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The makers of this week's map want to remind visitors to Beijing of the violent history lurking behind the glitz and glamor of the Olympic Games. Freedom House's Ellen Bork along with the Weekly Standard's design director Philip Chalk and Tiananmen survivor Tian Jian have created this map for Beijing tourists interested in visiting the sites of the June 4, 1989 massacre of the Tiananmen Square protestors. Each number shows the place where where one of the 176 victims were killed or the hospitals to which their bodies were taken.

You can find information on the victims here and read Bork's explanation of the map at the New York Sun's site.

Google

As if Georgia didn't have enough to deal with, yesterday the country's cities and transportation routes completely disappeared from Google Maps. Reportedly wanting to keep its cyber territory conflict-neutral, Google removed all of Georgia's details from its maps, making the war-torn nation look like a ghostly white blob flanked by Russia and Turkey. Georgia, though, isn't the only country going blank on Google: neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan--who have their own ongoing terrorital dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region--are coming up empty too.

Some online commenters speculate that the allegiances of Google's Russian-born co-founder Sergey Brin might have something to do with Georgia's disappearance. That's pretty doubtful, but it's possible that Google doesn't want their software used for military purposes.

But Google has helped out Georgia in one major way, providing (albeit "involuntarily") Georgian sites with a "cyber-refuge" from Russian hackers. News service Civil Georgia as well as the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs have started using the Google-owned site Blogger to post updates and press releases on the conflict.

 Update: Google denies that it has made any changes to the map:

“We do not have local data for those countries and that is why local details such as landmarks and cities do not appear.”

Looks like we may have gotten a bit ahead of ourselves, though as NYT's Miguel Helf notes, Google does seem to have plenty of "local data" about Georgia in its Google Earth program.

This week's Tuesday Map comes via the New York Times.

The Times provides a cool interactive graphic that shows overall medal counts for each participating country at every summer Olympiad stretching back to 1896. Below, the 2004 Athens Games:

As you'll see as you click around the graphic, the United States' greatest athletic adversary was always the Soviet Union. Yet China has been hot on America's heels at recent summer games, and has vigorously prepared its athletes to beat the United States in Beijing. China has been emphasizing sports that award more medals, such as rowing, in a savvy effort to garner as many medals as possible. Can the Chinese do it? And if they do, how will the world react?

As FP contributor Jacob Leibenluft wrote last year, beating the United States could have political ramifications:

[E]ven if organizers can somehow pull off an Olympics free of both pollution and protestors, they can't control what happens on the field. And ironically, just as China’s leaders emphasize its "peaceful rise," the athletic juggernaut in which they have invested so much may inadvertently send the opposite message.

Watch this space. 

Today's map is a source of a bit of controversy in the UK. Recent news reports have described plans to provide folks with interactive maps that display incidents of crime in any neighborhood. The maps would detail, on a street-by-street basis, where different crimes took place. It would also allow users to select different types of crime -- "serious violence," "other violence," and "youth nuisance" among others -- and highlight only those infractions in each neighborhood.

The map below shows "anti-social behaviour" in Leeds, West Yorkshire:

In case you're wondering what constitutes "anti-social behaviour," here's a quick sampling:

Street drinking, presence of drug dealers or users, soliciting, abandoned cars, illegal parking, off-road motorcycling, skateboarding, noisy neighbours, persistent alarms, shouting & swearing, fireworks, climbing on buildings, false emergency calls, uncontrolled animals, groups or individuals causing nuisance, graffiti, damage to bus-stops or buildings, dropping litter and fly-tipping."

Not everyone is happy about the map. Aside from privacy concerns, there are fears that publishing that sort of information in a rough housing market could devalue properties overnight.

It would sure make life easier for a British Bruce Wayne, though.

Nazi Germany's bombing raids on London and other English cities in late 1940 and early 1941 destroyed millions of homes and left thousands of civilians dead. However, an estimated 1 in 10 bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz failed to detonate, and have remained hidden in gardens, fields and building sites.

Using Royal Air Force photographs from the time of the Blitz, as well as maps produced by insurance companies after the war, the Landmark Information Group has developed charts that label the most likely places where unexploded bombs may still be located.

Landmark Information Group

Some 21,000 sites have been labeled as likely to contain unexploded bombs. The makers of this map hope to help builders, contractors and private citizens become more aware of their surroundings. Discoveries of these bombs are fairly common. Just last month, construction on an Olympic site outside of London had to be halted after a 2000-pound bomb was unearthed.

The Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston recently unveiled HealthMap, a Google Maps mashup that aggregates news about disease outbreaks from around the world, allowing users to track potential epidemics. There are still relatively few stories on the map, but its creators hope that it may one day allow the public to notice disease trends that are often hinted at in the media before researchers are able to connect the dots. For instance, early signs of the 2002 SARS outbreak were reported in Chinese newspapers well before the extent of the outbreak became clear.

There's a lot of room for improvement on this one, but it could soon be a game-changer for global public health.

(Hat tip: The Private Sector Development Blog)

With Google's latest innovation, you don't even need a bike to participate in the Tour de France. The company has unveiled a cool feature that allows you to follow each agonizing meter of the race's 21 stages using virtual, street-level views of all the routes.

Via Google Maps

You can either click on an individual route (marked by camera icons) or select a stage from the drag-down menu on the left. Then, click on the little cyclist that pops up to select a road. You can rotate the virtual map easily, and can follow whatever road you choose through the French countryside. I'd personally recommend Stage 21, where you can virtually race down the Champs-Elysees and finish by the Arc de Triomphe.

No spandex or performance-enhancing drugs necessary.

At least $6.4 billion of new, transoceanic cable lines will be installed in the coming years, according to Technology Review. The chart below, a snapshot of a larger interactive map, shows some of the new cable routes in the works.

The white lines represent preexisting cables, and the colors represent different new underseas fiber cable routes. For instance, cable-laying projects are planned for 2009 to connect Greenland to both Canada and Iceland. The Red Sea, the east coast of Africa, and the Caribbean are the sites of fresh projects, and new fiber will link the West coast of the United States with China and Japan. The new cables will provide greater bandwidth, allowing data to be transferred faster across the globe -- good news for YouTube addicts. And according to Technology Review, damages to existing cables and bad connections have led many poorer countries to rely on pricey satellite connections. With cheaper access for all, could a new Internet boom be on the way?

It's a tough world for journalists these days. Reporters attempting to shed light on tragedy, corruption, and death often encounter all three. The recent political violence in Zimbabwe may be the perfect example, and Sri Lanka is not far behind. Reporters in war zones face the obvious perils of combat-related injury or death, not to mention kidnappings at the hands of guerrilla groups. Iraq continues to rank as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists.

The following interactive map from MSN and the International News Safety Institute allows us to see where journalists have been killed in 2008:

Not surprisingly, death statistics tend to follow the political and social conditions in a given country. A reporter investigating gangs in Panama was stabbed to death. The same is true of India, where Mohammad Muslimuddin was killed in April after he exposed a drug-trafficking ring.

This week's Tuesday Map comes compliments of a new atlas, released today by the United Nations Environment Program. "Africa: Atlas of our Changing Environment," paints a grim picture of the African landscape, as climate change, deforestation, urban pollution, and refugee flows are all taking their toll.

Vegetation and forests in the Jebel Marra foothills in Western Sudan (below) have declined significantly from 1972 (left) to 2006 (right). The authors of the study attribute this change in part to an "influx of refugees from drought and conflict in Northern Darfur." Reuters reports that deforestation is occurring in Africa at twice the world rate.

While many people are familiar with the snows of Kilimanjaro, or lack thereof, climate change appears to be having an impact on smaller peaks as well. The second map illustrates a noticeable shrinking of the Rwenzori Glaciers, which border Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, over just an 18-year period.

Explore more climate change maps -- both in Africa and worldwide -- at UNEP's Web site.

Iran is far from a free and open society, but apparently its control of the Internet is not as pervasive as one might think.

Created by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) -- an Internet surveillance monitoring partnership between the Citizen Lab, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, and the Oxford Internet Institute -- this week's Tuesday Map plots the top 6,000 Persian language blogs according to the links among them, showing both those blocked (left) and visible (right) inside Iran.

Each dot represents a blog, color-coded by content (yellow and green for reformist, secular and expatriate bloggers; purple for Persian poetry; green for popular culture, and red for religious and/or conservative bloggers) and scaled by the number of links to the blog from other sites. 

Although most blocked blogs are "secular/reformist" in nature, ONI notes:

[T]he majority of these [secular/reformist] blogs are not blocked. Also, a handful of blogs from religious, pro-regime parts of the network are blocked as well. A preliminary analysis of these indicates content (like anti-Arab bias and discussion of "temporary marriages") that, while not unfriendly to the Islamic Republic, might nevertheless be embarrassing to it."

For a closer assessment of the Iranian blogosphere, check out this more detailed map and case study from the Internet and Democracy project at the Berkman Center.

