As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I think, as noted in the article, that it seems Google sometimes uses names from advertisements as if they are canonical.
In my case, the city in question puts out a very specific, very legally defined map of each neighborhood, and has for more than a century. But real estate agents make up names for the neighborhoods, or fudge the boundaries to improve selling prices (thus commissions) and make their offerings more attractive.
About a year after a new neighborhood name is invented by a real estate agency, it starts showing up on Google maps. Then I have to deal with people complaining that our locations are mislabeled, because if it's on Google, it must be right.
It happens so often that I have an e-mail macro to respond to these people. And since the web site is very well respected by the locals, a couple of times a year I get requests from real estate agents, developers, and others, to change our maps to match their needs.
I got a particularly ridiculous one just this week saying that it's "our policy" (the real estate developer's) that maps should be drawn along a certain set of lines, and that we (the web site) are required to adhere to their policy.
I laughed.
My mom says you should do something....
Anyway, this is how it is like in The Netherlands.
Neighborhoods imply far more than geography; things like culture, traditions, cooperation, people define a neighborhood. This is, among other things, the contents of trust. The idea of a foundation on which to make a happy life amongst they neighbors can involve many different things, so it’s vague, but the most important part is that the participants themselves are who develops the neighborhood; not capitalists trying to profit from it.
Gentrification is a prime example of where this becomes a cruel and unusual form of manipulation, but it’s not the only one.
What Google is doing should absolutely be considered a crime.
In this case, the city designations are important because each year the city divides a pot of money that goes to supplemental infrastructure improvements in each neighborhood.
Because it's supplemental money, it is a fixed amount for each neighborhood. If a neighborhood's boundaries increase, then money available for improvements in that neighborhood is stretched thinner. If a neighborhood's boundaries shrink, then more money is available for improvements per block.
This is why boundaries matter, and why they are codified.
Why shouldn't everyone else define neighborhoods however they feel is most useful to them?
Agents will arbitrarily change maps basted on what their current listing are and would happily change them daily. Longer term there is little point changing place names as changing demographics will eventually adjust the meaning of these names even if no lines move on a map.
Because chaos.
Your compiler isn't going to care about your opinion of the prettiest way to spell "print". Your lawyer is going to have strong opinions about how you spell you name and address on the contract you're about to sign.
Sure, if you're writing poetry, you get to choose everything. If you need what you write to be as close to unambiguously understood as possible to other people (or machines) - then you need to follow the norms and common uses of words, and spell them and use grammar that other people agree on.
(Neighborhood names might well be closer to "poetry" than "reserved words in a computer language", but if we then become beholden to commission-driven real estate agents to define our local nomenclature from a purely personal profit seeking motivation - I think I'd rather have some anonymous city bureaucrat responsible for drawing the lines and choosing the labels...)
The names that bureaucrats or real estate agents give to neighborhoods has never mattered to me. Why do you think we have to be beholden to it? My point is that you're free to call your neighborhood whatever you want. I'm sure you're capable of figuring out which name is appropriate to use depending on the context of your conversation.
You say tomato; I say tomato.
Not aywlas. I keep sineeg tihs, and ftnrqleeuy fnid mlesyf nidneeg to dcgrusaioe (or at lesat cllhgeane) the ptsooiin. For slaml wdros it can wrok, but I fnid tihs is iltnrheeny dcfuliift (and dnniirag, as wlel as fttrrnsaiug!) to raed, and dns'eot slace to let you raed in a ceorneht fhisoan oevr a ranblaosee poierd wtih mtlui-sllibyac wrods.
Iiagnme a cueopmtr sncciee or poolsghcyy txet dylpaeisd or ogzeriand tihs way. It wulod be ulllnntiigbee, or at the vrey bset a sptmbuioal mhoted of trrrnfnseiag lraeg qnttaiiues of dlteeiad itfrimaoonn atalccurey.
Butifyou'regoingtomessupwordsandclaimreadability,whynottakeoutspacesandseehowyoumightfare?
Orsrmcablewrdosinsteeenncswhoitutseacps,too?
Hope there aren't any spelling mistakes, I tried to ensure everything was correct before I messed with it. I spent way too long on this, and since I've tried to check everything out I need a break. It was still quite enjoyable to do, although I'm sure it had a negative impact on my spelling.
