why read maps?

My ongoing complaint is how people allow gadgets to replace thought. I have never complained about how computers can be used to gather, analyze and present geographic data. Technology can serve thought. Geographic information systems make possible fascinating, informative maps that would have been unthinkable in earlier times. (I do complain that the aesthetics are severely lacking in most GIS maps).

Here is a wonderful example of someone taking a ton of data that was just lying around out there and compiling a map that like most good maps can tell a million stories.

This was compiled from information about pictured locations and the homes of users who posted them, attached to images posted on Flickr. Clever work! It has gained jokey attention as a means for natives to avoid tourist infestations, but the comments on Flickr show there is plenty more to dig into here.

For instance:

“It’s like Queens and the Bronx have never heard of Flickr! Unsurprisingly, though, Williamsburg and Park Slope are fairly Flickr-friendly.”

“It’s interesting that tourists seem mostly to go to Yankees games, not Mets games.”

I was especially tickled to see that someone placed this label on the map: “5 pointz and/or views of the skyline from the 7 train.” And look how tourists, well represented on the Brooklyn bridge, have yet to discover the Williamsburg Bridge.

My point is the value of prior knowledge. In order to be able to look at this unlabeled yet data rich map and instantly grasp nuggets like these, you have to know the city as only a map reader can. The nuggets are endless.

Some nuggets are a question. What’s up with College Point?

Sue the driver, OK, but even I had to wonder about this. My first reaction was in line with the widespread ridicule and disbelief, but after some thought, I wish good luck to a woman who is suing Google because she was injured on a dangerous highway in Park City Utah while following Google Maps walking directions.

In the old days, no one would have thought to sue Rand McNally after an incident like this.  But claims beyond any that paper maps ever made are being made, tacitly as well as explicitly, by high tech navigation.  The suit gains some merit because Google omits the “Use Caution…” disclaimer on the mobile device version of their walking directions website.  But more importantly, who is responsible for the blind faith in Google Maps that the plaintiff, and millions of other people have adopted?  Can Google demonstrate some ongoing dismay that such faith exists?  What have they done about it?  Should the sometimes visible disclaimer be enough to get them off the hook?  What deliberate actions have they taken, through public relations and their carefully nurtured image of omniscience and civic responsibility, to promote the idea “Why hassle with an old fashioned map and thinking for yourself when you can just click and go?”

I am not yet saying she ought to win the suit, but I do hope a trial becomes an opportunity to air these issues.  Should Google get to enjoy the benefits of the people’s faith in their servces while denying they have done anything to foster it?  Where else does the faith come from?

Any paper street map, or even a look at the Google map that disregards the suggested route, reveals to an actual map reader a route that is slightly longer but follows non-arterial streets for more of its length.  Nevertheless there appears to be no way Lauren Rosenberg could have traveled where she wanted to go without walking at least an eighth of a mile or so on the deadly 4 lane highway.

Here is who she has not sued, but I wish she would, and win big:  Whoever thought it was OK to build a place where it is impossible to walk somewhere half an hour away without placing oneself in a lethal situation.  That is the opposite of any place I would consider worthy of having the word “Park,” or “City” in its name.

GPS has almost killed street maps. That won’t be the end of it!

Slate asks about the future of street signs “Does the advent of GPS mean we’ll no longer need them?”

I say: who’s we?

At least the article quotes an academic expert saying what I figured out running a map store all these years:

… the technology gets us where we need to go without teaching us anything: It’s not very good at “making us smarter about places.”

Skeptical nods like that, and a mention of bad GPS advice episodes, (which are, of course, being swiftly mopped up) do not begin to balance out the article’s Nothing-Can-Stop-Progress technophilia. If you read it, make sure to read the comments for perspective.

No one is looking at a big cost-benefit picture, some kind of greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number assessment of all this assumed progress. In the article, a booster of technology-for-all predicts

…Years from now, when a state can see that most of its population relies on satellite navigation, will it want to spent as much money maintaining signs that serve the minority of users—likely poor and elderly ones—who don’t?

The poor and elderly are only part of it. By the time the taxpayers can enjoy that big street-sign dividend, the heedless rush to get the latest gizmos (remember, these are no more of a one time purchase than paper maps) into everyone’s hands will have, collectively, cost a lot more than paper maps and decent street signs would have. What will we really have gained?

A dumber populace.

Google’s (or someone’s) ability to sell geotagged eyeballs to advertisers lucratively enhanced.

Totally invasive, all encompassing police state surveillance technology in place, just waiting to be abused.

Plus, I guarantee: In a city where emergency responders no longer know their way around because they depend on electronic navigation, things will go wrong (hoocouldanode?) and there will be preventable deaths.

Lives depend on emergency responders arriving as promptly as possible. But what do we really need to spend to obtain a sufficient level of navigational technology on fire trucks and ambulances?

