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

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A Climate Change Workshop, sponsored by SWIG and created as a UROC project, was held on Nov. 9. Pictured are the expert panelists with the UROC trio who created the workshop (left to right): Richard Alley, Andrew Carleton, Janet Swim, Michael Mann, Michelle Ritchie, Kathryn Jordan, and Kelly Meehan. Photo: Jacklyn Weier

GOOD NEWS

EMS Undergraduate Poster Competition will be held Wednesday, Nov. 28, on the ground floor of Deike Building from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Awards will be announced on Thursday, Nov. 29, at 12:30 p.m. in the Ryan Family Student Center.

Undergraduate Research Opportunities Connection (UROC) student presentations will be on Thursday, Nov. 30 at 5:30 p.m. in 319 Walker Building. Cameron Franz, Kathryn Jordan, Kelly Meehan, Kayla Bancone, Zhaogeng Ding, Shelby Duncan, and Samantha Matthews will talk about the projects they have been working on with their graduate student mentors. Learn about their research projects and how to get involved in UROC.

Gamma Theta Upsilon (GTU) geography honor society induction immediately precedes Coffee Hour on Friday., Nov. 30. Coffee Hour refreshments will be offered at 3:15 p.m. and the program starts at 3:45 in 112 Walker Building. Please join us to share in this special ceremony.

Alex Klippel’s research on the value of virtual field trips was featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal [paywall].

COFFEE HOUR

Roger Downs
Shaping Children’s Geographic Worlds: The Role of Free-Range Parenting

Children play a surprisingly minor role in geographic scholarship, given that of the 325.7 million US residents in 2017, 76.7 million or 23.6% are under the age of 18. The debate over free-range parenting (FRP) presents an opportunity to explore factors that shape children’s geographic worlds.

• Friday, Nov. 30
• 3:15 p.m. in 319 Walker Building, Coffee and refreshments
• 3:45 in 112 Walker Building, Gamma Theta Upsilon geography honor society induction ceremony
• 4:00 in 112 Walker Building, Lecture
• Coffee Hour To Go Webcast

NEWS

Geographers create unique wayfinding tool for game day safety

Collaboration with University Police and Public Safety yields tailgate grid map

When fans are tailgating before a Penn State home football game, they are standing on an invisible safety grid that helps first responders to pinpoint any location within more than 1,900 acres of pastures and paved lots.

Thanks to a new coordinate grid system developed by Penn State geographers, Penn State University Police and Public Safety and State College police, any 12.5-yard square location can be efficiently communicated to first responders by use of a simple alphanumeric code. The grid overlays a series of maps of the parking lots that surround Beaver Stadium and were compiled into a booklet.

Help SWIG sponsor a family this holiday season

For the last few years, SWIG has committed to sponsoring a family through the Centre County Women’s Resource Center (now called Centre Safe) Holiday Sponsorship Program. The Program connects sponsors with a local family (or families) of women and children who have experienced domestic violence. This year, SWIG is sponsoring a family of three (a mother and two children, ages 7 years and 9 months). We are targeting to raise $250 to fulfill our commitment to the Program. We hope you will consider donating to our efforts! You may drop off donations to Ruchi Patel’s office (328 Walker Building), the collection envelope in her mailbox (304 Walker Building), or via Venmo @ruchpate (comment “Holiday gift basket” please). We will be collecting donations through Friday, Dec. 7.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

An Inclusive Treadmill? Expansion of Industrial Maize Farming and Simple‐Commodity Producers in Turkey

