Google Maps/Earth mashup with real-time location data of planes, trains and automobiles

Cool mashups!

• Planes: 3D flight tracking with Google Earth for a few US airports (LAX, BOS, ORD, ATL and JFK)

• Trains: DartMaps is a very cool mashup of Google Maps and real-time rail times. You can really see the trains moving!

• Automobiles: Traffic jams in cities all over the world with Google Earth. Or parking availability in San Francisco on Google Maps.

Other (near) real-time stuff: Arctic and Antarctic ice flow vectors on Google Earth, Seattle 911 calls on Google Maps, …

Update: a blog with more cool google maps.

Update: Google Earth as a platform for OA geospatial data, scientific data mapped to Google Earth facilitates science reaching the public.

principles of Web 2.0

If you want your site to have a Web 2.0 look: Building your own Web 2.0 layout

And just to remind myself: Architectural and behavioral principles of the Web 2.0 era (From superpatron’s blog):

• Provide services, not packaged software

• Seek to own unique data for competitive advantage

• Design for user participation, e.g. let users add value by supplementing library-created metadata with user-created metadata

• Design for remixability. Encourage “mashups” and service recombination

• Adopt perpetual test model and release new features as soon as they are available

• Trust users as co-developers, i.e. release new features on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis, and remove features that are not being adopted by users

Update: Just don’t overdo it

Update: I just did a small Web 2.0 makeover of my Astrotest website, but I’m still in doubt on the link colors… blueish? or greenish? or reddish?

Update: A web 2.0 generator! Funny and even useful.

Update: A howto of web 2.0 design features.

Precognition proven?

Precognition, or maybe better presentiment, may have been proven.
There is a study that presents proof for intuitively feeling future events: Study Proves that the Heart Responds to Future Events.

It presents an overview of the study but unfortunately also has a bit of an advertisement feel. Also the HeartMath website itself makes me think more of new age than of a serious scientific institution… I don’t really know what to think about this, but it’s interesting anyway.

The original published articles:

R McCRATY, M ATKINSON, RT BRADLEY. 2004. Electrophysiological Evidence of Intuition: Part 1. The Surprising Role of the Heart. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. 10(1), pp. 133–143. (Intuition_Part1.pdf)

R McCRATY, M ATKINSON, RT BRADLEY. 2004. Electrophysiological Evidence of Intuition: Part 2. A System-Wide Process? The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. 10(2), pp. 325–336. (Intuition_Part2.pdf)

Update: Maurits’s analysis makes it clear that the study doesn’t prove anything!