on Google Maps

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The Green Building Information Gateway is a global platform for exploring and comparing the green dimensions of buildings. The project from The U.S. Green Building Council helps users discover green buildings around the world.

The GBIG Map shows the location of green buildings across the globe. It is possible to view the buildings in map or list form. If you select a marker on the map you can click through to view details about the building's green credentials in a number of categories, including building materials, energy and water efficiency.

Finding a Job with Google Maps

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JobKaster is a Google Maps based job search application. Using the app job seekers can search for jobs by location and also submit their location, professional skills and resume to potential recruiters.

Jobs are displayed on the map using markers that show the name of the company recruiting. If users click on a map marker they can view details of the positions on offer. The details section includes an 'apply' button that will take the user to the recruiting company's own jobs page.

JobKaster can also be used by companies to post their currently available positions.

Currently JobKaster only works in the USA but the site has plans to broaden coverage soon to other countries.

Botswana and Canada on Street View

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Chobe National Park

Botswana has today become only the second African country to get Street View coverage on Google Maps. There has also been lots of new Street View imagery added in Canada.

Now Google Maps users around the world can explore Botswana’s unique scenery and world-renowned game reserves, like Chobe National Park.


Monkey and deer. Pan the Street View around and there is an elephant as well.

There is also new Street View imagery available in Canada. The new imagery includes panoramas captured in the isolated Nunavut hamlet of Cambridge Bay in Canada's Arctic far north.



Via: Google Africa Blog and Google Canada Blog

Have You Sent Your Street View Cards Yet?

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There has been a huge increase in the clever use of Street View in marketing campaigns this year. It is easy to get a little blasé now about marrying animation and live video with Google Maps Street View but this new Christmas marketing campaign from Stella Artois is incredibly well done.

Stella Artois' Christmas Carole app on Facebook allows you to enter an address and then creates a video in which a band visits the address and plays you a song. The Street View of the address is used as a backdrop to the video so that it appears that the band is actually playing in your street. The video includes a zoom effect, using Google Maps Satellite View to zoom in on the address.

There are a number of other nice touches in this app, like a falling snow effect. Of course wrapping the whole thing inside Facebook means that users can also share the app and send personalised messages to their Facebook friends, using their addresses.

Spotting Wildlife with Google Maps

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The I-90 Wildlife Watch is using Google Maps to create a crowd-sourced wildlife monitoring project. The project is inviting motorists to report wildlife sightings along I-90 in the Snoqualmie Pass region of Washington.

The aim of the project is to gather information about wildlife on the I-90 to help inform highway planning. The Snoqualmie Pass region is a critical link in the north-south movement of wildlife. With the help of these crowd-sourced reports the project hopes that measures can be introduced to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions and enhance the safe passage of wildlife in the future.

'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."

Instagram Photos on Street View

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The Beat is one of those great ideas that you just can't help wishing that you had thought of yourself. There are a lot of Google Maps based Instagram apps but I think that this is the first one I've seen which has made the inspired choice of using Street View. How better to convey the sense of where a photograph was taken than to show you what it looks like with Google's 360 degree panoramic imagery.

Using The Beat it is possible to view photographs submitted to Instagram on top of a Street View of the location where the picture was taken. If you enter a hashtag search into The Beat you can just sit back and watch as a stream of Instagram images, placed on top of Street View, plays on your monitor.

The hashtag feature is a great way to search for interesting photographs around a theme or an event. For example, if you enter 'Thanksgiving' into the search you can view a selection of Thanksgiving photographs submitted to Instagram.

The only real omission to The Beat is a pause feature. It would be nice to be able to pause interesting photographs for a closer look and to be able to explore the Street View of the location for a little longer than the app currently allows.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

Miami Art Fair on Google Maps

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Next week is the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair (Dec 4-9). The Art Basel Miami is the largest US contemporary art fair attracting over 60,000 collectors andgalleries from around the world.

REFINeDr is a free, interactive website and smartphone app that puts Art Basel Miami fairs, galleries, artists and events on a searchable Google Map. The app allows users to find out what is happening in the fair,  discover all about the venues taking part and view expert recommendations on artists, artwork and galleries.

If you are looking for events to attend then you can use the app's excellent search tools that allow you to refine the results displayed on the map by date and by time.

Users will also have access to world-class art news and reviews from Blouin Artinfo in a special Art Basel magazine on the REFINEDr site. The map was created by Cartographic design agency, Carticulate in partnership with The Fulton Group.

Is This the Most Gorgeous Map Ever?

To contact us Click HERE

Oh man this is beautiful! Plane Finder has released a new Route Map that looks just all kinds of gorgeous.