> Not always. I keep seeing this, and frequently find myself needing to discourage (or at least challenge) the position. For small words it can work, but I find this is inherently difficult (and draining, as well as frustrating!) to read, and doesn't scale to let you read in a coherent fashion over a reasonable period with multi-syllabic words.
Imagine a computer science or psychology text displayed or organized this way. It would be unintelligible, or at the very best a suboptimal method of transferring large quantities of information accurately.
But if you're going to mess up words and claim readability, why not take out spaces and see how you might fare?
Or scramble words in sentences without spaces, too?
------------
Quite readable. Cant' vouch for spelling mistakes, or lack thereof :)
How many people will need to start calling you “daveFNfuck” before HN mods should change your username to “daveFNfuck”?
There are almost no situations where people refer to me by the name in my government records, and that's fine. Those records still work for their intended purpose and there's no need to update them to match my nicknames or aliases.
But what if they could?
The issue here isn’t that Google got the name wrong, but that they actively chose a new one and could change it to the new one because the public depends on a private entity’s map system and that private entity is able to manipulate the representation in their own private interest.
>If< I didn’t like you and I were able to change your name on every non-public record to “Fucking Idiot” (Job applications, Facebook, Twitter, GMail, etc.), maybe you wouldn’t mind that. Or maybe you would mind it and I convinced you to not mind it by explaining how it wouldn’t effect your government records. (I doubt the residents in question mind the name “The East Cut” either, but they already had one and preferred it. In many of these name changes, the effects can mean rapid mass development, raised rents and evictions, etc.) For you, this name change would mean at least a lot of explaining how this obnoxious poster on Hacker News was trying to make some disparate point but it has nothing to do with your qualification for the job, getting your account banned from Social media sites. You could start a new one but you’d lose all your posts and followers. At the end of the day, you should probably have been able to stop me, but you couldn’t.
I’m critiquing the shape of the system and the potential for harm. The municipal duties our ancestors fought to have managed through democratic processes we love to pride ourselves on are swiftly being surrendered to private corporations who citizens widely do not trust. And then we wait until the damage is irreversible and pretend we weren’t asking for it.
I warned you.
You say you critiqued the potential for harm and that you've warned me, but I don't believe that you've done that. You've explained how similar changes to other systems could potentially harm me, but you haven't explained how changing neighborhood names on Google maps could lead to harm.
Improvement projects are also designated by neighborhood, long term planning and resource allocation is on a per-neighborhood basis.
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"Currently the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising... We expect that commercial search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers..." - Sergey Brin and Larry Page, 1998
I’d love a detailed account of the process which derailed these moral ideals. Anyone?
It's relatively easy and fits into what Google has been doing: they want advertising to fit the (current) needs of the consumer, and the better the fit, the more money they can command for ad slots - compared to the "old guard" which simply firehosed advertising around without any kind of conversion tracking or effectiveness.
For example, when I'm in Munich and searching for a haircut and I get ads for a haircutter in Berlin, that ad money is wasted for the advertiser, and I as a customer lose one potential spot for a Munich based haircutter. When Google now shows me an ad for a Munich haircutter, or even better, one that is less than 5min of walking away, then both the haircutter benefits (from my haircut) and I benefit (for not having to walk more than I need to).
Or, to expand on this example, metadata like opening hours - advertising for a store that is closed is wasted money when I need an open store.
All that acquisition of ever more data is what drives Google: the more data they possess, the more fine they can tailor your advertising, and thus be geared towards both advertisers and users at the same time. After all, if the ads aren't effective, the advertisers will pack up shop and leave, and the users will be frustrated because they don't get what they need.
1. Let's make a better search engine. 2. Let's put ads on our search engine. 3. Let's create our own ad network so that we can control what ads look like, so they're unobtrusive. 4. People like our ads, let's put them on other people's pages. 5. People want more interesting ads, let's expand out. 6. Our business relies on ads, we need to collect more user data so we can focus ads even better than our competitors.
By doing advertising 'better' they could make a better product. Unfortunately, they went down the exact same path that other advertisers did: getting more invasive and more aggressive and less user-centric. I hate slippery slope arguments, but this seems to apply in retrospect.
