Southern Ontario bear incidents

BILL SANDFORD/FOR THE TORONTO STAR

Map: Southern Ontario bear incidents

There have been a number of encounters with black bears in southern Ontario this spring. One almost ended tragically for a Severn man, who was lucky to survive being mauled by a black bear in May. Two other people in the Orillia area were recently chased by bears.

On the other side of the coin, two bears have been shot dead by police, one in London, the other north of Peterborough.

Other encounters have been more benign: a bear toured downtown Cannington for a while last weekend, pausing to eat the contents of a grease bucket behind a sports bar, before being gently nudged out of town by police cruisers.

The map shows about a dozen incidents.

G20: The kite exclusion map

KEITH BEATY/ TORONTO STAR

Map: the G8/G20 air exclusion zones

The federal government released a document today outlining airspace restrictions during the summits. The two affected zones are circles with a 15 nautical mile* radius centred on a point east of Huntsville and another around Dundas West and Royal York Road. The Toronto area covers more or less all of the city, and quite a lot of the 905.

The regulations forbid most forms of aviation, broadly defined, including parasailing and kite-flying. The small print is here (pdf).

The reasoning behind the kite rule isn't obvious - my own kite-flying has posed a rather limited risk to national security (or so it seemed at the time). It also isn't clear whether there's any serious will to enforce this, but I guess we may find out.

* or 17.2 statute miles, or 27.6 kilometers

Maps elsewhere

A roundup of maps elsewhere:

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A colleague passes on this remarkable visualization of crime rates in SanFrancisco seen as contours. At left is arrests for narcotics.

I don't know why I haven't come across these state-by-state maps of popular baby names in the U.S. before. Ethan is an interesting case. The U.S. map (left) shows Ethans spreading north up the Mississippi into the Midwest and also west into the prairie states. Ethans top Canadian lists (according to this roundup) in all Western provinces and Ontario, but the name falls off further east. American Avas cluster in the Upper Midwest and Pennsylvania. I thought this might be a German/Scandinavian thing, (as in fact it may be) but Canadian Avas lead in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. In Quebec, Avas don't make a top 25 list.

A question for readers

For an upcoming project: If you use the subway regularly, how many minutes walking time to the subway would be the outer limit of being acceptable?

Renovating the Afghan casualty map (2)

I did some more work on our Afghan casualty map this week. A screenshot can be seen at left.

Rethinking the map turned into a large job, but was overdue: first, better technology is available now than when we started the project; second, the template of the old map was eventually overwhelmed by the number of casualties, sadly. (There is a longer explanation in last week's post.)

The main changes are:

- We now map communities, not individuals. Communities which have lost more than one person in Afghanistan have a numbered icon with a popup window with the names, pictures and other details of everybody from that place.

- To help deal with the crowds of points in the national map, we now offer regional maps, all of which draw from the same KML data file: Newfoundland, the Maritimes, Southern Quebec, Southern Ontario, Northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Alberta and Southwest B.C.

- The new maps are much larger.

The Guardian Data Blog

The UK only recently got a North American-style access to information system (the new New Yorker has a quick summary of this) and journalists and others have been taking advantage of the sudden opening of what was until recently a very closed official culture.

The British parliamentary expense scandal, in which taxpayers found they had unknowingly picked up the tab for, among other things, an MP using a moat-cleaning service, was one legacy of this. Another is the wonderful Guardian Data Blog, which has earned its place in my RSS reader many times over.

A post today on gun ownership, which lists absolute numbers of registered firearms by police jurisdiction (Hampshire, Merseyside, West Yorkshire and so forth) was a good example of what we try to to with online interactive widgets of one kind or another - tied to a news event, created quickly, locally customizable and so forth.

It's also a good example of why I often find the blog frustrating. Without knowing the populations of the areas involved and therefore a rate, we really don't learn anything about the pattern of gun ownership in England and Wales. Dorset has about half the number of firearms that London does, which offhand I would assume means Dorset, with a much lower population, has a much higher rate, which would make sense, being a rural area. But why not add a population column and show the reader the math?

The other thing it needs is a map - enough said.

Update: The table now has rates by 10,000.

G20: Mapping the security cameras

The Toronto police announced yesterday that they have finished installing dozens of security cameras for the G20 summit. The number was originally reported as 77, but the final list has 67 locations.

Two locations are described as 'Bremner and Lakeshore,' an intersection that doesn't exist as such. Openfile.ca journalist Bethany Horne also picked up on this. Both of us ended up with a best guess as to the intended location.

In any case, our map is here.

Maps elsewhere: Peel's biking/walking map

Ken Chiu at Peel Region draws our attention to the trail and bike lane map at walkandrollpeel.ca.

Chiu explains:

The (Peel) municipalities provided the map data - the GIS and web folks collaborated with the urban planners. What you have here are all known trails, bike lanes, and paths in Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon. And similar to using Google Maps, the user interface is the same regardless of which municipality you search an address for. This is not like most cycling maps (with the exception of Google’s upcoming efforts) where if you do a search in another city, it’s a totally different user interface, or the results are different.