The screenshot above doesn't do this map justice.You need to open up the map and then click on any of the airports displayed on the map - that's when the beauty happens. After clicking on an airport neon lines fly out from the airport to show all the destinations that you can fly to from that location.

It's a simple formula really:

 a styled map + animated polylines = poetry in motion

'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."

Death by TV on Google Maps

To contact us Click HERE

It may be a cliché to state that 'most accidents happen in the home' but I personally didn't realise that flat-panel television sets are a growing cause of serious injuries. According to TV Safety.org because of their height and thinness flat-panel sets easily tip over causing injury and sometimes even death.

The TV Safety Map shows the locations of accidents caused by television sets as reported by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The map can be searched by location and the results displayed on the map can be filtered by accidents causing 'death', 'injury' and 'other injuries'.

On the map design front the TV Safety Map has some very nice round information windows that pop-up when the user mouses-over a map marker.

What's Happening on Google Maps

To contact us Click HERE

Google Maps applications that display upcoming events and concerts have been coming thick and fast this month. Two weeks ago Google Maps Mania reviewed HUGE city, a map that displays nearby Facebook events, and Concert Mapper, a Google Maps based application to find and book tickets for concerts, theatre or sporting events.

Now a new Google Map has been released that can help you find out what is happening nearby, using listings from Facebook events, Eventbrite, Meetup and Upcoming. Mapify.us uses categorised map markers to show from which listing service each event comes (using the initial letter of each service). The markers are also color-coded to show whether the listed event is happening today, tomorrow or this week.

The Man Responsible for Google's Non-Island

To contact us Click HERE
The Culprit

Last week you might have heard about the non-discovery of an island called Sandy that appears on Google Maps. There has been a lot of fun had at the expense of Google Maps for showing an island in the Coral Sea that doesn't actually exist but today I can reveal the true villain of this mapping error:

William John Maguire, a sailor on the brig Velocity in 1876
The Back Story
Last week scientists from the University of Sydney revealed that they had sailed to where Google Maps shows a Pacific island called Sandy and had found nothing but a whole lot of sea. 

Today the Auckland Museum revealed that a trawl through their huge collection of historical maps turned up a 1908 map which shows the island. According to the map the island was discovered by the Velocity in 1876.



The Velocity

Searching on the National Library of Australia website I discovered that the Velocity was a whaling brig. Amazingly the library actually has photos of the ship. This one was taken at dry dock in 1870, six years before she 'discovered' Sandy.



Even more amazingly the library even has a photograph of William John Maguire (see the top of this post), described as a 'sailor on the brig Velocity'. The photo is dated to 1870, so it is quite possible that Mr Maguire was actually on board Velocity in 1876 when it 'discovered' Sandy. Because I don't know the names of any of the other sailors on board during that voyage, I'm laying the blame for this mapping error squarely on the shoulders of William John Maguire (may he rest in peace).

'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."

Map Your Facebook Friends' Photos

To contact us Click HERE

Log-in to Roam7 with your Facebook account and you can instantly view all of your friends' travel photos on a handy Google Map.

If you click on a photo pinned to the map you can then see your selected friend's photos turned into a travel story. You can browse through all the photos posted from their trip and see where each photo was taken on its own Google Map.

Once you have logged into Roam7 you can also start adding your own trips to the map. Users can upload photos from a trip and caption the photos to tell a story about the trip. It is possible to include details about your trip, including where you stayed, how you got around and what you did on your journey.

Explore the UK's Wildest Terrain

To contact us Click HERE

Honda are promoting their CR-V compact SUV car in the UK using Google Maps Street View. In order to encourage potential customers that they could really use a SUV Honda has put together a wonderful collection of Street Views of the UK's wildest terrain.

Do More New allows users to enter a postcode and then shows a beautiful Street View of somewhere nearby that they can visit. Users can choose from a number of terrains, including mountains, snow, forest and urban.

Overlaid on top of the displayed Street View are the current weather conditions and the option to view places to stay overnight.

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'

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."

Street View at Prayer

To contact us Click HERE

Outside Street View of Lincoln Cathedral

For a while Google Maps has steadily been increasing coverage of inside Street View for businesses, stores and museums. It is now also capturing Street Views inside a number of cathedrals.


The main nave of Lincoln Cathedral

In the UK Lincoln Cathedral has indoor Street View. For almost 300 years after it was first built Lincoln Cathedral was the tallest building in the world. In Google Maps you can now explore the main nave and the Chapter House.


The view from Salisbury Cathedral roof

Salisbury Cathedral also has some beautiful indoor Street Views. Salisbury Cathedral has Britain's tallest spire. Exploring the Street View in Google Maps you can get a wonderful view looking up into the inside of the spire.