For the love of money
People will steal from their mother
For the love of money
People will rob their own brother
For the love of money
People can't even walk the street
Because they never know who in the world they're gonna beat
For that lean, mean, mean green
-- For The Love Of Money, O'Jays
> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine.
> But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine.
> In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
---
If you go and search "Delta" today on Google, the top result is an advertisement for Delta that points to delta.com.
Every lawyer knows what is happening. Copyright 101 - you cannot copyright facts, a big deal for mapmakers. Google is pulling data from a map created by someone else. They are quiet about it because they do not want whoever owns that original map to catch wind that their work acts as source material for google maps.
Some map creators fight this by adding fictitious names, even streets, into maps. You can copyright fiction. So if your fake street name gets used in some other map you may have a case (the same game happened with phonebooks). No doubt google cross-checks source maps to detect such things. So it is no surprise that from this shady little battle we get the occasional strange name.
My work moved buildings a year ago (military facility). We have been trying to get our location changed on google maps for over a year, but are constantly refused. No matter what we say, taxis and pizza deliveries still go to the wrong place (a couple blocks away). Whatever source maps google uses obviously trump our opinions. We are debating installing a sign at the old location. Maybe google streetview will see it.
Who refused you? What other method did you try?
We tried the "report and error" and "claim this business" functions on maps. Both were rejected. I got a note from a moderator person saying the new location was a construction site, which it was three years ago. Now we are in the new building.
I walk through The East Cut nearly every day, and I admit I was confused by the rebranding. But it wasn't done by Google. There are people cleaning the sidewalks in East Cut shirts, banners that say East Cut, real estate companies that call it East Cut. It would be a little weird if Google ignored the name.
Yes, "The East Cut" is a strange name. But that area as never part of South Beach (which is also a strange name given that there is no beach). It wasn't really Rincon Hill, it is the area below Rincon Hill and is at sea level.
The East Cut is part of the larger South of Market area, and some of it could be considered to be the southern part of the Financial District[1]. But the neighborhood has evolved into its own thing, and deserves its own name.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_neighborhoods_in_San_F...
While in this case the impacts are fairly minor (with the exception of the border incident mentioned), this article is emblematic of the greater problem with tech giants in the information era: They cannot be regulated, managed, or held responsible for their behaviors, and have gained - and continue to gain - nigh-unprecedented influence over a staggering number of aspects our daily lives, without being chosen to do so by the people affected.
> The East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group in San Francisco that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area. The nonprofit paid $68,000 to a “brand experience design company” to rebrand the district.
> Mr. Robinson said his team asked Google to add the East Cut to its maps. A Google spokeswoman said employees manually inserted the name after verifying it through public sources.
The residents voted to create a non-profit to improve the area, the board of the non-profit voted on the name and then asked google to add it to the map. What is the problem here? How is google in any way at fault?
I am not trying to assign correctness, it might be that a developer came in and started the rebranding project to raise property values in objection to other residents, or the objectors might just be curmudgeons, the article doesn't provide enough information to tell.
> become an arbitrator of real-world boundaries, as there is functionally no oversight or recourse for those affected.
If you do what people ask, you're being the arbiter.
If you do what people don't ask, you're still being the arbiter.
This is one of those edge cases I love to hate in software dev. It's nice to imagine everything has a real value out there somewhere, but some data points don't actually have a clear definition _anywhere_.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/South+of+Market,+San+Franc...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/South+Beach,+San+Francisco...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rincon+Hill,+San+Francisco...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+East+Cut,+San+Francisc...
Put another way, you can call things whatever you want, but a marketing campaign does not obligate me to accept your silly branding nonsense.
Bored cynicism kinda requires the underlying reality support one's cynicism.
Call it what you want, but I don't see the point of being concerned over the change.
I get postal mail for someone living a few blocks away because they're technically in another suburb with a slightly worse reputation, and their real estate agent sold them on the idea they were in my suburb instead.
The post office, however, isn't paying attention to marketing or non-profit interest groups, it's paying attention to council zoning and regulation.
So every so often, I get mail addressed to a street name similar to mine, but in the next suburb over.
Names change over time, but when there's a central registry of names with a democratically founded process for managing those names, and the names are a public utility for locating things, it's best we don't just shit all over it and make up whatever we like because it suits us at the time.