The conclusions to be drawn from the possibly avoidable death of Tom Gallagher in Queens NY are not as obvious as the NY Post or many of the commenters on this colorful local blog seem to think.

Tom Gallagher, 69, a retired stationary engineer for Fordham University, was in his bedroom at his Little Neck home on Van Nostrand Court just after 10 p.m. Monday when he lost consciousness, his distraught family said.

While his son tried to revive him, firefighters rushing to his aid drove by his cul de sac several times without spotting the entrance.

Their rig was not equipped with GPS or electronic maps — which are not installed in any FDNY or EMS vehicles.

Instead, they relied on a 2005 Hagstrom map they keep on their dashboard.

Oh snap.  Might as well have dispatched a donkey cart loaded with leeches and bottles of Lydia Pinkham’s tonic.

I was not there with that driver.  I do wonder whether they radioed the dispatcher “Where the heck is this Van Nostrand Court?” and if so, what happened.  Could someone at the office have checked the properly updated wall map, gone online, called the family back for clarification or perhaps asked someone at the scene to step outside and flag down the ambulance?  (I am so old I remember being taught to stand and wait by the call box!)

I would allocate at least some blame to what looks to be a vanity address:

Van Nostrand Court does not look like a city street to me and I guess it did not look like like one to the responders either. It looks like a driveway. Perhaps the plaque in the gatepost, unreadable in the photo, names it, but there does not appear to be the kind of street sign anyone would be looking for when looking for a named street. If the official address of this little court was “52 Glenwood Street” and the responders had been dispatched to it, they would have rolled right in. Could this be the embodiment of the developer’s assumption that “Everybody who needs to find this little private street will be able to follow their GPS?”

It is much too easy to think that since this person may not have died had new navigational technology been in use, the technology has become a must. According to one commenter, “A decent system with an external antenna is only $300 and can be properly installed and hardwired by any shmuck with a cordless drill, crimping tool, grommet and some silicone sealer in an hour.” First of all, it would hardly be responsible for the city to let “schmucks” install discount-store electronics on emergency response equipment. Appropriately expert installation of heavy duty equipment on hundreds or thousands of vehicles, followed by inevitable repairs and maintenance would be an enormous expense. Most importantly, the irate taxpayers who populate comment threads should be glad their city knows darn well that even with the latest GPS system on every vehicle, something will go terribly wrong about as often as it does without the gizmos. They should be be relieved to know that firefighters and EMTs are still being hired from the ranks of people literate and generally competent enough to find their way by reading maps.

The printed map business has declined disastrously. Maps are getting harder to find, many publishers have gone out of business, and the survivors are hard pressed to maintain update schedules and editing standards. Advertising and general love for the latest gadgetry has convinced many people that printed maps are obsolete.

Save your “If onlys” for the saddest detail of all: The 2005 map. The 2009 edition of the $4.99 Hagstrom Map of Queens correctly shows Van Nostrand Court in Little Neck although the name was not added to the alphabetical index. We can never know if Mr. Gallagher would have been saved for $4.99, let alone $300, or $30,000,000.

I do not know what I could possibly say to comfort the Gallagher family. I am terribly sorry for their loss.

And the even more mysterious tree!

This is a fairly busy bus stop. The bench appeared about a month ago. The tree and the traffic cone have been there a few days. I assumed one of the many construction workers who have been renovating the building was responsible. (See the new stucco?) Turns out, the workers and the neighbors I have spoken to assumed the Map Center guy put it there. I am glad they think I could be so nice. So far, the real benefactor has not made him or herself known.

That design does not look like it came out of a book. I am afraid the roof will not bear up under a heavy snow. But the effort and workmanship are quite impressive. The tree roots are still in burlap inside that box. I have been watering it and am considering putting it into a proper container.

The inbound stop across the street has an official shelter with advertising. You can get out of the rain but you will not be charmed.

Thank you, street furniture folk artist, whoever you are!

Adults can easily dismiss the danger that “Technology is making us stupid.”  Maybe you used to fuss semi-competently with maps, got lost now and then, and now you are glad that your cell phone can provide directions.  What is the problem?  You did not get stupider, your life got easier.  Well, adults consistently fail to consider how differently certain problems can manifest themselves in that dimly remembered country they once inhabited: Childhood.

A fifth grade teacher recently told me that not one child in her room could tell time from an analog clock.  Their homes have only digital clocks on TV recorders, microwave ovens, clock radios and the like.  Experts and editorialists everywhere wring their hands about “Why can’t Johnny do fractions?”  There is your answer.  Incredibly, a fifth grade teacher confronts blank space where you might expect rudimentary notions of quarter, half and whole to preexist. If you are reading this, chances are by age 10 you could make it to dinner on time if your mother told you it would be at a “quarter past.”  Your familiarity with that pie shaped area between the big hand and the 12 made your fifth grade teacher’s job a whole lot easier.

