Archive for November, 2012
Geographer Don Mitchell receives Swedish Society medal
Post adapted from the November 2012 AAG Newsletter. Don Mitchell, Maxwell Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse University, recently received the prestigious Anders Retzius Medal in Gold from the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography (SSAG). The award was presented to Mitchell by His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden on Vega Day, which […]
Kuehnast Lecture Series on Climate
The University of Minnesota held a “mini climate school” on November 9, 2012 as part of the 20th annual Kuehnast Lecture. The three informational talks on 1) climate change in Canada, 2) urban climates, and 3) severe thunderstorms and climate change are available for streaming. Past years’ talks may also be watched online.
Geography Awareness Week
The Gustavus Adolphus College geography department celebrated Geography Awareness Week by posting informational posters around campus, contributing geography questions for Trivia Night at Patricks, and hosting a quiz contest in the Marketplace Cafeteria. The prize for the contestant with the highest score was a year’s subscription to National Geographic Magazine. Here is the four question […]
Local mining for sand used in fracking
The process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses pressurized fluids to fracture shale formations in order to extract natural gas or petroleum. Fossil fuel pumping using this technique has greatly accelerated since the early 2000’s. It allows fossil fuels that were formerly too difficult and expensive to extract to be mined, and has been an […]
Mapping Racist Tweets
RacisThe geography über nerds at the Floating Sheep collective have made another fascinating map. They mapped geo-tagged racist tweets that emerged after President Barack Obama’s re-election and computed location quotients based on the total state volume of tweets. One weakness of the map is that the sample size was small since they only sampled 0.05% of […]
Geology and political affiliation
An interesting blog post titled “How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline” is making waves. The Black Belt region of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia corresponds to a band of Cretaceous chalk deposited by a shallow sea over 65 million years ago. This chalk is the parent material for the region’s […]
Lencho Bati to speak at Minnesota State
Those of you who may have missed Prof. Bati’s excellent talk on Ethiopia last week at Gustavus have another chance! Geography Professor Lencho Bati will present “Africa After the Cold War” on Friday, November 9, at 3pm as part of Minnesota State University‘s Geography Department Colloquium (15 Armstrong Hall).
Mapping study abroad patterns
Here’s an interesting website by UNESCO that maps the flows of students studying abroad. Where do most U.S. students go when they study abroad? Do the same countries send their students to study in the U.S.? What about students from Boliva–where do they go to study abroad? Who knew that a large percentage of Uganda’s […]