15 Minutes Cities by Sony CSL

Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Rome have released a new interactive map which provides 15 Minute City accessibility scores for nearly every city in the world. The '15-minute city' is an urban planning concept aimed at designing cities in a way that ensures residents can access most of their daily needs—such as work, shopping, healthcare, education, and recreation—within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their homes. It seeks to create more livable, sustainable, and community-oriented environments where essential services are easily accessible to residents.

Select a city on the new 15min-City map and you can view a hexbin map of the city showing how accessible services are from each hexagonal area. The color of each hexagon on the city map corresponds to the number of minutes it takes to access a number of essential services by foot or bike. You can color the hexagons by either walking or cycling time and you can also select to view the accessibility times of individual category of service (outdoor activities, learning, supplies, eating, moving, cultural activities, physical exercise, services, healthcare).

If you live in the United States you can also refer to the Close interactive map which allows users to discover walkable, bikeable, and transit-friendly neighborhoods across the country. Close allows users to select the amenities & destinations which are important to them and then it creates a US travel-time map based on walking, biking and public transit travel times to those destinations. Which means you can quickly find your ideal 15 minute neighborhoods in towns and cities across the whole U.S..

World Level Zero

How well traveled are you?

My new map World Level Zero turns your travel experiences into a global achievement tracker. Whether you've been globetrotting for years or are just getting started, World Level Zero allows you to plot your personal journey across the globe and turn your wanderlust into a tangible score.

What Is World Level Zero?

At its core, World Level Zero revolves around a simple concept: players use an interactive world map to mark the countries they’ve visited, lived in, or simply passed through. As you chart your travels, the game rewards you with points for each location. It doesn't matter whether you've spent years in a country or had a brief layover — every experience adds to your overall score.

But that’s not all. The game also calculates your World Level, a score that reflects how well-traveled you are based on the number of countries you've checked off. The more countries you visit, the higher your World Level climbs, taking you from a novice explorer to a seasoned world traveler.

How It Works

1. Points System: Each type of visit to a country comes with a different points value. For instance, visiting a country gives you fewer points than living in one, while simply passing through nets you a smaller score.

2. World Level Progression: Your World Level grows as you accumulate more points. Initially, you'll start at "World Level Zero," but as you mark more locations, your rank increases.

More Travel Trackers

World Level Zero is inspired by the China Hegemony Generator. The China Hegemony Generator is a very similar interactive map which scores your travels in China based on which provinces you have visited. The China Hegemony Generator has inspired a number of imitators, including US Level (tracking the US States you have visited) and Europe Level (tracking European countries visited).

Every Basketball Court on Google Maps

The Pudding has mapped Every Outdoor Basketball Court in the U.S.A.. I'm not sure why The Pudding decided to collate satellite imagery of every basketball court visible in Google Maps' aerial imagery but it is quite fun to play with.

My guess is that Every Outdoor Basketball Court in the U.S.A. is an experiment by The Pudding in using computer vision to detect, recognize and classify objects in large-scale imagery datasets. The use of AI-powered object detection in satellite imagery has become a useful tool and The Pudding's Basketball visualization is an interesting experiment in how the results of a remote sensing search of an area can be sorted and organized.

The 'about' section of Every Outdoor Basketball Court in the U.S.A. declares 'Court Locations via Open Street Map. Satellite imagery via Google.' It is possible that the Pudding could have used something like Overpass to search for basketball courts on OSM instead of using AI object detection. However the presence of a number of false positive images of satellite images of shapes which closely resemble basketball courts leads me to suspect that some form of machine learning trained on Google's satellite imagery was used to collect this data.

Anyway, if you are looking for an outdoor court in your area, you can simply type your address into The Pudding's visualization to find all your nearby basketball courts. Or, if for some reason you only like playing basketball on a particular color of court, you can also sort all the outdoor basketball courts in the USA by color.

Scrambled Maps on Toast

I have a new favorite daily breakfast map game. Everyday my espresso and avocado toast is now served with a side dish of Scrambled Maps.

Scrambled Maps is a new daily map challenge. Everyday Scambled Maps presents you with a map of a different city of the world. The only problem is that all the map tiles on this city map have been mixed up. Your task is simply to drag the tiles back into the correct order. Restore the map to its original state and you win the game.

