Department of Geography (DoG) News and Events Where it's at!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Fall festivities fire pit shot by graduate student Xi Liu at the department’s annual gathering, held this year at House Taylor of Warriors Mark. More great photos and great memories from the event can be accessed here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByjbUZU-en9UOUt3LS1vYUFrdjg

GOOD NEWS

• A group of students will join Penn State President Barron on his television program “Digging Deeper” to discuss inclusivity. The program will air at 11:30 a.m. and again at 6 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 2, on WPSU-TV and at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 6, on WPSU-FM.
• Sheryl Kron Larson-Rhodes (’85) has accepted a full-time, tenure-track position as First Year Experience Librarian at SUNY Geneseo. She also serves as the library liaison to the Departments of Communication, Geography, and Languages and Literatures. Larson-Rhodes lives outside of Rochester, NY, with her husband and two cats.
• Jen Fluri (’01g, ’05g) is featured in the podcast, “Feminists on the Frontline”

NEWS

Coffee Hour on September 30 with Jared Oyler
Topoclimate data products: empirical modeling of climate variability at locally relevant spatiotemporal scales
High-resolution gridded climate products are essential for both the evaluation and downscaling of climate models, and as inputs to assessments of climate impacts on local hydrology, ecosystem processes, and biotic communities. However, there has been little formal analysis on the ability of these products to accurately capture temporal variability and trends in local climate.

• 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: Lucky Yapa “How development causes poverty: travel notes from Cuba, Haiti, South Africa, and Sri Lanka”

Reconnecting with Penn State’s past through virtual reality
There’s no question that Old Main stands as one of the most iconic landmarks at Penn State’s University Park campus. In fact, it can be difficult to even imagine the campus landscape without the building’s lofty bell tower and eight limestone columns.

But the recognizable look of today’s Old Main is far from the original structure, which was built in 1863, torn down in 1929 and rebuilt in 1931 as the landmark that stands today.

In an effort to more clearly visualize these previous iterations of campus, a cross-disciplinary group of researchers is using virtual reality and 3-D modeling technology as a time machine to travel back to the early days of Penn State.

Fall Affiliate Program Group meeting and networking event
We invite you to join us on Saturday, October 15, 2016 for the Department of Geography’s fall Affiliate Program Group (APG) meeting and networking event, which will take place in Walker Building on the University Park Campus.

The Geography Alumni APG is an officially recognized affiliate program group of the Penn State Alumni Association, chartered by GEMS—the Graduates of Earth and Mineral Sciences alumni society. The group acts as an advisory body to the department and a mechanism for connecting alumni with each other and with current students, faculty and staff.  Our agenda for the day includes an APG meeting and working lunch, followed by career networking activities where alumni give advice on geography careers and coach students on job-seeking strategies. The day will conclude with an informal reception.

Because it is Parents and Families Weekend, there are many activities on campus you can enjoy as part of your visit. More details, including the schedule and the registration form, can be found on our department website: www.geog.psu.edu/news/events/geography-apg-meeting-and-career-networking-session

“DOG” OF THE WEEK

Who is this dog? who is his human?

Send your answer and/or a photo of your dog to geography@psu.edu for our mystery dog of the week!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A digital comparison of historical maps of Barbados by Peter Koby
During the colonial phase of Barbados’ sugar industry, a number of maps were made of the island conveying a remarkable amount of cultural and economic information. Differing cartographic choices and varying levels of accuracy provide an intriguing challenge in comparing these maps. Learn more by attending this week’s Coffee Hour.

GOOD NEWS

• The book proposal of E.-K. Kim (with Raja Sengupta and Liliana Perez) to publish accepted GIScience workshop full & short papers has been accepted to the Springer “Advances in Geographic Information Sciences” series, scheduled to be published summer 2017.
• Nate Frey’s paper “Equity in the Distribution of Urban Environmental Amenities: The Case of Washington, D.C.” has been accepted for publication in Urban Geography.
• Guido Cervone received a grant from the NSF for “EarthCube Building Blocks: Collaborative Proposal: The Power of Many: Ensemble Toolkit for Earth Sciences.”
• Updated 2016-17 student and faculty/staff parking maps (work done by the Gould Center) are now available for pickup at the Parking Office and online at www.parking.psu.edu.
• Travis Young is one of 14 Penn State National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recipients for the 2016-17 academic year.
• Mikael Hiestand is a 2016–17 recipient of the Anne C. Wilson Graduate Fellowship
• Zongjun Li, a geography major from Guangzhou, China, is featured in an article about EMS International Culture Night.

NEWS

Coffee Hour on September 23
Department of Geography graduate student lightening talks

Ethan Davis
Is there enough existing agricultural land to feed and fuel the world?

