Water availability map of the world (Images via Grail Research)
In a report tabled by Grail Research on the water availability per capita, India, China and most parts of Africa are predicted to face water shortages in the near future. Even countries in Central and Eastern Europe will face water shortage if immediate steps are not taken to conserve and minimize water usage. Interesting most of the countries predicted to face water shortage are agricultural intensive which means they will start importing their food once the water issue gets difficult to manage.
Remote Sensing missions like NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission can monitor monthly water storage changes within river basins and aquifers but all this will be useless if real action is not taken. The only positive being that most of these nations have access to the oceans. Maybe in the future, converting saline water for domestic and industrial usage wont be a difficult or expensive thing. Guess it’s just going to become a matter of necessity more than anything else!
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In March this year, Bing Maps added over 200 Terrabytes of imagery and bathymetric information to its database and we were all thinking “that’s a lot of data”! Now they outdid themselves and added over 270TB of Bird’s eye imagery to their database!
Thats 270TB of high resolution images to the Bing Maps database! Seriously the guys at Bing Maps are really wanting to displace Google maps from being regarded as the most preferred Web Maps.
Bing has also improved their venue maps; adding more points of interest and a new “Report a problem” button to help users inform the mapping team in case of wrong labels.
A bird’s eye view of paris
Some of the more notable (read: gorgeous) additions include overviews of Rome and Milan in Italy, Stavanger in Norway and Kaanapali in Hawaii. SOURCE: Engadget
My personal belief, Bing Maps has to concentrate on the user interface! Google maps is far more intuitive and inviting than Bing maps at the moment. Maybe we are just so used to it but still they need to make a real attempt to give it a make over.
Once again, its time for the “Desktop” cartographers and tourists ready to explore the world from the comfort of our chairs 😉
