Philippines High-resolution Satellite Imagery on Google Earth - July 2013

Here's an update to the high-resolution satellite coverage of Google Earth/Maps in the Philippines. I've been making and updating a map like this for the past two years (see June 2012 and April 2011), so might as well keep it going.

Compared to the rather disappointing update last time, in the past year apparently Google's been doing a good job adding high-res coverage to a lot of new areas, including Boracay and Panglao. As you can see on the map, there's now significantly more red than non-red. Amount of coverage is now at 85.8%.

• 54.7% in April 2011
• 60.1% in June 2012
• 85.8% in July 2013

Only big glaring omissions on the map is the large swath of eastern Bohol, and the mountainous areas in inland Mindoro. The largest uncovered city is Kidapawan (population 125,447).

My Philippines Island Hopping Update

Last weekend I got to go to Cagayan de Oro for a day to attend a wedding, marking the first time I visited Mindanao, our country's second largest island. The visit was less than 24 hours, but at least I can say I've been there.

This is what the map of the Philippines would now look like if it only included islands that I have set foot on:

Un-visited islands are in very faint gray. Most of the smaller islands I've been to are too tiny to even be visible on this map.

Major islands I've visited (land area over 500 sq. km):

• Luzon
• Mindanao
• Negros
• Palawan
• Panay
• Leyte
• Cebu
• Bohol

Smaller islands, with the city or municipality they're part of:

• Siquijor
• Panglao (Panglao, Bohol)
• Mactan (Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu)
• Boracay (Malay, Aklan)
• Crystal Cove (off of Boracay, Malay, Alkan)
• Bantayan (Bantayan, Cebu)
• Malapascua (Daanbantayan, Cebu)
• Apo Island (Dauin, Negros Oriental)
• Balicasag (Panglao, Bohol)
• Virgin Island (Panglao, Bohol)
• Grande Island (in Subic Bay, Bataan)
• Maribago (Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu)
• Lagen (El Nido, Palawan)
• Miniloc (El Nido, Palawan)
• Dibuluan (El Nido, Palawan)
• Entalula (El Nido, Palawan)
• Pinasil (El Nido, Palawan)
• Vigan (El Nido, Palawan)
• Corregidor (Cavite City, Cavite)

The only large islands I haven't get been to are Samar, Mindoro and Masbate, and I don't imagine I'll be going there any time soon. Not much interesting to see there I'm afraid.

Philippines High-resolution Satellite Imagery on Google Earth - June 2012

Here's an update to the post I made last year, showing the extent of high-resolution satellite imagery in Google Earth/Maps. Areas in red have high-res coverage.

I started work on this hoping to see some real progression over the past year, but it was actually a bit disappointing to find that there wasn't a whole lot of additional area that was covered. A lot of the updates recently are just newer satellite imagery for places that already had coverage. Anyway, most of the important stuff is covered, including the top 70 most populous cities in this country. That's every city with a population above 160,000.

Still not covered are the tourism hotspots of Boracay and Panglao. Something to hope for.

712,958 Steps in 12 Weeks

A few months ago at work we got an irresistible offer to join a program meant to motivate people into keeping fit. Irresistible because it's completely free.
The deal is we get a free pedometer in the mail, and for 12 weeks we report our results on pedometer steps, exercise minutes, and weight management. I was less interested in the exercise and weight goals-- my weight is just fine. But I have come to develop a bizarre fondness for gathering data on things normally taken for granted, so having a pedometer was an alluring prospect.
My total: 712,958 steps.

Pedometer steps per day

My most active day (29,646 steps) was on May 29, when I joined a 10K fun run in the morning, then went to the Mall of Asia in the afternoon. Only one other day breached the 20,000 step level.

My least active day (1,138 steps) was on July 25, when I stayed at home all morning, slept all afternoon, and worked from home at night.

Pedometer steps per week, 12 weeks.

This weekly graph shows the same data but looks more stable, less affected by daily events.

Cumulative pedometer steps

The kit included a little booklet that I used to track my daily progress of steps, exercise minutes, and weight management. It also included a rough guide to how many steps you should be taking for a healthy lifestyle. The recommended number to aim for is 10,000.

• Under 5,000 is Sedentary
• 5,000-7,500 is Low Active
• 7,500-10,000 is Somewhat Active
• 10,000-12,500 is Active
• Over 12,500 is Highly Active.

