Map(s) of the Week #8

This map is representative to the Hispanic population of Idaho. The purple area of the map is very likely to be the sparsely-settled regions in Idaho, especially the mountainous regions. The part of the map which gave me the most problems is the key itself (thus you could see a thick border on the first category there). As could be seen here, Hispanics are more widespread and densely distributed in the south, particularly in and near Boise (but Canyon County has more than Ada County does). The maps shows where they are in relation to the local geography.


This is a global map of the Earth with world capitals with at least 750,000 people labeled. Sorting out the data for that is sort of time-consuming, but not hard, considering that sorting a category in descending order can help. The legend of the cities is stacked with the lowest population in front, and the legend therefore goes in descending order, from highest population down.


This is the map of vacant homes in Buffalo, New York. The symbol of a house represents a certain, approximate, number of vacant houses in the area, which can most commonly be seen in the center. The legend is sorted in descending order from the highest number down.

And as a bonus...

I have here another non-project map to present as a weekly map. I've been doing maps based on current events/the world for quite a while that I decided to change gears for a moment. This week's map is 2Fort (capture the flag) from the popular multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2. This takes into account the frequency of a player "death" throughout the map, going from blue (least frequent) to green to yellow then to red (most deaths). Based on the coloring, the most deaths occurred on and near the bridge linking the two sides

Map of the Week #7

Usually out on October 20th of each year, the Press Freedom Index by Reporters Sans Frontières sorts each county by press freedom. In the 2009 report, the United States is currently ranked 20th in the world (tied with Luxembourg and the United Kingdom), with a best score since the 2004 report. The representations on the map has a color scheme that transitions from green to yellow, then yellow to red, going from the greatest press freedom to the least. The interactive map can be accessed here.

Map of the Week #6 (and a couple more)

Just recently, an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale hit a remote county in the Qinghai province of China, and officials say that nearly six hundred people died, with thousands being injured. This occurred about two years after a similar earthquake that occurred in the neighboring province of Sichuan. The map attached (from the BBC) gives the location of the quake as well as two inlet maps: one of Qinghai province's location in China and within it, its location in the world.

And just recently, I created a couple of maps using two interpolation methods: Inverse Distance Weighting and Kriging. Both of them are about the annual precipitation patterns in Idaho.

Inverse Distance Weighting

This is a fairly complex map and brings into detail the contour lines in Idaho. In fact, there are small, isolated contour pockets surrounding certain weather stations
















Kriging

The map simply puts that in Idaho, it typically rains more in the north than it does in the south. While it is easy to understand, there are still some discontinues present, and the contour lines are drawn mostly based upon the geographical surroundings.

Map of the Week #5

Just recently, there has been political unrest in Kyrgyzstan. Protesting the recent price rises as well as government corruption, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets. The riot police were deployed, using stun batons, tear gas, and (at last resort) live ammunition at the protesters, and then the protests turned violent, turning into a clash against the police. On both sides, at least 40 people died and many more were wounded from the conflict. Just today, Prime Minister Daniyar Usenov resigned, but the current whereabouts and status of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev is currently unclear. Protesters wanted the president to step down, accusing him of being increasingly autocratic and unable to fix the economy.

This map below is a satellite image over the capital Bishkek, identifying the location of the government house there. There is also an inlet map, with a map of Kyrgyzstan itself, with protest-hit cities marked. For those who don't know, it is in Central Asia and bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Tajikistan to the south, Turkmenistan to the west and China to the east.