Here are some seemingly eclectic topics. All of them center around the appropriateness of the body being displayed publicly and the cultural norms that shape how we think about the issue. I’ve included a sensational restroom, public nursing, top-free protests, and of course, the Kate Middleton scandal.
Tags: culture, popular culture, gender, place, space.
See on geographyeducation.org
NASA’s Visible Earth catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet…
This classic image is full of classroom applications. The first impulse of most students is to note that this image will show us where people live, where the cities are or some other comment that speaks to the magnitude of the population in the white areas. Let them analyze this for more time, and they’ll notice that population isn’t the whole story of this image. A place like India shines, but less brightly than the eastern part of the United States. I like to point out that South Korea appears to be an island (because North Korea is literally blacked out). Politics, development, affluence and population information are all embedded in this image. As with all maps, the more information you have about the place in question (in this case, Earth), the more meaningful information you can extract out of the map.
Tags: remote sensing, worldwide, consumption, poverty, population, spatial, political, regions.
See on visibleearth.nasa.gov
Find the latitude and longitude of a point using Google Maps.
Simple, straightforward and easy to use. All you do is point and click on the map to get latitude and longitude in both decimal degrees and DMS (degrees, minutes and seconds). You can also quickly enter coordinates in either format an have the location displayed on the map.
See on itouchmap.com
Until now, there has been a lack of solid, comprehensive spatial data about African groundwater resources. Researchers have now done so. For a more academic article on the subject, here are their findings in Environmental Research Letters: (http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/2/024009/article).
Tags: water, Africa, resources, physical, environment, environment depend.
See on www.newsecuritybeat.org
More clashes with Pakistani police, as PM Ashraf orders YouTube to be blocked and Tunisia police surround Salafi mosque.
I think this issue is one that highlights differing cultural values (obviously many other topics are part of this complex situation, but I’ll focus on just that in this post). While most in the United States are appalled that someone would produce such a culturally offensive video, they also firmly believe that the right of citizens to free speech must be guaranteed. Most of the protesters are outraged that the video was produced, but also that a society would permit such action. Pakistan has block ALL of YouTube to prevent the spread of this one video. Click here for a photo essay of the protests: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/09/anti-islam_video_protests.html
See on www.aljazeera.com
It wasn’t just a high price that kept businessmen away from early portable computers.
Early on most men were adamantly opposed to purchasing a device for themselves that had a keyboard. Throughout the 1950’s 60’s and 70’s, keyboards and typewriters were seen as secretarial work.
Questions to ponder: How have American gender norms changed since then? Why have they changed?
See on www.theatlantic.com
After making an infographic depicting how much space would be needed to house the entire world’s population based on the densities of various global cities, Tim De Chant of Per Square Mile got to thinking about the land resources it takes to support those same cities.
Tags: consumption, development, resources, energy, density, sustainability.
See on www.fastcoexist.com
If you have over 100,000 staples, you can create an startlingly creative rendition of an urban landscape (well, Peter Root could). It is interesting how our cultural and historical context shape what we see as a human landscape. I can’t help but think that if I lived 2,000 years ago this uneven jumbled metallic mass wouldn’t remind anyone of any place they’d ever been.
Tags: art, urban, landscape, unit 7 cities, historical.
See on www.peterroot.com
One of a number of large wildfires that have affected northern California in 2012, the Chips fire burned more than 75,000 acres by the time firefighters had contained it.
2012 is going to go down in United States history as the year with the most acres burned in a single year (statistics only go back to 1960). The two featured images were taken earlier this month to display a Northern California wildfire; both with the same spatial resolution and acquired for the same instrument (Advanced Land Imager on EO-1 satellite), yet they are quite distinct. One shows an aerial photograph, displaying exactly what standard visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (showing us what our eyes would normally see). The other image displays a false color (near infrared) image.
Questions to ponder: what advantages does each image have for analyzing the fire damage? Drawbacks? How does the data from both images work together to create a more complete picture of the situation?
Tags: remote sensing, images, environment, land use, disasters, biogeography.
See on earthobservatory.nasa.gov
GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION 