GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

FEMA has coined a “Waffle House Index” to indicate the severity of a disaster.

Source: www.marketplace.org

A proxy variable is an easily measurable variable that is used in place of a variable that cannot be measured or is difficult to measure. The proxy variable can be something that is not of any great interest itself, but has a close correlation with the variable of interest.  So if you can’t order waffles after a big storm at Waffle House might not matter in the big scheme of things, but as this podcast demonstrates, it is a good indicator that the region has been serious impacted by a natural disaster–they are the canary in the coal mine that FEMA is using to help plan their relief efforts.  This is in part because Waffle House’s core area is in the South and is has a wide spatial network.

Tags: disasters, statistics, the South, regions, podcast.

“African countries are also quite diverse from an ethnic standpoint. As the Washington Post’s Max Fisher noted back in 2013, the world’s 20 most ethnically diverse countries are all African, partially because European colonial powers divvied up sections of the continent with little regard for how the residents would have organized the land themselves. This map above shows Africa’s ethnographic regions as identified by George Murdock in his 1959 ethnography of the continent.”

Tags: Africa, colonialism, borders, political, language, ethnicity.

Source: mic.com

Nkem Ifejika meets with Nigerian entrepreneurs who show how the nation’s economy is finding lubricants other than oil.

Source: soundcloud.com

The shadow economy, the black market or the side-hustle; these are all names for the informal sector of the economy.  In many countries such as Nigeria, this is a way of making money outside their normal jobs to boost their income and try to rise above just getting by.  “It was my grandmother who taught my mum that if you were lucky enough to have a salaried job, that was just pocket money. The real money came from your five to nine.”  If working 9-to-5 represents the formal economy, this BBC podcast (and accompanying article) are all about the 5-to-9 economy. 

Tags: economic, labor, Nigeria, podcast, 

U.S. Map + Haha + Yum = Foodnited States of America

Source: news.distractify.com

What can I say?  Horrible puns, crafty maps and gorgeous food presentations…how could I not share this?  You can follow the progress of this on-going project as they add more beautifully silly food map puns to their series under the hashtag #foodnitedstates on Foodiggity’s Instagram account.

In the shadow of a violent and drug-fuelled past, business confidence is growing in Colombia, a country that has been transformed over the past decade

Tags: South America, Colombia, development, economic.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Source: www.thepoke.co.uk

One of the main reasons I wrote this article for National Geographic about how to teach cultural empathy is nicely conveyed in the cartoon above–in spite of our cultural differences, I want people to see themselves in others.  This is reminiscent to this New Yorker cartoon on the why there should not be religious conflicts in the world.  

Tags: conflict, racism, religion, perspective.

“As the demand for its products escalated early in World War II, the Army Map Service, a heritage organization of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, was losing much of its largely male workforce to the armed forces. A solution to the urgent need for replacements emerged when the University of Chicago’s Geography Department developed a course in military map making and began offering it to women’s colleges in the East and Midwest.”

A new report tracks demographic trends across 66 U.S. metro areas.  The report provides comprehensive evidence for Aaron Renn’s “new donut” model of cities (pictured in above image, on the right). Renn’s model proposes that city centers and outer-ring suburbs are doing well economically, but inner-ring suburbs are struggling with a new influx of poverty.”

Tags: urban, economic, urban models, APHG.

Source: www.citylab.com