What with Google I/O and the launch of the new look Google Maps, it has been a reasonably quiet week for reviews of new Google Maps apps. At Google Maps Mania our attention has been drawn away by the live streams from I/O and playing with the new look Google Maps.

However, some great maps did get featured this week.

 
One map that grabbed my attention this week was from Rough Guide. One feature of the Rough Guide site that I really like is how you can drill down from general reviews of countries, to reviews of individual towns and cities and then search for great individual locations to visit within those towns and cities. 

As you navigate the Rough Guide website look out for the 'view map' option that allows you to view Rough Guide recommended locations on a map. The drop-down menu above the map allows you to select individual countries and cities.

If you select a country or city from the menu then a general introduction to your chosen destination is given beneath the map and all the Rough Guide recommended places to visit are displayed on the map.

 
Another interesting map that came to our attention this week was España en llamas (Spain in Flames), a Google Map displaying ten years of data about the location of forest fires in Spain. The map includes data on 1,508 fires, 699,560 hectares burned, 24 deaths and 191 injuries.

If you click on the 'Explora los incendios' link above the map you can filter the data displayed on the map. The filter controls allow the user to filter the results displayed on the map by cause of fire, fires that caused deaths, by location and by the size of the fire.

A time-line tool beneath the map also allows the user to explore each of the filtered results by year. One neat feature of this map is the use of relatively sized map markers to show the size of each individual fire.

Courtesy of Big Smarter Think Smarter

I had you at maps. Obviously. Because you too are puzzled by this peculiar cartographic specimen, showing the spatial distribution of certain social traits across Central Africa. 

The purple blob in the middle is a matriarchal zone, where females rule, and social stress tends to be relieved through sex. The orange, green and yellow areas arching around the blob are patriarchies. Here, men have the upper hand, and conflicts are settled mainly by violent means.  

We're not talking humans here, but if both behavioural patterns sound all too familiar - the former as a naive, outdated hippie utopia [1], the latter as the cynical, and all too current underpinning to much of what ails the world - it's because they are exhibited by humanity's two closest living relatives. 

Each colour on the map denotes the habitat of a particular type of hominid [2]. The purple zone is the domain of the bonobo (Pan paniscus), the others are inhabited by varieties of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) [3]. Both ape species are closely related - so closely, in fact, that the bonobo was only recognised as a separate species in 1928 [4]. 

Which is not surprising. Bonobos and chimps look very similar, the former being slightly smaller versions of the latter. Still sharing 99.6% of their DNA, bonobos and chimps started developing along separate evolutionary paths about 1 million years ago, when the Congo River divided Pan's ancestral homeland. 

As great apes are notoriously reluctant swimmers [5], all contact between the populations on either side of the river ceased. Over time, separate geographies led to different societies. The Pan population south of the river developed into the bonobo [6], those on the Congo's north bank became chimpanzees. The southern border of the bonobo habitat is formed by the Kasai and Sankuru rivers. 

Some researchers speculate that bonobos developed their more consensual approach to conflict resolution because their habitat had better food resources. Plus, they didn't have to compete for them with gorillas, who live only on the right bank of the Congo. Both factors would explain why bonobos experience less need for confrontation.

But others wonder whether the reverse might not have been the case.  Perhaps it was the chimpanzee who adopted a more violence-based resource management policy, in reaction to scarcer food supplies. Necessity being the mother of invention, that scarcity might also explain why chimps adopted tools, which bonobos as yet haven't done. 

Did chimpanzees become more violent, or bonobos more promiscuous than their Pan ancestor? That might sound like a simian variant of the chicken-and-egg question. But it is more relevant to who we are as humans, because of our close relation to the Cain and Abel of the ape world.

Homo sapiens and Pan shared an ancestor until about 5 million years ago, and humans still share about 98,7% of their DNA with both bonobos and chimpanzees. However, these percentages don't entirely overlap: about 1,6% of our DNA we share only with bonobos, not with chimps. And a similar percentage that we share only with chimps, not with bonobos [7].

These genetic differences could eventually help explain why bonobos are more playful than chimpanzees, and why humans are more cerebral than either. And perhaps even help answer the ultimate question, relevant to the deep origins of human nature: Did our common ancestor behave more like a bonobo, like a chimp or like yet something else?

This map doesn't answer that question, but it does offer us a tantalising glimpse in the social structure of our closest cousins - and our own: divergent behaviour can be determined by sheer geographic accident. 

In ape society, those cultural differences are neatly defined by Central Africa's big rivers. Human society is more complex - or at least more difficult. Even though we are a single species, we often find a Congo River to divide us from our fellow humans.

And if we don't we go look for one. Geography is one of the firm foundations of our everyday human prejudices: Northerners are stern, hardworking folk, Southerners are jovial layabouts; Western society is decadent and atomised, Eastern society is callously collectivist. And so on. 

But we don't have to stare at each other across the fast-flowing water of our mutual incomprehension until a million years turn us into separate species. Fortunately, we are the one ape that can teach itself to swim. If we can overcome our fear of water, why not our fear of each other?

