URBANmedias

Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.

That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Landsat was built for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. The space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.

These Timelapse pictures tell the pretty and not-so-pretty story of a finite planet and how its residents are treating it — razing even as we build, destroying even as we preserve.

Visit the article link to see an exclusive timelapse of climate change, deforestation and urban sprawl unfolding as Earth evolves over 30 years...

The Neighborhood Visualizer , developed by MIT PhD candidate David Quinn and Lisbon research student Daniel Wiesmann, aims to bring about a better understanding about urban patterns that relate to material use and energy use.

Built on top of a selection of open-source tools, the web-based map reveals the currently available data on material (i.e. kg/person) and energy use (i.e. kWh/person) in about 42 different US cities. 'Materials' include parameters like asphalt or gravel roads, or the use of masonry, glass or timber in residential housing, all based on estimations of urban form. Users can select specific neighborhood areas and create heatmaps that are normalized by population or household size. Further analyses are automatically generated as PDF files.

Beth Kanter

http://www.bethkanter.org

Another way to articulate the importance of sense-making.

Think about it this way: Tools are not always actual objects designed to help us with physical activities. A notebook, whether it is a Moleskine or an Evernote digital document, is a tool that expands our memory. A digital calculator, whether it is an inexpensive machine bought in the nearest Dollar Tree or an app downloaded to your iPhone, frees you from the burden of having to retain and execute many complex mathematical algorithms. Non-physical tools (or sets of tools and practices), such as statistics and the scientific method, evolved to let us gaze beyond what we would normally see, and to overcome our deepest biases and lazy habits of mind. The same is true for great visual displays of information...