Coffee Hour with Timothy Murtha | Parks and People | Orphan wells

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Giraffes

Giraffes gaze ahead in the Amakhala Game Reserve, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa during Parks and People, a cooperative Penn State/African partnership that integrates teaching, research and service across the multiple disciplines relevant to the management of protected areas, the economic development of communities surrounding or located within those areas, and public education in ecosystem services and natural resource management. Come visit us at the Education Abroad Fair on October 12 to learn more. Applications being accepted until October 19.

GOOD NEWS

NEWS

Coffee Hour on October 14 with Timothy Murtha
Cultural Ecology of the Lowland Maya Revisited: Regional LIDAR and Landscapes revisited
About 50 years ago, Penn State anthropologist Bill Sanders offered a two-part synthetic view of the Ancient Maya landscape, attempting to answer fundamental questions about population, society and settlement. Sanders’ view was not only explicitly ecological, but also offered a bottom up interpretation of Maya society. Yet, in the decades that followed, an overtly urban, highly centralized and top down model of Ancient Maya civilization has overshadowed these ideas, in part fueled by early remote sensing efforts used to identify landesque features, such as terraces in the Rio Bec region. This presentation revisits some of Sanders’ ideas through the lens of a newly acquired geospatial data set covering the Maya lowlands.

  • 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: Christelle Wauthier on Volcanic and tectonic processes revealed by radar remote sensing

Why so much blatant racism is bubbling to the surface
Joshua Inwood interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor
The firing of a teacher’s aide in Forsyth County, Ga., the censuring of a small-town mayor in Pennsylvania, the arrest of an East Tennessee State University student – all three after comparing black people to apes. These recent examples of blatant racism have been met by swift public condemnation. Americans, on the whole, remain firmly intolerant of intolerance.

Interactive video quizzes prove successful for student engagement
Students who do not have the opportunity to travel can still experience the geography of other countries through the use of interactive video.

Last spring, Erica Smithwick, an associate professor of geography at Penn State University Park, used HapYak to create interactive video quizzes for students in an online course (GEOG 001 (GS) Global Parks and Sustainability) as part of a Research Initiation Grant funded by Penn State’s Center for Online Innovation in Learning (COIL). Next semester, she has plans to modify her approach a little, as the course will go from an online offering to a hybrid one.

Conference takes aim at state’s orphan well problem
More than 150 years after the first commercial oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania, decades of energy exploration have resulted in hundreds of thousands of abandoned, lost and forgotten oil and gas wells scattered across the state.

RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED

Brown, Daniel G., Kim, Eun-Kyeong, Perez, Liliana, and Sengupta, Raja (Eds.) “Proceedings of GIScience 2016 Workshop on Rethinking the ABCs: Agent-Based Models and Complexity Science in the age of Big Data, CyberGIS, and Sensor Networks,” Montreal, Canada, September 27, 2016. https://sites.psu.edu/bigcomplexitygisci/publications/.

“DOG” OF THE WEEK

Last week’s feline companion was “Baby,” companion to Missy Weaver. There were no correct guesses to her identity.  Send your photos and/or your guesses to geography@psu.edu. The identity of the mystery animal will be revealed the following week.

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