This map found here on Atheist Universe.

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[1] The phrase 'Make love, not war' gained currency in the mid-1960s as a countercultural slogan against the Vietnam War. The quote is sometimes attributed to John Lennon, who wrote a song with that title during the Let It Be sessions (1968-'70), recycling it as Mind Games for his eponymous 1973 solo album. A chronologically more apposite claim is that of the American folklorist, and chroniqueur of the bawdy, Gershon Legman (1917-'99), who theorised that sadism and violence were so deeply ingrained in American culture because of a strong taboo on sex. Legman claimed to have invented 'Make love, not war' for a 1963 lecture at the University of Ohio. Other candidates include Louis Abolafia, who ran for president in 1968 on the Nudist Party ticket (his campaign slogan was 'I have nothing to hide'), the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a University of Oregon student named Diane Newell Meyer, and Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, who turned the slogan into a popular button. The French version of the slogan is sometimes completed with:faites les deux, mariez-vous! ('make both, get married!')

[2] Hominidae refers to a taxonomic family of the primate order, consisting of four genera: Pan (chimps and bonobos), Pongo (orang-utans), Gorilla(gorillas), and Homo (humans). These four hominids are also referred to as 'great apes', although humans are sometimes excluded. The term hominid should not be confused with hominin (describing humans and their closer-than-chimp, extinct relatives, like Neanderthals, or the recently discovered 'Flores Man'), hominine (any member of the Homininae subfamily, which includes all hominids except orang-utans), and hominoids (great apes and lesser apes - i.e. gibbons). 

[3] the Nigerian-Cameroonian chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti) [in orange on the map], the central chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) [in yellow] and the eastern chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) [in green]. Not shown on this map is the distribution of the western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus), in an arc from Senegal to Ghana.

[4] By the German biologist Ernest Schwarz, after the analysis of a skull initially believed to be a chimpanzee's, in the Africa Museum at Tervuren, near Brussels. Making the bonobo the only species of ape discovered in Belgium.

[5] Ernest Schwarz's paper on the discovery of the bonobo was called 'Le chimpanzé de la Rive Gauche du Congo', which could be interpreted as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the bohemian lifestyles on the Rive Gauche in Paris (i.e. the Left Bank of the Seine). The term 'bonobo', incidentally, didn't come into use until the 1950s, and may derive from a Bantu word for ancestor, or from a mis-read place of origin on one of the crates destined for the Tervuren museum (i.e. the Congo river town of Bolobo).

[6] Most animals instinctively know how to swim, but none of the great apes (including humans) are natural swimmers; what aquatic skills they have, need to be taught actively. Nobody really knows why this is so, but some theories include the relatively high body mass ratio, or the fact that apes are sentient enough to panic when in water. The latter theory could help explain why monkeys can swim. Monkeys are distinct from apes in that they have tails, live in trees, and generally have significantly smaller bodies and brains. 

[7] Scientists from the Max Planck Institute in Germany have calculated that this implies that the group of common ancestors from which humans, bonobos and chimpanzees eventually evolved, was quite large, numbering about 27.000 breeding individuals.

Courtesy of Open Culture

The volume of data in our age is so vast that whole new research fields have blossomed to develop better and more efficient ways of presenting and organizing information. One such field is data visualization, which can be translated in plain English as visual representations of information.

The PBS “Off Book” series turned its attention to data visualization in a short video featuring Edward Tufte, a statistician and professor emeritus at Yale, along with three young designers on the frontiers of data visualization. Titled “The Art of Data Visualization,” the video does a good job of demonstrating how good design—from scientific visualization to pop infographics—is more important than ever.

In much the same way that Marshall McLuhan spoke about principles of communication, Tufte talks in the video about what makes for elegant and effective design. One of his main points: Look after truth and goodness, and beauty will look after herself.

What does Tufte mean by this? That design is only as good as the information at its core.

For those of us who aren’t designers, it’s refreshing to consider the elements of good visual story-telling. And that’s what the best design is, according to the experts in this video. Every data set, or big bunch of information, has its own core concept, just as every story has a main character. The designer’s job is to find the hero in the data and then tell the visual story.

So much of the information we encounter every day is hard to conceptualize. It’s so big and complicated that a visual rendering represents it the best. That’s because human brains are wired to take in a lot of information at once. Good designers know that decision-making isn’t linear. It’s a super-fast process of recognizing patterns and making sense of them.

Information may be more abundant but it isn’t new, and neither is data visualization. In the video, Tufte talks about stone maps carved by early humans and how those ancient graphics form the template for Google maps.

What comes across in PBS’s video is that data visualization is an art, and the simpler the better. Tufte seems to argue that good data guides the designer to do good work, which leads to the question: Is the medium no longer, as McLuhan famously commented, the message?

Facebook is reportedly in serious talks to buy social mapping app Waze for a whopping $1 billion in cash and stock, an acquisition that would underscore the growing importance of mapping and navigation functionality to the Web’s major players.

