GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line…well, that depends on your map projection.  A flat map always distorts something when representing our three-dimensional Earth—whether it is distance, direction, shape or area—something gets distorted on our maps.  A great circle is the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere, so that’s going to be the quickest travel route between points (which is why so many airline route seem to arc).  This website Great Circle Mapper generates great circles that show the shortest distance between two points on many map projects will be an arc.  Why does this particular route arc ‘bend’ north for a while and then south?  Get out a globe for added perspective.   

This is a great photo gallery, but I wanted to make a special note of this image.  The caption for this picture says, “Egyptians watch as Muslims march on the street to mark the birthday of the Prophet Muhammed in Cairo, Jan 13, 2014.”  Is this a representative group of Egyptians?  What demographic group would we expect to see in the second story balcony?  What does the architecture tell us about the cultural norms of the society?

A maquiladora is a term that often used to describe a factory in Northern Mexico that enjoys special tax breaks for eport-driven production. Northern Mexico is an ideal location for this type of industry because 1) access to American markets is high and 2) labor costs are relatively low.  The Mexican Maquiladoras can no longer compete in a ‘race to the bottom’ for the lowest skill jobs, but they can produce higher-end goods and compete with China to supply more innovative consumer goods.  Labor costs in China are on the rise, making Mexico able to compete more effectively with them on the open market.  The total value of Mexican maquiladoras exports has grown by more than 50% in the last 5 years; more foreign corporations are investing money into Mexico.  Some of the more innovative and aggressive maquiladoras are attempting to become more involved in the research and development end of production; essentially they want to start competing with European and American companies on the lucrative high-end of the commodity chain instead of fighting for the scraps at the bottom. 

Tags: Mexico, manufacturing, industry, economic, globalization, technology.

In my world regional geography class I have 15 weeks to teach about everything in the whole world…no pressure.  Clearly, this course is designed to be a mile wide and an inch deep and I can’t teach the nuanced details each country.  However, one thing that I try to reinforce every semester is that their is a tremendous about of diversity within regions.  No country, region, ethnic or religious group is perfectly homogenous. 

Tags: Middle East, regions, gender, culture, Islam, perspective, culture, religion.

I love living in New England and finding stone walls from old farmsteads; an archaeology professor at UConn is using geospatial technologies to map out the remants of that historical landscape.  This is a great example of using spatial thinking across the disciplines. 

Tags: remote sensing, geospatial, landscape, historical, environment modify.

I was recently reminded of the graph and thought is was world sharing again.  This is an excellent spatial graph that helps to explain the distribution of the human population.  Why do we live where we live?   The longitude map is still fascinating, but has less explanatory power.  What would be brilliant is a graph that charted population by latitude (as this does) AND charts the amount of land at each given latitude.  Click here for Frank Jacobs analysis on the “Strange Maps” blog.