As part of a large undergraduate history course he teaches about World War II, Dr. Martinez developed a mapping mashup that he introduces to the 150 students at the beginning of the semester. The mashup, which works with Google maps, represents major events leading up to and during the war. Fundamentally, it’s a map, he explains, showing them on a projection screen that it works very much like the online mapping tools students regularly use. The map covers virtually the entire globe, and users can move around the world, zooming in and out, showing the area of search as a map, satellite images, or satellite images with maps, dates, and events superimposed.
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Silverlight is Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in that allows the creation of interactive web applications that employ high quality streaming media, vector graphics, images, and animation. Deployed as a plug-in for the major browsers on the Windows, Mac and Linux (supported by Novell) operating systems, web developers can craft interactive applications that have an identical user experience on the vast majority of web browsers deployed today. Silverlight addresses a disconnect that exists today in web development workflow where the design intent of graphics designers and interaction designers cannot be faithfully communicated to and crafted by the web developers. In Silverlight, this intent is created in design tools like Expression Design and Expression Blend and passed off to web developers in XML-based XAML data files. The fidelity of the designers’ ideas is kept as there is a clear separation between the design in XAML and the code in JavaScript.
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In Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM) a micro focused soft x-ray beam is generated by a zone plate, illuminates the sample and the transmitted x-rays are detected. Transmission images are obtained by a raster scan of the sample. Spectra are obtained in point, line or image mode by acquiring signal at multiple photon energies. The 5.3.2STXM is an interferometrically controlled device mounted on a dedicated bending magnet beamline. The user controls both the beamline and the microscope from a single computer.
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Google Earth™ is Google’s satellite imagery-based mapping product that combines global coverage of imagery with new navigational features including integrated Google search capabilities. It is based on technology from Keyhole, a company acquired by Google in October 2004. Google Earth is a broadband mapping tool that enables users to fly from space to street level views to find geographic information, and to explore places around the world.
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Google Earth, a tool that combines satellite imagery, maps, terrain, and 3D buildings, has partnered with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) to bring forth tangible proof of the devastation that is taking place in Darfur. It is a particularly good advocacy tool because it gives a clear visual representation of what is taking place in Darfur. Use this guide for tips on how to use Google Earth to move Darfur as a significant issue on your campus.
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A number of new geospatial viewing tools from major players in the Internet industry have recently appeared on the scene and are taking the geospatial world by storm. Google,Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have all released web-based mapping tools in the recent past, and collectively these new players to the industry have raised the bar for Internet mapping. Although their functional capabilities don’t provide anything we haven’t seen in web offerings from traditional GIS vendors, their emergence has been significant in that they have managed to capture a wider audience. Google, in particular, has emerged as the leader of this pack with it’s recently released Google Maps product which provides a slick, highly responsive visual interface built using AJAX technologies along with detailed street and aerial imagery data, and an open API allowing customization of the map output including the ability to add application specific data to the map.
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Google Earth is a virtual globe program, allowing viewers to visualize data on top of displayed satellite images of the Earth’s surface. Launched in 2005 and released to the public in 2006, Google Earth fast became a household name hailed as a revolution for humanitarian development, much as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were several decades ago. According to MapAction, “There seem at present tobe two distinct groups of humanitarian practitioners: those who are already, albeit tentatively,exploiting Google Earth and related geospatial methods in their work,and those whowill be, as soon as they see their first demonstration of its potential.” (MapAction, 2008: 9)
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Google Earth is a free-of-charge, downloadable program that allows you to view the entire Earth from orbit with amazing clarity. It maps the entire earth as a 3d Globe by pasting together images obtained from satellite imagery and aerial photography. The Google Earth Program comes as part of Google’s free “Software Pack”. It’s a quick and easy download that you can get for free. It comes with these great free titles:
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