Can I trust this map? 4 questions to ask when you see a map of the coronavirus pandemic

Shutterstock

Amy Griffin, RMIT University

Maps have shown us how the events of this disastrous year have played out around the globe, from the Australian bushfires to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. But there are good reasons to question the maps we see.

Some of these reasons have been explored recently through maps of the bushfires or those created from satellite images.

Maps often inform our actions, but how do we know which ones are trustworthy? My research shows that answering this question may be critically important for the world’s most urgent challenge: the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Why are trustworthy maps important?

Maps guide decisions, including those made by governments, private companies, and individual citizens. During the pandemic, government restrictions on activities to protect public health have been strongly informed by maps.

Governments rely on public cooperation with the restrictions, and they have used maps to explain the situation and build trust. If people don’t trust information from the government, they may be less likely to comply with the restrictions.

This highlights the importance of trustworthy COVID-19 maps. Maps can be untrustworthy when they don’t show the most relevant or timely information or because they show information in a misleading way.

Below are a few question you should ask yourself to work out whether you should trust a map you read.

What information is being mapped?

The number of cases of COVID-19 is an important piece of information. But that number could just reflect how many people are being tested. If you don’t know how much testing is being done, you can misjudge the level of risk.

Low case numbers might mean that there isn’t much testing being done. If the percentage of positive cases (positive test rate) is high, we might be missing cases. So not accounting for the number of tests can be misleading.

The World Health Organization suggests that at least ten negative tests to one positive test, a positive test rate of at most 10%, is the lowest rate of testing that is adequate.

In Australia, we have been at the forefront of making sure we are doing enough testing and we are confident that we are identifying most of the cases. Undertesting has been a problem in some other countries.

How is the information being mapped?

It’s not just the numbers that matter. How the numbers are shown is also important so that map readers get an accurate picture of what we know.

The Victorian Government recently advised Melburnians to avoid travel to and from several local council areas because of high case numbers. But their publicly available map does not show this clearly.

Compare the government-produced map with a map of the same data mapped differently. Most people interpret light as few cases and dark as more cases. The government-produced map uses dark colours for both low and high numbers of cases.

Active COVID-19 Cases in Victoria, 22 June 2020, ©State of Victoria 2020.
Victorian Government Department of Health and Human Services

Who made this map and why did they make it?

Maps can inform, misinform, and disinform, like any other information source. So it is important to pay attention to the map’s context as well as the author.

Viral maps are maps that spread quickly and widely, often via social media. Viral maps cannot always be trusted, even when they come from a reputable source. Maps that are trustworthy in one context may not be in another.

An example from Australian news media in February shows this. Several media outlets showed a map that was tweeted by UK researchers. The tweet announced the publication of their new paper about COVID-19.

The media reported the map showed locations to which COVID-19 had spread from Wuhan, China, the origin of the outbreak. It actually depicted airline flight routes, and was used in the tweet to illustrate how globally linked the world is. The map was from a 2012 study not the 2020 study.

Original tweeted map that went viral and was picked up by many news outlets, © WorldPopProject.
WorldPopProject, archived on the Wayback Machine

Many readers may have trusted that reporting because their justifiable anxiety about COVID-19 was reinforced by the map’s design choices. The mass of overlapping red symbols creates a powerful and alarming impression.

While the lines in the map indicate potential routes for virus spread, it doesn’t provide evidence that the did virus spread along all of these routes. The researchers didn’t claim that it did. But without understanding why the map was made and what it showed, several media outlets reported it inaccurately.

Maps on social media are especially likely to be missing important context and explanation. The airline route map was re-shared many times as in the tweet below, often without any source information, making it hard to check its trustworthiness.

Limiting the damage done by COVID-19 is a very substantial challenge. Maps can help ordinary citizens to work together with governments to achieve that outcome. But they need to be made and read with care. Ask yourself what is being mapped, how it’s being mapped, who made the map and why they made it.

