Log file for Human Geography

31 May 2001
Greg Cooper mentioned Golden Rice as a possible Case. Google has lots and Science has 4 articles , mostly 'news' but including Ye et al.  Engineering the Provitamin A (-Carotene) Biosynthetic Pathway into (Carotenoid-Free) Rice Endosperm (Volume 287, Number 5451, Issue of 14 Jan 2000, pp. 303-305)

6 June
Environmental Health Information Service (published Environmetal Health Perspectives and others too)

18 June
Why people are where they are is a question we seek different answers to at different scales and levels of aggregation. For individuals and families the whys are stories, narratives that follow histories through choices and decision points; for populations we think about resources and their exploitation as determiners of distributions; for 'ethnic groups' and cultural (or political) identities we may think in terms of bundles of traits that seem to distinguish them from contiguous others...

One can probably ask what is the geography of pretty much anything, and then start elaborating what you'd want/need to know, and then where you might look to find bits of the answer.

What's the geography of hamburger and what points of tangency does seeking that geography lead you to?

Tennyson, Jeffrey
Hamburger heaven : the illustrated history of the hamburger / Jeffrey Tennyson
New York : Hyperion, c1993

http://bbq.about.com/food/bbq/library/weekly/aa061000a.htm ('About hamburgers') and http://bbq.about.com/food/bbq/library/weekly/aa070597.htm ('History of...')

"Do you know who the biggest user of GIS is in the world? McDonald's. That's how they figure out where to put their stores. You see a new McDonald's go up and in a few years you see a Wendy's or a Burger King. They don't use a GIS. They just watch to see where McDonald's puts up their stores and then follow suit..." (from Computing Canada 16 Mar 1998)

Q: How many McDonald's restaurants are in the world today?
A: There are more than 26,000 McDonald's restaurants in 119 countries around the world.
(see http://www.vicinity.com/mcdonalds/ for map interface)

Animation of US county boundaries: http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/Animation/us.html
 (and http://www.goldbug.com/AniMap.html for a cool realization), and of 1918 influenza: www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/influenza/maps/

19 June
Epidemiology and racism

20 June
Integrated Public Use Microdata Series:  IPUMS International ("...a new project dedicated to collecting and distributing census data from around the world...") and  IPUMS USA ("...twenty-five high-precision samples of the American population drawn from thirteen federal censuses. Some of these samples have existed for years, and others were created specifically for this database. The twenty-five samples, which span the censuses of 1850 to 1990, collectively comprise our richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population...")

 Atlas of Cancer Mortality 1950-1994 "...site will not be available after June 21, 2001." and redirects to http://www.nci.nih.gov/atlasplus/

 Atlas of leading and avoidable causes of death in countries of central and eastern Europe (I've put the application in H:\public_html\eeurope\)

 Borchert Map Library at U Minn ...see section on  mapping 2000 Census data

 LSU Louisiana Atlas and Historical United States County Boundary Files

 Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer

 data extraction tools from Missouri and  Missouri Spatial Data Information Service (which has a nice implementation of ArcIMS)

19 July
Food Balance accounting:  FAO overviewFAQChina 1996

20 July
A look at AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment this morning reconfirms my sense that it's a good candidate for basic text, and that the fundamental Frame for the course is the hydraulic model of population size, the issue being the multitudinous forces that act upon B-D-Marr-Migr, and the underlying definition being Andrewartha's: ecology is the study of numbers and distribution (or perhaps he said "distribution and abundance", but it comes to the same thing).

14 August

Anthropogenic change is a primary counterpoint to Human Geography. Science for 27 July has a group of articles on Ecology Through Time, including  Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems and a pointer to the Global Population Dynamics Database

15 August

A number of basic modules occurred to me, each a centroid for development of lecture/exploration:

There are others... for all, we ask: what are the variables? what are the data sources? how can they be mapped or otherwise visualized?

Ways of knowing: 

Cases, of which there are many

The telesphere? noosphere

Multiple realities: maps are not 'objective' documents. Good quick summary of that in Robert Wilson's  "Klamath's federal agencies map different realities" from High Country News. The point is that we must become more aware of and sensitive to what the Information available to us has to say, as text and subtext.