Conversely, if most people do start calling it East Cut, you will be obligated to do the same if you want people to understand what you mean, since if you'll say "Rincon" they'll (mis)understand it as an area that explicitly excludes territory which they now call otherwise.
I also refer to the Emperor Norton Memorial Bridge, which is my own small contribution to building consensus on naming a different geographic feature.
What's more, NYT seems to willfully ignore that place names change and evolve constantly through natural social processes just like these. That Google is indexing this makes them no more the arbiter of it than a library is the arbiter of all knowledge.
Ultimately, is there any other possible source of names?
Unlike all those other placenames like "South of Market" which were decreed by god when he created San Fransisco :P
What they're really getting at is that it was made up by the wrong people. Like anything else that once happened organically among groups of people, you can now wrangle up an advertising budget and push it along.
My neighborhood has a "real" neighborhood name and a silly sub-neighborhood name that gets brought up once a year for a block party. If real estate developers thought the name was valuable, I bet it would mysteriously become a lot more popular.
Money (spent) IS speech.
Want to speak more or louder? Spend more money.
True, community efforts to agree socially on something also matter, but it takes much more social capital than it does cash capital to affect such changes.
> In San Francisco, the East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area.
How are these the "wrong" people to be naming the neighborhood?
Plus there are plenty of sub-neighborhood names that do get used but don’t really define any meaningful community or other enclave.
Some cities do seem to take a more active role in defining official neighborhoods but many don’t.
> Barry F. Hersh, a professor at the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University, said online maps were only the latest tool in a long line of technology influencing geography. “The telephone company once decided which neighborhood you were in,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/nyregion/amateur-mapmaker...
The East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group in San Francisco that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area. The nonprofit paid $68,000 to a “brand experience design company” to rebrand the district. [...] and one of the East Cut nonprofit’s board members is a Google employee.
Inverted pyramid is for those other newspapers I guess
Here's my fun story: in order to verify my dad's website with Google's 'My Business' service (now a defunct product?), they had to mail a physical postcard with PIN code to ensure the address was legitimate. Picking the mailing address was hooked into Maps/ Maps data; a "real" address had to be among their existing database of addresses.
Well, my dad lives in a somewhat-rural area outside St. Louis. His street is "Alt Road" -- named after the Alt family, German immigrants who started a large farm in the area 150+ years ago.
Yet Google Maps had the street listed as "Alternate Road". Clearly some data entry person presumed it must be an abbreviation and took liberty to 'correct' the apparent mistake.
So it was literally impossible to have a postcard mailed to his address on Alt Road. I had to have it sent to Alternate Road instead. I recognize, of course, the verification steps taken thereafter will have permanently corroborated what was bad data in first place. Now I'm part of the problem.
I'm guessing Maps will now forever have renamed the street. Should I alert the county to Dad's 'new' mailing address?
https://www.google.com/maps/search/alternate+rd/@38.5320081,...
Looks like they might have updated it since then.
The funny thing is, Google can get updated road info in a timely manner as most counties offer a weekly dump of their map data. Open Street Maps is often on point in rural areas due to pulling these weekly dumps, meanwhile the 3rd party vendors Google buys their address data from rarely pull down the publicly owned dataset, contributing to the shoddy quality of Google Maps outside most cities.
Every time a HN thread like this pops up I write about my annoyance with this and nobody has any solution apart from this suggestion. It shouldn't be this hard. Open Street Map is a breath of fresh air in comparison.
> Matthew Hyland, [...] said he considered those all made-up names, some of which he deleted from the map
Unfortunately all place names are made-up names. If everyone suddenly agrees to start calling a place by a new name, who is Google to argue? But what if people can't agree and some start calling it by a new name and others don't? And of course you can't just poll every resident for their opinion, so you're stuck with relying on other signals...like local advertising and publications.
Appeals to authority are also of dubious value. There may be an "official" map somewhere, but if it doesn't reflect the day-to-day usage of the space, is it very useful? Prescriptivist maps generally enjoy about as much success as prescriptivist linguistics -- pretty to look at, but not what you want in your back pocket.
Anyway, authoritative data could exist, but you'd have to collect it by survey and you'd have to get a lot of people to truthfully reply to the survey. No financial incentive exists to collect this data, apparently; wrong data sells condos (see the Cabrini Green quip above) and correct data gets you nothing except a map that more people agree with.
