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September 21, 2007
News Roundup: UFO Sightings, Free UK GE workshops, Godwit migrations, Boating videos
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UFO Sightings - A long time ago, in Google Earth History, Michael Jones (Chief Technologist of GE) was known to have spoken about how cool it would be to implement the time dimension in GE (see story in Dec. 2005 post at OgleEarth). A bit of time passed and, in the summer of 2006, the time feature was first released as part of a GE 4 beta. During Michael's presentation in 2005, he showed an example of a UFO sightings database over time. For a long time, I've been meaning to take the UFO Sightings in Google Earth (and Google Maps) map from UFOmaps.com, and add time stamps. Yesterday, after a fair amount of Emacs macro parsing, I came up with the new UFO Sightings over time animation
(2 Mbytes). (Note: I chose to not include some earlier random sightings - one in 1860, and a few others in the earlier part of the 1900s). After loading hit the play button to the right of the time slider (or just drag the slider). You can almost see the spread of UFO psychosis brought on by TV, junk food, and sci-fi... :-) On a related note, someone called 'Mangani' has released a BigFoot sightings file which shows a time animation as well. Notice the similarities in growth of sightings?
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Free UK GE Workshops - From Royal Geographical Society:
The Royal Geographical Socieity with IBG, with generous support from Google, will be offering 10 free workshops for LEA-maintained school geography teachers. These practical workshops show teachers how to create virtual fieldwork using Google Earth. They involve hands-on experience with digital cameras and GPS units creating mini-fieldwork projects outdoors. Participants are then shown how this data can be transformed into a virtual journey using Google Earth.
The workshops will take place across the UK at the following venues:
RGS-IBG, London – Tuesday 16 October 2007
Swansea – Monday 12 November 2007
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne – Monday 19 November 2007
Edinburgh – Tuesday 20 November 2007
Belfast – Monday 10 December 2007
Leeds – Monday 14 January 2008
Cornwall – Monday 21 January 2008
Birmingham – Monday 28 January 2008
Southampton – Monday 4 February 2008
RGS-IBG, London – Tuesday 4 March 2008
More details and further documents at this RGS web page.
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Godwit migrations - You may have heard the news a while back about the little Godwit bird - designated E7 - which was tracked flying all the way from New Zealand to Alaska and back non-stop. The longest recorded non-stop migratory flight in the world - 10,200 km (6340 miles). The USGS has posted Google Earth track data for the flights of the birds they were tracking. Load this Godwit tracks file
, and turn on just the one labeled E7 to see her record flight.
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Boating videos - EarthNC continues to explore the ability to access the YouTube API to grab geo-tagged videos based on specific tags. This time they have released a collection of YouTube boating videos
. If you use GE 4.2 on Windows, you can watch the videos in the placemarks. More details here at EarthNC. I like Virgil's earlier post about YouTube Airport videos more.
Posted by FrankTaylor at September 21, 2007 09:45 AM
Comments
Posted by: Alberto at September 21, 2007 12:14 PM
Is there a problem with the download link for the UFO over time animation? In both Firefox & IE7 I get an error when trying to download it.
Posted by: Jason at September 21, 2007 12:30 PM
I get a failed message, Parse error at line 1, column 2 - not well-formed (invalid token)
Posted by: Noel_B at September 22, 2007 04:18 AM
why we cant download the program to use the earth google files in iran?
Posted by: pennyroyal at September 23, 2007 01:10 AM
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To expose how the UFO phenomenon is just ludicrous, one might want to correlate sightings with events like: release of new scifi movie, political unrest, meteor showers, sun activity, etc... I bet the results will expose the lack of veracity of all these claims...