Taking the kids for a hike or just out on a drive?  Let the GPS be for emergencies only!  Those minds will not develop unless they get practice observing and memorizing landmarks, guessing and testing distances and travel times, comparing routes and struggling to make the connection between the the territory and the map.  The ability to absorb abstract information and apply it in the real world, an ability you may take for granted, can be gained in no other way.

Just posing or actually reading?

I think both!

I hope they hang it where it will do some good.  Even if you can ace a geography quiz, when thinking about world affairs you can always benefit from having the map before you.

What do you make of the commonplace notion that we only use 10 percent of our brains?  I have always taken it to mean that we could all afford to learn about 10 times as much stuff as we do before having any overload trouble. Too bad we seldom bother. Like most people, I watch for information that confirms my pre-existing notions, and Lo!  An article in The Economist about the link between genius, or savant syndrome and autism roughly confirmed my suspicion.

The movie “Rain Man” is a fair presentation of savant syndrome.  I had assumed that such savants are born, not made, but an element of the syndrome called RRBI, restrictive and repetitive behaviors and interests, must indeed be made, even if the inclination towards RRBI is inborn.

Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.

So what happens when a neurotypical does clock up 10,000 hours?

There are, however, examples of people who seem very neurotypical indeed achieving savant-like skills through sheer diligence. Probably the most famous is that of London taxi drivers, who must master the Knowledge—ie, the location of 25,000 streets, and the quickest ways between them—to qualify for a licence.

The expert here is Eleanor Maguire of University College, London, who famously showed a few years ago that the shape of the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in long-term learning, changes in London cabbies. Dr Maguire and her team have now turned their attention to how cabbies learn the Knowledge.

The prodigious geographical knowledge of the average cabbie is, indeed, savant-like. But Dr Maguire recently found that it comes at a cost. Cabbies, on average, are worse than random control subjects and—horror—also worse than bus drivers, at memory tests such as word-pairing. Surprisingly, that is also true of their general spatial memory. Nothing comes for nothing, it seems, and genius has its price.

25,000 streets, and no Manhattan-style grid to make it easy!  Plus, London cabbies must also know all hotels, theaters, museums, hospitals, shops, embassies and so much more. I love that they simply call it The Knowledge. 10,000 hours is about 3 1/2 years of 8 hour days.  Obtaining The Knowledge can be a four year project.

So now we know.  Spend 45 minutes a week reading maps. Look for places you have been.  Look for places you have heard of and might like to know more about or visit.  Think about new ways you could travel to work. What might be worth seeing along the way?  Who could you drop in on?  45 minutes a week.  You might get 2% of the way towards a situation where you have clogged up your mind to the point where your ability to do crosswords or learn to read music is slightly impaired.

Tweenbots is a provocative and heartening work of art.

Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

We see in a new way that low tech navigation is engaging and fun.  The project demonstrates

…the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object.

The novel anthropomorphic object certainly gets attention and appeals to people’s playfulness, but I would argue that any human empathy it gives rise to is best thought of as directed at its presumably human creator!  Just imagine the emergency response were this object suspected of being anything but a toy, more or less, that nevertheless has some purpose and meaning for somebody.

I am greatly encouraged that even after a 8 years of fearmongering, no one called the bomb squad on the tweenbot.

Such sensibility and behavior are some of the things I love about about cities, especially New York.

Continued from an earlier post

Mochuisle, an excellent mama, left the kittens only to eat, drink, use the box and to get petted by me. No ingrate, she. Here they are at 6 days.

Soon after, perhaps tired of strangers crouching in front of her home to peer in with a flashlight, she moved her family to a less trafficked spot under the packing table in back.  This made it easy for me to set up barriers to confine the kittens so they would not get underfoot in the store.

I decided early on to keep the mama.  For the rest it was “Buy a map, get a free kitten!” Soon I had a waiting list, in case someone changed their mind and did not show up to take theirs.  It was a lot of fun having kittens at the Map Center.

By four weeks they were getting into everything.

The easiest kitten to name was Vincent The Chin, another polydactyl.

I had trouble thinking up a name for Little Cat C, but don’t worry. The person who took him named him Magellan.

Here is their last group portrait.

The calico and the tuxedo with a white nose were adopted by my neighbor who named them Anna and Piano. I still get to see them now and then.

A store cat had seemed like a nice idea, but Mochuisle was so affectionate, she seemed more like a house cat.  When the kittens were gone, I brought her home.   I had planned to give all the kittens away but one of my sons insisted we keep Vincent The Chin.

Good thing. He grew up into a great big Mama’s Boy.

Although he is a scaredy cat who hides when company visits, he can strike a pose with the best of them.