On some level, perhaps people read too much into neighborhoods. "I'm a good person because I live in neighborhood X." That is probably not an association worth making, but I think it exists because the reactions to wrong information in Google Maps apparently elicit so much vitriol.
Just speaks to how tricky the question really is. Cities have legally-defined boundaries for very good reasons while neighborhoods just...don't, so what is a mapmaker supposed to do?
[1] https://data.cityofchicago.org/browse?q=neighborhoods&sortBy...
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/1/viewer?msa=0&mid=13rPY3gTM...
My only real complaint with its accuracy is I recognize that Wicker Park extends north to the Bloomingdale Line, but otherwise, it's pretty good. It includes a lot of pocket neighborhoods like Palmer Square and the Wrigleyville portion of Lakeview, too.
I think this is part of the argument the article is making. People who buy real estate put an emphasis on the neighborhood, thus realtors have an incentive to create "new" neighborhoods. West Bucktown in Chicago is an example where realtors they didn't want renters or buyers to think they were in Humboldt Park so they made up a new neighborhood.
San Francisco says it's a liberal city of immigrants, but unless you're born here and have lived here all your life somehow you're part of the evil "other" that is ruining the city and changing the names of neighborhoods.
For years, several dozen points of interest in downtown Seattle were transposed into downtown Kirkland. It totally broke routing - if you tried to map a bus route from Kirkland to the Seattle Federal Building, it would give you a route that dumped you in a residential neighborhood in Kirkland.
This is a general problem with deriving stuff indiscriminately from information supplied by unidentified people.
Wikipedia has a whole bunch of similar inventions, made up by people writing them into Wikipedia initially. (http://jdebp.info./FGA/legacy-encoding-has-no-definition.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...) And there is a fair amount of stuff that survived in Wikipedia for a long time, based solely upon a mention by other, highly credulous, WWW sites.
Google Web famously gives greater credence to some common spelling errors.
I live in Thessaloniki, Macedonia (the region, not the country), Greece. In our city there's a bus station called "Bus Station Macedonia".
Funded in 1952, long before the name conflict became a thing, it was named that way because it was servicing the region of Macedonia in Greece (it's an intercity bus station).
Recently, I noticed that Google maps names it "Bus Station Thessaloniki". I live in this city for well over 20 years and I have never, not once heard it called this way. If you ask for the "Bus Station Thessaloniki" locals will ask you what do you mean. But Google returns "Thessaloniki" to the query "Macedonia".
And it's a recent thing. I don't want to get into the details of the naming conflict, but the fact is that our NATO allies want to usher Macedonia (FYROM, the country) into NATO really fast, despite their nationalist and expansionist government, because of Russia. That's a reasonable move and I fully support it.
The problem arises when instead of actually intermediating to find a solution to the name issue, they just use their tools (like Google Maps) as a propaganda machine with complete disregard to our interests or even the fabric of reality (It's simply not named like that. Period.).
Of course there are a lot more machine-learning based artifacts on Google maps than political ones (for example Fiskhorn-->Fishkorn is probably the result of assuming misspelled queries as the ground truth) but keep in mind they can use this power in numerous, much more malicious ways (ie downgrading or upgrading neighborhoods, reducing visibility of businesses that they don't like etc).
The article literally explains that the mispelling is due to Google relying on a 20 year old document lying somewhere around the internet with misspelt names.
You say nationalist as if that's something wrong, even forbidden. Greece itself is being run by nationalist governments since decades (disregarding their political color). Austria is run nowadays by a nationalist government. Heck, the US is run by Trump, who is a nationalist.
"and expansionist government"
FYROM has never ever even hinted they, a 2.1 million people tiny nation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Republic_o...), have any territorial request on Greece, an 11.2 million people nation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Greece). As Greece is part of both the EU and NATO, the idea of an expansionist FYROM is pure and simply ridiculous.
Google asleep at the wheel again.
Developers wanting to create some tony new "neighborhood" as well as real estate agents attempting to shift the borders of desirable and undesirable neighborhoods are having a field day.
Whether the first someone is an official isn't that important.
Realtors often drive the naming of new "neighborhoods", especially if it is lower class area that they want to gentrify. You know, branding.
