The World Port Index (Pub 150) contains the location and physical characteristics of, and the facilities and services offered by major ports and terminals world-wide (approximately 3700 entries), in a tabular format. Entries are organized geographically, in accordance with the diagrams located in the front of the publication.

The World Port Index publication can be downloaded in the following formats:

• Adobe PDF document file
• Windows executable file (automatically installs Adobe PDF document file) 
• Microsoft Access database 
• ESRI ArcGIS shapefile

Specific World Port Index entries can be retrieved from the on-line database using the query form below. 

http://www.nga.mil/NGAPortal/MSI.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=msi_portal_page_62&pubCode=0015

Kai Sonder (PhD; Head Gis Unit, CIMMYT)

BigThink (http://bigthink.com) is a NY-based online knowledge forum, famous for posting interviews with many high-profile experts from a wide range of fields (think of it as TED in interview format; my favorite is the one with Jason Fried: http://bigthink.com/ideas/18522) and timely bits of radical ideas (follow @bigthink).

They have a special discussion topic going on now, and it’s about “Women and Power”. As one of the posts on the website, today they posted a global dataset (country-level) of the “Global Index of Women’s Power”.

From the post (http://bigthink.com/ideas/24565):

In consultation with leading universities and research groups, Big Think has created a composite country-by-country index by equally combining data from three recent international studies dealing with women's power:

·         The World Economic Forum’s “The Global Gender Gap Report,” an index which measures national gender gaps using economic, political, education and health criteria.

·         The Economist Intelligence Unit’s “Women’s Economic Opportunity Index,” which measures women’s economic opportunity and their ability to participate equally in the workforce.

·         The United Nations Development Programme’s Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) and Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), which rank countries based on gender-specific criteria like adult literacy, life expectancy and estimated income.

The numerical Power Quotient, which averages the results of these studies, is on a scale from zero to 100—with 100 being the best possible numerical score for female empowerment, and zero the worst. Yemen, the country where women have the least power according to the survey, received a score of 24.02 on our scale. Meanwhile Norway, which got a score of 88.75, was found to be the country where women have the most relative power.

Along with the Google Visualization implementation, they also posted a raw data in CSV format (but they forgot to put country code; could somebody please attach ISO code column and share around for your lazy colleages? :p): http://assets.bigthink.com.s3.amazonaws.com/Big%20Think%20Women%20Global%20Index.csv

Natural

Managed

FYI, yesterday’s Nature has a cover story on the Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity by C. J. Vörösmarty (CCNY) et al (doi:10.1038/nature09440). Following that, this story has been posted practically everywhere on the media by now, including BBC.

On their project website (http://www.riverthreat.net), you can find/download their published data and maps (0.5-deg, global) of four water “threats” as well as 23 (!) drivers in PNG, ESRI ASCII, NetCDF, and KML.

·         Main article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7315/full/nature09440.html (login required)

·         Methodology: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7315/extref/nature09440-s1.pdf (freely accessible)

·         Data and maps: http://www.riverthreat.net/data.html