18
Jul 17

ChoroPhronesis | UROC projects due | More news on summer activities

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Arts FestPenn State highlighted the art of science and the science of art at a booth during the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. Alex Klippel demonstrates how his lab enables one take a virtual 360-degree field trip to Brazil, Belize, Iceland, and historic University Park campus with virtual reality headsets.

GOOD NEWS

For the summer, DoG news will be published every other week. Continue to send your good news, story ideas, and photos from fieldwork and travels to geography@psu.edu.

Yanan Xin was featured in an EMS Summer Dispatch.

Now is the time to submit projects for Undergraduate Research Opportunity Connection (UROC) for fall 2017. Projects due by Sunday, July 30. To learn more and submit projects visit: www.geog.psu.edu/uroc

Welcome to visiting Ph.D. student, Ekaterina Chuprikova, who is joining us from the Technische Universität München. Her dissertation is focused on “validation of global land cover data, predictive analysis and spatial-temporal uncertainty estimation and visualisation.”  Over the next couple of months, she will be exchanging ideas with faculty and students in GeoVISTA and the department about these and related topics. Her desk is in 206A Walker Building.

Joshua Inwood was featured on a podcast on NPR about the Confederate Memorial Debates in St. Louis. www.npr.org/podcasts/404742561/we-live-here

Alex Klippel has been named an Associate in the Institute for Cyber Science

A visualization to show forest development under climate change led by ChoroPhronesis member Jiawei Huang in collaboration with Melissa Lucasch, Robert Scheller, and Alexander Klippel, won third prize in the VISTAS contest. Our VIFF (viff.psu.edu) group tested a workflow of translating LANDIS-II output into virtual reality for the very first time, creating this video of the Willow Creek LTER:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuRYGTdrwXM&feature=youtu.be&t=4s

RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED

Street naming and the politics of belonging [book chapter]
By Derek Alderman, Joshua Inwood
In The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place
By Reuben Rose-Redwood (’02g,’06g), Derek Alderman, Maoz Azaryahu
Access: https://books.google.com/books?id=QkYrDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT313&ots=cY6JWRaNMe&lr&pg=PT313#v=onepage&q&f=false
Streetscapes are part of the taken-for-granted spaces of everyday urban life, yet they are also contested arenas in which struggles over identity, memory, and place shape the social production of urban space. This book examines the role that street naming has played in the political life of urban streetscapes in both historical and contemporary cities. The renaming of streets and remaking of urban commemorative landscapes have long been key strategies that different political regimes have employed to legitimize spatial assertions of sovereign authority, ideological hegemony, and symbolic power. Over the past few decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban toponymy, and the present collection brings together the works of geographers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists to examine the power of street naming as an urban place-making practice. Covering a wide range of case studies from cities in Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, the contributions to this volume illustrate how the naming of streets has been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries and the cultural politics of place.

Archaeological site exploration and analysis
By Wallgrün, J. O., Huang, J., Zhao, J., Ebert, C., Roddy, P., Awe, Jaime, J.,. . . Klippel, A.
In P. Fogliaroni, A. Ballatore, & E. Clementini (Eds.), Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017). Springer: Berlin.
Access: http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319639451

Developing and evaluating VR field trips
By Oprean, D., Wallgrün, J. O., Duarte, J., Pereira, D., Zhao, J., & Klippel, A. (2017).  In P. Fogliaroni, A. Ballatore, & E. Clementini (Eds.), Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017). Springer: Berlin.
Access: http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319639451


05
Jul 17

Online student focus | ChoroPhronesis at Arts Fest | Sustainable forestry report

IMAGE OF THE WEEKWest Campus Steam Plant

Hmm … what’s missing here? This is the view from the eastern side of Walker Building looking toward the West Campus Steam Plant.

GOOD NEWS

For the summer, DoG news will be published every other week. Continue to send your good news, story ideas, and photos from fieldwork and travels to geography@psu.edu.

ChoroPhronesis will be featured at the Penn State Arts Festival Booth on Friday, July 14, 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.  They will be sharing  several augmented virtual reality experiences.

Guido Cervone sent a summer dispatch from Italy:

NEWS

Online Geospatial Education Student Focus: Jim Daly
We love hearing from our talented students in the Penn State online geospatial program, especially about what they have learned from our classes and how they plan to apply their certificate/degree.
Jim Daly, from Huntington, New York, entered our program in Fall 2013 and is on track to complete his MGIS degree in 2018. For his capstone project, he plans to pursue developing an online subdivision and zoning web map application for local municipalities and residents. The purpose of the application would be to identify property subject to certain state and municipal subdivision and zoning laws based on proximity to environmental features and governmental jurisdictions.

RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED

HLPE Report #11: Sustainable forestry for food security and nutrition
By HLPE Project Team members: Terence Sunderland (Team Leader), Fernande Abanda , Ronnie de Camino Velozo, Patrick Matakala, Peter May, Anatoly Petrov, Bronwen Powell, Bhaskar Vira, Camilla Widmark
Committee on World Food Security (CFS)
Video conference with panel: http://www.fao.org/webcast/home/en/item/4399/icode/
Download a PDF of the report: http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/hlpe/hlpe_documents/HLPE_Reports/HLPE-Report-11_EN.pdf
In October 2014, the CFS requested the HLPE to conduct a study on Sustainable Forestry for Food Security and Nutrition. The HLPE is now launching the report in FAO. Q&A session will follow the presentation (link to agenda below). Forests and trees contribute to food security and nutrition (FSN) in multiple ways. They provide wood, energy, foods and other products, generate income and employment, delivering ecosystem services vital for FSN, including water and carbon cycle regulation and protection of biodiversity. Increasing and competing demands on land, forests and trees create new challenges and opportunities and impact FSN. This report calls for a renewed understanding of sustainable forestry in order to fully integrate the different functions of forests and trees, from farm and landscape to global levels, as well as at different timescales, for enhanced FSN and sustainable development. This requires inclusive and integrative governance mechanisms at different scales that enable the full and effective participation of concerned stakeholders, particularly of forest-dependent indigenous peoples and local communities.


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