Edit: Oh wait, that was a renaming too; just ask the Ohlone.
Maybe that's the confusion.
Sure, there's still graffiti and taco shops, but it's commissioned art and mango-chutney-glazed-pork-belly-kimchi tacos now.
Again? They've been comatose for years. Look how they keep screwing up w/Youtube.
Everything is an algorithm problem to them and when something goes wrong it's always "oops, crazy technology blah blah algorithms". Which is 100% a cop out. Google has been resting on its laurels for a while now. Like Steam, they've shirked all responsibility for their service/platform. Must be nice to do f-all and still print money...
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times themselves provide the authoritative source of neighborhoods in LA [1], through an extensive project incorporating local feedback and years of their employees' experience covering stories around LA county.
And there you have it, the exact same process that gave rise to all toponyms. It's debatable if Google has a fault for unwittingly altering a random walk. Your older Fiskhorn is no more 'right' than my new Fishkorn, and in many ways worse. If consensus forms, by whatever means, that's what's right.
Seems a bit strange that you combined an absolute prescriptivist stance ('what's right') in support of an absolute descriptivist one.
It's not logically self-consistent: what if a consensus forms that your view here is wrong?
For example, a bridge was constructed in central London named William Pitt bridge, named for the Prime Minister. But people didn't _call_ it "William Pitt Bridge", people called it "Blackfriars Bridge", because they'd always named that part of London "Blackfriars" and that's where the bridge was. Today the replacement bridge is just named "Blackfriars Bridge", nobody bothered writing "William Pitt" and being ignored.
It is still named Blackfriars Bridge to this day, even though the adjacent railway station, named Blackfriars, is actually in the form of a bridge, crossing the same river, if referring to _this_ bridge people call it "Blackfriars Railway Bridge".
But even though consensus is the appropriate tool for figuring out what these bridges are _called_ we certainly shouldn't use it to figure out when they were built - what they're made of - which country they're in and so on.
I'm not so sure.
"Fiskhorn" was probably named after a person or family. Like The Bronx in New York.
Changing it to "Fishkorn" erodes the neighborhood's history.
If you've lived most of your life in newer states, you may be used to made up place names. But in older cities/towns/states, place names have meaning. Often historic meanings. Knowing a little bit about the local history, you can read a story just by looking at a map.
Changing historic place names doesn't make the new names "right" just because the person who made the change thinks it's so.
Why do you see that change as more legitimate than Fishkorn?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation
This is precisely why mapmakers introduce deliberate errors, so they can prove that a plagiarizer produced a copycat atlas not by recompiling from the basic facts, but rather used the compilation as a starting point.
Knowing all the commercial districts is a huge advantage for them. I’m betting they can see how often people who live in each block spend in each commercial district, as well as what all the buildings and shops are named.
This must be one of the hard problems for computers, though it doesn't seem like it should be.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_townlands_of_County_...
It was really fun directing people "oh it's really easy to get here but don't use google maps".
https://bostonography.com/2012/crowdsourced-neighborhood-bou...
You've got a weirder situation in Cambridge, where there are 'official neighborhoods' which everybody ignores (except for maybe Cambridgeport) and instead divides the city into squares.
After the proposal had its first reading before the Board of Supervisors on November 8, 1909, the western neighborhoods had an immediate hostile reaction. The more populated Richmond District took the lead and fiery orators were chosen to speak out at the Board meeting a week later. When the Board met on November 15, the speakers from the two western neighborhoods decried the idea of changing streets to these "unpronounceable" Spanish names. Orators got up and berated the Board for "selling out" to the Spanish we had so nobly defeated only a few years previously in the Philippines. The over-riding sentiment was that the accepting of these names would be a humiliation and henceforth the Richmond and Sunset would be mocked as "Spanish Town". Despite the vigorous oratory, the Board of Supervisors voted 12 to 5 to accept the recommended changes.
Outraged, the residents of the western avenues got organized to fight this imposition of Spanish names on their streets....
"Spanish Town"
I'm happy to see my old stomping grounds of Golden Hill are regulated to about 6 blocks now in Google Maps. It's all Golden Heights and South Park now. "Golden Hill" encompassed everything now known as South Park at one time afaik, but it had a reputation, so they started calling part of it South Park and selling properties for a lot more.
