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I'm sure most of you have seen the 2008 version of these fantastic maps and cartograms and they've been a go-to reference for me since the last election. The typical red state/blue state map conceals much concerning the spatial voting patterns in the United States and fails to account for the population densities of these distributions. That's what makes this county level voting maps and cartograms so valuable. Questions to Ponder: What new patterns can you see in the county map that you couldn't see in the state map? What do the cartograms tell you about the United States population? Tags: cartography, mapping, rural, zbestofzbest.
Via Seth Dixon
Not every state is equally impacted by migration, and the demographic profile of migrants is different for every state. This is an online mapping tool to search a large database that can give the user state specific information about the impact of economics and politics based on migration from Latin America and Asia on any given state. Tags: Immigration, unit 2 population, migration, economic, statistics, mapping, political.
Via Seth Dixon
Geographer Andy Baker provides an excellent spatial analysis of the key voting patterns that will shape the 2012 presidential election in the United States. Tags: political, statistics, spatial, regions, USA.
Via Seth Dixon
Excellent electoral geography maps from the U.S. presidential election of 2008. What are the major patterns you see? What do these patterns in say about the politics, culture and demographics about these places?
Via Seth Dixon
And the United States of Awesome, what any state is best at. This could lead to some humorous, but also engaging discussion--hopefully without the negative stereotypes. Thanks Danbury HS!
Via Seth Dixon
"Are more and more people in the western world dropping off the radar and becoming the invisible poor or is the opposite happening? We recently heard that an astounding 46 million Americans are officially below the poverty line (That's $23,050/year for a family of four according to the official sources). That number really caught our eye and as such we decided to do a little more digging to help put some more facts and figures around it. Above is a nice visualization of the results we came up with."
Via Seth Dixon
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The green dots on this map representing Starbucks locations which are obviously clustered in major metropolitan centers. Cross-referencing this Starbucks address location with population data, Davenport explains his mapping technique: "By counting the number of people who live within a given distance to each Starbucks, we can measure how well centered Frappuccinos are to the US citizenry. In other words: draw a 1-mile circle around every store, then add up the % of the population living within the circles. Repeat for 2, 3, 4....100 miles." The result of this data is a fabulous logrithmic S-curve which explains much about the American population distribution. Tags: statistics, density, consumption, mapping, visualization, urban.
Via Seth Dixon
For the first time in its history, the United States does not have a Protestant majority, according to a new study. Interestingly, this is not due to the rise of a new religious group, but the rise of secularism in the United States. The fastest growing group in the United States is the religiously unaffliliated. Click here for a simplified AP news story on the report. Questions to ponder: What are some causal factors that might explain why there is an increase in the non-religious population in the United States today? How does this impact American culture and politics? Tags: religion, USA, culture, unit 3 culture.
Via Seth Dixon
A teaser trailer for the MLK Streets Project, a documentary film examining the state of the many avenues, boulevards and thoroughfares named after the slain ... This video echoes much of what the authors of the fantastic book "Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory" say (in fact one of the authors is shown in this video). Throughout America, streets that are named after Martin Luther King Jr. frequently are in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods. This video highlights the irony between the historical memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and places of memorialization that bear his name. Questions to ponder: If Matin Luther King Jr. represents non-violence, then why are streets bearing his name often in 'violent' neighborhoods? Where should Martin Luther King be memorialized in the United States? Only in the South? Only in predominantly African-American communities? Do the geography of the spaces where he is memorialized say something about the United States? Tags: historical, culture, landscape, place, race, unit 3 culture, USA, urban, poverty, unit 7 cities, book review.
Via Seth Dixon
Since Katrina, the cartoonish pace of vegetation growth in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans resembles something out of a Chia Pet commercial. The ecosystem is reclaiming parts of New Orleans that have been physically or economically abandoned. This is part elevation, climate and ecosystem; but it is also about urban land uses, disinvestment and socioeconomics. Tags: urban ecology, environment, ecology, urban, unit 7 cities, disasters, land use.
Via Seth Dixon
"While many northern cities did see anemic growth or even losses in black population, and many southern cities saw their black population surge, the real story actually extends well beyond the notion of a monolithic return to the South." Demographics, culture, scale, region are some of the applications available.
Via Seth Dixon
"A recently-released online tool enables Californians to see where they stand on a “human development index” – a composite measure of health, knowledge and standard of living developed by the American Human Development Project of the Social Sciences..." This is cool. Instead of aggregating the data at the country level and comparing countries, we can see differences in local levels of human development. Students see patterns of socio-economic and development vividly, and in an intensely local way tailored to their regional frame of reference.
Via Seth Dixon
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