I had a very busy two weeks but found some very interesting pieces the last week. I especially like the Heat Vulnerability Map from Vienna. And all over the place you see that Earth Observation (satellite) data is used more and more in analysis and data visualization. I love this trend and I love pocking not satellite data myself.

Geospatial Development

Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis

Great article by Carto explaining where Zip codes originate, why they’re not useful for geospatial analysis and what you should use instead.

The problem with zip codes are:

They don’t represent real boundaries, but rather routes

They don’t represent how humans behave

Read the full article, it’s well worth it.

Urban Heat Vulnerability Map of Vienna

Literal heat map of the city of Vienna.

There is also a methodology PDF which explains the methodology very detailed. They used satellite data to calculate the average yearly temperature. Very interesting, I thought about something similar as well. I might actual do one of those for San Diego and Berlin sometime soon.

Bubble Maker

Do you need a Bubble map? Do you have a geojson? Look no further than this great notebook from the LA Times data desk on Observable.

Data Visualization

Where the last pristine skies in America are

Light pollution is something everyone kind of knows but we’re not really aware of it. We’re used to how the sky looks like in the city. But man are we missing out. Look at the gorgeous photos in this article and find the place were you can see the real sky.

Risk of Sunburn Across the U.S.

We all know it and I’m guilty as well of not using sun blocker all the time. The Earth Observatory from NASA published a great gif of maps showing the risk of sunburn across the U.S.

And in my favorite American City, San Diego the risk is there throughout the year :) Great and not so great for someone like me who does not use sun blocker that often.

How much warmer is your city?

Impressive but sad story. You can personalize it to the city you live in. Great globe visualization and animations about sea level rises.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-985b9374-596e-4ae6-aa04-7fbcae4cb7ee

Almost half of Europe’s soil is dryer than normal

Another sad visualization but very interesting to look at and the animation makes it even more depressing. Worth checking out.

https://vis4.net/drought-in-europe/

Civic Tech

Civic Tech Fellows Offer Their Ideas for Attracting Youth to Public Service

After just 10 weeks in government, the Coding It Forward fellows were able to succinctly identify the promise and challenges in getting young people to join the government.

Announcing the State Software Budgeting Handbook

The handbook will provide state officials with tools to make custom technology projects more successful. Over a dozen best practices are documented, including budgeting for software as an operational expertise, limiting contract size, measuring success iteratively, and hiring in-house tech talent.

Where Chicago Issues Parking Tickets and Who Pays For Them

This interactive database contains more than 54 million parking, standing and vehicle compliance tickets issued since 1996, obtained by ProPublica Illinois in partnership with WBEZ and made public for the first time.

Great database, story and dashboard from ProPublica and WBEZ Chicago. Worth checking out and diving into the data.

https://projects.propublica.org/chicago-tickets/

Business/Consulting

I used the weekend to work on my monthly and weekly planning. Notion is a great tool for organizing your business. I use it for all my documents and ideas that I have. For my weekly planning. Just not yet for my daily tasks. It’s just not there yet, their apps are not at the level I want for a task manager. But for organizing all my other business stuff I use Notion. Be sure to check it out. (Affiliate Link, you get 10$ credit for a plan).

Photo of the Week

We were at a coworking space this week and I plan to integrate a coworking day once a week. Should be fun.