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PHOTO OF THE WEEK
• Send your photos from fieldwork, outreach, and travels to geography@psu.edu
Many undergraduate students in the department presented posters during AAG 2013.
GOOD NEWS
• Send your good news to be shared to geography@psu.edu
Karl Zimmerer has received the 2013 Robert McC Netting Award, which is a career honor of the Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) Group of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). ( http://capeaag.wordpress.com/cape-honors/). As part of this award Karl will deliver the featured paper presentation of the AAG-CAPE plenary session at next year's annual AAG meeting to be held in Tampa, Florida (8-12 April 2014).
Kirby Calvert will join the department as an assistant professor of energy policy this fall.
Jan Oliver Wallgrun and Jinlong Yang authored a paper that has been accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics and Cognitive Computing. Title: Investigating intuitive granularities of overlap relations.
At the recent AAG conference in LA, the Middle States Division team won the World Geography Bowl. For the first time in a number of years, all 9 regions competed, and the Bowl was very well attended and highly competitive. Our team, captained by Shawn Dacey (SUNY, Oneonta), also included Jim Baker (William Paterson University), Jase Bernhardt (Penn State), Katya Bezborosko (Rutgers University), Rachel Bianchetti (Penn State), Shawn Dacey (SUNY Oneonta), and Sam Finn (Shippensburg University).
NEWS
Coffee Hour April 19: In Search of Lost Frogs: Changing perceptions one frog at a time
Speaker: Robin Moore
• 3:30 p.m. Refreshments are offered in the E. Willard Miller seminar room, 319 Walker Building
• 4:00 p.m. The lecture begins at 4:00 p.m. in the John J. Cahir Auditorium, 112 Walker Building
Coffee Hour To Go
Engaging an apathetic public in the conservation of less charismatic creatures can be a tricky business. But if we are to scale up conservation efforts for the most threatened vertebrate group, the amphibians, this is exactly what we need to be doing. So how do we engage a public that is increasingly disempowered by prophecies of inevitable doom and gloom? I will discuss three initiatives designed to deliver a serious message about amphibian conservation in unconventional packages.
First, the Search for Lost Frogs dispatched more than thirty teams in twenty countries in search of species lost to science. The campaign was quickly picked up by the media and generated over 650 news articles in 20 countries with a potential viewership of over a billion. The initiative resonated with the public, tapping into a sense of adventure and exploration, and rediscoveries transformed amphibians from symbols of extinction to symbols of hope in Israel, Haiti, and beyond. The campaign reinforced the potential of rediscoveries as a policy and publicity tool, and of amphibians as flagship species for conservation. Read more.
LOCAL EVENTS AND DEADLINES
(New events and deadlines on this list are highlighted.)
See more events and deadlines on the Student Calendar.
April 17 Department of Meteorology Colloquium "Towards an Improved Understanding of
the Tropical Tropopause Transition Layer" with Dr. Brian Toon at 3:30 p.m. in 112
Walker Building.
April 19 Coffee Hour: In Search of Lost Frogs ...
April 19–21 Blue–White Weekend
April 22 Christopher Joyce, a science correspondent at NPR, will give a talk at 4 p.m.
in the Penn State HUB-Robeson Center Auditorium
April 25 Irvin Cookout 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. For more information: Meredith Nichol
April 26 Department of Geography Recognition Reception
April 27 Department of Geography end-of-year picnic at Sunset Park, noon to 3:00 p.m.
May 3–5 spring commencement
CONFERENCES
April 22–26 International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment in Beijing, China
April 23–25 European Navigation Conference in Vienna
April 26–27 Geographies of Power: Justice, Revolution, and Cultural Imagination
at The Nittany Lion Inn, State College, Pennsylvania
May 8 Pennsylvania Groundwater Symposium at Penn State
May 13–17 Summer Institute on Contested Landscapes at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
May 21–24 The National Map Users Conference in Denver, Colorado
May 23–25 GeoComputation International Conference in Wuhan, China.
June 3–5 2013 PA GIS (Geospatial Information Systems) Conference in
State College, Pennsylvania
July 8–12 Esri International User Conference
July 16–18 The Society for Conservation GIS, Monterey, California
August 15–17 Asian Urbanism and Beyond
August 25–30 International Cartographic Conference (ICC) in Dresden, Germany
October 18-19 AAG Middle States Division Annual Meeting
October 24–26 Geographies of Labor, 35th Annual North American Labor History Conference
at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan
October 30–November 2 AAG Middle Atlantic Division Regional Meeting
(jointly with AAG Applied Geography Specialty Group)
November 1–3 Graduate Climate Conference at Woods Hole, Massachusetts
November 6–8 International Greening Education Event in Karlsruhe, Germany
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