The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has teamed up with Google to give anyone with Web access a chance to see what life and conditions are like in a refugee camp. The initial iteration centers on Chad, Iraq, Colombia and Darfur.

Web surfers can explore camps through the visual, textual, audio and video information that's layered on top of the bigger picture. Pop-up windows throughout the images of the camps tell you what's going on, and what's needed. You can also move in close enough to examine the infrastructure, including schools and other facilities.

To coincide with our special Future of the Environment issue, we've constructed a Google Earth layer highlighting several geographic points of environmental interest around the world. If you're already a Google Earth user, download and open the layer here to begin browsing; if not, now is a perfect time to start exploring one of the more amazing pieces of mapping software ever conceived!

Sunday's afternoon seminar, "Toward a Spatial Reality," delved into the mysteries of geo-tagging and included several instances of semantic amazingness. (At a certain point, one panelist complimented another's idea by remarking that he was "riding on a fascinating tiger," and at another point, an apparent lunatic in the audience started screaming about how the GeoWeb was soon going to be in the hands of mastermind criminals: Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha!)

The room was filled with engineering whizzes and other people really excited about modeling a virtual 3D version of the real world and layering it on Google Earth's satellite maps in order to see every building in every city in eye-popping, textured detail. There was also much talk about the use of ComStat by police departments to track the location of cop cars.  ComStat basically allows police to be held accountable when crime rates don't seem to be going down, say, in the Cherry Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, because all the officers are clustered around the Dunkin' Donuts on Howard Street. (You watch The Wire, right?) The big idea is that ComStat could be used in lots of cities for lots of problems, in a way similar to New York's use of 311, the municipal help line. But instead of dialing up on the telephone to report rats in your neighbor's trashcan, or a big pothole on Broadway, users would upload photos or stories about their issues to ComStat-like Google Earth layover software, and this would be monitored by city officials.

This sort of real-time information layover is being used right now by CBS to mashup breaking news reports with maps, so you can see exactly where in the world all the trouble is happening, and avoid those places. (Kidding, sort of.)

The seminar wrapped up with a Utopian vision of a future, maybe just a few years away, when cell phone GPS systems will not only act as map-based mobile Web browsers that give you (or allow you to submit) news and information about what's going on around you, but also act as negotiators on your behalf, pinging nearby businesses you might be interested in to get the best deals on products and services. In this future, we'll always be interacting simultaneously with the world around us, and with the reflection of the world displayed on our GPS systems and enhanced with user-submitted info. The upshot? We're getting closer and closer to entering the Matrix. —Megan Miller

China already has the world’s largest population (1.3 billion), the world’s most polluted cities (pollution-related ailments are the leading cause of death), and plans to build some of the world's tallest structures (the Shanghai World Financial Center is still under construction) to rival the current record holder, Taipei 101. This weekend, China will come one step closer to obtaining its next superlative when the last structural concrete is poured for the Three Gorges Dam.  When it comes online fully in 2009, it will be the largest hydroelectric dam in the world.

Although the officially reported budget for the dam is $25 billion, estimates of the actual cost are as high as $100 billion, which would also make it one of the world’s most expensive construction projects. Plus, the $100 billion does not factor in the dam's secondary costs, which include relocation expenses for the million people displaced by flooding, the loss of fertile land, bribes and corruption, and extensive environmental damage. The most environmentally destructive human construction, perhaps? That’s a record no one’s in any rush to publicize.

Google Earth's coverage of the region is disappointingly low-res, but as it always does, NASA’s Web site comes through with a giant satellite photo of the region. —John Mahoney

Related: "How High Will They Build?"

Graham Flint is the sort of man who uses the structural bracing of a nuclear reactor's safety door as a camera stand. The bracing secures his camera casing to the inside of his minivan and is indicative of the precision and focus with which he approaches all aspects of his life, none more so than his current and most ambitious project: a 1,000-shot survey of America at the dawn of the 21st century, his Portrait of America, taken with the camera he designed and built, the highest-resolution landscape camera ever created.