The wisdom of the crowds puts this location in the following Neighborhoods: https://geocoder.ca/37.78992,-122.39427
1. Rincon Hill,San Francisco 2. Chinatown 3. San Francisco,CA
Where does Google come up with these names?
https://sf.curbed.com/2017/6/5/15730564/rincon-hill-east-cut...
Rincon Hill is the only name on that list that makes sense. Chinatown is no where near this neighborhood.
I've been able to create/edit/remove cafes, restaurants, roads and businesses by just filling a simple change form. In a few minutes I receive an email that the change has gone through and anyone can see it live.
What a wonderful system. (:
...and this is without even going into the incompetent mess that is bilingual road/place names in Finland. 10 years since the first complaint and it's still not fixed.
Now it says I live in "Warlick," and I have no clue where that name came from.
Also the area is mostly office buildings. The few residential buildings are mostly high end luxury apartments. I doubt most residents are even aware of the neighborhood nonprofit organization.
How so? I missed how or why this is upsetting to local residents.
So if they made a mistake they can't own up to it (like the Fiskhorn one)?
The border between Israel and the West Bank is an odd one.
'Both sides' have their view of it.
But if 7 Billion people on planet earth grow up seeing one version of the border, it's what they will come to believe as 'true' and effectively support - particularly those in modern nations that might have influence.
China is aware of this and they control any maps their citizens will ever see.
"Of course all that ocean between Philippines and Vietnam belongs to China!" is what most Chinese citizens will assume, after all, they saw it on their maps growing up. While the rest of us will have seen a different map.
Mostly the issue is populism. It doesn't matter what leaders think if their entire population thinks otherwise.
And politicians will use said populism to their favour as well.
And I also think there is room for objectivity and reason here.
And also to look at past maps of the world when the borders looked quite different.
But there is a huge difference between natural boundaries and human boundaries: one can be measured and objectively represented. You can measure heights and make a map of the earth with different colors for mountains, oceans etc. It could all be done by a machine without any human intervention, and represents useful physical differences on Earth.
On the other hand nobody could draw a map of countries' borders without talking with human societies, and no map can be objective or exact. In addition, those borders often are not even visible on the field, and in most border you can just cross and not even realize you are in another country (on roads you have border control, but most borders are just rivers, forests, fields, mountains, deserts without any remarkable feature).
The have plenty of meaning.
Nations are not plots of geography - they are groups of people.
Everyone is aware of it. Maps have always been political. Maps and borders are political creations. Why is it that whenever a controversial topic comes up, people always bring up china? Every HN thread that has a controversial topic, someone always sneaks in a reference to china?
> "Of course all that ocean between Philippines and Vietnam belongs to China!" is what most Chinese citizens will assume, after all, they saw it on their maps growing up. While the rest of us will have seen a different map.
You act like there are two maps. One china is pushing and another everyone else agrees to. China, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and every nation in ASEAN have their own maps.
The issue with maps has always existed. Whether it is current - crimea (russia/ukraine), sea of japan/east sea ( japan/korea ) or historical - hawaiians/inuit/nativesc vs european colonizers. Or the remnants of colonization like india/pakistan or artificial nations created by european colonizers in africa and the middle east which has created ethnic border issues.
Pretty much every nation today has map issues. Even within a nation there are map issues ( like the renaming of mount denali ).
As an amusing aside, and whilst not wishing to introduce flammable politics into this discussion, there's a funny thing that goes on whenever the topic of the Scottish Independence debate arises in the media or on social media. It usually concerns the Scottish border between Scotland and England and usually heads along the lines of "rebuilding Hadrian's Wall" to keep us pesky Scots out of the rUK (or whatever the reason de-jour is) and is often repeated by unionists (and journalists) far south of the border who've likely never set foot in Scotland.
Little do they realise (or they do and are playing along with the usual lazy stereotypes and tropes about Scotland) that Hadrian's Wall doesn't track along the Scottish border and is in fact up to 70 miles south of the border (at the eastern end). So they unwittingly in their minds donated a decent chunk of the north east of England to Scotland come independence day. Well, thank you :)
So yes, people's ideas about maps and where borders lie are issues everywhere, not just in China.