A lot of digital ink has been spilled about why Facebook would want to snap up Waze — namely, the company’s 40 million mobile users. But the discussions also verify the once-unthinkable reality that a startup could scale a navigation and mapping service into a billion-dollar business in five years. A number of technological trends have set the stage for Waze and other mapping and navigation startups to compete. Here’s a look at a few of them:

A Historical Accident
Suppose I’m a Pittsburgh-based salesperson, and I need to stop in Toledo, Cleveland, Akron and Cincinnati to see clients. What’s the shortest possible route that visits each city without backtracking and returns to Pittsburgh? That’s called the traveling salesman problem, and it’s one of the quintessential questions of algorithmic theory. The problem is often solved using graph theory, a way of storing, traversing, and processing complex relationships, which has traditionally served as the underlying technology for navigation services.

Long a backwater of computer science, the technique has seen a renewed emphasis over the past few years thanks to Facebook and its open graph. Facebook uses graphs, which are a collection of vertices and edges or links between them, to help reveal the sea of connections between people in the same way that maps help us navigate between places.

“Graph computations were cute, and everyone knew they would be important some day, but there was no serious driver for investment before Facebook showed up,” says Scott Rafer, founder and chief executive of Lumatic, which makes a pedestrian-focused navigation app called Citymaps. “So you had a million PHDs that suddenly cared to make it work.”

What happened was a “historical accident” of sorts, says Rafer.  The investment, and subsequent leap forward, in graph computation, which Facebook sparked, indirectly led to a dramatic decrease in the cost of running the complex graph database algorithms used to get people from point A to point B. That led to a what Rafer views as a classic innovator’s dilemma, in which a new set of algorithms created a more efficient way to make the same product at a fraction of cost. These new algorithms also allow smaller companies like Waze or Lumatic to create better mapping services, accounting for additional information like user-generated traffic data to optimize a user’s route in real-time.

Cheapening the ‘Stack’
What’s happening with navigation is one example of a cheapening of tools that’s occurring across the mapping “stack” (the term used to describe the combination of technologies that goes into making maps work). OpenStreetMap (OSM), for instance, has created an open source geospatial dataset that companies can use to cheaply build the underlying map. Firms like Foursquare have used the company’s data, which provides the basic geospatial information indicating a river or city boundary, to build the customized maps that underlay the function as the foundation for their services. A number of other open-source technologies have emerged to make rendering this information and showing it on a website easy as well.

Waze doesn’t use OpenStreetMap, but the company has thrived by finding a cheap alternative to traffic data. By crowdsourcing traffic information from users’ mobile devices, the company was able to forgo the massive costs associated with hiring and managing a fleet of cars to survey the roadways.

Unbundling the ‘Stack’
Today, Google sells its mapping services as a bundle in the same way that a cable company might package ESPN, AMC and the Oprah Winfrey Network into one flat month. Given its strong position in the marketplace, the Web giant has an incentive to lump all of its features into one product, whether you need it or not.

But Rafer believes that the cheapening of tools and the increasing need for mapping and navigation services on mobile will trigger an unbundling of the stack of mapping services, resulting in a number of layer-specific services cropping up. Companies like Lumatic will be able to focus on a specific layer like pedestrian routing (or driving, in the case of Waze), and bring that technology to a host of different consumer and marketing use cases on a software-as-a-service model.

Rafer’s argument is, of course, self-serving, but he’s peddling a familiar story for information-related business on the web. The web fragments industries that justify scale based on either the collecting (mapping) or distributing (media) of information. And, as Andy Weissman points out, unbundling is a necessary corollary to that process: “What if the power of connected networks such as the Internet is that they unbundle all that came before them? They disintermediate incumbent industries but also do the same to any new attempts at re-aggregation?

Steven Jacobs is Street Fight’s deputy editor.

Waze’s business development chief Andy Ellwood will be joining us on June 4th in San Francisco at Street Fight Summit West. Register now to learn from and network with some of the brightest minds in hyperlocal. Click here for more info.

 
Google are beginning to push out the new Google Maps. You can request an invitation here. Google will then e-mail you an invite. The invites will start being sent out from tomorrow morning.

One of the stand-out features of the new Google Maps is the integration with Google Earth (without the need for a plug-in). The photo above is an actual view of the new Google Maps (the poor quality is due to it being taken from the presentation on the huge screens at Google I/O).

 

The whole look of the new Google Maps is designed to provide an individual map for every individual user. For example, places that you visit often will show up on your map. If you regularly visit a particular restaurant then that restaurant will be a place-mark on your map. You might also see similar restaurants on your map and other restaurants that have been recommended by your friends.

The new map also features some amazing transitions from the map into Street View. The photo tour feature also seems to be improved, with amazingly smooth transitions between user photos taken around the same location.

There are also some great improvements to directions in the new Google Maps. I posted about some of them earlier today but one stand-out feature is the ability to view detailed schedules for individual transit stations.

The new Google Maps looks to be such a radical step forward that I wonder if we might hear news of v4 of the Google Maps API later today.