IMAGE OF THE WEEK
La Pyramide Inversée (The Inverted Pyramid), by architect I.M. Pei, is a skylight in the Carrousel du Louvre underground shopping mall in front of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. It is an upside-down and smaller version of the Louvre Pyramid, also designed by Pei. In the denouement of the film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, the camera elaborately moves through the entire glass pyramid from above and then descends beneath the tiny stone pyramid below to reveal a supposedly hidden chamber and the sarcophagus with the remains of Mary Magdalene. Send your photos from field work and travel to geography@psu.edu.
GOOD NEWS
Stacy Levy, award-winning environmental sculptor (You may know her Ridge and Valley Sculpture in the H. O. Smith Botanic Gardens.) will give a talk on “The Shape of Water: An Artist works with Rain, Watershed, and Hydrology,” at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2019, in 101 Agricultural Sciences and Industries Building and streamed online at https://psu.zoom.us/j/250545279. For more information, contact Kathleen Reeder at 863-8690 or kkr1@psu.edu.
Clio Andris will give a talk on “Representing Relationships and Social Life in GIS Models,” Thursday, Feb. 14, 1:30–3:00 p.m., 233B HUB-Robeson Center and streamed online. More details and registration info: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/representing-relationships-and-social-life-in-gis-models-tickets-54942114343.
The Esri Mid-Atlantic User group is planning a one-day meeting on April 26, 2019 at Universities at Shady Grove, Shady Grove, Md. The general format of the meeting will include a plenary presentation in the morning with updates from Esri on the latest technology followed by breakout sessions with user presentations and, weather permitting, outdoor demos of field data collection technology. The organizers are looking for user presentations and one or more outdoor field data collection or other interactive outdoor demo(s) for the afternoon. If you would like to submit a presentation or demo for consideration, please send an abstract and your contact information to Sandy Woiak at Sandra.Woiak@fairfaxcounty.gov by March 1, 2019.
Karen Schuckman, who teaches remote sensing and geospatial technology in the online geospatial education program, was a finalist for the 2019 Lidar Leader Award for Outstanding Personal Achievement.
Qassim Abdullah, who teaches Unmanned Aerial System, photogrammetry, and remote sensing in the online geospatial education program, received the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Lifetime Achievement Award.
Alan MacEachren has been awarded the 2019 Graduate Faculty Teaching Award. He will be formally recognized at the Faculty and Staff Awards ceremony on Tuesday, Apr. 12, 2019.
COFFEE HOUR
No Coffee Hour this week. The next Coffee Hour is The Miller Lecture on February 15 with Judith Carney, Professor of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles. Her talk is titled, “Out of Africa: Food Legacies of Atlantic Slavery in the Americas.” For The Miller Lecture, special refreshments are offered starting at 3:00 p.m. in 319 Walker Building and the lecture begins as usual at 4:00 p.m. in 112 Walker Building.
NEWS
Science of Connection: Researcher to discuss GIS and connected communities
Interpersonal relationships are an important part of personal and public health, which makes understanding how to cultivate these connections important to improving health.
Clio Andris, assistant professor of geography and Penn State Institute for CyberScience (ICS) associate, will discuss how geographic information systems (GIS) are helping to investigate ways of building communities that foster relationships and social life at the CyberScience Seminar. The session, which is free to the public, will be held from 1:30 to 3 p.m. on Feb. 14 at the HUB-Robeson Center.
Wernstedt Fund continues legacy of helping students
Both seasoned researchers and then-budding students remember the late Penn State professor Frederick Wernstedt for his contributions to geography.
Wernstedt, who taught at Penn State from 1952 until 1986, explored the geography of Southeast Asia, an interest borne from his service there during World War II, which resulted in him writing a book that investigated the region’s migration and land use. He compiled information for World Climatic Data, a volume of data from nearly 19,000 stations. He oversaw the Department of Geography’s undergraduate program as an adviser and associate dean from 1972 until his retirement. He was a dedicated educator, receiving the Wilson Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences in 1981.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Dietary transitions among three contemporary hunter-gatherers across the tropics
Victoria Reyes-Garcí, Bronwen Powell, Isabel Díaz-Reviriego, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Sandrine Gallois, Maximilien Gueze
Food Security
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-018-0882-4
The diets of contemporary hunter-gatherers are diverse and highly nutritious, but are rapidly changing as these societies integrate into the market economy. Here, we analyse empirical data on the dietary patterns and sources of foods of three contemporary hunter-gatherer societies: the Baka of Cameroon (n = 160), the Tsimane’ of Bolivia (n = 124) and the Punan Tubu of Indonesia (n = 109). We focus on differences among villages with different levels of integration into the market economy and explore potential pathways through which two key elements of the food environment (food availability and food accessibility) might alter the diets of contemporary hunter-gatherers. Results suggest that people living in isolated villages have more diverse diets than those living in villages closer to markets. Our results also suggest that availability of nutritionally important foods (i.e., fruits, vegetables and animal foods) decreases with increasing market integration, while availability of fats and sweets increases. The differences found seem to relate to changes in the wider food environment (e.g., village level access to wild and/or market foods and seasonality), rather than to individual-level factors (e.g., time allocation or individual income), probably because food sharing reduces the impact of individual level differences in food consumption. These results highlight the need to better understand the impact of changes in the wider food environment on dietary choice, and the role of the food environment in driving dietary transitions.