This website was posted on Cartotalk and I thought it looked pretty good:  Cartography 2.0.  Seems to be a lot of valuable theoritical and some practical guides to cartography.

Kelso has posted a link to an interesting article.  The gist - "How Google’s open-ended maps are embroiling the company in some of the world’s touchiest geopolitical disputes."  Of course this isn't really anything new.  Maps created outside of the contested area are always controversial, e.g. National Geographic and the Persian Gulf.  What is particularly interesting in this case, is how technology is allowing the modern atlas to be in more than one place at once.  Google maintains different maps for different regions of the world, allowing a space where Iranians might see the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabians might see Arabian Gulf.  Of course, there are always going to be layers of meanings and names for places from the local/individual to what the nation has "officially" decided.  In some ways, Google is trying to cater for that as well by placing photos from panaramio on google maps so you can "explore" the area.  The other interesting bit in the article is how Google is being held responsible for Crowdsourcing of geographic/historic data (accurate or otherwise).  I think when Neogeography and Crowdsourcing are spoken of, it is generally in this solve the world gleam sort of way (sorry not very eloquent this morning), but this article shines a light on its dark side.

 

Plus it quotes Goodchild, so how bad can the article be.

I struggled to find an example of what I was trying to do, so I thought I would post here.  I borrowed some from this site, but it didn't quite do what I wanted and my tables weren't split up the way the author had it.

 

Basically I have a table in Access 2007 that contains a column for the venue location, a column for the monthly revenue, and a column for the date (month, last day of the month, and year).  I needed a quick way to sumarize the data by financial year.  The financial year in this case runs from July 1st to June 30th.   Here is the completed query.

 SELECT [Table1].[IDColumn],  Year([Table1].[DateColumn])  & "-" & (Year([Table1].[DateColumn]) +1) As FinancialYear, (SELECT SUM([Table2].[MonthlyRevenue]) as FYTD
FROM [SomeTable] AS Table2
WHERE [Table2].[DateColumn] >= DateSerial(Year([Table1].[DateColumn]),7,1)               
     AND [Table2].[DateColumn] <= DateSerial(Year([Table1].[DateColumn])+1,6,30)
AND [Table2].[Venue_ID] =  [Table1].[IDColumn];) AS Rev_Value_Year

FROM [SomeTable] AS Table1
Group By [Table1].[Venue_ID], Year([Table1].[DateColumn]) , Year([Table1].[DateColumn])  & "-" & (Year([Table1].[DateColumn]) +1) ;

 

Basically i used a subquery to calculate the total for that financial year.  I'm not quite sure why, but I need to group by the year as well as the Financial Year.  I genericized the table and column names.  Hope that helps someone else with the same problem.

 

Interesting list of the Ten Greatests Maps from The Daily Mail, via Flowing Data.  Interestingly, Google Earth made the list.  "Is Google Good for Geography?"  I think I would have liked to see the Hereford mappa Mundi on the list.  A commenter on Flowing Data suggested Snow's Cholera map.  I suspect the intention of the list is to bring attention to maps that aren't necessarily the ones you would think of.  The article is authored by Peter Barber, head of Map Collections at the British Library.  He is also featured prominently in the BBC 4 production The Beauty of Maps.  If you can find a copy of the documentary it is worth checking out, otherwise the website has some nice interactive features and clips.

I saw this very very cool mashup from a post at cartotalk.  It shows all the trains movement in the London tube/subway/metro system on a google map.  It's based on data that comes direct from a government API.  It does beg the question - what would a terrorist do with such information?  Something tells me they wouldn't make a cool mashup, but hopefully terrorists don't know how to use AJAX.