Already bored with Google Earth? Is Google Transit just too mundane? Then it's high time to go the way of the Phoenix and check out Google Mars:

Google Mars

In collaboration with NASA researchers at Arizona State University, Google Maps has created an interactive map of our neighboring planet, complete with "elevation," "visible," and "infrared" view options, as well as markers indicating space craft landings, dunes, craters, and ridges.

While Google Mars is a pretty cool concept, and its mapping has certainly come a long way from those of the 19th century astronomer Percival Lowell, it appears Mars as a planet doesn't offer quite the diversity of satellite images provided by Earth's mountains, oceans, deserts, and plains.

Google actually admits that without color alteration, "Mars pretty much looks like butterscotch." And according to the principal investigator for the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, images sent back from the spacecraft, which landed on Mars's toffee-like surface this weekend, show a "barren landscape that is kind of lumpy."

Apparently the lumpiness, which orbiting space crafts detected back in 2002, is a sign of underground water ice. But now NASA's Phoenix lander is back to explore the next big question: "But does the ice melt?"

If the answer is yes, then at least we're not alone.

What are the world's disaster hotspots? Arthur Lerner-Lam, who we spoke with in last week's Seven Questions about global disasters, set out with a team from Columbia University and the World Bank to answer this in "Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis." They divided the world up into sub-national swathes of land and analyzed population and disaster data going back about thirty years for six disaster types: drought, flooding, cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides. For reasons of data accuracy and availability, the results are relative rather than absolute likelihoods that disasters will occur in various corners of the globe.

The study focuses on more significantly populated areas amounting to about half of the world's land area. It approaches loss as potential damage to that which is "valuable but vulnerable includ[ing] people, infrastructure, and environmentally important land uses." And what's more, based on data from a Brussels-based research center, the study hints that disaster frequency is increasing.

The following map shows mortality risk by disaster type. This isn't a comprehensive summary but rather a summary of the top at-risk areas. Those purple blips in central China sure have a lot more meaning in the aftermath of recent events.

www.ldeo.columbia.edu

This second map shows risk in terms of total economic loss based on disaster type.

www.ldeo.columbia.edu

And finally, the third map normalizes potential economic loss based on country GDP. Notice the migration of the top at-risk areas away from the more developed regions.

www.ldeo.columbia.edu

The 130-mph winds and 12-foot-high waves of Cyclone Nargis have already left at least 22,500 dead and another 40,000 missing along Burma's Andaman coast and Irrawaddy river basin, but the worst may not be over. Caryl Stern, head of the U.S. fund for UNICEF, said of the days to come, "Our biggest fear is that the aftermath could be more lethal than the storm itself."

Burma's paranoid, isolationistic junta has actually asked for international assistance in the face of this mounting disaster, but according to The Irrawaddy, a Burmese newsmagazine run out of Thailand, government cooperation with international relief groups is still questionable in practice.

As seen in this week's Tuesday Map(s), though, the biggest issue on the ground may simply be standing water -- miles and miles of standing water.

These images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite show just how much of Burma's coastal plain is now under water.

On April 15, the image shows clean-cut river tracks and a visible shoreline:

NASA

The May 5 image, however, is clearly a different story:

NASA

And this map, created by UNOSAT (the Operational Satellite Applications Program of the U.N. Institute for Training and Research), shows the flooding's impact on Burma's citizens along the Andaman coast:

UNOSAT

As you can see, standing flood water (red-pink areas) has unfortunately closely followed the denser populations (red/orange dots) of this agricultural region. And that's why the cyclone's toll has been so astoundingly high.

After a record-setting week, the price of rice dropped 3 percent following announcements yesterday that the United States had accelerated its rice planting and that, more importantly, major rice exporters Thailand and Brazil would not impose export bans.

The news may be a drop in the bucket compared to the world-wide "silent tsunami" of inflated food prices (last month saw a 57 percent increase), but as this week's Tuesday Map shows, Thailand's decision to stay in the game was very much needed:

Three of Asia's top rice exporters shown above (China, India, and Vietnam) have already cut their rice exports this year, leaving neighboring importers high and dry. And according to the U.N. World Food Program's executive director, who spoke with FP during her recent visit to Washington, the countries who have the greatest potential for massive unrest, suffering, or starvation are "import-dependent countries, because we're seeing a strain on their capabilities to obtain enough food to meet their needs."

