Slashgeo

The Map Room links to a profile of Kirstin Dow, co-author of The Atlas of Climate Change. From the profile: "One of the goals that Dow and Downing had when creating the book, was to make it's contents accessible for everyone, as they feel it is information everyone should know. They've accomplished that through a combination of clear, concise writing and colorful, easy-to-comprehend graphic elements. Loaded with basic, yet effective maps and charts, as well as photographs, the book is a user-friendly reference guide, as well as an interesting and informative read." I own two copies of this atlas. The geographic content is not omnipresent nor detailed, but it is definitely worth the read: well designed, informative maps, great content and even cheap price. I recommend it.

The role of Earth Observation satellites in combating climate change is being highlighted at the United Nations climate change conference where thousands of delegates from more than 180 countries are gathered in Bali, Indonesia to begin negotiations of an international emissions-cutting agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, whose first commitment period ends in 2012. See this e-news from the European Space Agency (ESA) : http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMS3HBL2AF_planet_0.html

The Earth Is Square reports that the new WorldWind Java 1.0 will be released at JavaOne. From their summary: "NASA World Wind provides 3-D virtual globe technology that you can put in your applications. It’s a visual component based on the JavaBeans™ component architecture, with an extensible API and a friendly user interface that you can easily enhance or even replace. It can be used as-is or highly customized. You can put one or more in your programs or your web pages. In a web page, you can control it with the JavaScript™ programming language. It’s as good as it sounds; it’s what the world has been waiting for."

Visit the Earth Is Square blog for more information.

The VerySpatial blog points us to an article and flash demonstration site showing things in our daily lives discovered or advanced by NASA. It's worth a look to see how space technology trickles down into our everyday life. From their summary : "NASA has posted a pretty cool new site to help people understand how they have impacted everyone’s life in so many ways. It’s called NASA @ Home and City. They’re want to remind everyone that they’re not just about “space”. While a lot of their technologies really aren’t spatial (cosmetics, for example), there is an impressive display of geographic related materials they have impacted. Stuff from environmental cleanup and monitoring to simply travel technologies."

Please visit the VerySpatial blog for more information and a link to the NASA demonstration.

A lot of World Wind news came out of the JavaOne conference last week, so I am going to summarize those here for one quick and easy source.

• JavaOne WorldWind Java Presentation Slides
  If you want to see what was presented at the NASA World Wind Java SDK 3D Earth in your Applications and Web Pages session, you can now view the power point file and see what was covered The power point also has several diagrams that explain some of the core features about WWJava.
• First Known Commercial Use of WWJava
  LandPrint.com is an interesting commercial enterprise, they are creating 3D models of the earth and make use of WWJava as the way the user selects what they want to have created.
• NASA World Wind Java Demo Applications and Applets
  List of live examples of WW usage
• NASA Presents Knowledge Planet at JavaOne Conference
  At this year’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco, NASA developers showed that virtual globes are not only suited to explore geographic maps, but can also serve as rendering engines for other types of imagery.