Amy Griffin, Senior Lecturer, Geospatial Sciences, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

6 things to ask yourself before you share a bushfire map on social media

NASA’s Worldview software gives you a satellite view of Earth right now, and can help track the spread of fires.
Nasa Worldview

Juan Pablo Guerschman, CSIRO

In recent days, many worrying bushfire maps have been circulating online, some appearing to suggest all of Australia is burning.

You might have seen this example, decried by some as misleading, prompting this Instagram post by its creator:

As he explained, the image isn’t a NASA photo. What a satellite actually “sees” is quite different.

I’ll explain how we use data collected by satellites to estimate how much of an area is burning, or has already been burnt, and what this information should look like once it’s mapped.

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Reflective images

When astronauts look out their window in space, this is what they see:

It’s similar to what you might see from an aeroplane window, but higher and covering a wider area.

As you read this, many unmanned satellites are orbiting and photographing Earth. These images are used to monitor fires in real-time. They fall into two categories: reflective and thermal.

Reflective images capture information in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum (in other words, what we can see). But they also capture information in wavelengths we can’t see, such as infrared wavelengths.

If we use only the visible wavelengths, we can render the image similar to what we might see with the naked eye from a satellite. We call these “true colour” images.

This is a true colour image of south-east Australia, taken on January 4th 2020 from the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite. Fire smoke is grey, clouds are white, forests are dark green, brown areas are dryland agricultural areas, and the ocean is blue.
NASA Worldview / https://go.nasa.gov/307pDDX

Note that the image doesn’t have political boundaries, as these aren’t physical features. To make satellite imagery useful for navigation, we overlay the map with location points.

The same image shown as true colour, with the relevant geographical features overlaid.
NASA Worldview / https://go.nasa.gov/2TafEMH

From this, we can predict where the fires are by looking at the smoke. However, the fires themselves are not directly visible.

‘False colour’ images

Shortwave infrared bands are less sensitive to smoke and more sensitive to fire, which means they can tell us where fire is present.

Converting these wavelengths into visible colours produces what we call “false colour” images. For instance:

The same image, this time shown as false colour. Now, the fire smoke is partially transparent grey while the clouds aren’t. Red shows the active fires and brown shows where bushfires have recently burnt.
NASA Worldview / https://go.nasa.gov/2NhzRfN

In this shortwave infrared image, we start to “see” under the smoke, and can identify active fires. We can also learn more about the areas that are already burnt.

Thermal and hotspots

As their name suggests, thermal images measure how hot or cold everything in the frame is. Active fires are detected as “hotspots” and mapped as points on the surface.

While reflective imagery is only useful when obtained by a satellite during daytime, thermal hotspots can be measured at night – doubling our capacity to observe active fires.

The same image shown as false color, with hotspots overlaid in red.
NASA Worldview / https://go.nasa.gov/2rZNIj9

This information can be used to create maps showing the aggregation of hotspots over several days, weeks or months.

Geoscience Australia’s Digital Earth hotspots service shows hotspots across the continent in the last 72 hours. It’s worth reading the “about” section to learn the limitations or potential for error in the map.

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Spread the word: the value of local information in disaster response

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When hotspots, which show “hot” pixels, are shown as extremely big icons, or are collected over long periods, the results can be deceiving. They can indicate a much larger area to be under fire than what is really burning.

For example, it would be wrong to believe all the areas in red in the map below are burning or have already burnt. It’s also unclear over what period of time the hotspots were aggregated.

The ‘world map of fire hotspots’ from the Environmental Investigation Agency.
Environmental Investigation Agency / https://eia-international.org/news/watching-the-world-burn-fires-threaten-the-worlds-tropical-forests-and-millions-of-people/

Get smart

Considering all of the above, there are some key questions you can ask to gauge the authenticity of a bushfire map. These are:

• Where does this map come from, and who produced it?

• is this a single satellite image, or one using hotspots overlaid on a map?

• what are the colours representing?

• do I know when this was taken?

• if this map depicts hotspots, over what period of time were they collected? A day, a whole year?

• is the size of the hotspots representative of the area that is actually burning?

So, the next time you see a bushfire map, think twice before pressing the share button.