But the global food crisis is unfortunately not limited to import-heavy countries. The WFP estimates that more than 100 million people around the world could soon be without food. The problem has already reached great enough proportions that 33 countries have already seen hunger-driven, social unrest.  

Today, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced he would chair a U.N. task force to create and carry out a response action plan. Let's just hope his efforts don't prove too little, too late.

This week's Tuesday Map illustrates the fragile and spotty nature of Africa’s "Internet Weather" -- or "teledensity" as tracked by Internet monitoring technology.

Researchers at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, tracked Internet connectivity at points in more than 40 African countries, whose populations make up more than 80 percent of the continent's inhabitants. Their findings (pdf) are sad, though not surprising: "Africa's network performance is over 10 years behind that of Europe and the U.S. and falling further behind," and among African countries "performances in developing regions are a factor of 5-20 times worse than that in developed regions."

This video maps daily connectivity and explains each dot's meaning (in a funny British accent):

Hat tip: Today's Tuesday Map has been made possible by the PingER (Ping End-to-end Reporting) project of the Internet End-to-end Performance Measurement (IEPM) group at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

Thanks to the likes of Napster, modern-day piracy is often associated more with ripped files than riptides. But according to this week's Tuesday Map, modern-day pirates still roam the high seas –- at least off the coast of Somalia.

This integrated satellite map, created by UNOSAT (the Operational Satellite Applications Program of the UN Institute for Training and Research) shows reported incidents of pirate attacks and hijackings off the coast of Somalia between January and November of 2007 (highlighted in red orbs) as well as incidents in 2005 and 2006 (not highlighted).

Somalia, ranked third in the 2007 Failed States Index, has been in a rough patch ever since the 1991 fall of President Said Barre. For more than two decades, it remained loosely governed and divided by warlords. Then, back in June 2006, a group of Muslim clerics, leaders, and businessmen called the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control of Mogadishu and installed an Islamic extremist leader, challenging the legitimacy of Somalia's U.N.-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Seven months later, the TFG, with the help of neighboring Ethiopia, retook the capital city and much of the South. The TFG's resurgence was also supported by American commandos, sent in to take out suspected al Qaeda terrorists.

Given this rocky track record, Somalia's coastal chaos would seem to reflect its internal instability. But according to UNOSAT's figures (see the chart included in the pdf map), piracy actually subsided during the UIC period, a time otherwise reported as bearing a striking resemblance to the Taliban regime.

Perhaps there's a fatwa against eye patches?

This week’s Tuesday map comes to us from a billboard controversy south of the border.

Created by advertising agency Teran/TBWA and launched a few weeks ago in Mexico, the Absolut billboard ad depicted pre-1848 North America -– before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo turned Mexican territories into what is now the American South West.

The campaign was obviously intended for a Mexican audience, as Favio Ucedo, creative director of a top Latino advertising firm, explained:

Many (Americans) aren’t going to understand it. Americans in the East and the North or in the center of the county -- I don’t know if they know much about the history… Probably Americans in Texas and California understand perfectly, and I don’t know how they’d take it.”

But Absolut quickly learned just how some Americans would take it: not well.  Although the ad never appeared in the U.S., it was picked up by American media outlets, causing a flurry of complaint from U.S. citizens (some more creative than others).

As of Friday, Absolut’s maker Vin & Spirits had decided to withdraw the apparently offensive advertisement even though it "was based upon historical perspectives and was created with a Mexican sensibility... [and was] in no way was meant to offend or disparage, nor...advocate an altering of borders..."

Already bored with Free Rice?

This week's Tuesday Map has the solution: the NATO Map Game. Test your knowledge of flags and capitals across NATO member states. And if you find the transatlantic a bit too easy, give the NATO partner countries a go -- picking out all those tiny Balkan states is no easy task. More of a North Africa buff? Try your hand at the NATO Mediterranean Dialogue countries. And if you're really up for a challenge, you can play the whole game in French.

Tired of reading about U.S. politics? Then pick up a copy of l’Humanite. Want to follow issues in Iraq and Iran? Then Slate is for you. At least according to these cartograms, which show media coverage, by source, of the world's countries.

Nicolas Kayser-Bril and Gilles Bruno have created 11 such maps for media sources ranging from La Croix, to the New York Times (shown above), to the "blogosphere." Not surprisingly, each source allots a disproportionate degree of coverage to its own country – Slate less so than the New York Times and The Economist much less so than, say, the Guardian.

Oddly enough, the blogosphere –- an amorphous source not exactly known for credibility –- does not appear too different in its global coverage from The Economist.

(Hat tip: BoingBoing)