GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

“As the demand for its products escalated early in World War II, the Army Map Service, a heritage organization of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, was losing much of its largely male workforce to the armed forces. A solution to the urgent need for replacements emerged when the University of Chicago’s Geography Department developed a course in military map making and began offering it to women’s colleges in the East and Midwest.”

A new report tracks demographic trends across 66 U.S. metro areas.  The report provides comprehensive evidence for Aaron Renn’s “new donut” model of cities (pictured in above image, on the right). Renn’s model proposes that city centers and outer-ring suburbs are doing well economically, but inner-ring suburbs are struggling with a new influx of poverty.”

Tags: urban, economic, urban models, APHG.

Source: www.citylab.com

“WebCams de Mexico archives the best of webcam videos in Mexico.”

Source: www.youtube.com

What does a volcanic eruption look like?  Just like this. 

Tags: disasters, Mexico, physical, volcano.

Maria says she’s black and Lucy says she’s white. Together, they prove none of this makes sense.

Source: www.vox.com

These twins also have three siblings and they say “we are at opposite ends of the [skin color] spectrum and they are all somewhere in between.”  Their lives show that the differences underlying the cultural constructs of “white” and “black” as discrete categories isn’t defensible, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t culturally important.  As stated in the article, “here’s no question that the way people categorize Lucy and Maria, and the way they think of themselves, will affect their lives.  That’s because, even though race is highly subjective, racism and discrimination based on what people believe about race are very real.”

Tags: culture, race.

The need for speed devours huge chunks of American cities and leaves the edges of the expressways worthless. Busy streets, for almost all of human history, created the greatest real estate value because they delivered customers and clients to the businesses operating there. This in turn cultivated the highest tax revenues in town, both from higher property taxes and from elevated sales taxes. But you can’t set up shop on the side of an expressway. How can cities afford to spend so much to create thoroughfares with no adjoining property value?

Source: www.originalgreen.org

That is is the ENTIRE city of Florence, Italy on the left, while there is area surrounding just one cloverleaf interchange in Atlanta, Georgia on the right.  The high speed on the highways is one of the costs of sprawl.   

Tags: transportation, planning, sprawl, scale. 

“Realtime topographic contour line generation.”

Source: www.youtube.com

Many of our first experiments of creating landforms and designing a new world started in the sandbox (you can only image what I do at the beach).  This video shows how that early childhood activity can make for an excellent classroom demonstration to shows how Earth’s physical systems work.  If you don’t happen to have a digital topographic map to superimpose on the sandbox and a GPU-based water simulation, then at least you’ve got this video.  Click here to learn more about this UC Davis project on the visualization of lake ecosystems.

Tags: water, physical, geomorphology, landforms, visualization.

By simplifying gerrymandering we see how problematic it really is.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

The redistricting process is far from neutral; to be fair we should remember that gerrymandering is has happened on all ends of the political spectrum.  Which map do you think is the best way to divide these districts?  What is the fairest way to divide them?

Tags: gerrymandering, political, mapping, census, unit 4 political.