Why is it either of those? I think you're willfully taking "rebuild Hadrian's Wall" to have an extremely literal meaning that isn't intended by anyone saying it. Clearly they mean "build a wall between Scotland and rUK", not "follow the exact line of a 2000-year-old wall".
Even their GPS coordinate system is different than the rest of the world. Most of the world has settled on WGS-84, but when you display GPS points on a map of China, you need to convert them to their own somewhat randomly-obfuscated coordinate system [1], and display all map data in that datum as well.
Because of these kind of special-snowflake rules, when you're making any kind of geographic software, you usually have to make two versions: One for China and one for everyone else. Not unlike dealing with the USA's insistence on using imperial measurement systems while most of the rest of the world has standardized on metric.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
Other nations may have map issues, but China, in addition to concentration camps, really has map issues.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2128124/marr...
> As for the Marriott employee who “liked” the Twitter post by Friends of Tibet, Smith said disciplinary proceedings had been started. “Due to the mistake of an individual employee, our official [Twitter] account wrongly ‘liked’ the tweet supporting Tibet independence and misled the public. [We] have now suspended this employee and dismissal proceedings are under way,” he was quoted as saying.
Well, except that's not what happened. I couldn't find the one that was originally posted on HN, that article was much better, but this one has the tweet in question:
http://www.hoteliermiddleeast.com/33151-marriott-employee-fi...
He didn't make an "error" even. He liked a positive tweet that thanked them for something he didn't understand and had no instructions about. Off with his head, and everybody do the pre-emptive obedience dance, go! When something like this walks the planet, when something like this feeds, then it's not the worst idea to mention it or things related in spirit to it at every occasion, especially whenever you meet new people or new crowds, as a litmus test.
Just like you might have a dinner party in the early 1930s and, then you mention Nazi violence, and a guest mentions that people have just different ideas about how to best go about internal politics. You smile, thank them for their comment, and never invite them again. You don't "leave politics out" when concerned with serious things, unless you're either putting all your stakes on the Nazis winning and erasing all records, like they would have done in Eastern Europe had they not lost the war, or simply aren't thinking that far. As I said, many historical archives are testament to that kinda being the norm, but culture of the present and last half century, uncountable movies and speeches, kind of seem to suggest it's not the norm we end up thinking fondly of in hindsight. They're not the people we wish we had the courage to be. They're the ones we're ashamed of and euphemize, instead of just mentioning their name and some kind of glow filling our hearts. Oh well.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-25/us-airlines-give-in-to...
China insisting that non-Chinese companies remove "Taiwan" as a nation from their web sites.
Some complied fully. Others, like Apple, geolocate the censorship:
Because China's often top of mind due to being in the news. Also, because China does many things (some good, many horrible) that suit them and not the West or Western principles. I'm curious to see why this bothers you and I hope you avoid falling into the "whattaboutism" trap.
Regarding parent comment: China's aggressive military base push in SCS and other waters is very worrying.
China is NOT merely acting like anyone else in regards to international territories.
China very aggressively uses every social, political and military means to change the maps in their favor and extend their political control. This ranges from building military bases by expanding islands in international waters and putting air bases on it and threatening others, to denying that they invaded Tibet, to getting foreigners fired for liking a tweet that might hint that Taiwan is independent.
The US regularly needs to put naval vessels & aircraft in harm's way to frequently reassert Freedom Of Navigation in international waters -- the potential harm is from China's false assertion that these are Chinese territorial waters. This needs to be done ONLY against China in this region -- no other players try to pull the same nonsense.
Please stop trying to act as if China is not an outlier in this regard. Their egregious and even bellicose behavior needs to be called out and halted before it gets more violent. This only serves to normalize and encourage China's egregious behavior.
(They also ask you not to use allcaps for emphasis, since that's basically yelling.)
He is, it happens, Irish.
(His view is also poorly supported, and worse argued.)
My understanding is that it shows multiple boarders labelled as disputed. Here's the wiki page about it: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes
They also provide this guide to diplomats/officials where they essentially tell them to back off:
http://www.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritori...
" However, to remain neutral and to provide a practically useful service to a global community, we cannot delete base data to suit a particular legal jurisdiction. "
There's also Ukraine and Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Thailand, India and Pakistan, and a whole swathe of territorial claims in other places. Borders, especially when not naturally delineated by something like a river, are messy things.