“By 2050, the world’s population will likely increase 35 percent. But is growing more food the only option—or even the best? National Geographic investigates the challenges and solutions to feeding everyone on our planet, based on an eight-month series in National Geographic magazine. Visit http://natgeofood.com for ongoing coverage of food issues as we investigate the Future of Food today on World Food Day.”
Tags: sustainability, agriculture, food production, unit 5 agriculture.
“Watch along with Expedition 38 crew members Mike Hopkins and Rick Mastracchio as they look at various cities across the globe from the vantage point of the cupola on board the International Space Station.”
Tags: mapping, perspective, images, remote sensing, geospatial, unit 1 Geoprinciples.
Source: www.youtube.com
How alarmist, racist coverage of Ebola makes things worse. A dressing down of the latest #NewsweekFail.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
The recent Newsweek Cover showing a Chimpanzee for the article, Smuggled Bushmeat Is Ebola’s Back Door to America, has received a lot of criticism for being factually inaccurate, but also for it’s portrayal of Africa that taps into deep-rooted cultural anxieties about Africa in United States. Western writers have use many cultural conventions to talk about “the Dark Continent” stemming from a long colonial tradition. Africa had been developing rapidly in the last decade and how Ebola fares seems to be a referendum on the continent for many cultural commentators. This great Washington Post article is less about Ebola, but uses the outbreak to analyze how we think about Africa, and sometimes it isn’t a pretty reflection. The Ebola outbreak is teaching us how we perceive Africa as much as it is about Africa itself.
Tags: Ebola, Africa, colonialism, regions, perspective.
Source: mapfight.appspot.com
This simple WebApp allows the user to compare areas that are hard to compare on a map or globe because of distance or the map projection. Competitive students love to hypothesize and then verify. This helps strengthen student’s mental maps and their ability to make regional comparisons.
Tags: mapping, K12, perspective, scale.
Source: www.youtube.com
What would Earth be like if all humans suddenly disappeared? This question posed on the YouTube series Earth Unplugged, has many intriguing ecological and biogeographic ramifications that are worth considering to explore how systems are interconnected.
Tags: biogeography, environment, ecology, video.
“Workers at an ailing paper mill in Siberia are clinging to their jobs in the face of financial pressure and criticism from environmentalists.
Related Article: http://nyti.ms/gSvOkM“
Source: www.youtube.com
The environment, industry and politics play key roles in this story of an old style Soviet mono-town on Lake Baikal. Monotowns had planned economies that revolved around one industry and today many of these are struggling in the post-Soviet era. While the particulars of the political situation are a bit dated, the overall issue is still quite relevant to understanding Russia today.
Tags: Russia, industry, labor, environment, economic, water, pollution, environment modify, unit 6 industry.
“What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading.”
Source: www.youtube.com
What one invention has made the greatest difference in the lives of people all around the world? The case can be made for the washing machine; it has been a major tool in transforming the lives of women and restructuring gender roles in industrialized societies.
Tags: gapminder, poverty, gender, technology, industry, development, TED.
Which countries consume the most electricity per person? You might guess the United States would top the World Bank’s list, but the Nordic countries of Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden are actually at or near the top. Icelanders consume an average of 52,374 kilowatt hours per person per year, Norwegians 23,174 kilowatt hours, Finns 15,738 kilowatt hours, and Swedes 14,030 kilowatt hours. Americans are not far behind, with an average consumption of 13,246 kilowatt hours per person. The Japanese consume 7,848 kilowatt hours.
This image is part of a global composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite in 2012. The nighttime view of Earth was made possible by the “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, wildfires, and gas flares. The city lights of several major Nordic cities are visible in the imagery, including Stockholm, Sweden (population 905,184); Oslo, Norway (634,463); Helsinki, Finland (614,074), and Reykjavik, Iceland (121,490).
Tags: Europe, energy, remote sensing, development, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Norway.
Source: earthobservatory.nasa.gov
Why knowing where countries are in Africa matters for how the rest of the world thinks about Ebola.
Cultural and media norms that often refer to Africa as one entity rather than an 11.7 million-square-mile land mass comprised of 54 countries and over 1.1 billion people who speak over 2,000 different languages. This cultural confusion means that, when a dangerous virus like Ebola breaks out, Americans who are used to referring to “Africa” as one entity may make mistakes in understanding just how big of a threat Ebola actually is, who might have been exposed to it, and what the likelihood of an individual contracting it might be. This Ebola outbreak is wreaking havoc on African economies beyond the three most heavily affected by Ebola, and that damage is completely avoidable. The East and Southern African safari industry provides a good example. Bookings for safaris there — including for the famed Great Migration in Kenya and Tanzania — have plummeted due to the Ebola outbreak. These actions are based in fear, not reality.
Tags: Ebola, medical, diffusion, Africa, regions, perspective.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION 