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Boston schools ditch conventional world maps in favor of this one

Social studies classrooms throughout the Boston public school system are getting an upgrade some 448 years in the making.

Source: www.bostonglobe.com

Personally, I’m not a fan of this decision, but it’s as if they watched the classic West Wing clip and decided to roll with it. I think that the Peters projection map is better than the Mercator for most educational applications, but it isn’t the “right, best, or true” map projection.  Many viral videos comparing the two love to exaggerate and say things like “The maps you use are lying to you” or “the world is nothing like you’ve ever seen.”  Yes, Mercator maps distorts relative size, but it isn’t a “wrong” map anymore than the Peters projection.  All maps have distortion and map readers need to under that all maps are a mathematical representation of the Earth.  

 

Tags: mapping, visualization, map projections, cartography, perspective, education, geography, geography education, Boston.

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America’s Wealth Is Staggeringly Concentrated in the Northeast Corridor

“At the county level, America is a tremendously unequal place.”

Source: www.citylab.com

The concentration of wealth within U.S. cities is one of the most powerful geographic patterns in North America (and remains of of the key geographic stories of the 2016 presidential election). NYC served as a hub for the import/export of primary economic resources during the 18th and 19th centuries as the Erie Canal opened up the interior of the United States to become part of NYC’s hinterland.  NYC expanded as a hub for the manufacturing of consumer products and then began to transition to a more tertiary based economy. “There are more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. Of the 75 with the highest incomes, 44 are located in the Northeast, including Maryland and Virginia. The corridor of metropolitan statistical areas that runs from Washington, D.C., through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston includes 37 of these top-earning counties (where the median family takes home at least $75,000 a year).”

 

Tags: urban, industry, manufacturing, labor, economic, NYC, Washington DC. Boston.

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