Crowdsourcing Imagery Analysis (Wikimapia)

I have written previously about the value of the Google Earth Community for leads and other hard to find information concerning virtually any geographic location. Tasks like identifying and describing geographic locations on a map are perfect for crowdsourcing, where lots of people throw a little bit of time at a project. While I would not center my business, law enforcement or military plans around such data, it can provide very useful leads.

Wikimapia, which is very much like the Google Earth Community, allows users to post data concerning any place in the world. When this service first came out, I didn't think it would be able to compete with the Google Earth Community. Apparently, I was wrong.

I gave Wikimapia a second look today (Thanks, Rachel!) and was very impressed with the quantity of information and detail available. Take a look at the image of Bushehr Iran below.
Of course this is just a screenshot and I added the title and the website but the yellow box highlighting the Iranian HAWK site is all Wikimapia. Yeah. I thought it was pretty cool, too.

All of the little white boxes are sites that have been identified as something by someone. A good number of the sites identified are in the native language of the country making this a useful training tool for linguists as well.

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Wikileaks Collects 120 Videos And Photos Of Tibet Unrest (Wikileaks.org)

Wikileaks has done a service by collecting a variety of photos and videos on the recent unrest in Tibet on its website. The photos are all from the AP but it is a very good collection nonetheless. The videos are more helpful as they come from a variety of news sources and having them all in one place is a nice feature. There even appears to be some footage not previously shown on any of the world's news services. Wikileaks has compiled the images and video to ostensibly "help drive the footage through the Chinese internet censorship regime -- the so called 'Great Firewall of China'".

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Convert 2D To 3D Online For Free! (Stanford AI Lab)

Ashutosh Saxena and his team of brilliant computer programmers at the Stanford AI Lab have created an intensely cool bit of web based software. The site, called Make3D, allows you to upload a 2D image and then the software renders it as a 3D image, sends you an email telling you its ready and posts it to a personal page for your viewing.

I converted a number of images (taken from .mil sites) last night. The process was painless. You can see an example below (you need to have the Shockwave plugin installed to see these images. You can get this plugin for free here):



To get the full effect you need to use the arrow keys, the page up and page down keys and the Shift+Arrow keys to navigate. As you play around with it, you will notice the picture tends to get distorted pretty quickly. You can always go back to the original image by hitting the "reset view' button. All of the images I uploaded are available for viewing here. My favorites are this one, the "Para Jump" and the "Patrol On the Roof".