PHOTO OF THE WEEK—Send your photos from fieldwork, outreach, and travels to geography@psu.edu
• Stephen Matthews has been asked to chair a new Scientific Panel on Spatial Demography created by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population based in Paris.
• Karl Zimmerer is one of four University faculty members that have received the 2014 Faculty Scholar Medals for Outstanding Achievement.
NEWS
March 28 The Miller Lecture with Ann Bisantz "Meta-Information Visualization: A Human Factors Approach"
This Miller Lecture is co-sponsored by the Big Data Social Science IGERT
• Refreshments offered at 3:00 p.m. in 319 Walker Building
• The lecture begins at 4:00 p.m. in 112 Walker Building
• Watch live or later online via Coffee Hour To Go
In many domains, users are confronted with large volumes of information from a variety of sources. In addition to understanding the content of the information, they need to understand and reason about potential qualifiers of the information. These qualifiers, or meta-information, include characteristics such as the uncertainty associated with the data, the age of the data, and the source of the data. There is a long history of research in scientific visualization and geospatial information systems which has considered visual techniques for representing complex information, in both spatial and non-spatial frames of reference.
Spring Coffee Hour Schedule: http://www.geog.psu.edu/news/coffee-hour
Alumni-Student-Faculty Networking Session
The Department of Geography will host an alumni-student-faculty networking session on Thursday, March 27, in conjunction with the EMS GEMS Board meeting. Take advantage of this opportunity to meet and talk with our GEMS Board members Brendan Wesdock and Jennie Karalewich, and other alumni in a relaxed atmosphere. Light refreshments will be provided.
Robinson interviewed on CBC “Day 6” radio program:
How should Crimea be shown on maps?
"Reality is not something that's easily translatable into something like a map. Our job as cartographers always involves editing and making decisions about what we show."—Anthony Robinson
Related:
The Washington Post article about mapping gray areas
Students, faculty, and staff presenting at AAG
More than 70 students (graduate and undergraduate, residential and online), faculty, and staff from the Department of Geography and other departments at Penn State are presenting at the AAG annual meeting in Tampa, Florida, April 8–12, 2014.
If you are going, remember to RSVP by April 1 for the Alumni and Friends Reception
from the spring GEOGRAPHY newsletter
Is fire bad?
The number of large and severe wildfires in the United States has more than doubled in the past decade, even while there has been a decline in all fires over the past three millennia, and passive and active suppression of fire during the last two centuries. In the U.S., the Forest Service and Interior Department spent about $1.7 billion last year fighting fires, a $500 million increase over the previous year and double the average amount spent a decade ago. What is causing this increase in such destructive fires? What are the long-term effects on ecosystems and climate? Can and should we do anything about it? Is fire bad?
OTHER GEOGRAPHY VIEWS
The Allegheny Front Radio program on environmental issues in Western Pennsylvania
Living on Earth PRI's environmental news magazine
The Equation Union of Concerned Scientists blog
LOCAL EVENTS AND DEADLINES
March 26 Lecture: Richard Mayhew “Creative Survival” at 3 p.m. in the Palmer Lipcon Auditorium
March 27 Geography alumni and students reception and networking 4:00 to 5:30 p.m.
in 319 Walker Building.
March 28 The Miller Lecture with Ann Bisantz " Meta-Information Visualization..."
March 28 “Blood at the Root” School of Theatre performance
March 29 EMEX
April 2 Center for Online Innovation in Learning (COIL) conversation with Alex Klippel
on blended learning and flipped classroom experiences at 10:00 a.m.
April 5–6 Traditional American Indian Powwow at the Mount Nittany Middle School
April 4 Pennsylvania Geographic Bee
April 10 Department of Geography Alumni and Friends Reception at AAG.
RSVP to geography@psu.edu by April 1.
April 14 Commission for Women Annual Awards Luncheon
May 2 Department of Geography Annual Recognition ReceptionCONFERENCES
April 5 Penn State WSGO Conference “ The Future of Women’s Studies and Women’s
Studies of the Future.”
April 8–12 AAG Annual Meeting in Tampa, Florida.
April 14–17 United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) Symposium, Tampa, Florida.
Note: this event was rescheduled from October 2013 due to sequestration.
May 2 Pennsylvania Spatial Cognition Symposium
May 7 Pennsylvania Groundwater Symposium
May 15–18 Feminist Geography: Who we are, what we do, why we do it,
at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
May 18–21 ISCRAM at Penn State.
May 19–21 UCGIS Symposium: Setting the Agenda: Research and Education for
Today & Tomorrow in Pasadena, California.
June 6–7 Education and Civil Rights interdisciplinary conference hosted by the
College of Education
June 15–21 Fifth Jubilee International Conference on Cartography & GIS, Riviera, Bulgaria.
June 18–20 Moving Mountains: Studies in Place, Society and Cultural Representation,
Edinburgh, United Kingdom movingmountainsconference@gmail.com
August 13–15 First International Workshop on Information Integration in Cyber Physical
Systems (IICPS 2014) in San Francisco, California, USA
August 19–21 Jointly held 10th International Conference on Natural Computation (ICNC 2014)
and 11th International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery
(FSKD 2014) in Xiamen, China.
2015
April 21–25 AAG Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois
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Comments, questions? geography@psu.edu
Angela Rogers, Marketing Communications Specialist
Department of Geography, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Penn State
316 Walker Building, University Park PA 16802
Office: 814-863-4562 Cell: 814-571-2942
geography@psu.edu • editor@geog.psu.edu • www.geog.psu.edu
Member of the Penn State Commission for Women. Ask me how you can get involved