tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 49
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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I have uploaded a new collection of the NPI with corrected locations for 9 sites based on community feedback, including every comment in this thread.
Looking forward to receiving many more corrections once these changes make their way into the community layer.
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Hill
Master Guide
Reged: 10/31/04
Posts: 9230
Loc: Southern California
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Please read the Inital post. You can help correct misplaced placemarks yourself.
Quote:
There is now a link in each balloon to enable the Google Earth community to contribute corrections to the location of each site.
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tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 49
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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At the suggestion of an anonymous member of the Google Earth Community I have included a URL in each placemark balloon that links to Wikipedia with the name of the site and the state. For example, /wiki/Big Power Station, Victora
Hopefully this will provide a deeper pool of information and encourage community collaboration on more contentious sites. In many cases there is already a Wikipedia entry for the site and they usually don't match the naming convention I have used, but the redirection capabilities of Wikipedia are excellent and easy to use. It is standard practice on Wikipedia to search for related articles before creating a new one - please do this yourself and use redirects where relevant.
This is somewhat of a new idea and I'm not a Wikipedia expert so all comments are very welcome. 
Also, I have updated the locations of another 9 sites based on your feedback.
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tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 49
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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This collection made it into the GEC layer in Google Earth on about 7 April. Since then I've received a ten-fold increase in location corrections. I have updated the collection at the top with a total of 60 community-contributed corrections. I have also repeated the geocoding using what seems to be an updated API.
The NPI released the 2006-2007 data on 31 March. Stay tuned for an update to the latest data. Now updated.
The NPI is holding a conference on 22-23 May at which I'll be presenting on what I've done with their data.
Edited by tegandrew (05/08/08 06:54 AM)
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tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 49
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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I have redone this placemark collection with the following enhancements and updated the above technical discussion to reflect the current situation.
The NPI released the 2006-2007 data on 31 March 2008. This is now incorporated into the placemark collection and the 2005-2006 data has been archived.
After some further reading and consideration I decided that using a normal distribution to compare sites was problematic as there are some very small emissions and very large ones. In order to linearise the data I took the natural logarithm off each emission, calculated the Z-scores then summed exp(Z) for each site and medium (air, water, land). I believe this provides a much more accurate means of comparing sites.
My other big post on the European Pollution Emission Register hasn't had any trouble with formatting in the community collection so I have included the full data in the top post. I'll keep the sister thread going for a while yet to avoid dead links.
Thanks to everyone who has offered suggestions, criticism and encouragement.
Andrew.
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tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 49
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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I made a 30 minute presentation and demonstration of the work discussed in this thread to the NPI 2008 conference. The presentation may be of interest or use to some so I have published it on my website.
On another note, there seems to be a technical problem with the NPI info in the community layers. It has disappeared from the Geographic Web layer and the version in the Gallery layer seems to be the very first one that I uploaded and is consequently not very good. 
I encourage everyone to download the latest version from the top post in this thread. Stay tuned for the next community layer update...
Regards,
Andrew
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Diane9247
Humanitarian
Reged: 01/15/07
Posts: 1921
Loc: Californian in Oregon
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Andrew -
I am amazed by the amount of work you are putting into this valuable post. Thanks for your ongoing diligence! 
Diane
--------------------
Women for Women International - For the special needs of women surviving war.
Kiva - Small loans changing lives around the world.
Bukavu Foundation - For the Panzi Women's Shelter & other programs in Eastern Congo.
Room to Read - Change begins with educated children.
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tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 49
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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Since the "Best of Google Earth Community" has been removed from an option within the layers I have had very few links from this post. There have been 3 location corrections made since 1 July 2008 compared to 78 made in June 2008. I find it hard to believe that the data set is suddenly highly accurate with respect to location and can only conclude that nobody is looking at it anymore.
The replacement of "Places" doesn't really compare. I believe that users of Google Earth are worse off for loss of access to a moderated collection of placemarks. I suspect that Stefan Green has found out the reason why in this post about politics.
The result is that I question the value of putting hours into something that not many people will look at. I'll keep updating the locations based on corrections received but may not update the whole data set in April 2009 when the NPI releases their new data, especially if they don't publish their unique site IDs as is the current pattern.
All replies or PM's are welcome.
Andrew.
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tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 49
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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There has been some news coverage in Australia recently on lead levels in children's blood from industrial emissions. The main towns of interest are Mt Isa in Queensland with the Mt Isa Mines facility owned by Xstrata, and Port Pirie in South Australia with the Zinfex smelter owned by OZ Minerals following the Zinifex merger with Oxiana.
New England Journal of Medicine paper on child blood lead levels and IQ
This paper states "Blood lead concentrations, even those below 10 µg per deciliter, are inversely associated with children's IQ scores at three and five years of age, and associated declines in IQ are greater at these concentrations than at higher concentrations."
Some recent press:
Brisbane Times
ABC
The Australian
To get a perspective on comparative heavy metal emissions I created a KML collection of raw emissions. I think this goes some of the way to explaining why there are such problems in Mt Isa and Port Pirie. A little more pollution control and emissions reduction would be a very good thing.
Link to post
Link to download
I haven't attached the download directly to this post as I am trying to avoid duplicate placemarks appearing in the community layer.
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