You can enter an address, and out comes all the trails, bike lanes in the area. You can also select some of the named-trails (i.e. Waterfront Trail, Caledon Trailway, etc.) and the maps will show you where the trail is. Hover your mouse over the trail lines, and you’ll receive info about the trail. Hover your mouse over the trail-types in the legend and a description of that that trail-type is displayed.

There are advance features in the Advance section where you can plot/draw your route, and it will calculate your distance. There’s also a calculator to estimate how long it might take to cycle that route you drew.

Peel's planners are looking for feedback - feel free to leave some here.

Maps elsewhere: Visualizing the Gulf oil spill

A colleague points out a much better version of the map we linked to earlier letting you visualize the size of the Gulf oil spill elsewhere in the world. This iteration detects your IP address and generates a map for your location (or the address of your ISP) automatically.

The map is also a good teaching tool for how the Mercator projection distorts area. The difference between a shape of the same size at our latitude and Louisiana's is visible at left - try putting in quito ecuador and inuvik nwt to see a much more extreme contrast.

Map of the Week: Renovating the Afghan casualty map

REUTERS

We've been maintaining an interactive map of the home towns of Canadians killed in Afghanistan for several years now. It's needed a rethink for some time.

I'm inviting comments on an alternate version, which can be seen here. The points tend to cluster, so there are also regional maps showing Newfoundland, the Maritimes, Southern Quebec, Southern Ontario, Northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Alberta and Southwest B.C.

The main advantage is that the new map is about three times as big as the old one; the disadvantage is that we lose the chronological list on the old map. (This information is available elsewhere, for example on the DND site.)

The remaining issue is that our handling of communities who have lost multiple people in Afghanistan has become increasingly awkward as the numbers have increased. Our approach until now has been to create a new icon at a visible distance from the old one in the same city. However, we reached the limits of this approach a while ago - the extreme case is Edmonton, where seven different icons co-exist.

The solution is going to have to involve mapping communities, not individuals, with numbered icons on communities where more than one person has died. I tried a version of this approach about a year ago on the old map, but the larger popup windows were large enough to blot out the (smaller) map.

Maps elsewhere (2)

A reader points out a large number of very detailed public health-related maps published in the last few days by Statistics Canada. These follow 'health region' boundaries, which in southern Ontario mostly means county/regional/megacity boundaries (Toronto, Peel, Middlesex, Brant and so forth).

All are worth a look. Here is a regional map of where it is more (or less) accepted to smoke in a house.

There is a sharp regional difference between south-central Ontario and Quebec, with the upper Ottawa Valley more tolerant. In the West, an area of the prairies in southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba west of Brandon stands out, while in the Maritimes Cape Breton and an area in northern New Brunswick more people smoke in their houses.

Maps elsewhere (1)

David Topping at Torontoist points to a series of maps produced from geotagged photos in Flickr.

Toronto's map is below. Maps for another couple of dozen cities are here.

Maps elsewhere

The map project I've been working on this week isn't finished - it will appear early next week.

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A reader passes on a link to a wonderfully detailed map project at the Modern Languages Association site showing distribution of languages in the United States down to the county level.

Here is French:

and Spanish:

Renovating our traffic death map

We've been regularly updating a map of fatal collisions in the GTA since January, 2008. The data has sadly outgrown the small map it was originally given (we now display 290 accidents with somewhat over 300 victims) and I've been meaning to relaunch it for a while now. The main visible change is that the new map is about three times as big as the old one.

The new map can be found here. A screenshot showing southern Durham is at left.

What patterns do you see in the data? Let us know in the comments.

Catching up

I've been short on original maps lately (there are several interesting ones in the pipeline). The available time has been spent on other interactive map projects. Here are two:

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	Graphics editor Catherine Farley obtained very detailed spreadsheets of average assessed property values in Toronto broken down to the census tract level. This creates a very fine-grained map, with the city represented in over 500 areas. I produced five maps for the Web based on this data: all properties, detached houses, semi-detached houses, townhouses and condos.
	Another project used Google Maps to look at the pattern of burglaries Col. Russell Williams is accused of committing. At left is a suburban Ottawa neighbourhood, with the house icon on Williams' own house, and the numbers showing the number of burglaries at each address. The addresses came from the documents in which Williams was charged with 82 separate counts of breaking and entering.
Maps elsewhere:
	The Guardian has some maps up from the British election, much like the ones we have done for elections here breaking out each party individually. What this sort of thing really needs is a simple animation for each party showing change over several elections. All the maps but the last one could be set up well beforehand.
	Hat tip to the Google Lat Long blog: a widget that will show an overlay of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in its real size anywhere on the earth. Toronto is shown at left. You may need the Google Earth browser plugin.