geography
gregladen | July 18, 2010Where I grew up, lakes were important. We would spend considerable time driving to them, and once there, camp next to them for a couple of weeks. Every now and then we'd go and camp next to the really really big lake. The one with England on the other side, or so my brother would tell me. All the lakes had these big chairs along the swimming areas that lifeguards sat in. The really really big lake had extra tall chairs. I remember thinking that they could probably see England from up there!
But despite the importance of lakes in our recreational regime, lakes were actually fairly…
grrlscientist | January 27, 2010tags: health, medicine, TEDMED,health care, medical records, GPS, geography, geomedicine, Bill Davenhall, TEDTalks, streaming video
Where you live: It impacts your health as much as diet and genes do, but it's not part of your medical records. At TEDMED, Bill Davenhall shows how overlooked government geo-data (from local heart-attack rates to toxic dumpsite info) can mesh with mobile GPS apps to keep doctors in the loop. Call it "geo-medicine."
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the…
edyong | September 6, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Everybody, apparently, needs good neighbours, but in many parts of the world, your neighbours can be your worst enemy. In the past century, more than 100 million people have lost their lives to violent conflicts. Most of these were fought between groups of people living physically side by side, but separated by culture or ethnicity.
Now, May Lim and colleagues from the New England Complex Systems Institute have developed a mathematical model that can predict where such conflicts by looking at how…
razib | May 24, 2009
People By Nature Are Universally Optimistic, Study Shows:
Data from the Gallup World Poll drove the findings, with adults in more than 140 countries providing a representative sample of 95 percent of the world's population. The sample included more than 150,000 adults.
Eighty-nine percent of individuals worldwide expect the next five years to be as good or better than their current life, and 95 percent of individuals expected their life in five years to be as good or better than their life was five years ago.
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At the country level, optimism is highest in Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, and New…
razib | May 4, 2009Via Andrew Sullivan, One nation, seven sins: Geographers measure propensity for evil in states, counties. Here's the methodology:
Greed was calculated by comparing average incomes with the total number of inhabitants living beneath the poverty line. On this map, done in yellow, Clark County is bile (see map on Page 2).
Envy was calculated using the total number of thefts -- robbery, burglary, larceny and stolen cars. Rendered in green, of course, Clark County is emerald.
Wrath was calculated by comparing the total number of violent crimes -- murder, assault and rape -- reported to the FBI per…
jwhitfield | February 4, 2009When the Origin was published, the idea that species were not fixed entities had been in the air for some time, thanks to Lamarck, Robert Chambers, anonymous author of the best-selling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus.
But unlike those men, Darwin put all the different pieces together into a coherent whole. How was that? Chapter 11 of the Origin, 'Geographical distribution', gives some hints.
First there's the nurture. In the age of long-haul flights and wildlife documentaries, it's easy to forget how difficult it was to see different…
sporte | November 10, 2008Worldmapper is a web site with 366 maps of the world. These maps however, are not the kinds of maps you've seen in school, with every country shown by size. These maps are cartograms. It's a bit like seeing a cartoon version of a Thomas Friedman book. These maps present a whole new way of visualizing information about the world.
In a cartogram, the size of each country or geographic region is drawn in proportion to some kind of variable. The variable could be population size, number of people who practice a certain religion, incidence of infant mortality, voting patterns, energy use,…