Looking up the Salisbury spire 

New York's opulent St Patrick's Cathedral also has indoor Street View. The cornerstone of St. Patrick’s Cathedral was laid in 1858 and her doors first opened in 1879.


Click on any of the images above to view the Street View depicted on Google Maps

Twitter Trends on Google Maps

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If you want to know what people are talking about right now around the world then Twitter is probably the best place to go. Twitter's trending algorithm identifies the most discussed topics on the micro-blogging platform and even displays the top trends by location.


Twordly is a Google Map which shows what is trending on Twitter around the world.

The application allows the user to view what is currently trending in different countries and even lets you drill down and view trending subjects at city level. If the user clicks on a map marker an information marker opens displaying the current top trends at that location. Select a trend on the map and you can then view that hashtag on Twitter.


TwitTRENDS also allows users to view local top trends on Twitter with a little help from Google Maps.

To use the application users can click anywhere in the world on a Google Map. A list of the nearest places nearby that are available as geo-located 'Trends' is then loaded beneath the map.

If you click on one of the cities listed you can view the top trends on Twitter for that location. Click on one of the trends and you can view the latest Twitter messages about that trend.


Trendsmap is probably the best map of Twitter trends. The map shows recent trends on Twitter live on a Google Map for any location that you choose.

Move the map and zoom in on any location and the Twitter trends shown on the map will update in real-time. The map is live, so if you leave the map zoomed in on one location you can see the trends growing and changing on the map over time.

When you click on a trend you can see the Tweets updating in the trends window. For each trend clicked on it is also possible to review a trend graph so that you can see the peaks and troughs of that trend over time, both locally and globally. Pictures that have been posted about that trend will also appear in the window.

Live Music Reviews on Google Maps

To contact us Click HERE

#GDNGIG is a live music Google Map from The Guardian newspaper. The map hopes to capture the excitement and unforgettable moments at live concerts and share the experience with the rest of world.

If you are at a gig then you can share your photos, thoughts and reviews with the #GDNGIG map by posting a Twitter message, an Instagram photo or a comment on nOtice with the tag #gdngig. Bands themselves can also post their own photos and comments to the map. The Vaccines, Band of Horses, Dry the River, Tegan and Sara, and Aluna George are among those who have already used the #gdngig tag.

Judging by the current mapped reviews the hashtag seems to have only been adopted by UK gig goers but there is no reason why the map shouldn't work for live music worldwide. 

'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."

Map Your Facebook Friends' Photos

To contact us Click HERE

Log-in to Roam7 with your Facebook account and you can instantly view all of your friends' travel photos on a handy Google Map.

If you click on a photo pinned to the map you can then see your selected friend's photos turned into a travel story. You can browse through all the photos posted from their trip and see where each photo was taken on its own Google Map.

Once you have logged into Roam7 you can also start adding your own trips to the map. Users can upload photos from a trip and caption the photos to tell a story about the trip. It is possible to include details about your trip, including where you stayed, how you got around and what you did on your journey.

Steam Groups on Google Maps

To contact us Click HERE

The Steam Community Map Browser is a pretty visualisation of a large network of Steam Community members. The Steam computer game distribution platform allows players to create and join groups which the map has accessed through the Steam Web API.

The circles on the map represent Steam groups and are clustered close together if they share a large number of the same players. The map tiles were created using the Gephi interactive visualisation platform.

Some of the larger and more interesting groups on the map include map markers which when clicked on reveals information about the group in the map sidebar, including a link to their Steam Community page.

Explore the UK's Wildest Terrain

To contact us Click HERE

Honda are promoting their CR-V compact SUV car in the UK using Google Maps Street View. In order to encourage potential customers that they could really use a SUV Honda has put together a wonderful collection of Street Views of the UK's wildest terrain.

Do More New allows users to enter a postcode and then shows a beautiful Street View of somewhere nearby that they can visit. Users can choose from a number of terrains, including mountains, snow, forest and urban.

Overlaid on top of the displayed Street View are the current weather conditions and the option to view places to stay overnight.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

The Canadian Census on Google Maps

To contact us Click HERE

Canadian Census is a great way to explore data from the 2011 Canadian census.The visualisation uses Google Maps to allow the user to browse data from the census related to 'families', 'people' and 'languages'.

One very clever feature of the map is that it allows users to explore the data and different granularities depending on the zoom level of the map. Zoom right out and you can explore the data at province level. As you zoom in on the map you can explore the data at ever smaller administrative levels, right down to the smallest census tracts when you zoom right in on the map.