IMAGE OF THE WEEK
This bench is located on the northwest side of Walker Building and bears a plaque in memory of Jeff Gockley. The plaque shows part of this quote: “A map in the hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man’s faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader—even whose author, perhaps—must allow in his mind a recess for doubt. A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.” ― Beryl Markham, West with the Night. The Gockley family will be with us at the Recognition Reception on Friday, April 29, to give the Jeff Gockley Memorial Award to a top rising senior (current junior) in the GIS option. We hope you will join us. More details and RSVP.
GOOD NEWS
Eden Kinkaid received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from the US Department of Education for academic year 2016–17.
At the college Wilson Awards Banquet, held on Sunday, April 17:
- Lorraine Dowler received the “Faculty Mentoring Award.”
- Brent Yarnal received the “Wilson Award for Outstanding Service.”
- Alan Taylor received his “25-Year Service Award.”
Alex Klippel, leading a team of nine researchers across several colleges at Penn State, received funding from the Cyber Science Institute for a project on: Immersive Analytics—3D/VR Environments to Support Expert Decision Making for Climate Change Scenarios.
Ashlee Adams passed her proposal defense.
Anne Mosher (MS 1983, PhD 1989) was appointed chair of the double-major in Citizenship and Civic Engagement at The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
Nari Senanayake received the Evelyn Pruitt National Fellowship for Dissertation Research from Society of Woman Geographers and the Whiting Indigenous Knowledge Research Award from the Penn State Inter-institutional Center for Indigenous Knowledge (ICIK).
E-K Kim has had two paper presentations (one with Alan MacEachren and another with Hang-Hyun Jo) accepted to the 2nd Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science, held at Northwestern University, 23-26 June 2016.
E-K Kim has received grants from KUSCO, KSEA, and Penn State UPAC for the conference she is organizing “The 1st Symposium on Research Methodologies in the Big Data Era” on May 13-15 here in Walker Building. For more details and to register.
The first-year cohort invites you to the department end-of-year picnic at Sunset Park, Saturday, April 30, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. More details and RSVP form.
E-K Kim, Ramzi Tubbeh, and Peter Koby have been elected as the new grad reps.
NEWS
Penn State’s Peuquet named 2016 UCGIS Fellow
Donna J. Peuquet, professor of geography in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ Department of Geography, has been selected as a 2016 Fellow by the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS).
Fellows are individuals who have contributed significantly to the advancement of geographic information science education and research. No more than two Fellows are selected in any given year. Peuquet is the 23rd person and the first Penn Stater to be recognized as a UCGIS Fellow.
Researchers study location’s role in romance
Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck had their holiday in Rome. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks had their meeting at the top of the Empire State Building in New York. And of course, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman will always have Paris.
Cities have long played an important role in romantic relationships, both on and off screen. Couples met in coffee shops, had picnics in the park and went on dates at the bowling alley. But a Penn State research team says that’s begun to change with the rise of online dating and weekend-long Netflix binges.
44-year teaching and research career draws to a close for EMS associate dean
Hampton Nelson ‘Nels’ Shirer says he first got the weather bug growing up in Lawrence, Kansas, watching his father design and build weather monitoring equipment that they installed in their backyard.
RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED
Toward the Integrated Framework Analysis of Linkages among Agrobiodiversity, Livelihood Diversification, Ecological Systems, and Sustainability amid Global Change
By Karl S. Zimmerer and Steven J. Vanek
In Land 2016, 5(2), 10;
doi:10.3390/land5020010
Scientific and policy interest in the biological diversity of agriculture (agrobiodiversity) is expanding amid global socioeconomic and environmental changes and sustainability interests. The majority of global agrobiodiversity is produced in smallholder food-growing. We use meta-analyses in an integrated framework to examine the interactions of smallholder agrobiodiversity with: (1) livelihood processes, especially migration, including impacts on agrobiodiversity as well as the interconnected resource systems of soil, water, and uncultivated habitats; and (2) plant-soil ecological systems.
Mining social media to task satellite data collection during emergencies
Guido Cervone
In SPIE Newsroom (April 14, 2016)
doi:10.1117/2.1201604.006400
The era of Internet and social media has drastically changed the way individuals all over the world interact and communicate. In particular, the current digital world has changed the dynamics of how we collect and share data across all age groups and socioeconomic statuses. Although social media is not primarily intended for scientific studies, it can be an invaluable source for distributed and timely measurements. This is especially true during disasters and emergencies, where first responders and emergency managers rely on multiple sources of data inputs to make decisions.
“DOG” OF THE WEEK
Last week’s feline was Frank, companion to Donna Peuquet. Send a photo of your animal companion to geography@psu.edu.
Photo by Trina Miller Bauer, pet sitter and “catographer.”
