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Tsunami Stones: Ancient Japanese Markers Warn Builders of High Water

“Residents of Aneyoshi, Japan, heeded the warnings of their ancestors. They obeyed directions and wisdom found on a local stone monument: ‘Do not build any homes below this point,’ it reads. ‘High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis.’ When the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan, this village.”

Source: 99percentinvisible.org

Beachfront property is beautiful real estate with enormous economic potential, but when it is in an area with a history of tsunamis, the impending threat of an earthquake looms over the coastal lowlands and limits the land use plans for the region.

Tags: physical, tsunami, water, tectonics, disasters.

December 27, 2016 0

Japan forces a harsh choice on children of migrant families

Born in Japan, Gursewak Singh considers himself Japanese. The government doesn’t. But it offers children like him a chance to stay – if their parents leave.

Gursewak’s parents, who are Sikhs, fled to Japan from India in the 1990s. For several years, they lived without visas under the radar of the authorities until they were put on a status known as “provisional release” in 2001. It means they can stay in Japan as long as their asylum application is under review. While there were almost 14,000 asylum cases under review at the end of 2015, Japan accepted only 27 refugees last year. The year before that, the number was 11.

The low acceptance rate stands in stark contrast to Europe, which has seen hundreds of thousands of refugees arrive from countries such as Iraq, Syria and Eritrea. In the first half of the year, European countries ruled on 495,000 asylum applications, approving more than 293,000.

Tags: culture, Sikh, declining population, population, migration, refugees, Japan, East Asia, .

Source: www.reuters.com

December 26, 2016 0

100 Great Teaching Images

“Nature and humankind are both great artists, and when they join forces, amazing masterpieces can be produced. Today Bright Side has collected for you works in which the combined efforts of mother nature and photographic artists have captured magic moments showing the wondrous diversity of modern life and the natural world. Pictured above is the Westerdok District in Amsterdam.”

Tags: images, art, landscape, worldwide.

Source: brightside.me

December 25, 2016 0

Why Eating Chinese Food on Christmas Is a Sacred Tradition for American Jews

“[Jews] will not go to Mile End on Christmas because [they] happened to feel like fried rice; they will go to proudly proclaim their Jewish-American identity. They may or may not enjoy General Tso’s Chicken, but if they are eating it on Christmas, their prime motivation is not the general’s sweet, spicy deliciousness, but rather the knowledge that they are doing something that in some adapted way reinforces their Jewishness.”

Tags: Judaism, culture, cultural norms, food, seasonal.

Source: www.tabletmag.com

December 24, 2016 0

Election Results in the Third Dimension

“By extending each region into the 3rd dimension, it’s possible to show the relative importance of each region while retaining the map’s shape, keeping the areas recognizable. In this case, the height of each county corresponds to its total number of votes, though it could just as easily show population or share of the electoral vote. For a closer look, see the full screen interactive version.”

Source: metrocosm.com

We’ve all probably seen enough maps of the 2016 presidential election and are familiar with the basic patterns (although my favorite is still the interactive that let’s you redraw the states to alter the election). This 3D map certainly though is an innovative way to portray some of the disparities in the U.S. electorate.

Tags: electoral, political, density, mapping.

December 23, 2016 0

GPS Essentials

“GPS Essentials is the most complete GPS tool on Android Market: Navigate, manage waypoints, tracks, routes, build your own dashboard from 45 widgets.”

Source: www.youtube.com

GPS Essentials is a great, free app for a smart phone to create some simple, geospatial data. Need to create a GPX file with various waypoints (that imports nicely into ArcGIS)? Try GPS essentials (or if you only need linear data about where you’ve been, Map My Run works if you don’t mind needing a desktop to download the GPX file).

Tags: mapping, GPS, edtech, video.

December 22, 2016 0

#RenunciaYa–Quit Already!

“Morales will take office in the wake of Guatemala’s worst political crisis in decades, resulting in the resignations of President Otto Pérez Molina, Vice President Roxana Baldetti, and multiple cabinet members—all of whom are now prosecuted for their role in a massive corruption ring.”

Source: gimletmedia.com

How does an online movement become a revolution? Much has been made about how much organizing for the Arab Spring was conducted online, but it still needed old-fashioned protesting, gathering in the streets, and controlling symbolic public spaces to add meaning to their movement. This podcast shows the behind-the-scenes look at how a small online Facebook group against corruption in Guatemala, not only pulled down their targeted villain (the vice president), but also eroded support for the president that propped up the whole system.

Tags: Guatemala, political, podcast, Middle America.

December 21, 2016 0

The Final Days Of Hawaiian Sugar

The sugar industry in Hawaii dominated the state’s economy for over a century. But it has shrunk in recent years. Now, the last of the state’s sugar mills has wrapped up its final harvest.

Source: www.npr.org

I grew up hearing commercials that sold the purity of the Hawaiian sugar Industry (C & H, Pure Sugar, that’s the one!). These commercials sold not just the purity of Hawaii’s sugar, but also of the people and the place. These commercials were some of my first geographic imaginings of an exotic tropical paradise on the peripheral edge of the United States. Just like the imagined tropical bliss, the actual sugar industry of Hawaii is also coming to an end. “For over a century, the sugar industry dominated Hawaii’s economy. But that changed in recent decades as the industry struggled to keep up with the mechanization in mills on mainland U.S. That and rising labor costs have caused Hawaii’s sugar mills to shut down, shrinking the industry to this one last mill.”

Tags: industry, manufacturing, labor, economic, agribusiness, agriculture.

December 20, 2016 0

Gullah Culture

“While Gullah was not originally a written language and has never had a governing authority or dictionary, linguistic scholars have found that the language is internally consistent and in some ways more efficient and expressive than standard English. Elements of the language have seeped into African-American Vernacular English across the country.”

For the first time in recent memory, the Charleston County School Board is discussing how to address the specific needs of Gullah and Geechee students, children of a culture whose linguistic origins trace back to the west coast of Africa via the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Some teachers have said the students’ way of speaking — whether in the heavily West African-influenced Gullah language or in the more Anglicized dialects sometimes known as Geechee — can present an obstacle to understanding in the classroom. Like many Lowcountry Gullah speakers of her generation, the current head of state for the Gullah/Geechee Nation carries painful memories of adults who taught her to hold her family’s way of speaking in contempt.

Tags: language, culture, race, education, historical.

Source: www.youtube.com

December 19, 2016 0