IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Alex Klippel demonstrates the use of VR googles at the Penn State Art of Discovery tent during the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts in 2017. He returns this year to share his research on immersive technologies. Visit him on Saturday, July 14, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.. And don’t forget to visit with another geographer, Denice Wardrop, who will explore mankind’s relationship with plastics, also on Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to noon. The Art of Discovery booth is next to Willard Building.
GOOD NEWS
- The 50th annual conference of the International Society for Landscape, Place, & Material Culture will be September 26–29, 2018 in New Orleans, La.
- Purple Lizard Maps announces a new series of maps covering the northeastern most section of Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. The maps include Blackwater Falls State Park, Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge, Dolly Sods Wilderness, Gandy Creek, Seneca Creek, Smoke Hole, Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area, and more.
- Emily Domanico was announced as the winner of an AAG Cartography Specialty Group Master’s Thesis Research Grant for her proposal related to maps & public transportation.
- Chelsea (Gilliam) Nestel (’13) was interviewed for a CNN feature article, “The future of maps: Cartography in the 21st century.”
- Jase Bernhardt (’16g) has been awarded the American Association of State Climatologists’ Dissertation Medal in Applied Climatology for 2018, for his article “A comparison of daily temperature-averaging methods: Spatial variability and recent change for the CONUS” (published in J. Climate, February 2018).
NEWS
Explore the impacts of plastics through art at Arts Festival
Plastic bottles. Kitchen bags. Toys. Medical devices. Each year, mankind produces more than 320 million tons of plastic — roughly the same weight as all of humanity itself put together.
“Think about that,” said Denice Wardrop, professor of ecology and geography at Penn State. “Every year we recreate humanity in plastic.”
New course puts Penn State students in control of transformational technology
GEOG 397 will convene for the first time at University Park in fall 2018
In his decade of teaching at Penn State, Professor of Geography Alex Klippel has seen immersive technologies disrupt everything at the University from education to research to outreach. His belief in the power of this machinery to improve the learning process guided his creation of GEOG 397: Immersive Technologies – Transforming Society through Digital Innovation.
Penn State launches new graduate certificate for geospatial software developers
Certificate in geospatial programming and web map development being offered exclusively online through Penn State World Campus
Penn State has launched a new graduate certificate aimed at helping geospatial professionals working in the GIS and web mapping industries to expand their software development and coding skills.
Athletic ‘pull’ increases campus diversity
The next time you see your favorite collegiate athlete on the field or court, think again about their road to getting there.
That is something Clio Andris, assistant professor of geography at Penn State, has spent the past several years piecing together. Her findings were published in The Professional Geographer.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Social Cyber-Security
Carley K.M., Cervone G., Agarwal N., Liu H.
In: Thomson R., Dancy C., Hyder A., Bisgin H. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93372-6_42
Social Cyber-Security is an emerging scientific discipline. Its methodological and scientific foundation, key challenges, and scientific direction are described. The multi-disciplinary nature of this field and its emphasis on dynamic information strategies is considered.
Coupling Traffic and Gas Dispersion Simulation for Atmospheric Pollution Estimation
Cervone G., Dallmeyer J., Lattner A.D., Franzese P., Waters N.
In: Wang S., Goodchild M. (eds) CyberGIS for Geospatial Discovery and Innovation.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1531-5_2
A CyberGIS approach is presented in this chapter where microscopic traffic simulation and gas dispersion simulation systems are combined in order to estimate atmospheric pollution for different scenarios. The combination of these two simulation models allows for detailed investigations of different situations such as the investigation of pollution impacts of different traffic infrastructure variants, as well as for prediction of expected pollution and whether pollutant thresholds will be exceeded. For different case studies, real data about traffic movements provided by the state government, a digital terrain model of the area as well as real measurements of atmospheric data have been used. The evaluation of the approach shows that variations in the settings, regarding traffic or atmospheric conditions, lead to different patterns of observed pollution. The CyberGIS environment described is used to run multiple simulations on a distributed cyberinfrastructure, where the high-end computational resources are available on servers in Europe and in North America.