GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

“A year after Superstorm Sandy stranded many New Yorkers without power for days, a federal judge has ruled that New York City’s emergency plans violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. Those shortcomings, the judge found, leave almost 900,000 residents in danger, and many say the ruling could have implications for local governments across the country.”

See on www.npr.org

The news from the Philippines, where it’s feared that last week’s powerful Typhoon Haiyan killed more than 10,000 people, isn’t getting better as hundreds of thousands of people struggle to survive and authorities struggle to get help to them.

“Its absolute bedlam right now,” says Richard Gordon, head of the Philippine Red Cross.  “There’s an awful lot of casualties, a lot of people dead all over the place, a lot of destruction.”

According to the BBC, a huge international relief effort is underway, but rescue workers have struggled to reach some towns and villages cut off since the storm.

Tags: physical, environment, water, disasters, Philippines.

See on www.npr.org

In the end, rank falls away

See on www.startribune.com

See on www.amergeog.org

Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government.

“The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history,” Woodard writes in the Fall 2013 issue of Tufts University’s alumni magazine. “Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities.”

Take a look at his map.

See on www.washingtonpost.com

See on rigea.files.wordpress.com

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission is now Landsat 8, and that means images are now public (woohoo!). NASA handed control of the satellite to the USGS earlier this year (May 30, 2013), and calibrated imagery is available through the Earth Explorer. Unfortunately, the Earth Explorer interface is a bit of a pain, so I’ve put together a guide to make it easier.

See on earthobservatory.nasa.gov

Create a color-coded Visited States Map, showing off your road travel in the United States and Canada.

See on www.defocus.net

“I recently saw this map in a Washington Post article about modern day slavery and was immediately was struck by the spatial extent and amount of slaves in today’s global economy.  As stated in that article, “This is not some softened, by-modern-standards definition of slavery. These 30 million people are living as forced laborers, forced prostitutes, child soldiers, child brides in forced marriages and, in all ways that matter, as pieces of property, chattel in the servitude of absolute ownership.”  This map shows some important spatial patterns that seem to correlate to economic and cultural factors.”