Up close? Far away? --the Scale Problem

...and I keep coming back to the fundamental skills we want to encourage, which center on how to find out and what to do with what one learns as one 'finds out' about the subjects that attract interest.

20 August

Time to devise a syllabus...

22 August

Networking in Developing Nations (see maps)

28 August
The night sky in the World (Satellite monitoring of the artificial night sky brightness and stellar visibility) --what does this actually measure? [mondo_ridotto0p25.gif and pdf of article with color maps]

31 Aug
http://www.iiasa.ac.at/ International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

http://www.juliansimon.com/
http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/BMGT/.Faculty/JSimon/ (Writings by Julian L. Simon Available on WWW)

http://www.bomis.com/rings/simon/ (Julian Simon Webring)

http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/people/julian_simon.html (Julian Simon's Bet With Paul Ehrlich)

http://www.overpopulation.com/
http://www.overpopulation.com/FAQ/index.html
http://www.overpopulation.com/bookstore/cohen_001.html (review of Joel Cohen)
(who IS Brian Carnell?)

http://www.rockefeller.edu/labheads/cohenje/ACADPUBL.html (Joel Cohen's bibliography)

"This is a book that should be used to bludgeon every Julian Simon fan and every Zero Population Growth fanatic to depth. (You hear that Brian Cornell at overpopulation.com? I'm coming over your place with a hardcover edition to smash your cornucopian little mind!) This book doesn't pander to either the alarmists who think doom is just a year or two ahead, or to the giddy technocrats a la Julian Simon who think that technology combined with human beings' ineffable goodness is about to bring about a golden age like the United Federation of Planets on Star Trek. For straight thinking on population growth, read this book." (amazon.com review of How Many People...)

2 Sept
CIESIN gridded population of the world --see maps and data

Population and Development Review, Vol. 24, Supplement: Frontiers of Population Forecasting, 1998

1998 Revision of the United Nationas Population Projections

Plants and population: Is there time? (Nina V. Fedoroff, and Joel E. Cohen, PNAS Vol. 96, Issue 11, 5903-5907, May 25, 1999)

3 Sept
Robin LeBlanc's Human Development Report dataset is available at p:\leblanc\3sept.apr and seems to have complete data and labels for variables. It has the ISO3 codes for nations, for linking of other datasets. But... when I import the .apr into AV8.1 the labels ('alias' in the .apr) for the variables don't come with the data.

1998 Revision summarized. See also Population Information Network (POPIN)

BIOMAPS (Biodiversity Mapping for Protection and Sustainable Use of Natural Resources)

5 Sept
Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare

6 Sept
Demographic Links from University of Southampton

Office of Population Research at Princeton

International Data Base of US Census Bureau

IDB Population Pyramids ('Dynamic' is amazing)

US CEnsus Bureau Home Page

POPLINE ("world's largest bibliographic population database... brings together over 280,000 records representing published and unpublished literature in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues")

Population Council on Fertility transition, and Population and Social Policy more generally

Population Reference Bureau data sheets and PRB Home page

7 Sept
The Global Trajectory (Richard A. Anthes Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 74, No. 6, 1993)

World Population: A Guide to the WWW (Richard Jensen)

PHOENIX pluss ("an interactive computer simulation model which enables to analyze, simulate and visualize population changes")

Links of interest to demographers

10 Sept
Olson Ecosystem Complexes: ecosystems ranked by carbon in live vegetation (viewer)

Major World Ecosystem Complexes Ranked by Carbon in Live Vegetation

Exponential Growth applet

Human Appropriation of the World's Fresh Water Supply

Olson World Ecosystems

12 Sept
Forum: Perspectives on Sustainability in Ecological Applications, Vol. 3, No. 4, Nov., 1993

Calculate Your Ecological Footprint

Data on Poverty (and see 2001 figures on inequality by nations from World Bank, including Gini index) (and UNU/WIDER - UNDP World Income Inequality Database, which gives historical data on distribution) and POVCAL ("A PROGRAM FOR CALCULATING POVERTY MEASURES FROM GROUPED DATA")

13 Sept
Visible Earth NASA image gallery (viz: environmental impacts, Earth's city lights, Aral Sea)

Where is the root and branch of 'terrorism'? Where does it live, and why does it live there? Perhaps one could as well ask, where is there conflict in the world, and what are the bases thereof?

