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Statehood, Politics, and Scale in D.C.

“Washington may be the political center of the free world, but its 670,000 residents don’t have a say in the national legislature. What they do have is a nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives. Eleanor Holmes Norton can introduce legislation and vote in committee, but she can’t vote on the House floor. Over the course of 13 terms, the ‘Warrior on the Hill’ been fighting to change that.”

Source: www.slate.com

If you haven’t discovered the podcast “Placemakers” you are missing out.  In this episode, they explore the competing political context of Washington D.C. Since this podcast ran, the citizens of the district voted overwhelmingly for statehood, but since the governance of the district operates more at the national scale then on the local level, statehood is not happening anytime soon.  

 

Tags: place, podcast, political, autonomy, scale, Washington DC.

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The history of space exploration mapped

“Humans have dreamed about spaceflights forever but only in the second half of the 20th century were developed rockets that were powerful enough to overcome the force of gravity to reach orbital velocities that could open space to human exploration. The awesome poster called Chart of Cosmic Exploration documents every major space mission starting from the Luna 2 in 1959 to the DSCOVR in 2015. The map traces the trajectories of every orbiter, lander, rover, flyby, and impactor which ever left the Earth’s orbit and successfully completed its mission.”

 

Tags: space, remote sensing, scale. 

Source: geoawesomeness.com

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Election Cartograms

“The states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, or the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, respectively. There is significantly more red on a traditional election maps than there is blue, but that is in some ways misleading: the election was much closer than you might think from the balance of colors, and in fact Clinton won slightly more votes than Trump overall. The explanation for this apparent paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that the map fails to take account of the population distribution. It fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones.

We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.”

 

Tags: electoral, scale, political, density, mapping.

Source: www-personal.umich.edu

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Maps to change how you think about American voters — especially small-town, heartland white voters

Small towns are as Democratic as big cities. Suburban and rural voters are the Republicans.

 

I have assembled a Web map from precinct-level 2008 election data that allows users to zoom in and out, focus in on specific towns or neighborhoods and superimpose census data on income and race, allowing readers to examine their own favorite postindustrial towns. One of the most striking lessons from exploring these maps is that the red non-metropolitan counties on election-night maps are internally heterogeneous, but always following the same spatial pattern: Democrats are clustered in town centers, along Main Street, and near the courthouses schools, and municipal buildings where workers are often unionized. They live along the old railroad tracks from the 19th century and in the apartment buildings and small houses in proximity to the mills and factories where workers were unionized in an earlier era.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

There have been SOOOO many articles about the 2016 election, what happened, why it happened and how particular demographics voted and why.  Most of these articles are highly partisan, or ideologically informed but this just analysis of past spatial voting patterns  (I am waiting for the updated version of these maps to show what happened in 2016–but I’m thinking some of this changed).  Too often we’ve lumped the geography of small towns and rural areas as though they are one and the same.  Too often will only see electoral maps with state-level voting data or possibly county level data; but the sub-county scale reveals what would otherwise be missing in our assessment of electoral, spatial patterns (Scale matters?  Who knew?)

 

Tags: electoral, scale, political, mapping.

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Olympic Races, in Your Neighborhood

“What would Olympic races look like if they took place near you? Enter your address below to find out, or keep clicking the green button to explore races that begin in where you live.”

Source: www.nytimes.com

I thought I was done with the Olympics, but this just sucked me right back in…in the most geographically relevant way possible.  Scale and distance are important geographic concepts and realizing JUST HOW FAST these Olympians are on the TV can be deceptive when they are paired up with other great Olympians.  Seeing how far in your own neighborhood you would have to go to beat the 400m champion–or the 5000m.  Since the United States doesn’t use the metric system, this map is a good way to contextualize these measurements and try to run the race in your own backyard.  Let the Backyard Games begin!!

 

Tags: mapping, fun, scale, distance, sport, unit 1 GeoPrinciples.  

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The Language of Maps Kids Should Know

The vocabulary and concepts of maps kids should learn to enhance their map-skills & geography awareness. Concise definitions with clear illustrations.

Source: kidworldcitizen.org

I really like this article because it briefly shares the language needed for students to able to successfully use maps in the classroom…plus it’s highly adaptable for virtually any grade level.   


Tags: mapping, K12, scale, location.

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Globalization

The world is becoming more and more interconnected. Globalization changes how people consume, work and live almost everywhere on the world. Today, many economic, political, cultural or ecological relationships are not explainable from a national perspective. At the same time, a controversial debate about the consequences of globalization has begun.

Questions to ponder: What are the driving forces behind globalization? What areas are most impacted by globalization?  How does globalization benefit some, and adversely impact others? Why?

Tags: Globalization, economic, industry, NGOs, political, scale, unit 6 industry.

See on www.youtube.com

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America Is Stealing the World’s Doctors

Via Scoop.it – Geography Education
Who wants to practice medicine in a country where they use power tools in surgery? The dilemma of doctors in the developing world.  

This article’s title is inflammatory, but it touches on some very real interconnected geographic issues.  Economic development in the many parts of the world is complicated by the migration issue of ‘brain drain.’  The individual choices that doctors from the less developed world face often lead the best and brightest workers to leave their home country.  If you could make a very good living as in the United States(the median salary of a surgeon in New Jersey is $216,000) or go back to your home country where your skills are more desperately needed (in Lusaka, Zambia a surgeon makes about $24,000 a year), which would you choose?  This is not a hypothetical example (nor one with only one right answer) but one rooted in a globalized economy, where the places that offer the greatest opportunities for individual advancement get the top talent–excellent for the individual and family economies but problematic at the national scale.
Via www.nytimes.com

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