IMAGE OF THE WEEK
A detail from the new 2nd Edition of the Pine Creek Lizard Map—Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. Purple Lizard Maps was founded by Penn State geography alumnus Michael Hermann (’95).
GOOD NEWS
Gregory S. Jenkins will give a brown bag talk on Wednesday, March 20 on “Natural, Human and Climate Change Drivers in Africa and the Need for Interdisciplinary Research and Communication,” at 12:30 p.m. in 158 Willard Building.
Welcome to Cindy Etchison the new NRT Program Coordinator for Landscape U.
A Penn State study on using VR for second language learning was featured in a news article in Campus Technology.
The Institute for CyberScience is hosting its annual Symposium on April 1, which is free for Penn State faculty, staff, and students (and includes free breakfast and lunch). It’s at the Nittany Lion Inn, and the theme is Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Science and Society. Learn more and register here: https://ics.psu.edu/events/ics-symposium-2019.
Save the date: The Penn State Geography Alumni and Friends Reception during the AAG annual meeting is scheduled for Friday, April 5 at 7:00 p.m. at Lillies. More details to come soon.
COFFEE HOUR
Denice Wardrop
Peak Ecological Water and its shift under climate change: case studies from Peru and Pennsylvania
In most watersheds, as withdrawals for human needs increase, the ecological services provided by the same water are in decline. At a certain point, the value of water provided for human use is equal to the value of the ecological services, and beyond this point, ecological disruptions exceed the benefits of increased water extraction; this point is referred to as “peak ecological water.” In addition, the human and ecological benefits may occur at different spatial and temporal scales. Climate change may be shifting the point of peak ecological water in new and unpredictable ways, and two case studies provide insights into how those changes may be context dependent.
- Friday, March 15
- 3:30 p.m. in 319 Walker Building, Coffee and refreshments
- 4:00 in 112 Walker Building, Lecture
- Coffee Hour To Go webcast
NEWS
Complex trade-offs persist in drawing fair election maps for purple PA
Penn State Professor Christopher Fowler’s fall 2018 GEOG 421: Population Geography class won first place in the Higher-Ed division of the “Draw the Lines PA” statewide finals in February. For Fowler, the work on how to get better representation in Pennsylvania is just beginning.
Seed grants awarded to projects using Twitter data
Clio Andris is among recipients
Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), in collaboration with the Institute for CyberScience (ICS) and the College of Information Sciences and Technology, has awarded over $100,000 in funding to support six new interdisciplinary teams of Penn State researchers whose work is aimed at developing innovative research programs using Twitter data.
North Pacific jet stream, moisture and fires change with fire suppression
Future conditions in California may include more rain rather than snow during the wet season, longer fire seasons, and higher temperatures leading to drier fire seasons, according to a team of researchers who looked at the historic patterns of the North Pacific Jet, precipitation and fire.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Book Review of A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake
Deryck W. Holdsworth
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History
https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01359
Before Chesapeake City at one end of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal was named in 1839, the plantation site had been known as Bohemia Manor for more than two centuries, under the ownership of Augustine Herrman, a Bohemian who worked for the Dutch West-Indische Compagnie (WIC) in both Amsterdam and later New Amsterdam. Herrman marked its location on his magnificent map Virginia and Maryland as it is Planted and Inhabited this present year 1670. Koot explores the multiple intentions of the Herrman map from its origins as a manuscript initially commissioned by Philip Calvert in 1659 delimiting the boundary between Dutch New Netherlands and colonial Maryland to a far different map printed in London in 1673 as a piece of imperial propaganda celebrating possession of the broader Chesapeake.
Metrics for characterizing network structure and node importance in Spatial Social Networks
Dipto Sarkar, Clio Andris, Colin A. Chapman & Raja Sengupta
International Journal of Geographical Information Science
DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2019.1567736
Social Network Analysis offers powerful tools to analyze the structure of relationships between a set of people. However, the addition of spatial information poses new challenges, as nodes are embedded simultaneously in network space and Euclidean space. While nearby nodes may not form social ties, ties may exist at a distance, a configuration ill-suited for traditional spatial metrics that assume adjacent objects are related. As such, there are relatively few metrics to describe these nuanced situations. We advance the burgeoning field of spatial social network analysis by introducing a set of new metrics. Specifically, we introduce the spatial social network schema, tuning parameter and the flattening ratio, each of which leverages the notion of ‘distance’ to augment insights obtained by relying on topology alone. These methods are used to answer the questions: What is the social and spatial structure of the network? Who are the key individuals at different spatial scales? We use two synthetic networks with properties mimicking the ones reported in the literature as validation datasets and a case study of employer–employee network. The methods characterize the employer–employee as spatially loose with predominantly local connections and identify key individuals responsible for keeping the network connected at different spatial scales.