The word 'terrorism' occurs in 991 Annie records, a stunning 159 of them published in 2000 and 2001. Consider:

Terrorism Research Center and The Counter-Terrorism Page

Juergensmeyer, Mark
Terror in the mind of God : the global rise of religious violence
Berkeley : University of California Press, c2000
Leyburn-Level 4 BL65.V55 J84 2000
(read the first chapter)

Pillar, Paul R., 1947-
Terrorism and U.S. foreign policy
Washington, D.C. : Brookings Institution Press, c2001
Leyburn-Level 3 HV6431 .P56 2001

Reeve, Simon
The new jackals : Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the future of terrorism
Boston : Northeastern University Press, c1999
Leyburn-Level 3 HV6432 .R42 1999

Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000 (State Department)

Huband, Mark
Warriors of the Prophet : the struggle for Islam / Mark Huband
Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, 1998
Leyburn-Level 4 BP60 .H8 1998

The future of terrorism : violence in the new millennium
Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Sage Publications, c1998
Leyburn-Level 3 HV6432 .F87 1998

It's interesting how little one hears 'al Quaeda' and how often it's 'Osama bin Laden' (CNN describes him as having a 'grudge' against the US)

Transcript of UN Security Council meeting on "The situation in Afghanistan", 5 June 2001

14 Sept
What we need to be at War against is what John Blackburn characterized as "the startlingly simplistic".

Another piece of the puzzle, hidden on http://www.janes.com/ : "Lion of Panjshir dies"

18 Sept
Afghanistan page put together by John Blackburn, including one of mine on 'finding information'

The Real bin Laden (a New Yorker profile by Mary Ann Weaver, 24 Jan 2000)

20 Sept
Glossary of Social Development Indicators

Is Earnings Inequality Really Increasing? (Robert I. Lerman)

12 Oct
A Geo-Referenced Database of Global Sweetpotato Production from the International Potato Center (see their World Potato Atlas and Global GIS Data Server)

Society for Conservation GIS Newsletter

Borneo Project

SALCRA (Sarawak Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Authority)

Illegal Timber Trade in the ASEAN Region

from Agricultural Expansion and Pioneer Settlements in the Humid Tropics

The speed of land clearing and of the provision of new settlements has been so fast that there appears to be a shortage of potential settlers to fill them. Sarawak still depends on its own settlement programmes, begun in the early 1960s with the permanent settlements of Dayak shifting cultivators on land near their traditional settlements. The author remembers a scene that vividly expresses the dramatic changes resulting from this modernization: In 1966 during a visit to an Iban longhouse at a distance of only some 500 m from the Melugu Settlement Scheme (second division of Sarawak) the elderly village chief appeared to become somewhat irritated when we saw a net filled with old skulls from former head-hunting ceremonies still hanging on the verandah of the longhouse. He quickly explained that these heads had been taken during his grandfather's generation, whilst nowadays his own grandchildren were attending the modern secondary school attached to the new settlement scheme, which their parents had recently joined (Uhlig 1966, 1970). In 1970 this Melugu land development scheme had achieved 782 ha planted with rubber and divided into 236 settlers' lots. The total of seven land development schemes (so-called type B. for former tribal shifting cultivators) of Sarawak had established 5,548 ha of rubber in 1,313 lots; no further rubber planting followed after 1970 (Lien 1980, table 3.5).

Hedda Morrison Photographs Guide to collection at Cornell

17 Oct
GIS@development ("Asia's first GIS/GPS/RS monthly magazine")

GeoScience Images

First International Health Geographics Conference 1999

22 Oct
World Food Issues: Past and Present (Clark Ford's course at Iowa State

GRID Data (Geneva) (world GIS data, especially environmental)

25 Oct
The World Gazetteer current population figures for cities, towns and places of all countries

10 Dec
Luca Cavalli-Sforza

13 Feb 2002
New Zealand Digital Library

The Collection on Critical Global Issues 2.0 was developed in 1999 by United Nations University Press. It contains 210 publications (32,000 pages) in the fields of Agriculture and Land Management, Development, Environment and Sustainability, Food and Nutrition, Natural Resource Development, Science and Technology.

21 Feb
A Guide to Global Population Projections (Brian C. O'Neill, Deborah Balk, Melanie Brickman, Markos Ezra, from Demographic Research vol 4, 2001)