IMAGE OF THE WEEK
NASA Space Station Flyover of the Mediterranean: Expedition 46 flight engineer Tim Peake of the European Space Agency (ESA) shared this stunning nighttime photograph on Jan. 25, 2016, writing, “Beautiful night pass over Italy, Alps and Mediterranean.”
GOOD NEWS
- The State College Maptime chapter will meet Wednesday January 27, at 6:00 p.m. at the New Leaf Initiative. If you want to go, plan to bring a laptop computer and register ahead of time at: http://www.meetup.com/Maptime-State-College/events/228100509/
NEWS
Coffee Hour with Qunying Huang
Social media: an emerging data source for human mobility studies
While most previous studies relied heavily on the expensive travel-diary type data, social media now emerges as a new data source to describe human daily activity patterns and population dynamics. Despite the various appealing aspects of social media data, including a much larger numbers of “subjects,” low acquisition cost and relatively wide geographical and international coverage, these data also have many limitations, including sparseness and irregularity of sampling points over space and time, and the lack of background information of users, such as home locations and socioeconomic status (SES).
- 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: Hamil Pearsall “Growing a sustainable city? The question of urban agriculture”
Mining social media can help improve disaster response efforts
Leveraging publicly available social media posts could help disaster response agencies quickly identify impacted areas in need of assistance, according to a Penn State-led team of researchers. By analyzing the September 2013 Colorado floods, researchers showed that a combination of remote sensing, Twitter and Flickr data could be used to identify flooded areas.
Preliminary edition of the AAG 2015 conference program is available online
The online, searchable program includes a preliminary agenda of sessions, plenary speakers, and specialty group meetings. You can browse the program by presenter, keyword, title, or specialty group. You can also view sessions by day using the calendar of events.
RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED
“High severity fire and mixed conifer forest-chaparral dynamics in the southern Cascade Range, USA”
By Catherine Airey Lauvaux, Carl N. Skinner, Alan H. Taylor in Forest Ecology and Management
DOI:10.1016/j.foreco.2015.12.016
Understanding how alternative vegetation types co-exist in a landscape is important in managing for biodiversity within an ecosystem. In California, mixed conifer forest is often interrupted by stands of shrubs known as montane chaparral. The development of chaparral stands following recent high severity or stand-replacing wildfires in mixed conifer forests has been well documented. Fire has been excluded from mixed conifer forests for over a century, and fuel loads are at historically high levels across much of this landscape.
“Species and site difference influence climate-shrub growth response in West Greenland”
By Amanda Young, David Watts, Alan Taylor, and Eric Post in Dendrochronologia
DOI:10.1016/j.dendro.2015.12.007
We examined the suitability of two deciduous arctic shrubs (Salix glauca L. and Betula nana L., hereafter Salix and Betula, respectively) for dendroclimatological analysis at two sites in West Greenland. Chronologies were successfully cross-dated, and the oldest covered the period 1954–2010 (Expressed Population Signal [EPS] > 0.85, 1977–2010). Distinctive pointer years, also called micro-rings, including those from a known outbreak of the irruptive moth Eurois occulta L. (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) that peaked in 2005, assisted in the dating process.
“Situated knowledge of pathogenic landscapes in Ghana: Understanding the emergence of Buruli ulcer through qualitative analysis”
By Petra Tschakert, Vincent Ricciardi, Erica Smithwick, Mario Machado, David Ferring, Heidi Hausermann, Leah Bug in Social Science & Medicine
DOI:10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.12.005
At a time when fear and misinformation about uncommon diseases have become a fixture of our global dialogue, the opportunity is ripe to re-evaluate our understanding of health crises as they relate to society as a whole. Buruli ulcer (BU), an aggressive infection that degrades the skin, soft tissue, and bone of affected individuals, represents one such poorly-understood and stigmatized disease.
DOG OF THE WEEK
Hope we did not catch you catnapping. “Dog” may be our catchword, but this week’s animal companion is no canine. Will this catalyze you to send in a photo of your animal companion? Who is this feline? Who are her humans?