by Matt Ball on February 29, 2012
The University of Maryland is partnering with Beijing Normal University to create the Joint Center on Global Change and Earth System Science that will develop tools to track climate change. The center will create an international remote sensing database, track land use and cover, in addition to monitoring agriculture. The agricultural work will focus on [...]
by Matt Ball on February 9, 2012
Did that title get your attention? The same exact title appeared in a feature in today’s People’s Daily. The feature highlights major accomplishments, such as full countrywide mapping coverage at 1:50,000, digital urban model construction, Internet mapping sytems, precision measurement, and the real-time monitoring of changing geographic conditions. The launch of a high-resolution earth observation [...]
by Matt Ball on January 22, 2012
Environmentalist Ma Jun of the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs, giving a speech recently in the Mary Robinson Speaker Series, discusses the data-driven advocacy he pioneered to hold China’s government and businesses accountable for air and water pollution. In this presentation Jun outlines water pollution, increased coal burning, and the inevitable health impacts that [...]
by Matt Ball on January 18, 2012
A team from China’s Department of Climate Change toured the United States last week hosted by the World Resources Institute. The tour focused on low-carbon development, and the need for a climate-conscious path to urbanize China. China’s urban population is expected to grow to 1 billion people by 2030, with 350 million more people moving [...]
by Matt Ball on December 28, 2011
China’s second most popular search engine, Soso.com, has launched a street-level viewing function to their maps.soso.com. This feature currently is only available for three geographies, but more collection is underway with more areas to be added. The street-level mapping function looks very similar to Google’s StreetView. Unique to this offering is a night view that [...]
by Matt Ball on November 16, 2011
Maybe you’ve seen the strange patterns found in China’s Gobi Desert via satellite imagery in Google Maps. These strange patterns are located near Jiuquan, where China’s space program is headquartered, and the latest news is that these patterns are used to calibrate China’s spy and radar satellites. The massive scale of these structures, with one [...]
by Matt Ball on October 3, 2011
Archaeologists in China have uncovered ancient agricultural systems in the lost city of Loulan using remote sensing and field investigations. This ancient city used to be an important stop along the Silk Road, but disappeared in the third century AD, perhaps because of an extended drought. Among the structures uncovered were canals and irrigation ditches. [...]
by Matt Ball on August 22, 2011
UniStrong, the market leader in navigation devices in China, is poised to prosper at the country’s navigation industry matures, and as the country’s Compass navigation satellite constellation takes shape. UniStrong holds 40 percent of the market for automobile navigation systems in what is projected to be a 100 billion yuan ($15.6 billion) market over the [...]
by Matt Ball on July 5, 2011
A story in today’s Wall Street Journal outlines an ambitious surveillance project in the city of Chongqing. The ‘Peaceful Chongqing’ project is planned to span a 400-square-mile area with 500,000 cameras to keep track of traffic and crime among the city’s 12 million inhabitants. The companies participating and interested in the project are Cisco, Intergraph [...]
by Matt Ball on June 22, 2011
The Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping launched 10 online mapping sites today that mark revolutionary bases and historic sites in time for the July 1 celebration of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. These “Red Map” applications contain three-dimensional maps of major revolutionary events, campaigns, revolutionary leaders [...]