Carolyn Fish
Point Symbols

Yooinn Hong
Home but Not Tame: Wild plants in home gardens tells a tale of agricultural modernization impacts in Jeju, South Korea.

Peter Koby
Temporal Data from a Digital Comparison of Historical Maps of Barbados

• 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: Jared Oyler “Topoclimate data products: empirical modeling of climate variability at locally relevant spatiotemporal scales”

Andrew Carleton quoted in AccuWeather news story on supra-glacial lakes
Why beautiful blue lakes forming on East Antarctica have scientists worried
Beautiful, blue lakes are beginning to form atop of East Antarctica ice sheets, but despite their breathtaking aura, these lakes are sparking concerns among scientists. Supraglacial lakes form during the warmer summer months when temperatures tend to rise above freezing. The higher air temperature at the surface causes the snow over the glacier to melt and form these ponds. However, these dazzling meltwater ponds may pose serious threats for glaciers.

No ordinary classroom
Imagine studying and learning where your classroom has no walls. It is the expansive Groot Winterhoek Wilderness where you sleep out under the stars and observe ancient rock paintings by the San and Khoi people. It is the Karoo National Park, a biodiversity conservation area, where you consider the effects of fracking. It is Nelson Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island where you hear stories from those who knew him personally and gain access not available to the general public.

Penn State welcomes three new ethics core faculty members
This fall the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State welcomes the second group of ethics core faculty members recruited to expand the University’s national leadership in ethics research and ethical literacy. The faculty members, C. Daryl Cameron (psychology), Joshua F. J. Inwood (geography), and Alan R. Wagner (aerospace rngineering), are part of the University’s transformative initiative to position itself at the intersection of its research strengths and the world’s major ethical conversations.

RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED

“Measuring burstiness for finite event sequences”
By E.-K. Kim and Hang-Hyun Jo
In Physical Review E (Vol.94, No.3
URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.94.032311
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.94.032311
Characterizing inhomogeneous temporal patterns in natural and social phenomena is important to understand underlying mechanisms behind such complex systems and, hence, even to predict and control them. Temporal inhomogeneities in event sequences have been described in terms of bursts that are rapidly occurring events in short time periods alternating with long inactive periods.

“DOG” OF THE WEEK

Last week’s animal companion was Kasey. The dog is part of the Kloehr family. There were no correct guesses about her identity.

Each week we feature a mystery photo of an animal companion. Any animal companion can be the dog of the week. Have fun guessing which human cares for this creature and learning about the members of our community.

Send your photos and/or your guesses to geography@psu.edu. The identity of the mystery animal will be revealed the following week.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A stunning view from the West Glacier Trail of the Mendenhall Glacier by Mike Nassry, taken during the CAUSE 2016 trip to Alaska.

GOOD NEWS

• Guido Cervone received a grant from the Office of Naval Research for his project “Fusing radiation data from UAVs and social media during nuclear emergencies.”
• Azita Ranjbar’s article, “Silence, Silencing, and (In)Visibility: The Geopolitics of Tehran’s Silent Protests” has been accepted for publication in Hypatia, a top feminist philosophy journal.
• Send your good news to geography@psu.edu to be announced during Coffee Hour and published here.
• Remember to submit your meetings and events for LOCAL EVENTS AND DEADLINES and CONFERENCES each week.

NEWS

Coffee Hour on September 16 with Brian King
“Eat Healthy and Nutritious Food”: Political Ecologies of Managed HIV
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has had significant impacts for social and ecological systems throughout the Global South. The epidemic has taken on a new course in recent years with improved access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) that has the potential to extend the lives of individuals for years or even decades, which has made HIV management similar to other chronic health conditions. This transition presents new relationships between citizens and the state, and the political ecologies of health for individuals and communities. This talk highlights some of these patterns in rural South Africa, drawing from a long-term research project addressing how livelihood patterns and environmental systems are responding to disease.

• 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: Department of Geography graduate student lightening talks

Tenure track geography faculty job posting
The Department of Geography at The Pennsylvania State University invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position at the assistant or associate professor rank. We seek an established scholar whose research and teaching contributes to the area of Environment and Society as a subfield of Geography. Areas of investigation could include water resources, sustainability, health, urbanization, social justice, globalization, global environmental change, planning, or governance. A Ph.D. in Geography or a related field is expected at the time of appointment. It is expected that applicants in related fields will demonstrate how their work will fit within a diverse Geography department. Excellence in teaching, research, and service is expected, as is the development of an extramurally funded research program. For more information and to apply visit: https://psu.jobs/job/66474

How land use affects the spread of disease
Protecting the landscape may also help protect people from some infectious diseases, according to Erica Smithwick, associate professor of geography. Smithwick and her colleagues have been investigating how land use has affected the spread of two diseases in sub-Saharan Africa.

