“This Geography News Network Article podcast is an historical description of Christopher Columbus’s role in discovering the Americas.”
See on maps101blog.com
“This is a ship-shipping ship, shipping shipping ships.”
Seth Dixon‘s insight:
The two industries that are the real backbone of globalization are transportation and technology. What has accelerated the pace of global interconnectedness is the scale of these devices and their ubiquity in facilitating massive global commerce. Economies of scale infuse our transportation and communicating technologies, boosting the diffusion of countless other technologies. China’s transportation infrastructure, for example has undergone some amazing physical transformations that have made their economic growth possible.
Tags: transportation, globalization, diffusion, industry, economic.
If however you only want to laugh at the tongue-twister of ship-shipping ships, this is the internet meme for you.
From grains to grapes to cabbage and many other crops the harvest season has been in full swing in the Northern Hemisphere.
Seth Dixon‘s insight:
So few of my students have actual experience working on a farm and being part of the food producing process. This gallery of 38 photos around the world is a great visual to reinforce how important the harvest is for sustaining life on this planet. The picture above shows the a Hmong hill tribe woman harvesting a rice terrace field at Mu Cang Chai district, northern Vietnamese province of Yen Bai. The World Bank on Oct. 7 lowered its 2013 growth forecast for East Asian developing countries to 7.1 percent and warned that a prolonged US fiscal crisis could be damaging to the region.
Tags: agriculture, food production, landscape, images.
See on www.boston.com
Factories are finding that years of doing business overseas has withered what once was a thriving textile and apparel work force in the United States.
Seth Dixon‘s insight:
Historically, waves of immigrants came to the United States to work in textile mills. Since 1990, 77% of manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to places with lower wages as the industry has become automated. Today though, specialty items that still need to done by hand are coming back to the U.S. and wages in that sector are rising as American consumers want a “made in the USA” label.
Tags: manufacturing, North America, labor, USA.
See on www.nytimes.com
Think everyone should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Try this one on for size.
Seth Dixon‘s insight:
This video shows the place matters; a Washington D.C. educator shows how food deserts and other spatial problems of poverty impact his students on a daily basis.
We usually look at life expectancy data at the national scale and that obscures some of the real issues of poverty in developed countries. Above is a map that shows the Gini index which measures the degree of economic inequality (the Gini coefficient was recently added to the APHG course content for the Industrialization and Economic Development unit). Here are some maps and data from the World Bank that utilizes the Gini Index as well as an interactive Gapminder graph.
Tags: industry, location, place, migration, APHG, poverty, socioeconomic.
See on www.upworthy.com
The Shinn Study Abroad Committee is dedicated to giving students at Rhode Island College opportunities to make the world their campus. This is a program designed to globalize the educational experiences here at my school by allowing students to study abroad. I have worked on this committee the last 3 years and wholeheartedly support this program; when I was going to school, help from programs such as this one allowed me to complete my research and internationalize my own educational experience. On November 15th, 2013, we will hold a raffle ($5 per ticket, $20 for a book of 5) to raise funds for this worthy goal.
If anyone wishes, you may also choose to donate to help sustain the webpages that I manage. The first one is Geography Education on scoop.it and the second one is geographyeducation.org. These sites do incur some costs (URL, hosting fees, etc.) and I would like for the activity to at least pay for itself. If you feel this site’s has helped you out, I’d appreciate it if you’d consider returning the favor.
See on www.gofundme.com
“Submarine canyons were identified by the pre-SONAR mappers, but it wasn’t until this technological advancement that we realized how common a feature they are. We now know that there are hundreds (perhaps thousands depending on your definition) of submarine canyons incising into continental shelves and slopes all over Earth.”
Tags: physical, environment, water, geomorphology, erosion, landforms.
See on www.wired.com
Few know “boondocks” is a relic of U.S. military occupation in the Philippines.
Seth Dixon‘s insight:
I imaged that the term ‘the boondocks’ was of Asian origin, but I was surprised to learn how this U.S. military lingo was able to become a mainstream term. The Tagalog word bundok means mountain and given that the guerrilla warfare tactics, the enemies were hiding ‘in the boondocks.’ This term spread throughout the military to mean an isolated region, but today the term completely shifted from its military-based meaning to one that embraced the American heartland. This is a fascinating article from NPR’s Code Switch team that focuses on issues of culture, identity and race.
Tags: language, toponyms, historical, conflict, culture, diffusion.
See on www.npr.org
“Portland is a city that some residents praise as a kind of eden: full of bike paths, independently-owned small businesses, great public transportation and abundant microbreweries and coffeeshops. And then there’s a whole other city. It’s the city where whole stretches of busy road are missing sidewalks, and you can see folks in wheelchairs rolling themselves down the street right next to traffic. It’s the city where some longtime African-American residents feel as if decades of institutional racism still have not been fully addressed.”
Seth Dixon‘s insight:
Portland, Oregon is often discussed as a magnet for a young demographic that wants to be part of a sustainable city that supports local businesses and agriculture. This podcast looks behind that image (which has a measure of truth to it) to see another story. Relining, gentrification, poverty, governance and urban planning are all prominent topics in this 50 minute podcast that provides as fascinating glimpse into the poorer neighborhoods of this intriguing West Coast city. When in cities, we often use the term sustainability to refer to the urban ecology, but here we see a strong concern for the social sustainability of their historic neighborhoods as well.
Tags: neighborhood, gentrification, urban, place, culture, economic, race, poverty, place, socioeconomic.
See on stateofthereunion.com
GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION 