Tonight I attended the 2008 Annual Meeting of Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE) - an environmental justice community organization based in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood. The work that ACE does, and has done, for Roxbury and other neighborhoods in the greater Boston area is serious and impressive, but these events are always like carnivals. We elected four new members of the Board (congrats to T.J. in particular) and enjoyed some particularly funny skits lampooning the MBTA experience of students (thanks to REEP) and the T Riders Union. As always, the food was great and the company warm.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
ACE in the Hood
Tonight I attended the 2008 Annual Meeting of Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE) - an environmental justice community organization based in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood. The work that ACE does, and has done, for Roxbury and other neighborhoods in the greater Boston area is serious and impressive, but these events are always like carnivals. We elected four new members of the Board (congrats to T.J. in particular) and enjoyed some particularly funny skits lampooning the MBTA experience of students (thanks to REEP) and the T Riders Union. As always, the food was great and the company warm.
GIS Day 2008
For GIS Day 2008 I drove up to the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire to man a booth advertising our Department. This is the 10th year that UNH has hosted GIS Day activities (and my second year attending). The staff honored Mike Routhier with a glass clock for his decade of organizational success. Interestingly, I met Mike's father who had volunteered to drive the van that shuttled attendees from Morse Hall to the guest parking lot. Very pleasant gentleman and very proud of his son.
As usual it was a good turnout, although a slightly younger crowd. I recall speaking to more high school groups last year. This year I spoke to mostly middle school groups. I took posters by three of my students to show off (thanks to Jim, Jen and Bill Sr.), although I found myself explaining what an "undergrad" is more often than the GIS projects I showcased. One student was very interested in the quality of food on campus.
I also met up with two of our alums, both of whom made a point of stopping by to say hi. One works for GeoVantage - Dan Shinnick - and the other for Pictometry - Matt Deal. Very friendly people. They pushed their products, I pushed my students (for internships). It all works out very well.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Latinos in Scotland
I am writing this post a little late after our trip, but better late than never.
Just before the start of the school year, my wife and I made a 10-day trip to Scotland. She was presenting at an invitation-only conference in Glasgow (I wasn't invited but came along anyway).
We decided to document our trip in "realtime" (or close to it) by maintaining a 'geo-blog' of our travels for friends and family back home. This was an interesting - and time consuming - experiment. Scotland is a 21st century country (technically it is part of the UK, but the relationship is complicated), but it is also a still a rural country. Finding a stable Internet connection was almost always a challenge.
View Larger Map
An interesting thing about the state of online maps and directions. We discovered - the hard way - that Google Maps consistently underestimates travel times in Scotland. By contrast, Multimap (a British product) provides much more accurate estimates of travel time. Google has a national bias (surprise, surprise), or at least it doesn't take into account the unique quality of British roads or hapless American tourists trying to drive on the left side of the road. The difference was significant and we nearly missed a crucial connection on a car ferry. Luckily, the Scottish people are very forgiving.
Edinburgh is suitably beautiful and romantically Gothic - thick walled castles on craggy peaks dripping with damp and history. The newer buildings (those less than 300 years old) are still black and sooty from the city's coal-fired past.
We were warned that Glasgow would be a gritty contrast (and a waste of time), but I found it to be easily as engaging as Edinburgh. I spent 3 full days walking that city. Where Edinburgh is a beautifully preserved museum, Glasgow is a living, breathing, frenetic metropolis. Many of the buildings are products of the city's wealthy heyday - the mid to late 19th century. High Victorian architecture and a strong Gothic revival - flying buttresses, extraordinary gargoyles and grotesques, incredibly carved, multi-hued stone. And inside and all around this 19th century architecture flows the modern day Scotland - well dressed people occupied with modern pursuits. Lots of good 'ethnic' restaurants too.
Modern day Scotland is a bundle of contrasts. Our visit to Eilean Donan, one of the most beautiful and charismatic castles, provided a jarring example. While the local guide (dressed in full kiltish reglia) explained the fairytale-like saga of clan battles and rediscovered histories, the reality is that much of the surrounding lands are now owned by Saudi families (why, I don't know).
The Highlands were breathtaking. Treeless and green. The Highlands are a region of long, unbroken views, low skies, and steep-sided giants. "Moody" is a cliche description I've often heard, but now I understand. It's not just the constant damp and cloudiness, it's also the consistently unpredictable light. Clouds and mist move and shift with eerie speed.
Must go back.
Just before the start of the school year, my wife and I made a 10-day trip to Scotland. She was presenting at an invitation-only conference in Glasgow (I wasn't invited but came along anyway).
We decided to document our trip in "realtime" (or close to it) by maintaining a 'geo-blog' of our travels for friends and family back home. This was an interesting - and time consuming - experiment. Scotland is a 21st century country (technically it is part of the UK, but the relationship is complicated), but it is also a still a rural country. Finding a stable Internet connection was almost always a challenge.
View Larger Map
An interesting thing about the state of online maps and directions. We discovered - the hard way - that Google Maps consistently underestimates travel times in Scotland. By contrast, Multimap (a British product) provides much more accurate estimates of travel time. Google has a national bias (surprise, surprise), or at least it doesn't take into account the unique quality of British roads or hapless American tourists trying to drive on the left side of the road. The difference was significant and we nearly missed a crucial connection on a car ferry. Luckily, the Scottish people are very forgiving.
Edinburgh is suitably beautiful and romantically Gothic - thick walled castles on craggy peaks dripping with damp and history. The newer buildings (those less than 300 years old) are still black and sooty from the city's coal-fired past.
We were warned that Glasgow would be a gritty contrast (and a waste of time), but I found it to be easily as engaging as Edinburgh. I spent 3 full days walking that city. Where Edinburgh is a beautifully preserved museum, Glasgow is a living, breathing, frenetic metropolis. Many of the buildings are products of the city's wealthy heyday - the mid to late 19th century. High Victorian architecture and a strong Gothic revival - flying buttresses, extraordinary gargoyles and grotesques, incredibly carved, multi-hued stone. And inside and all around this 19th century architecture flows the modern day Scotland - well dressed people occupied with modern pursuits. Lots of good 'ethnic' restaurants too.
Modern day Scotland is a bundle of contrasts. Our visit to Eilean Donan, one of the most beautiful and charismatic castles, provided a jarring example. While the local guide (dressed in full kiltish reglia) explained the fairytale-like saga of clan battles and rediscovered histories, the reality is that much of the surrounding lands are now owned by Saudi families (why, I don't know).
The Highlands were breathtaking. Treeless and green. The Highlands are a region of long, unbroken views, low skies, and steep-sided giants. "Moody" is a cliche description I've often heard, but now I understand. It's not just the constant damp and cloudiness, it's also the consistently unpredictable light. Clouds and mist move and shift with eerie speed.
Must go back.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Geography in Nebraska
I spent this last week at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska (Go Big Red!) scoring Advanced Placement Human Geography exams. I personally scored 400 exams. I was accompanied by another 200+ high school teachers and college professors, and together, we scored 40,000 exams from high schools across the country and around the world. This was my first year scoring high school AP exams, but the AP Human Geography exam has been around for 8 years now, and the number of students taking the exam has been doubling every two years!Until I had signed up to be an AP reader, I was not even aware that high schools taught AP Geography in the US. It turns out that there are hundreds of high schools around the country that offer formal Geography courses either as electives, or in some cases, required courses! High school students who achieve a minimum score on the AP Human Geography exam can get college credit (and thereby have one less course to take).
Geography is not a required course in Massachusetts high schools, nor is it commonly offered. That could be changed. Imagine how much easier it would be to recruit Geography majors if students were already aware of Geography as a discipline before they got to college.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Trust Me, I'm a Scientist
An article in the Boston Globe describes a study done by physicists at Northeastern University in which they surreptitiously tracked the movements of 100,000 cell phone users in some undisclosed "industrial nation" in order to look for patterns in peoples' day-to-day movements (see "Study Secretly Tracks Cell Phone Users Outside US" Globe 6/4/2008). The results of their analysis were published in Nature, a highly prestigious science journal. It is disturbing that neither the Northeastern researchers nor the editors at Nature seems to have thought through the ethical questions of this kind of study. The authors admit that they did not consult with an ethics panel.