Juan Pablo Guerschman, Senior Research Scientist, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sodom found? The quest for the lost city of destruction – Part 2

By Brian Nixon, special to ASSIST News Service

Dr. Steven Collins, the unassuming archeologist from New Mexico, was at a crossroad. The site he was helping to excavate in the West Bank (Ai) from 1995-2000 closed down due to warfare and political maneuvering in the region. Steve, and project director Bryant Wood, had to close up shop.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he told me in a recent interview. “For the past five years, my life had been consumed by this dig. Then it was gone. I was dumbfounded.”

But this closed door proved to be an opening for something more amazing.

“It was then that I decided to conduct some research on a thought I had in 1996. During an archeology tour, I found that the traditional site for Sodom (known as the “Southern Theory”) didn’t match the geographical profile as described in Genesis 13-19.”

“As I began to research it more, and read through Genesis 13-19 several times, I had a thought that I had to pursue: they have the wrong location.”

“Many think Sodom is in the South (modeled after the famous archeologist, William F. Albright’s views), but the text seems to indicate that the site is in the Northeast,” he continued.

As “Indiana Jones” as Steve’s thoughts were, the conclusions and findings could be even more monumental than any blockbuster movie.

Essentially, Steve took the literal text of Genesis 13-19 and created a theoretical map, using the research methodology of Dr. Peter Briggs. This “map” utilizes a scientific approach to determine the validity of ancient texts. The conclusion? The texts in Genesis are reliable geographical indicators.

Working with Briggs, Collins developed a theory that the location was not in the Southern region, but in the Northeast.

From there, Dr. Collins began to flesh out his thoughts in a formal paper. This 250-page research paper was highlighted at the Near-Eastern Society Conference.

In his research, Collins focused in on five key areas: the geographical indicators, the chronological indicators, the terms of the destruction, the architecture and pottery, and the facts themselves.

“What I didn’t want to do,” he said, “was trample down the well-worn theories of past commentators and scholars. Basically, I wanted the text to speak for itself.”

“At the NES meeting, I received favorable comments from men of whom I have the utmost respect. I knew we were on to something quite thrilling.”

The one thing left to do was further research and the beginning of a dig.

“So my wife, a couple of students from Trinity Southwest University, and I headed off to Jordan to do research. We were in Jordan by 2002.”

“When I was doing research in the U.S., many of the maps and books were conspicuously absent of any detailed information regarding the north eastern region of the Dead Sea. Sadly, many of the scholars had ignored the text in Genesis.”

In Jordan, Collins found a host of helpful material.

“While in Jordan I found many maps, books, and archeological information at the American Center for Oriental Research library. In particular, a book by the journalist Rami Khouri, gave me the foundation I needed to get started.”

“Though this book was a popular work, it quoted from—and made reference to—many scholarly works. From that point on, we used Khouri’s book as a guide to the Jordanian literature on the sites north of the Dead Sea . We spent hours copying as much material as we could.”

“What we discovered seemed to coincide with our findings: Sodom was not in the south, it was northeast of the Dead Sea.”

“We were able to locate some information from one of the last major digs that occurred in the area. We also paid close attention to a 1975/1976 survey of the Jordan Valley. This survey stated that the area of our interest had many ancient sites.”

“So we headed off to the area northeast of the Dead Sea and began to look around. What we found amazed us. There were at least ten sites that could possibly be ancient Sodom.”

“Sodom is mentioned first in the Bible—consistently—thereby giving it prominence as the largest city in that area. So based upon the text and our previous research we chose the largest site. And let me tell you, this find at Tel-al-Hammam turned out to be much greater than we ever hoped for.”

Report from the Christian Telegraph

REFORMED PARTICULAR BAPTIST FELLOWSHIP

The ‘Reformed Particular Baptist Fellowship’ community (social network / group) is a Particular and Reformed Baptist Community, providing a wonderful opportunity for members to communicate, interact, contribute and fellowship with other Particular and Reformed Baptists from around the world. We also welcome other Reformed brethren to our community, but ask you to always remember that this is a ‘Baptistic’ group and it will therefore reflect the distinctives of such believers as expressed in the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith.

