IMAGE OF THE WEEK
A comparison of two different map formats for University Park campus. On the top, the old style shows 3-D buildings. On the bottom, the new style shows simpler building footprints and bus routes. See related story below.
GOOD NEWS
SWIG exceeded its goal and collected enough money to sponsor a mom, her two young children and purchase 5 additional gift cards for women and children at the Centre County Women’s Resource Center. Thanks to everyone in the department who contributed so generously.
Aparna Parikh has been elected as a new grad rep. She joins Ashlee Adams, Adrienne Tucker, and Carolyn Fish as your graduate representatives. Her term will run through December 2016.
Azita Ranjbar’s opinion piece on H.R. 158 “When Rhetoric Becomes Reality: Changes to Visa Waiver Program Create Second-Class Citizens” was published on Huffington Post.
Ashlee Adams’s book review of “Seeds of resistance, seeds of hope: place and agency in the conservation of biodiversity” has been published in the journal Agriculture and Human Values.
NEWS
Coffee Hour with Jia-Ching Chen: “Forging Low-Carbon Value: People, Places and Things in the Global Green Economy”
How do markets for renewable energy commodities like solar panels capture and represent low-carbon value? This talk examines the geography of low-carbon value in the transformation of Yixing, a municipality in China’s Jiangsu province, and the site of large scale state investment and master planning in the renewables industries beginning in 2006. Using a political industrial ecology approach, I examine the changing social-environmental relationships surrounding the construction of a solar photovoltaics industrial cluster that now accounts for approximately ten percent of global manufacturing capacity.
- 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
- Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.
- The lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.
- Coffee Hour To Go Webcast
- Next week: Alton Byers “Impacts of the 27 April, 2015 Nepal earthquake on four potentially dangerous glacial lakes in Nepal”
Gould Center releases updated University Park campus maps
Situated on more than 8,500 acres with nearly 300 academic, administrative and residential buildings, Penn State’s University Park campus is a big place. As a service to the University community and the thousands of annual visitors, the Peter R. Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach in Penn State’s Department of Geography has produced maps of the University Park campus for more than 20 years. The newly updated 2016 maps are now available for downloading and printing.
Undergraduate Research Opportunities Connection (UROC) now ready for applications
Undergraduate students looking for a way to gain research experience as well as 1 to 3 credits, can now apply for spring 2016 undergraduate research projects supervised by graduate students in the Department of Geography. To view the new projects and apply, go to: http://www.geog.psu.edu/uroc
RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED
“The Sociospatial Network: Risk and the role of place in the transmission of infectious diseases.”
By Jay Logan (MGIS 2014), A.M. Jolly, and Justine Blanford In PlosOne
“Using small cities to understand the crowd behind OpenStreetMap”
By Sterling Quinn in GeoJournal
DOI: 10.1007/s10708-015-9695-6
Using Twitter for tasking remote-sensing data collection and damage assessment: 2013 Boulder flood case study
By Guido Cervone , Elena Sava , Qunying Huang , Emily Schnebele , Jeff Harrison , Nigel Waters in International Journal of Remote Sensing
DOI: 10.1080/01431161.2015.1117684
“Intuitive Direction Concepts”
By Alexander Klippel, Jan Oliver Wallgrün, Jinlong Yang, Kevin Sparks in The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/1944-3676.1103
“Species and site differences influence climate-shrub growth responses in West Greenland”
By Amanda B. Young, David A. Watts, Alan H. Taylor, Eric Post in Dendrochronologia
doi:10.1016/j.dendro.2015.12.007
DOG OF THE WEEK
Who is this dog? Who is his human? Send your answer and/or send a photo of your animal companion to geography@psu.edu.