Borlu, Y. and Matthews, S. A.
Rural Sociology
doi:10.1111/ruso.12254
The growth of industrial maize farming in Turkey during the first decade of this century points to the primacy of economic development over ecological concerns at a time when global nitrogen and phosphorus flows already exceeded safe limits. In this article we focus on the relations of production as the driver of an economic sector that not only has ecological but also social costs. Through a trend analysis of maize yields as our ecological indicator, we explain how relations of production influence industrial maize farming in this period and how different modes of production (e.g., simple‐commodity producers) participate in a corporate market. A “treadmill of production” perspective argues that simple commodity producers are excluded from industrial treadmills. Our findings indicate that provinces with predominantly simple commodity production experienced significant increases in maize yields and adapted to the industrial maize treadmill. However, there is a significant difference between simple‐commodity producers and large farms that widens over the decade. Our results suggest that simple‐commodity producers are included in ecologically harmful economic practices with significant obstacles. We call for a revision of the assumed relationship between the size of economic operations and their ecological impacts in the critical sociology literature and policy approaches.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Carolynne Hultquist chaired a session and gave presentations at SciDataCon 2018 as part of International Data Week in Gaborone, Botswana. International Data Week was attended by over 800 people from 66 countries and convened by CODATA, the ICSU World Data System, and the Research Data Alliance. She received travel funding from the Penn State Center for Social Data Analytics. Hultquist organized a session with Penn State Professors Guido Cervone and Jenni Evans on “Harnessing the power of the digital revolution: Data- and computation-driven research for Environmental Hazards.” The session covered challenges in accessing and evaluating relevant environmental data for use in computing applications that increase the societal value of the data and can provide assessment of the direct impact of decisions. She presented on “Assessment of Contributed Environmental Data for Decision-making during Disasters.” She also gave a presentation on “Validation of Spatio-Temporal Citizen Science Data” in a session on “Citizen Science Data – from Collection to Curation to Management.”

GOOD NEWS

Alumna Stephanie Campbell-Flohr (’02) has a new position as Research Project Manager with the Center for Health Care and Policy Research (CHCPR) here at Penn State.

Alumnus Wayne Brew (’81) has published two articles in PAST, the journal of the International Society for Landscape, Place & Culture, from his sabbatical road trip last year.

Lorraine Dowler was awarded the College’s Ryan Faculty fellowship which will allow her to start preliminary research into the role of 2nd generation conflict youth in Belfast, during Brexit, and she was also awarded the AAG’s 2019 Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award.

Jamie Peeler received a National Geographic Support for Women and Dependent Care award to attend the International Association for Landscape Ecology World Congress in Milan, Italy.

COFFEE HOUR

Next Coffee Hour is Nov. 30 with Roger Downs, “Shaping Children’s Geographic Worlds: The Role of Free-Range Parenting”

NEWS

Today is GIS Day 2018: ‘Visualize the World’

Penn State University Libraries celebrates GIS Day on Tuesday, Nov. 13, at an event aimed at the broader Penn State community — students, staff, faculty and community members — who are interested in learning about how geospatial information is being used on campus and beyond.

This year’s program, “Visualizing the World: Connecting the disciplines through geospatial technologies and virtual reality,” explores GIS, geospatial technologies, remote sensing, maps, and location-based applications to foster greater geospatial awareness on campus, within the community, and beyond.

Help SWIG sponsor a family this holiday season

For the last few years, SWIG has committed to sponsoring a family through the Centre County Women’s Resource Center (now called Centre Safe) Holiday Sponsorship Program. The Program connects sponsors with a local family (or families) of women and children who have experienced domestic violence. Our responsibility is to purchase gift cards for each family member and prepare a small basket of gift items for the holidays.

This year, SWIG is sponsoring a family of three (a mother and two children, ages 7 years and 9 months). We are targeting to raise $250 to fulfill our commitment to the Program. We hope you will consider donating to our efforts! You may drop off donations to Ruchi Patel’s office (328 Walker Building), the collection envelope in her mailbox (304 Walker Building), or via Venmo @ruchpate (comment ‘Holiday gift basket’ please). We will be collecting donations through Friday, Dec. 7.

from GEOGRAPH
Faculty Profile: Cracking the code for sustainable energy

Jennifer Baka joined the Department of Geography in the summer of 2016. She is an assistant professor of geography who studies energy using the emerging subfield of political-industrial ecology.

