In the shadow of a violent and drug-fuelled past, business confidence is growing in Colombia, a country that has been transformed over the past decade
Tags: South America, Colombia, development, economic.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
Source: www.thepoke.co.uk
One of the main reasons I wrote this article for National Geographic about how to teach cultural empathy is nicely conveyed in the cartoon above–in spite of our cultural differences, I want people to see themselves in others. This is reminiscent to this New Yorker cartoon on the why there should not be religious conflicts in the world.
Tags: conflict, racism, religion, perspective.
“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.”
Women in science are awesome and we need to encourage girls in STEM disciplines, especially geospatial technologies…hearing this story of women in the past might help to inspire a future generation.
Tags: mapping, cartography, war, gender, STEM, geospatial.
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
Fascinating footage of a traditional ceremony that takes place on the Pakistan India border. From the BBC
Source: www.youtube.com
This is a fascinating political display that shows a degree of cooperation, but is made into a sports-like event because of the geopolitical tension/passion between these two South Asian neighbors. They have ‘toned down‘ the overtly display of hostility in recent years. Some love this border ceremony and others fear that they are playing with fire, fanning the flames of nationalism that only exacerbates the tension. Just last year, this border checkpoint was the site of a terrorist attack that killed 50. Click here for more information about the border tension in the Pakistan/India/China borderland.
Tags: borders, geopolitics, political, territoriality, video, India, South Asia, Pakistan.
“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.
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.”
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.