For me, simply getting to work means walking for about 1 km-- or 1200 steps-- so I'm already pretty much assured of 2,400 steps per workday. Still, only one third of my days reached that magical 10,000 step target. Worse, another one third of my days failed to reach even 5,000 steps-- which is classified not only inactive, but sedentary:

Other numbers to look at:

• Days: 84
• Total steps: 712,958
• Most steps in one day: 29,646 (May 29)
• Least steps in one day: 1,138 (July 25)
• Average steps per day: 8488
• Most steps in one week: 88,813 (Aug 1-7)
• Least steps in one week: 36,869 (July 4-10)
• Average steps per week: 59,413
• Days with over 10,000 steps ("Active"): 28 (33%)
• Days with under 5,000 steps ("Sedentary"): 33 (39%)

Assuming an average stride length of 80 cm (a figure I came up with just now from a few minutes of Googling), my total steps in those 12 weeks would add up to 570 km, which is approximately the straight line distance from Manila to Cebu.

The 12-week program may be over but I'm still wearing the pedometer this very moment. I think I'll decrease the tracking of my progress to a weekly basis now though, lest I lose my mind in graphs and statistics.

Flood of Wedding Photos

Well we finally received the complete set of photographs from our wedding photographer, and I was immediately crushed by the sheer volume of it. The whole thing came on 10 DVDs. Not CDs, but DVDs, each of them with their storage capacity reasonably used up.

The photos are shot at a resolution of 4288x2848, and average about 5 MB per image, with the largest ones reaching 10 MB. I had to copy them straight from the DVDs to my external hard disk because I simply did not have space for them on the actual laptop.

Here's a breakdown of where all these pictures are coming from:

Granted, the vast majority of these are duplicates, and it's not uncommon to have 15 images of the same pose with minuscule variations:

It will take several days-- perhaps weeks-- to sort through them and clear out the redundancies, choose the favorites, and post them on Facebook (that is, of course, the point).

Here's a random image. Not even one of the greatest photos, just a good random one:

Credit must be given where it is due: Our wedding photographer was Rolando Pascua, who is based in Cebu, extremely talented, and worth every cent.

Philippines High-resolution Satellite Imagery on Google Earth - April 2011

Here's a map of the high-resolution satellite imagery of the Philippines that's available on Google Earth as of April 2011. Areas in red have high-res coverage.

Some background-- seav made some maps like this before, but it's been a few years and I felt like seeing what the coverage looks like today.

Compare this with what the coverage looked like in June 2006 or March 2007.

Note, in Google Earth you can more clearly see which areas are available in high-resolution by clicking the historical imagery button.

The top 40 most populous cities and municipalities in the Philippines all have high-res coverage. The largest uncovered cities are poor Cabanatuan in Nueva Ecija (rank 44, population 259,267), Marawi in Lanao del Sur (rank 67, population 177,391), and Valencia City in Bukidnon (rank 71, population 162,745).

Also notably lacking high-res coverage are the tourist spots of Boracay and Panglao/Tagbilaran.

Still, 54.7% of the Philippines' total land area is covered, including 65.9% on the island of Luzon. That's more than half! What a glorious age we live in.

Philippine Senate Batch of 2004, Where Are They Now?

A look back at what happened to the Philippine Senators elected in 2004, whose terms end on June 30, 2010:


Reelected to the Senate this year are Juan Ponce Enrile, Pia Cayetano, Jinggoy Estrada, Lito Lapid, Bong Revilla, and Miriam Defensor-Santiago.

Richard Gordon and Jamby Madrigal both lost in their bid to become President, and Mar Roxas has apparently lost his bid for Vice President.

Senior citizens Aquilino Pimentel and Rodolfo Biazon both had their proxy candidates who lost in their campaign for the Senate (daughter Gwen Pimentel and son Ruffy Biazon).

And it took Alfredo Lim just 3 years to get tired of the Senate. He was elected Mayor of Manila back in 2007.

Philippine Senate, Batch of 2010

A look at the names that the people of the Philippines chose on Monday to comprise half of the Senate:

The Facebook Campaign, Pt. 2

Now that the election is over, here's a look back at the growth in Facebook fans of the Philippine presidential candidates since the start of the year. (See my previous post, from back in February)

Noynoy Aquino and Manny Villar kept a surprisingly tight race going for most of this graph, with Aquino leading by just around 40,000 fans-- until around April, when the anti-Villar propaganda began to pile up and Aquino began to pull away. The lead widened to 100,000 in late April, then something weird happened to Noynoy's fan page (his official site described it as a technical and security issue), rendering it mostly inaccessible. This allowed Villar to take the lead just days before the election.