There are actually two sites in this community. This is our new and main site. The other site is at http://particularbaptist.ning.com/ (on the Ning Platform), where the community first begun. Eventually I hope to have the site completely contained here on the Grou.ps platform. Because Grou.ps allows very limited customisation of member profiles I have decided to keep the Ning site going for the time being, with the hope that members of the first site will move to Grou.ps when they are comfortable to do so (the Ning site will then be closed). Should members of the community choose to continue on both sites for the time being, it will be necessary to switch between sites, perhaps having two tabs open in your browser).

Please have a look around the site and familiarise yourself with all that is on offer. This platform is in ‘Beta’ development, meaning there is still some way to go before it is fully functional and all features are working in a stable manner (so please be patient).

I would encourage all members of the community to become actively involved and contribute regularly, thereby making our community all the stronger and vibrant.

Introducing Community Features:

At the top of the page is the directory menu if you like. These ‘buttons’ will take you to the main sections of the community and appear on most pages within the community (except at Ning of course). In brief, this is what you will find within the community at each of these locations:

• My Page: This location is a members individual profile page, including such things as a comment wall and a record of your recent activity within the community.

• Mems: This location shows all the members of the community.

• Maps: This location allows for members of the community to plot their current location on a map, etc.

• Calendar: This location allows community members to mark events on a calendar, pass on event details, etc.

• Wiki: This location is the ‘Particular Baptist Systematic Theology Encyclopedia’ wiki, which works in in a similar fashion as Wikipedia.

• Forum: This is a location to discuss various questions and topics raised by community members.

• Blog: This is a Blog that is open to all community members to post on – sort of like an ‘open mic’ type approach to Blogging.

• Files: This is a location for community members to share files with other community members, such as books, articles, slideshows, presentations, etc.

• Links: This is a place for community members to share links they have found useful.

• Photo: This is a place for community members to share photos with one another.

• Video: This is a place for community members to share videos with one another.

• Music: This is a place for community members to share music with one another.

• Groups: This is a place for community members to set up there own groups within the community – you may have a Bible Study Group, a Church Group, etc.

• Contact: This is a place to contact administration.

In short, I am very hopeful that this community location will be far superior to that of the previous. Please join and grow with us.

Visit Reformed Particular Baptist Fellowship at:
http://grou.ps/particularbaptist/home

Visit the network’s ‘parent’ web site at:
http://particularbaptist.com/

Kevin – founder of the Reformed Particular Baptist Fellowship

MISSIONARIES EVACUATED FROM MADAGASCAR

Assemblies of God World Missions has evacuated its missionaries from troubled Madagascar, an island nation in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa, reports Dan Wooding, founder of ASSIST Ministries.

Following months of threats and infighting for political position, Madagascar experienced a coup on March 17, as President Marc Ravalomanana apparently chose to step down.

“The military is divided as to who they are going to support,” explains Africa Regional Director Mike McClaflin. “The American Embassy very strongly urged American citizens to evacuate the island . . . and now the American Embassy has evacuated its staff.”

McClaflin says that Assemblies of God World Missions (AGWM) leadership made the decision on March 14, at the recommendation of the U.S State Department, to take AG missionaries in Madagascar out of harm’s way and moved them to Nairobi, Kenya, for the time being.

“With missionaries now in 212 countries and territories of the world, almost no civil uprising, conflict or disaster takes place in the world that does not touch the lives of some of our missionaries,” states AGWM Communications Director Randy Hurst. “The unrest and government takeover in Madagascar affects four missionary families and well as one single missionary.”

Included in the list of missionaries evacuated are the families of Nate and Tammy Lashway, Jay and Carey Rostorfer, and Aaron and Heather Santmyire, Zach and Shellie Maddox, missionaries from East Africa who were visiting the Santmyires, along with short-term MAPS worker Ashley Masten, were also evacuated. The Manny Prabhudas family, who also serve in Madagascar, are currently in the United States on their itineration cycle.

Hurst adds that “Madagascar is an example of how so many of the crises in our world today demand that we as a church must commit ourselves increasingly to intercessory prayer for our missionaries and fellow believers around the world.”

Report from the Christian Telegraph