“Political-industrial ecology is the integration of two kinds of systems thinking,” Baka said. “From an industrial ecology perspective, we think through the whole supply chain for a particular resource. For example, from the extraction of crude oil, to transportation, to refining it into gasoline (and other products), to distribution, to the exhaust coming out of your car.”

“From a political ecology perspective, we think about the political and economic processes shaping that supply chain,” she added. “How are regulations created? Who decides? What are the implications?”

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

In a dense swampland in Georgia, just north of the Florida border, you find the headwaters of the Suwannee River. The Suwannee is known as a “blackwater river” because of its dark-brown waters laden with organic material. This river system has been called one of the most pristine in the United States, but some environmental pressures are putting that distinction in jeopardy. When the river finally meets the Gulf of Mexico along Florida’s Big Bend its dark waters act like a tracer, revealing whereby the river water mixes with the sea. That mixing was on display on February 20, 2015, when the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 captured this view. Image: NASA.

GOOD NEWS

Mikael Hiestand will present the results from his MS research, “Growing Season Synoptic and Phenological Controls on Heat Fluxes over Forest and Cropland Sites in the Midwest U.S. Corn Belt” in Michael Mann’s climate dynamics seminar Nov. 7 at 11:15 a.m. in 529 Walker Building.

A Tanzania Parks and People Study Abroad Program Information Session will be held on Nov. 7 at 6:00 p.m. in 118 Stuckeman Family Building. Program leaders Carter Hunt and Larry Gorenflo will present basic information on the schedule for the coming season. To learn more, visit: https://stuckeman.psu.edu/studyabroad/tanzania

Dr. Arzu Çöltekin, from the University of Zurich, will visit the department and give a presentation, “Thinking About Visuo-Spatial Information Displays: Perceptual And Cognitive Considerations,” at 3:30 p.m. on Nov. 12, 2018, in 319 Walker Building.

The GIS Coalition is hosting a YouthMappers Map-a-Thon on Nov. 12 at 6:30 p.m. in 208 Walker Building. All skill levels and majors welcome! Come join us as we map villages in Saint Louis, Senegal to help disaster relief efforts for water-borne illness. Drop-in for some pizza, drinks, conversation, and music! No laptop or experience necessary!

SWIG is sponsoring a Thanksgiving basket for Students Engaging Students that will be delivered along with hundreds of others to multiple sites across Centre County. A basket is in 304 Walker Building to collect food items.You can sign up for an item here or just drop something in the basket. To make a monetary donation, there is an envelope in Michelle Ritchie’s mailbox. The last day to contribute to the basket will be Nov. 12.

COFFEE HOUR

Lindsay Naylor
“Whose Baby Is It Anyway?” Conflicting Regimes of Care and Feeding in NICU Spaces in the U.S.

In the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit human milk is considered a medical intervention in the treatment of premature and critically ill infants—yet barriers exist to providing milk, including the separation of the mother and infant, education, and traumatic birth experience. In this talk I revisit scale, territory and power beginning with the lactating body as a site of food production and the traumatized body as a territorial battleground in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Drawing on feminist geopolitics, I examine how politics are written by and on bodies, and how power relations flow within and between them as sites of material exchange. Specifically, I consider the (geo)politics of infant feeding in the NICU, where there are conflicting regimes of care and feeding and there is friction between parents and NICU staff as each tries to attend to infant well-being. Using preliminary data from an online survey and early interviews with NICU staff in Delaware, I argue that the NICU is not an apolitical space and the structural barriers to breastfeeding and inequities in access to human milk are compounded in this public, controlled, and regulated space of infant care.

• Friday, Nov. 9
• 3:30 p.m. Coffee and refreshments, 319 Walker Building
• 4:00 Lecture, 112 Walker Building
• Coffee Hour To Go Webcast
• Next Coffee Hour is Nov. 30 with Roger Downs

NEWS

Sifting through 50 million phone calls for patterns to aid refugees

When refugees use their mobile phones they leave clues about how well they are integrating (or not) into their host country. Clio Andris, assistant professor of geography in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, is analyzing a year’s worth of phone calls to find the clues to help address the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey.

