Teaching About Meteors and Crater Impacts

Here's a nice web site for showing students the size and density of a meteor and the impact that piece of rock or ice might make on the ground (or in water). It's called Impact Calculator.

You can put in various parameters for the piece of "rock": diameter, trajectory angle, velocity, density of the rock material, density of the landing site, and distance from the impact.

Click Submit and you get the impact values. If you select a place around the world from the dropdown menu and then click on the map, you can see the size of the hypothetical crater. This is under the Crater Size tab.

Look at what you get under the Crater Depth tab. In the interest of this summer's revolving around all things UK, I chose Big Ben as a scale bar for this hypothetical imapct structure.

Saw this on a tweet by eSpatial.

Adding Photos to a Spreadsheet Mapper 2 Doc

My collegue wants to add photographs to a Spreadsheet Mapper (Google Doc spreadsheet) file that I created. Information on the original Spreadsheet Mapper discussion is here, but scroll down a ways. Spreadsheet Mapper allows you to place geotagged photographs into one network-linked KML file, plus each placemark bubble can be given the same template. My colleague may wish to update our file to using Spreadsheet Mapper 3 but I'll leave that up to her.

To get started, I've given her access to the original spreadsheet so she can add her new points. When opening the spreadsheet, it'll look like the above image. This is the first sheet in spreadsheet and it's called "start here." There are instructions on this sheet but I'll give you most of what you need to know right here. 

You'll definitely want to update the Basic Information by typing in new or additional information in the "About your KML Document" section. Keep in mind that this is, as are all KML placemarks, a mini web page so the language is in HTML. Ask me if you need help with tagging.

Your photos and their locations and metadata will go under the Placemark tab. There are 130 photos in the KML now. You can have up to 400 photos (I think). Here's the plus for using Spreadsheet Mapper 3, you can add 1000 images. I used template 6. It worked fine so don't change that.

Here's what's in the metadata. These are the 17 columns you'll need to fill.

• (use sort to keep like folders together)


• (for label & Places list)


• latitude


• longitude


• address I didn't use this one


• 1 (this is the template column which is 6)


• Title


• Subtitle I didn't use this one


• Photo URL


• Paragraph1Text


• Paragraph2 Text


• Link1 URL


• Link1 Text


• Link2 URL


• Link2 Text


• Next Placemark ID


• Previous Placemark ID

When you take a look at the spreadsheet, you'll see what is needed. It's not difficult. You'll see you'll need a photo URL. The photos need to be on a web server. Ask Kim if you can put your shots on the CERMES server. Some of the columns (like the project website) you can just Control D and fill down.

 

Once you're done with editing, republish. Add a location or two and then republish, just to make sure it's all working properly. But then after you feel confident that it's gonna work, add away!

Then after you've edited and republished in the spreadsheet, go to Google Earth and the KML link to the photos, right click (or Control click) on the file name (it's under Photographs and Videos) and go to Refresh. That's it.

If you need to get to the KML for the MarSIS project, here it is. It's on the Grenadines MarSIS project page under the Google Earth data tab.

One more thing, Aly, in these photos, the link to the "MarSIS project blog" is no longer working. Unless Kim has another idea for what to put in that location, I say just erase that dead blog link. It would mean deleting data in these columns: Link2 URL and Link2 Text

And as always...have fun!

Toilet Access: Mapping the Facilities in a Mumbai Slum

Access to a toilet is something we can all understand. When I'm walking around an unfamiliar city and I or one of my children need to use a restroom, finding one, especially a clean facility, becomes a single focus. In North America, we usually can.

This article ("Mapping Toilets in a Mumbai Slum Yields Unexpected Results" in the NYTimes) on toilet locations in an Indian slum - Cheeta Camp - got my attention.  A MPH student at Harvard mapped the toilets in Cheeta Camp and found there to be roughly 1 toilet for every 170 people.

The map, which you can get to here, is striking. As you look at it and click around on the placemarks, you can quickly see that there just aren't that many toilets. Some don't work. Some are being built. Often there's a fee to use the better toilets. Check out the article and photos too. This a clear example of environmental injustice.

I'll try and remember this next time I'm standing in a long line at a sports event or play, waiting to use the restroom.

Thanks, Beth, for sending this article my way!