I'm still working on making the game responsive to different screen sizes. For now you might need to avoid playing the game on a mobile screen and instead use a computer or tablet. You might also find it helps to click on the full-screen button in the top-left corner of the game.

Scrambled Maps is the latest in a series of map games from TripGeo. You might also like Guess This City, Backdrop and TripGeo Trivia.

Create an AI Poster for Your Location

The Global Culture Map is a fun little tool which uses AI to create a poster for any location chosen on an interactive. Simply click on the Global Culture Map and it will use a generative AI to design a poster based on that location.

Currently I would say that the Global Culture Map is an interesting fun experiment rather than a completed, fully-realized AI poster creation tool. At the moment the map poster creation tool doesn't have an 'about' page so I don't know for sure which AI is being used to create the posters but the text errors in some of the 'Recently Generated Images' suggest that Midjourney is the generative AI creating the completed posters.

The text errors on some of the created posters are one example of why you probably won't want to actually print out a Global Culture Map completed poster and hang it on your wall (I think the text errors could be overcome fairly easily by allowing users to add their own text on top of the AI generated posters). As the Global Culture Map is using an AI to create posters it also makes sense to allow users to choose their own 'style' prompts for the AI generated posters so that users aren't restricted to the generic 'poster' style prompt currently being used by the tool.

Despite these quibbles I think the Global Culture Map has a lot of potential to become an impressive location based poster creation tool. One that could be easily monetized by allowing users to order prints of their poster designs (see Mapiful as an example)

If you want to create an actual map poster (featuring actual maps of your location) then you might also like these other map poster tools:

Prettymapp
Figureground Posters
Street Patterns

The EJAtlas: A Map for Environmental Justice

Around the world the ever demanding quest for economic growth and profit is having an impact on natural environments. The result is that local communities and groups are often forced into fighting governments and multinational companies in order to try to save their local environments from the eternal forces of 'progress'.

The Environmental Justice Atlas has set itself the task of documenting and mapping these social conflicts centered around environmental issues. The EJAtlas interactive map highlights the struggles of different communities around the world for environmental justice. It aims to make these protests more visible and amplify the voices of those affected, ensuring their stories reach a global audience. By doing so, it seeks to foster greater awareness and understanding of the injustices faced by marginalized communities, build solidarity among those fighting for their rights, and promote accountability from corporations and governments responsible for environmental harm.

Environmental conflicts are shown on the map using colored map markers. The colors of the markers reflect  different categories of conflict, including nuclear, water management and mineral extraction. The map also features a number of filters which enable you to adjust the environmental conflicts displayed on the map by category, population, type of project, type of protest and environmental impact.

The Featured Maps section of the EJAtlas showcases a number of interactive maps focused on specific thematic or regional maps concerned with particular environmental justice issues, conflicts, or regions. These maps are curated to showcase selected cases or topics that deserve special attention due to their significance, scale, or urgency.

The Map to the White House

NBC has launched the 2024 edition of its Road to 270 interactive electoral college map. The map visualizes the current likely, possible and fantastical outcomes of the 2024 U.S. Presidential race. Last night Kamala Harris and Donald Trump went head-to-head in their first presidential debate. The Philadelphia debate was a hugely significant opportunity for both Harris and Trump to present their case for the presidency.

Following the debate you can now use ABC's map to predict the result of November's election. You can click on individual states on the map to predict whether you think they will swing for either Harris or Trump. The map will then automatically assign that state's electors to the chosen candidate and tally the total number of votes of each candidate. A candidate needs at least 270 electoral votes to win the 2024 presidential election.

As well as allowing readers to predict their own electoral map NBC has also mapped out a number of possible outcomes. Steve Kornacki's 'electoral tie' map outlines a theoretical drawn outcome where both candidates receive 269 electoral votes (in which case the deadlock would be broken by the House of Representatives). Kornacki has also mapped out Trump and Harris' most likely direct path to the White House, while Kristen Welker has mapped out scenarios for 'Trump's Dream Path' and 'Harris' Dream Path' to the Presidency.

If you want to know how last night's debate has affected the possible results of the election then you can also refer to 538's Who Is Favored To Win The 2024 Presidential Election? (although at the time of writing 538 has yet to update with the results of the post-debate polls - but I am sure it will update soon). 

