Bing Maps Adds Malls

Bing Maps Adds Malls

Mall Maps in Bing Maps
The preview lists a set of malls in the Seattle, Boston, and NY metro areas, including:

1. Bellevue Square, WA
2. Crossroads, WA
3. Redmond Town Center, WA
4. Shops at the Bravern, WA
5. Meridian Town Center, WA
6. North Bend Premium Outlets, WA
7. Seattle Premium Outlets, WA
8. Cascade Mall, WA
9. Everett Mall, WA
10. Kitsap Mall, WA
11. University Village, WA
12. Marketplace at Factoria, WA
13. Bellevue Place, WA
14. Lincoln Square, WA
15. North Gate Mall, WA
16. Pacific Place Mall, WA
17. Tacoma Mall, WA
18. West Field Southcenter Mall, WA
19. Southhill Mall, WA
20. Queens Center Mall, NY
21. Roosevelt Field Mall, NY
22. Chestnut Hill Mall, MA

source:
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/12/07/bing-s-new-mall-maps-get-in-get-out-and-the-avoid-the-crowds.aspx

New SketchUp books for interior designers

Judging by last year’s SketchUp Pro sales numbers, it’s pretty clear that interior design is one of our fastest-growing markets. It’s about time, too—between the piles of content on the 3D Warehouse, the availability of awesome photo-rendering plugins, LayOut and SketchUp’s all-around awesomeness, there’s plenty for interior designers to love.

And now there are books, too! Adriana Granados is an architect and interior designer who happens to know an awful lot about SketchUp. She’s written a series of mercifully short, to-the-point manuals collectively titled Google SketchUp for Interior Design & Space Planning that are available for sale online. The books are printed in full color and I think they’re really helpful.

UseR Meetup at Google San Francisco

Earlier this week, Google hosted the Bay Area useR Group at our San Francisco office. Over 40 attendees showed up to hear Dylan Beaudette from UC Davis give a presentation about investigating soil genesis and geography with R (PDF). Dylan has been using R to study and visualize large amounts of soil data and has made his routines available in the aqp: Algorithms for Quantitative Pedology package on CRAN.

Dylan Beaudette explaining his research.

Dylan’s research also utilizes a number of Google technologies, such as Google Earth KMZ overlays of soil data and the Google Ngram Viewer for tracking Temporal Trends in Soil Science Jargon. In addition to open source and soil science, there were lively discussions at the meetup about reproducible research and the data sharing problem.

I’d like to thank our speaker, Dylan, all of the attendees, the Bay Area useR organizers who continue to put together interesting talks each month, and the Google Open Source Program Office for hosting the event. We’re looking forward to the R User Conference in England in August and more local Bay Area Meetups in the interim.