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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
This is a clip from the TV show West Wing (Season 2-Episode 16) where cartography plays a key role in the plot. In this episode the fictitious (but still on Facebook) group named "the Organization of Cartographers for Social Justice" is campaigning to have the President officially endorse the Gall-Peters Projection in schools and denounce the Mercator projection. The argument being that children will grow up thinking some places are not as important because they are minimized by the map projection. While a bit comical, the cartographic debate is quite informative even if it was designed to appear as though the issue was trivial. Questions to Ponder: Why do map projections matter? Is one global map projection inherently better than the rest? Tags: Mapping, geospatial, video, visualization.
Via Seth Dixon
This is the short version of the differences between these interrelated places and terms; the long version is much more complicated than this. Tags: Europe, political, unit 4 political, states, toponyms.
Via Seth Dixon
After making an infographic depicting how much space would be needed to house the entire world’s population based on the densities of various global cities, Tim De Chant of Per Square Mile got to thinking about the land resources it takes to support those same cities.
Tags: consumption, development, resources, energy, density, sustainability.
Via Seth Dixon
From TD-architects Theo Deutinger Rotterdam. Rome was the first city with one million residents, with that occuring in 5 BC. Over a thousand years later, London and Beijing joined that group as industrialization became the impetus for wide-scale urbanization. Today we are seeing an explosion of "million cities" throughout the world.
Tags: urban, megacities, unit 7 cities.
Via Seth Dixon
An interactive series of maps show possible new additions to the world’s list of independent nations. This is great way to show examples of devolution and political instability. Included are 11 potential scenarios where further fragmentation/disintegration might occur or even greater regional integration that would redraw the map. These case studies include: Somalia, Korea, Azerbaijan, Belgium and the Arabian Gulf Union. Tags: political, devolution, supranationalism, war, autonomy, unit 4 political.
Via Seth Dixon
See photos from 7 Billion: http://bit.ly/hhYz3m With the worldwide population expected to exceed seven billion in 2011, National Geographic magazine offers a... This video provides excellent material for discussing population growth, space and sustainability.
Via Seth Dixon
This video is a class introduction to the Advanced Placement course in Human Geography, which is intended to give high-ability students the opportunity to ea... This is an excellent promotional video for geography as a whole, but the AP Human Geography course specifically. For more from this great Florida teacher, visit his course website at: http://teacherweb.ftl.pinecrest.edu/snyderd/APHG/ which has some incredible resources.
Via Seth Dixon, Andrea 'Norris' Kline
Discover the number of countries participating in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. Find out which countries are not participating in the Olympic Games and learn which non-countries are participating as well. 204 countries are participating in the Olympics? There aren't even 204 countries in the world! This article looks at the political geography of international recognition. One interesting case not discussed in the article is that of Taiwan. Taiwan is participating, but marched under a non-Taiwanese flag under the name Chinese Taipei because the IOC wanted the mainland Chinese to return to the games. Also, South Sudan, Kosovo and the Vatican are not participating (although pondering them competing, especially the Vatican, is something that deeply amuses me). Another intriguing thought: how many of the participants were former British colonies? For classroom resources based on the Olympics, see: http://www.scoop.it/t/history-and-social-studies-education/p/2254468864/london-the-olympics-and-geography
Via Seth Dixon
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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.
Via Seth Dixon
This is the truly global project that asks the children of the world to introduce us to the people of the world. We've seen videos and resources that ask the question, "if there were only 100 people in the world, what would it look like?" This takes that idea of making demographic statistics more meaningful one step further by asking student in schools for around the world to nominate some "representative people" and share their stories. The site houses videos, galleries from each continent and analyze themes that all societies must deal with. This site that looks at the people and places on out planet to promote greater appreciation of cultural diversity and understanding is a great find. Tags: Worldwide, statistics, K12, education, comparison.
Via Seth Dixon
The Global Closet Calculator aggregates the contents of your closet by origin to generate a map showing your unique global footprint, and puts you in charge of the global journey your stuff takes to get to you. As I've worked now with the Rhode Island Geography Education Alliance, I've had the good fortune to interact with the folks at National Geographic. They are preparing for Geography Awareness Week (Nov 11-17th) with the theme "Declare your Interdependence!" This newly released interactive feature allows students of all ages to see the global interconnections in their lives. By analyzing the items in our closets (or any of the items that we consume), we can easily see that our own personal geographies create a web of global interconnectedness. Tags: NationalGeographic, GeographyEducation, K12, consumption, globalization.
Via Seth Dixon
This is another old classic image that I might have shared earlier but it merits repeating. As Salvatore Natoli (a leader in geography education) once said, "In our society we unconsciously equate size with importance and even power." This is one reason why many people have underestimated the true size of Africa relative to places that they view as more important or more powerful.
Tags: mapping, Africa, perspective, images.
Via Seth Dixon
For the first time in generations, more investment than foreign aid is pouring into Africa. But is that growth enough to change its future? This is the first article in six-part series designed to investigate the changing economic and developmental possibilities that are facing the African continent. As more foreign investors are exploring potential windfalls in Africa, it is making places that were on the margins of a global economy more directly tied to the process of globalization. Tags: Africa, development, globalization, economic, NGOs, unit 6 industry.
Via Seth Dixon
Public health crises of the past decade — such as the 2003 SARS outbreak, which spread to 37 countries and caused about 1,000 deaths, and the 2009 H1N1 flu p... The spread of infectious diseases is inherently connected to the mobility of infected. Airports are important nodes in this complex transportation network. Which airports would have the greatest potential to spread diseases? At MIT, they've gathered data that incorporates variations in travel patterns among individuals, the geographic locations of airports, the disparity in interactions among airports, and waiting times at individual airports to create a tool that could be used to predict where and how fast a disease might spread. To read more, see: http://cee.mit.edu/news/releases/2012/airport-disease-contagion-model
Via Seth Dixon
Music video by Counting Crows performing Big Yellow Taxi. (C) 2002 Interscope Geffen (A&M) Records A Division of UMG Recordings Inc. This music video is a vivid portrayal of the cultural power of place and the deep emotional connection many people have to their neighborhoods. What types of urban geographies are being critiqued by the original lyrics (orginally performed and written my Joni Mitchell) of this song? What do the images portrayed in the video say to further this critique? What type of urbanism are these performers advocating? Given the context of this video, what priorities do you think city planners should consider when building and reshaping cities?
Via Seth Dixon
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