Archive for Mark Bjelland
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Open Farms in the News
The work of Ben Penner, a frequent guest lecturer in geography and environmental studies courses at Gustavus, was featured in a recent StarTribune article. Ben directs the Open Arms farm at the Prairie Institute in Belle Plaine, MN. The farm produces organic produce for free distribution to persons living with life-threatening illnesses.Volunteers work on the [...]
The Google vs. Apple Map Wars
Google’s treasure house of geographic data, maps, and images is incredibly valuable and has driven a great deal of internet traffic to their site since they launched Google Maps in 2005. Google employs 7,000 employees to accumulate and update their map data including the streetview photo crews who drive or bicycle down streets around the [...]
Visualizing the Human Imprint
One of the most valuable tools in GIS is the ability to overlay two images of the same location and then compare before and after images. ESRI has a website that allows the user to go back and forth between Landsat Satellite images using a simple slider bar. You can see the dramatic transformation of [...]
Food Deserts
Food deserts are areas where affordable, healthy food is scarce. Supermarkets are non-existent in many small towns and low-income inner-city neighborhoods. That leaves residents with few options other than paying high prices in convenience stores. The problem is particularly acute when residents lack access to a car. Urban geographer Adam Pine of UMD has highlighted [...]
How Geography Fuels Innovation
Some commentators say the world is flat, but a map of innovation suggests otherwise. Patent registrations come from a select group of highly innovative places. Leading the pack in the United States is the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California metropolitan area–Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, a culture of innovation, infrastructure such as research universities and venture [...]
The Geography of Political Donations
MinnPost, a fabulous non-profit online journalism project aimed at raising the level of public discourse in Minnesota, has done some excellent work in visualizing spatial data. In preparation for election season, they’ve created an interactive map of political donations to presidential campaigns. If you zoom in and hover with your mouse you can get valuable [...]
Google Street View Goes to Nunavut
Google is using a tricycle-based camera and gps system to capture images of the remote Inuit village of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut. The town is only accessible by airplane or by barge during the couple weeks of summer when the bay is ice-free. The program is part of Google Earth’s outreach program. One of the [...]
The Distinctive Look of a City
A fascinating article in Atlantic Cities explains how data mining of Google Street View images can identify the distinctive visual elements of a city. For Paris the computer identified the distinctive elements as street signs, ornate 19th Century windows, cast iron balconies, and decorative street lamps. You can’t see the rooflines on a Google Street [...]
The Visual Image of a City
Thomas Sigler, a former visiting assistant professor of geography at Gustavus, has authored a fun piece in Atlantic Cities entitled, “What Your Skyline Says About Your City.” Thomas points out the difference in skylines for cities featuring urban living, the dominance of a few key industries, proximity to the beach, and so forth. Where does [...]
Why We Need More Globes
A recent New York Times Sunday Review opinion piececelebrates the old fashioned globe. Pilot and writer Mark VanHoenacker reminds us of the many advantages of globes. Globes are probably the best way to understand distances across polar regions, to teach earth-sun relationships, and to convey the sense of living on a single, shared planet. Globes [...]