If you click on a state on the 538 map you can discover how many electoral votes are up for grabs in the state and which candidate is most likely to win those votes based on the polls and 538's election simulations. 538's simulations are based on extensive polling, economic and demographic data, 

Tracking Russia's 'Dark' Shadow Ships

Asya Energy's AIS track places it in the Norwegian Sea, at the same time satellite imagery shows it at the ALNG2 plant

In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine the West has imposed sanctions on the sale of Russian oil. In an attempt to avoid these sanctions Russia has been operating a shadow fleet of covert oil tankers. The West has been working on strengthening international cooperation to try to limit the use of these covert oil tankers.

SynMax claims that Russia is also developing a 'shadow' fleet of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) tankers. In The Inception of Russia’s LNG Ghost Fleet SynMax maps out how a number of LNG tankers have been using AIS spoofing tactics in order to conceal their visits to Russia's Arctic-2 LNG Export Plant. (ALNG2)

At the same time as their spoofed AIS tracks show them supposedly in the Norwegian Sea a number of LNG tankers have been spotted on satellite imagery by SynMax actually at the ALNG2 plant 800 miles away. These ships are part of a dark fleet assembled by Russia’s Novatek to avoid sanctions imposed on transporting cargoes from ALNG2.

Alongside the AIS spoofing activity mapped by SynMax these ships also show a common pattern of frequent changes in ownership, vessel names and country registrations. All common tactics used by tankers trying to avoid sanctions on the sale of Russian oil and LNG. At least one ship has also been tracked taking the perilous sea route south through the Red Sea. SynMax speculates that "Russia may have negotiated a deal with Yemen’s Houthis ... allowing for “safe passage” through the Bab el Mandeb Strait". 

AI Search of San Francisco

AI and machine learning are revolutionizing the field of remote sensing. The ability of machine learning algorithms to automatically detect and identify objects in satellite images has enhanced our abilities to monitor deforestation, identify illegal fishing, track wildlife, and more quickly implement disaster response.

Thanks to AI it is now also possible to see who owns a Tesla car in San Francisco. Bluesight.ai has released a new interactive map to demonstrate how objects can be identified in aerial imagery of San Francisco. Using natural language searches it is possible to explore the Blue Explorer map for things like Tesla cars, dry patches, boats, and tennis courts. Just type your search criteria into the Blue Explorer search box and the AI will automatically search the aerial imagery of San Francisco and show the results highlighted on the interactive map.

Some other recent examples of machine learning being used to search aerial imagery include OneSoil (which uses AI to detect where different the types of crops are being grown), Земляна проказа (identifying illegal amber mines) and Curio Canopy (identifying tree canopy cover in European cities).

Robin Wilson also recently  released an impressive Aerial Image Search Demo which allows you to explore an AI image search of aerial imagery in the UK port town of Southampton. Clay Explore is another impressive interactive AI map demo, allowing you to search aerial imagery of Southern California, Seoul and Puerto Rico using machine learning.

China vs America - World Influence Map

The Global Influence Index (GII) shows the influence of the United States and China on 191 countries around the world based on 28 different economic, security, and political criteria. Using the GII's new 3D globe you can tell at a glance where in the world either the U.S. or China has the greatest influence.

Individual countries on the GII globe are colored to show whether they are aligned more with China or the U.S. (green being U.S. aligned and red being aligned with China). If you select the 'stories' button you can view a number of guided tours of the influence that China and the United States hold in different regions of the world (including Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and the Indo-Pacific).

According to the GII currently the United States holds sway in Europe. This is based partly on the strong historical ties between Europe and the U.S. but also on Europe's growing concerns over the strategic threat posed by China. In many other regions of the world, for example in Africa, the U.S. is losing the influence battle to China. According to the GII China has pursued 'sustained and deliberate engagement with nations throughout Africa', which is reflected in its growing influence in the region.

According to the GII the 'Indo-Pacific is the epicenter of strategic competition between the United States and China'. Australia, India, South Korea and Japan retain very strong economic and strategic ties with the United States. However many other countries in the region are developing very strong ties with China.

A full breakdown of the variables and methodology used to determine the influence scores of each individual county are available on the about section of the GII website.