IMAGE OF THE WEEK
From the International Space Station, European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti took this photograph of the island of Hawaii on Feb. 28, 2015. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti
GOOD NEWS
Aparna Parikh is the winner of this year’s SWIG Nancy Brown Geography Community Service Award.
Guido Cervone was awarded a PSIEE seed grant for the project: Solar BASES: New Solar Data Informing the Next Generation of Smart Energy Systems.
Three alumni — Reuben Rose-Redwood (M.S. ’02, Ph.D. ’06), John Krygier (Ph.D ’95), and Jeremy Crampton (M.S. ’87, Ph.D. ’94)— are among the authors of the forthcoming Cartographica special issue “Deconstructing the Map.”
Sterling Quinn has been nominated for “2015 GeoForAll Global Educator of the Year Award” for his course: GEOG 585: Open Web Mapping.
NEWS
Coffee Hour: Ken Kato “Advancing a campus GIS from a mapping system to a platform for exploring the spatially enabled smart city”
Alongside supporting faculty colleagues with research projects, an essential function of the InfoGraphics Lab is providing our campus with a GIS and mapping system. Delivering timely and accurate spatial information to those charged with delivering essential services that make the university run, producing accurate maps for wayfinding, and providing a rich experiential learning opportunity for our students has been pillar of our program.
- 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
- Next Week: Budhendra Bhaduri “Landscape Dynamics, Geographic Data and Scalable Computing: The Oak Ridge Experience”
EMS THON recap: an insider’s perspective
For the fifth year in a row, the EMS THON raised the largest amount among general organizations for The Four Diamonds, fighting pediatric cancer. Student dancers and committee members say the THON families and EMS THON esprit de corps are why they do it.
Behind the Relaunch of The New York Times Magazine
Our design director, Gail Bichler, on this week’s covers: “We asked several artists to make works based on the idea of chaos in the world, and how this is something we have all learned to live with. The only constraint we gave them was that they had to use imagery of the earth or a globe.”
Recently (or soon to be) published
“Review of remote sensing methodologies for pavement management and assessment”
Schnebele, B. F. Tanyu, G. Cervone and N. Waters
In European Transport Research Review
doi:10.1007/s12544-015-0156-6
Evaluating the condition of transportation infrastructure is an expensive, labor intensive, and time consuming process. Many traditional road evaluation methods utilize measurements taken in situ along with visual examinations and interpretations. The measurement of damage and deterioration is often qualitative and limited to point observations. Remote sensing techniques offer nondestructive methods for road condition assessment with large spatial coverage. These tools provide an opportunity for frequent, comprehensive, and quantitative surveys of transportation infrastructure.
“Geovisual Analytics Approach to Exploring Public Political Discourse on Twitter”
Jonathan K. Nelson, Sterling Quinn, Brian Swedberg, Wanghuan Chu and Alan M. MacEachren
In International Journal of Geo-Information
doi:10.3390/ijgi4010337
We introduce spatial patterns of Tweets visualization (SPoTvis), a web-based geovisual analytics tool for exploring messages on Twitter (or “tweets”) collected about political discourse, and illustrate the potential of the approach with a case study focused on a set of linked political events in the United States. In October 2013, the U.S. Congressional debate over the allocation of funds to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly known as the ACA or “Obamacare”) culminated in a 16-day government shutdown. Meanwhile the online health insurance marketplace related to the ACA was making a public debut hampered by performance and functionality problems. Messages on Twitter during this time period included sharply divided opinions about these events, with many people angry about the shutdown and others supporting the delay of the ACA implementation.
DOG OF THE WEEK
Send your answer and/or a photo of your dog to geography@psu.edu for our mystery dog of the week!
Who is this dog? Who is her human?