Skip to main content

Power Cuts in India - Let's see how hot it gets this summer

           A bunch of Twitter users have come together to gather information about power cuts in India and make an infographic map to map the geographical spread of power cuts across the country.

           It all started when Shefaly Yogendra, a London-based investment consultant, saw a discussion on power cuts on her Twitter timeline and suggested to her friends, "May be you guys should tweet #powercut with location. The infographic will highlight the need for investment. To many people." The idea caught on. Users had begun writing about the time and location of the power cuts in their respective areas with the hashtag #powercutindia. Ajay Kumar, a software engineer, put up a web page that had started mapping power cuts in the country on the basis of the tagged tweets. Now the page can be accessed at http://powercuts.in. A Twitter account by the name of @PowerCutsIn has also been employed to collect data.

           The page is built on an Ushahidi platform, which provides free software for information collection. While the updates from Twitter are being incorporated on to the map by a team of 11 moderators information received via the smartphone app updates the map automatically.

           First city to be mapped, according to Ajay on Twitter, was Gurgaon. In the first couple of days, 46 reports had been mapped, at a rate of 9.2 reports a day. These reports have further been sorted into categories of "planned", "unplanned", "good news" (indicating no power cuts) and "voltage". An open Google document, which anyone can read, edit and shared, was also floated online, where people volunteered to do the data crunching and provide tech support. Those involved are trying to take this beyond an empty data-visualisation exercise and trying to figure out what to do with it.

           Crowdsourcing, or getting a large group of people to provide data on a particular subject, has been a rage ever since the web went social. A similar mapping exercise, which maps mobile network problems in India, already exists online by the name of Mobile Telco #Fail.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments here...

Recommended for You

Where does Google get it's live traffic data from?

Referring to a post that I wrote earlier, Google’s - Live traffic Layer , ever wondered how Google collected this data? I was wondering the other day, how Google received live data to display it on their maps as a layer! I looked up the web and found something very interesting and am sharing the same with you all. As we all know, the traffic layer is available most accurately in several states in USA. Most major metro areas in the US have sensors embedded in their highways. These sensors track real time traffic data. Easy to miss at high speeds (hopefully anyway, traffic permitting), more commonly noticed may be the similar sensors that often exist at many busy intersections that help the traffic lights most efficiently let the most amount of people through. The information from these tracking sensors is reported back to the Department of Transportation (DOT). The DOT uses this data to update some of the digital signs that report traffic conditions in many metro areas. They als...
17 comments
Read more

Playing with the markers and info window bubbles...

    In the last few posts, we have seen some marker examples and some information window examples. Now, lets do something interesting combining these two things. Just writing that "This is an info window" in the information bubble is not very interesting! And I know this...Have gone through the same phase!     So, today we will do something interesting! We will display the latitude- longitude co-ordinates of the point that the user clicks on the map! Doing this is not at all complex! Copy paste the following code and you will see for yourself a map coming to life!     The output of the above code looks as seen in the result section above! If you have any queries regarding the above code please comment on the blog post or feel free to contact me at my mail ID .
3 comments
Read more

Geodesic Polyline

    Today we will have a look at a very interesting polyline example - "The geodesic polyline". Now the first question that will pop is "What is geodesic?". Mathematically, geodesic means the shortest line between two points on a mathematically defined surface, as a straight line on a plain or an arc of a great circle or sphere.     The next question after reading the above definition is clearly, "Why do we need geodesic polylines?" and that would be followed up with "What is this Great Circle?". We will discuss this first, before we move on to the actual example today. The example is very very similar to the normal polyline example, with just a small change.     Having said so, I will now try to explain why we need a geodesic polyline? The shortest distance between two locations on the earth is rarely a straight line as the earth is roughly spherical in nature. So any two points on the earth, even if they are very close lie on a curve a...
5 comments
Read more

Jquery Mobile - Listview with data-inset property

    In the previous post we looked at a basic example of the jQuery Mobile listview. The listview in jQuery Mobile stretches 100% of the width with sharp edges and straight corners. If you wish to have rounded corners for your lists you need to make use of the data-inset="true" property.     Lets take a look at the example below. The lists as seen in the result below have rounded corners as opposed to the straight edges in the example in the previous post, where we had not made use of the data-inset property. When we say that we did not use the data-inset property, we mean that the value of data-inset property is "false". UPDATE: The following example makes use of the next stable version of Jquery Mobile 1.3.1     Hope you have followed the post. Do let me know your feedback on the same and drop your commenets below.
Post a Comment
Read more

Why this difference?

       Several of you must have observed this like I did, that the Google geocoder returns different results on the Google Maps website and Google Maps API v3 for the same address string. To understand why this difference exists, I dug deeper into the web and came up with the following.        The first and foremost place to look for an answer was the Google Maps API FAQ section. The FAQ section did not let me down of course! The FAQ section says: The API geocoder and Google Maps geocoder sometimes use different data sets (depending on the country). The API geocoder occasionally gets updated with new data, so you can expect to see results changing or improving over time.         What I concluded from the above is that, in a lot of cases Google licenses data from other companies like DigitalGlobe, Infoterra Ltd & Bluesky, GeoEye, Getmapping plc, Tele Atlas, etc. When negotiat...
3 comments
Read more