Most, if not all, institutions of higher learning, as well as many private institutions, maintain some kind of Institutional Review Board (IRB). The purpose of an IRB is to ensure that any research done by the members of an institution (e.g., faculty, students, researchers) is conducted responsibly and ethically, so as not to cause injury, harm, or undue risk (physical, mental, economic, legal, etc.) to humans and even animals. Under federal law, institutions receiving federal funds must in fact maintain an IRB to review research on human subjects - whether medical or behavioral.
These requirements for ethical review are rooted in past abuses. The most notorious include the experimentations done on humans by Nazi physicians during World War II. In the U.S., biomedical researchers are still haunted by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which Public Health Service researchers withheld medication from patients with syphilis in order to observe the effects of the disease when left untreated. The latter study did not end until it was revealed in 1972. Unfortunately, there are numerous examples of unethical research that have resulted in physical, psychological and even social harm.
Having served on Salem State's IRB, I know that most of the day-to-day work of an IRB is simply determining whether or not a proposed form of research even warrants scrutiny; most do not. However, the point is that it is the responsibility - the prerogative - of the IRB to make that determination. The IRB is an institutional safeguard to catch problems before they develop. Any research involving the collection of sensitive information from or about living persons should pass before the IRB just to make sure.
A spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission pointed out that the kind of 'nonconsensual' tracking done by the Northeastern researchers is in fact illegal in the US. It is illegal in other countries as well. The Nature News article notes that another researcher working on very similar research was not able to do what the Northeastern researchers had done specifically because it was illegal in Germany, where he was based. However, the Northeastern study discloses neither the country in which the study was conducted, nor the cell phone company that supplied the data.
Cesar Hidalgo, a Northeastern physics researcher and coauthor of the study, said, "In the wrong hands the data could be misused ... But in scientists' hands you're trying to look at broad patterns.... We're not trying to do evil things. We're trying to make the world a little better."
Without transparent processes or institutional safeguards, however, such assurances must be suspect.
Most, if not all, institutions of higher learning, as well as many private institutions, maintain some kind of Institutional Review Board (IRB). The purpose of an IRB is to ensure that any research done by the members of an institution (e.g., faculty, students, researchers) is conducted responsibly and ethically, so as not to cause injury, harm, or undue risk (physical, mental, economic, legal, etc.) to humans and even animals. Under federal law, institutions receiving federal funds must in fact maintain an IRB to review research on human subjects - whether medical or behavioral.
These requirements for ethical review are rooted in past abuses. The most notorious include the experimentations done on humans by Nazi physicians during World War II. In the U.S., biomedical researchers are still haunted by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which Public Health Service researchers withheld medication from patients with syphilis in order to observe the effects of the disease when left untreated. The latter study did not end until it was revealed in 1972. Unfortunately, there are numerous examples of unethical research that have resulted in physical, psychological and even social harm.
Having served on Salem State's IRB, I know that most of the day-to-day work of an IRB is simply determining whether or not a proposed form of research even warrants scrutiny; most do not. However, the point is that it is the responsibility - the prerogative - of the IRB to make that determination. The IRB is an institutional safeguard to catch problems before they develop. Any research involving the collection of sensitive information from or about living persons should pass before the IRB just to make sure.
A spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission pointed out that the kind of 'nonconsensual' tracking done by the Northeastern researchers is in fact illegal in the US. It is illegal in other countries as well. The Nature News article notes that another researcher working on very similar research was not able to do what the Northeastern researchers had done specifically because it was illegal in Germany, where he was based. However, the Northeastern study discloses neither the country in which the study was conducted, nor the cell phone company that supplied the data.
Cesar Hidalgo, a Northeastern physics researcher and coauthor of the study, said, "In the wrong hands the data could be misused ... But in scientists' hands you're trying to look at broad patterns.... We're not trying to do evil things. We're trying to make the world a little better."
Without transparent processes or institutional safeguards, however, such assurances must be suspect.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)