In an article released last week it was reported that the Federal Aviation Administration has released the names and locations of Organizations approved for flying drones within the U.S. Drones have become infamous over the past several years due to their use for military purposes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and many other places. The use of the military technology for domestic purposes should not be unexpected as we have seen many military technologies cross-over for domestic purposes. Many argue that the use of such Military technology in local police agencies may be problematic and seen as an increase in …

We have done a lot of posts about tornado activity in the past on this blog. This is largely due to the interesting data that are openly available as well as the awesome power that tornadoes contain, which naturally makes them interesting. The recent tornado activity in Indiana and Kentucky and then Monday's dramatic daytime tornado that ripped through through the Dallas area has again brought my attention back to tornadoes. Recently Core Logic produced an interesting study on tornado and hail damage throughout the United States. Get the article here The report looks at similar data that we have …

Washington D.C. has an excellent catalog of GIS data that is made available to the public at DC GIS. The website provides data on all sorts of issues ranging from criminal activity to building permits. Also the website contains spatial files that can be used to create detailed and professional maps. For this post I collected data on 2011 crimes within the city. I will show how to import the data into Cartographica, how to geocode the crime incident data, how to search for specific types of crimes, and how to create Kernel Density Maps. The first step in …

Recently there have been several earthquakes around the world. In Negros-Cebu region, Philippines there was a 6.7 magnitude earthquake that resulted many injuries and deaths. The earthquake activity peaked my interest to explore what was happening around the world in terms of seismic activity. To find data on recent earthquake activity I went to the U.S. governments data portal Data.gov, which is a clearinghouse for thousands of maps and datasets. I found data on earthquakes for the past 7 days. The link to this data is here. When you go to the webpage you will see that …