There are slim pickings in the make smarter department this past month, but there were a few things that jumped out at me.

First, via Vector One, Cynthia Dietz, Map Librarian at the University of Stony Brook NY, wronte an excellent paper called Geospatial Web Services, Open Standards, and Advances in Interoperability: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography. From the abstract:

This paper is designed to help GIS librarians and information specialists follow developments in the emerging field of geospatial Web services (GWS). When built using open standards, GWS permits users to dynamically access, exchange, deliver, and process geospatial data and products on the World Wide Web, no matter what platform or protocol is used.

Next up, via InfoQ, comes an interesting piece from the Harvard Business Review titled What Really Motivates Workers. Most studies have found it isn’t money that motivates workers, but the other assumption, that it’s recognition, isn’t the case either.

In a recent survey we invited more than 600 managers from dozens of companies to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five workplace factors commonly considered significant: recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, support for making progress, and clear goals. “Recognition for good work (either public or private)” came out number one. Unfortunately, those managers are wrong.

As it turns out, they found the #1 motivator for employees is progress – the sense that people are making headway in their jobs or are overcoming obstacles.

Finally, ESRI put out a good video on their YouTube channel called Social Media and Geo-Services: Real-time modeling of the disaster situation in Haiti. It showcases some of the abilities of ArcGIS Explorer, which is my mind is one of ESRI’s best, least hyped products.

Here’s the TED talk on upcoming Bing map features that has been in the news lately. In a nutshell, MS Worldwide Telescope and Flicker geotagged image integration with a demo of a live video overlay. It’s an impressive demonstration. The coolest bit is the Flickr image integration – it’s doing some kind of SIFT operation to get the Flickr image in the exact right place on the background imagery.

Doh!

Unfortunately, when I head over to Bing Maps I get one of these.

Thank you, Microsoft. No luck trying to run it via Moonlight, Novell’s open source Silverlight implementation, either. Sigh.

Some things are so amazing, they just have to be shared. Sand painting over a light box by Kseniya Simonova, who won Ukraine’s version of “America’s Got Talent.” It’s an interpretation of Germany’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII, and you can tell from the audience’s reaction how emotional the subject is there. Thanks to my sister for passing it along.

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for Flash.

First you had some quotes from Steve Jobs of this ilk:

Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.

Ouch.

Adobe quickly put out a statement that they never ship Flash with known crash bugs (I’m not sure whether they did themselves any service with that remark), and then someone quickly proved they did. If you click on this link your browser will likely explode. It’s a Flash bug first reported in 2008. Only the 10.1 beta is safe.*

With support for HTML5 video and canvas, Flash is in trouble. If you’re using anything but IE, check this out. No Flash or Silverlight or Java here – just HTML5 canvas and JavaScript. The biggest supports under the Flash tent are market share, the lack of a specified coded for HTML5 video and, ironically, Internet Explorer, since they don’t offer much in the way of HTML5 support yet. If there was a HTML5 standard video codec and IE supported it, I don’t think their market share would last long. Big sites like YouTube are already experimenting with HTML5 video (h.264). And with breakout gadgets like the iPhone and (less likely) iPad not supporting Flash, consumers will demand alternatives.

Every time I hear about devs (some of my co-workers included) choosing the Flex API for AGS I have to bite my lip. With the life span of web mapping sites they’re probably more than safe going with Flash – it’s slide will likely be long and slow. But I think that slide is becoming inevitable.

*btw, if you have a supported graphics card the 10.1 beta will hit the GPU rather than clobber your CPU. It’ll keep your media center PC from eating itself.

I’ve already been asked several times how I did the floating cloud bit in the header, so here it goes. Fair warning: if you were expecting some miraculous bit of coding here you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

First, I’m using jQuery for this, so stick a reference to the Google CDN in your head.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js">

</script>

Happy cloud is happy.

Next, you need an image to go blundering about on your web page. If you don’t want it to obscure the page underneath it, you’re going to have to do some creative transparency. Here I made a cloud with a radial shading so the edges are less transparent than the middle. But you could use or make anything you want here. I used and recommend Inkscape if you don’t have a favorite vector graphics editor yet.

We’re going to use the image as a background to a div, which you should stick in whatever container div you want the image to roam around in, probably at the bottom. I stuck it in a div creatively named “page-head”.

<div id="cloud"></div>

Now let’s style that div a bit.

/* moving image */
#cloud {
position: relative;
top: 10px;
left: 0;
width: 299px;
height: 173px;
background: transparent url(img/cloud.png) no-repeat scroll 0 0;
}

Nothing special here. Use the top property to move the image up or down to where you want it. Note I’m setting the left property even though I’m starting it the default (0). This is important as you’ll see in a minute.

Now on to the JavaScript.

$(document).ready(function() {
animateCloud();
});

function animateCloud() {
$("#cloud").animate({
'left':  $("#page-head").width() - $("#cloud").width() - parseInt($("#cloud").css("left")) }, 50000, 'linear', function() {            animateCloud();        });
}

When the page is ready, we call the animateCloud function. From there we’re running a jQuery animation where we change the left property of the could by the container width – the width of the cloud image – the current left property of the image. So when the image is at the starting position, we get the width of the container – the width of the cloud div, since the starting left property of the cloud is 0. This is why we had to specify the position even though it’s 0 – if you didn’t, jQuery would return a NaN for this value. So the image goes across the screen over the course of 50 seconds (50000ms), and when it gets to the end it calls itself again. This time we set the left to 0, since container width – cloud div width – cloud div left property will equal 0. Back it moves, calls itself, ad nauseam.

Told you you’d be disappointed.