Amazing map of ship and port traffic using AIS and accurate up to one hour. Brought you by the U of A Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering. This project is so amazingly useful, I don’t know what to say. Zoom in and check out some of the individual ships. See full size here.
About Younghusband
Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863-1942) was a British explorer, army officer, military-political officer, and foreign correspondent born in India who led expeditions into Manchuria, Kashgar, and
Tibet. He three times tried and failed to scale Mt. Everest and journeyed from China to India, crossing the Gobi desert and the Mustagh Pass (alt. c.19,000 ft/5,791 m) of the Karakoram mountain range in modern day Pakistan. Convinced of Russian designs on British interests in India, Younghusband proactively engaged in the nineteenth century spying and conflict over Central Asia between the British and the Russians known as the Great Game.
"Younghusband" is a Canadian who has spent a number of years bouncing back and forth between his home country and Japan. Fluent in Japanese and English with experience in numerous other languages from Spanish to Georgian, Younghusband has travelled throughout Asia. He graduated with an MA from the War Studies Department at the
Royal Military College of Canada, where he focussed on the Japanese oil industry and energy security issues. He has recently returned to Canada from Japan, and is working in the technology sector.
This is very cool.
That is very cool, but I wondered something as I panned the map around. Why are there no cities in Israel on this map? There are roads and major communities in all the other territories, but not Israel. I noticed because I panned over to check out Haifa, where I sailed out of back in ’94.
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I have 2gb of ram on my computer and it takes forever to load — although I’m in the market for a new computer and will probably get 16gb-32gb on my next machine, it feels at present as if the data is too much for the technology available…
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Wonder if it tracks Iranian ships delivering missiles to Hezbollah?
No cities in Israel?
They’ve been pushed into the sea by Google.
I don’t think there is a conspiracy theory over Israel. I think it is just a matter of the data being incomplete. The port where I used to work, Nagoya, is also not listed and it is the 5th busiest port in Japan.
I heard the reason why there are no cities in Israel is that the Israel service that would hand the mapping information to Google maps doesn’t do it in a format that Google maps can use. But I could be wrong.
It’s not a conspiracy. There are other countries that also are blank.
Yea, I just figured it was a bad map. I looked over the western US, but not Japan. It also has some odd blocks it tracks in Alaska, no Anchorage or south central, but a block to the west where its all fishing boats.
There’s an international initiative to provide shipping information into a centralized computer, in part to fight piracy, but also for general safety information. The initiative requires the voluntary participation of each country to provide the data. Some countries chose not to participate. It wouldn’t surprise me if Israel felt such information was too sensitive.