“We responded to the Data for Refugees (D4R) Challenge which provides researchers with call data records (CDR) collected during the 2017 calendar year. Researchers tend to get excited about CDR data because they show human calling, texting and mobility patterns at a very fine grain level. The data challenge is a great opportunity,” Andris said. “And equally compelling is a real opportunity to help refugees.”

GIS Day 2018: ‘Visualize the World’ to be held Nov. 13 at University Libraries

Penn State University Libraries will celebrate GIS Day on Tuesday, Nov. 13, at an event aimed at the broader Penn State community — students, staff, faculty and community members — who are interested in learning about how geospatial information is being used on campus and beyond.

This year’s program, “Visualizing the World: Connecting the disciplines through geospatial technologies and virtual reality,” explores GIS, geospatial technologies, remote sensing, maps, and location-based applications to foster greater geospatial awareness on campus, within the community, and beyond.

The 2018-19 Hubert H. Humphrey Fellows announces its fall presentation series

All talks are held noon to 1:00 p.m. in 102 Chambers Building.

• November 8
  Higher Education Reform: Promoting Mauritius as an Education Hub
  Challenges in Higher Education in Uzbekistan
  Assessing Critical Thinking in Iraqi Kurdistan Universities
• November 15
  Secondary Education in Benin
  Teacher Professional Development in Iran
• November 29
  Higher Education Challenges in Ukraine
  Preparing Undergraduates for the Job Market in Ivory Coast
  Higher Education Challenges in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt
• December 6
  Education Reform in Croatia: “School for Life”
  Internationalization of Serbian Higher Education
  How the Internet has changed Chinese Lifestyles

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Back-projecting secondary craters using a cone of uncertainty

Naegeli, T. J. and Laura, J.
Computers & Geosciences
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2018.10.011
In this paper we present an extension to the Large Crater Clustering (LCC) tool set which places a cone of uncertainty around the trajectories of secondary impact craters to determine potential locations of source craters. The LCC tool set was a first step in the spatial quantification of primary and secondary cratering processes, which allows planetary geologists to accurately estimate the geologic age of a celestial surface. This work builds on the LCC tool set by accounting for the ambiguity of flight path trajectories through a Python script that leverages ArcGIS’s ArcPy library. We chronicle the mechanics of the script, which creates geodetically correct cones then counts them within equally sized cells of a vector grid. We describe the process that was used to derive the shape of the cone and provide parameters for the sizes of the cones and the grid. We demonstrate that the cone of uncertainty has the ability to compensate for error in secondary crater trajectories by introducing deviation in the trajectory bearing and comparing the predicted primary crater location. We use two study areas on Mars as well as the entire lunar surface to illustrate the usefulness of the extension as an aid to human interpretation of back-projections.

HIV Citizenship in Uneven Landscapes

Brian King, Marina Burka & Margaret S. Winchester
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2018.1457428
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has taken on a new course in recent years with expanded access to antiretroviral therapy in the Global South. Although this transition is extending the lives of individuals for years or even decades, it is also creating new relationships between citizens and the state that are driven by resource needs specific to HIV management. This article details findings from an ongoing research project in northeast South Africa that is examining the social and ecological impacts of HIV/AIDS. Qualitative interviews are combined with ethnographic observations of a rural primary care clinic to document the ways in which residents and health care institutions are managing HIV. While initiating care for HIV-positive patients on antiretroviral therapy, clinics and other health care agencies advocate behavioral practices that challenge existing cultural norms and spatial economies, particularly in the realm of nutrition and food access. The importance of accessing certain foods is advocated as necessary for maintaining bodily health, yet this therapeutic citizenship confronts historical systems of inequality produced through spatial segregation. The consequence is that the coupling of drug provision with public health interventions produces uneven opportunities for health management that are mediated by cultural, ecological, and political systems in the era of managed HIV.