Gibo Teodoro placed a valiant third. The others, by comparison, are hardly worth mentioning.

It's interesting to note that Erap Estrada, though ranking a shockingly strong second place in the actual election, is a very distant 6th place on Facebook. I don't have a single friend that supports him.

Philippine Election 2010 - The Facebook Campaign

So, I scoured Facebook to check how many fans each Philippine presidential candidate has. And here you go:


Methodology: I only counted the number of fans from each presidential candidate's one most popular fan page. Some candidates have fans spread out over a bunch of minor fan pages, but if we start rounding those up and combining them it risks slipping too far into the subjective. Plus, it's possible for one person to be a fan of multiple pages.

Noynoy Aquino and Manny Villar are way ahead of the pack. Aquino leads with 661k fans, and Villar is not far behind with 630k. Gibo Teodoro is probably the only other one worth mentioning, with a respectable 155k.

This is followed by Eddie Villanueva with 30k, Richard Gordon with 15k, Joseph Estrada with 7k, Nicanor Perlas with 3k, Jamby Madrigal with 600, and JC de los Reyes with 500.

As for "Vetellano Acosta" (I must put his name in quotation marks, as it seems unclear whether this candidate actually exists), he scrapes the bottom of the barrel with a jaw dropping 6 fans. The only page for him that I could find was called "Vetellano Acosta for Philippine President?"-- yes, with a question mark-- and listed other presidential candidates as its favorite pages. The page's only wall post asked, appropriately, "Sino ba si Mr. Vetellano Acosta?". Nobody knows.

The Twitter Illusion

Another interesting thing I found while putting together the previous post. A Google Trends graph comparing the search volume of "twitter" and "facebook":


As seen in the upper graph, Twitter emerged in 2009. But with Facebook in the scale, Twitter is reduced to practically nothing. It's simply annahilated by the Facebook juggernaut. The one-sidedness of the comparison may be surprising, but the winner is not.

The real revelation is in the lower graph, tracking news reference volume, where Twitter and Facebook are practically neck-and-neck.

Why such a huge discrepancy between news volume and the search volume? It seems to support my theory that Twitter is just a hype machine for news sources that no one in the real world actually uses.

Friendster's Fall

My number of friends remaining on Friendster has gone down by around 15 from its peak. I don't have it in me yet to delete my account entirely, so I deleted another 20 people that I've decided are not really friends. Maybe that'll make it easier to let go, eventually. Friendster has become an internet wasteland of neglected, obsolete, and embarassing information.

This is interesting, a Google Trends graph showing search volume for "friendster" and "facebook" in the Philippines:



Friendster continuted to grow gradually over the years, hitting its high point at the end of 2008. It then went into a steep decline throughout 2009, and is now about 70% off from its peak. Notice how the drastic redesign at the end of 2009 barely registered on the graph.

Meanwhile, Facebook exploded in 2009, passing Friendster at around August, and actually becoming bigger than Friendster ever was.

Also interesting, the same graph but for the whole world:

Proximity to Chowking

A map of the Philippines showing proximity to the nearest Chowking:

Source: www.chowking.com

There are 376 Chowking restaurants in the Philippines-- that's 1 per 798 sq km, or 1 per 244,635 Filipinos. Nearly half of Chowkings are in Metro Manila: With 175 restaurants, that's 1 per 3.64 sq km, or 1 per 66,019 Filipinos in Metro Manila.

I originally was going to do a map for Jollibee or McDonald's, but they have way more branches. Maybe some other time.

The new big C2 and economies of scale

At the grocery store a few days ago, rising off of the shelves like a torpedo, the new big bottle of C2 caught my eye.

I do not know if this is a new thing, or just new to me. This is 1.5 liters, the same size as a bottle of Pepsi or Coke. Before this the biggest bottle available was 1 liter, and that was only sporadically available.

It's about time we started getting our groceries in larger volumes to save on costs. I feel like such a chump when buying milk in those 1 L cartons, with the knowledge that America buys their milk by the gallon (3.78 L).

One of my favorite principles of economics, which people do not seem to take advantage of as much as they should, is economies of scale, the principle that per-unit cost decreases as output increases. In other words, it's cheaper on a per-unit basis to buy goods in bulk.

The 350 mL bottle of C2 costs P14.25, while 1.5 L bottle of C2 costs P32.25. That means that the 1.5 L bottle is about double the cost, but has more than four times the content.

Buying the 350 mL bottle is essentially paying double what you could be paying. So, yeah. Think about it.

Facebook friend statistics

Just a bunch of statistics and graphs from playing with Facebook data in Microsoft Excel:

Of my 232 friends in Facebook, 209 have their birthdays specified, and just 145 of those also specified the year that they were born.

Here's an age distribution graph of my friends (more accurately, the age that they turn on their birthday in 2009). The youngest is 14, and the oldest is 63. There's a massive spike at 25, since that's the age of most of my high school and college classmates. I'm actually 24 myself, and a year younger than most of the people in my class. This graph may be biased against old people, who I assume are more reluctant to reveal their age.

I was able to divide my friends into five categories with very little overlap: Family (including many extended relatives), high school, college (including faculty), work, and others. College people are the biggest slice of the pie. The majority of the people lumped into "others" are known to me mainly as friends of friends, plus some other people that I simply do not remember but would feel guilty removing since we have a lot of mutual friends. Haha...

Any other ideas for graphs?

The Philippine peso, from 1950 to 2009

A 60-year history of the Philippine peso packed into one happy graph:

What we have here is a chart showing the historical exchange rate of the Philippine Peso against the US Dollar from 1950 to 2009. (Data from 1950 to 1997 from Penn World Tables; Data from 1997 onwards from Oanda, using exchange rates on January 1 of each year)

It's just really weird that I haven't seen a graph like this available anywhere else on the internet, because there's so much that can be learned from it. Look at how all the significant movements in the graph can be traced to events in Philippine history (which is, looking back at it, composed almost entirely of bad news):

• 1961: President Diosdado Macapagal allows the peso to float on the free currency exchange market, unpegging it from the US dollar to stimulate economic development. Its value sinks from P2 to P3.7 to the dollar.

• 1970: I can only assume this is due to the First Quarter Storm, where a series of heavy demonstrations and protests and marches take their toll on the country. The value of the peso slips from P4 to P6 to the dollar.

• 1983: Ninoy Aquino assassinated, and Marcos' shit hits the fan. The country rapidly deteriorates, culminating in the EDSA Revolution. Value of the peso dives from P8 to 20 to the dollar over a few years.

• 1989: A series of ugly coup attempts threatens the Aquino administration, including a bloodbath in January 1989. Peso descends from P21 to P27 to the dollar over two years.

• 1997: The Asian Financial Crisis occurs, and I can't understand it no matter how many times I check Wikipedia, but the peso crashes from P26 to P41 to the dollar in a single frickin' year.

• 2000: Economic mismanagement and political instability during the Estrada administration, plus charges or corruption leading to an impeachment trial. Peso nosedives from P40 to P50 to the dollar.

And finally there's 2005 to the present, the only time in history that the Philippine peso has significantly strengthened in value, albeit with a sharp rebound in 2008. I'm at a loss to attribute this to any single event, but history has shown that movements of that scale do not happen without a reason.

Where Do Philippine Senators Come From?

I liked this recent post at FiveThirtyEight.com and wondered what a Phlippine version would be like, so I baked up this delicious pie chart. It may not be as informative or useful due to the much smaller number of members in the Philippine Senate (and the messy nature of Philippine politics), but it's something:



This shows the most recent prior elected office that the 23 current Philippine senators held at the time of their first election to the Senate. Take note that it only accounts for elected offices-- appointed government positions (like Mar Roxas as Secretary of Trade and Industry, or Ping Lacson as PNP Chief) are not reflected.

Seven of the current senators (Roxas, Aquino, Arroyo, A.P. Cayetano, Escudero, Villar, Zubiri) came from the House of Representatives. Two of them (Pimentel and Enrile) are even ancient enough to have been assemblymen in the Batasang Pambansa, the parliament that replaced Congress during Marcos' administration.

Two senators came from governorships (Lapid and Revilla), and two came from city mayors (Estrada and Gordon). Remarkably, Kiko Pangilinan's most recent elected office before becoming senator was councilor of Quezon City from 1988 to 1992.

Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?), the largest chunk of the pie consists of senators who had never before held any elected office whatsoever before winning their election to the Senate. Don't hold it against all of them though... Many of them held prominent positions (Pia Cayetano was a lawyer, Legarda was a broadcast journalist, and Angara was president of UP). Others had appointed government positions (Biazon was AFP Chief of Staff, Santiago was Agrarian Reform Secretary, Madrigal was Presidential Adviser for Children's Affairs, Lacson was PNP Chief, Honasan was Chief of Security). Only one has no record of positive accomplishment to speak of (Antonio Trillanes, terrorist).