Infectious disease transmission: It’s who you know and where you go
Public health researchers have long used social networks to understand the spread of infectious diseases, but those social networks often have gaps. A team of researchers recently showed that spatial analysis can help fill in those gaps, leading to a more complete picture of disease transmission and ways to mediate the risk, particularly for those who are most vulnerable.

“DOG” OF THE WEEK

Who is this dog? Who is her family?

Each week we feature a photo of a mystery animal companion. Any animal companion can be the dog of the week. Have fun guessing which human cares for this creature and learning about the members of our community.

Send your photos and/or your guesses to geography@psu.edu. The identity of the mystery animal and the correct guesser will be revealed next week.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Alumnus Ralph W. Tutlane, Jr. (’83) sent in this image of a remote sensing device he spotted in the Village of Doe Run, Pa. Doe Run, located in Chester County, is on the National Register of Historic Places. You can read more about it in the NRHP nomination.

GOOD NEWS

• Erica Smithwick and Alan Taylor, along with three other Penn State colleagues, received a grant to study social perceptions of prescribed fire in the mid-Atlantic.
• Erica Smithwick and Alex Klippel, along with several colleagues from EESI and other institutions, received a grant from NSF-Coupled Natural Human Systems, to use virtual ecology and ecosystem modeling to assess values and trade-offs in decision making about sustainable forest management under climate change.
• Send your good news to geography@psu.edu to be announced during Coffee Hour and published here.
• Remember to submit your meetings and events for LOCAL EVENTS AND DEADLINES and CONFERENCES each week.

NEWS

September 9 Coffee Hour with Ann Jolly: Looking for love in all the wrong places
Sexually transmitted infections (STI) spread through networks of susceptible people, where the people form nodes in the network, and the links are sexual intercourse. Data on sex partners of people are available from network studies, and from public health units which co-ordinate partner notification, in which sex partners exposed to people with STI are notified of their exposures, tested and treated. Key features of networks in which STI flourish include homogeneity; where many of the members share common characteristics; but also require a certain amount of heterogeneity, whether it is in ethnic origin, age, or geography.

• 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: Brian King

GEOGRAPH Highlight
Symposium shows the transdisciplinary nature of spatial cognition
The third “Pennsylvania and Friends Spatial Cognition Symposium” took place in State College, Pennsylvania in May 2016. It was organized by the Penn State Department of Geography in collaboration with the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) at Temple University and the School of Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

The entire Summer 2016 Department of Geography annual newsletter, GEOGRAPH, is now available online.

The symposium reflects the transdisciplinary character of spatial cognition; while geography is a spatial discipline, there are areas in disciplines such as psychology, information science, architecture, and others that explicitly address how humans think about, represent, and interact with their spatial environments.

From the Allegheny Front
How Allegheny County is trying to move on from the legacy of blight
Scattered remnants from Pittsburgh’s steel era still dot the hills in Allegheny County, where at its peak, more than 1.6 million people lived and worked. Almost 60 years later, nearly 400,000 people have left, but the homes they forged remain. According to the most recent census, there are 50,000 vacant homes in the county. Of these, 16,428 properties are blighted, exhibiting signs of deterioration that pose threats to human health, safety and public welfare.

RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED

Strange encounters: a dialogue on cultural geography across the political divide
By Reuben Rose-Redwood (’02g, ’06g) vs Jonathan M. Smith
Journal of Cultural Geography, 33:3, 356-378
doi: 10.1080/08873631.2016.1201351
Disagreement is a fundamental aspect of scholarly inquiry, yet it is exceedingly rare for scholars on opposite sides of the political spectrum to engage in a sustained dialogue across the political divide. This article seeks to contribute to precisely such a dialogue with specific reference to the field of cultural geography. The discussion featured herein consists of an encounter between “critical” and “conservative” approaches to cultural geography in the form of a back-and-forth exchange of arguments and counter-arguments by the interlocutors. The dialogue covers a wide range of issues, including the cultural politics of essentialism, white supremacy, racial segregation, patriarchy, traditional morality, secularism, justice, authority, friendship, difference-as-strangeness, and the very question of disagreement itself. The broader aim of this dialogical intervention is not to find some sort of common ground that will resolve all differences but rather to explore what those differences are with the hope of opening up a space for more constructive dialogue on cultural geography across the political divide.

“DOG” OF THE WEEK

Last week’s animal companion was P-J. The horse is part of the Inwood family. There were no correct guesses about his identity.

Each week we feature a mystery photo of an animal companion. Any animal companion can be the dog of the week. Have fun guessing which human cares for this creature and learning about the members of our community.

Send your photos and/or your guesses to geography@psu.edu. The identity of the mystery animal will be revealed the following week.