Robert Lemon's Email

Dear all,

I enjoyed talking with you all yesterday, I just wanted to pass along a few more bits of info. I was going to pass around the few books I brought but forgot, so I will link them here. I also thought I would give Texas' Geography Dept. and geography in general a plug. We always need more geographers, so I should do some recruiting. If geography sounds somewhat interesting, I would look into it a bit further and would be happy to help. The geography dept. web site at Minnesota (http://www.geog.umn.edu/) does the best job breaking down geography into eight clusters and giving a good description of each. If you find you want to pursue geography for graduate study I highly encourage you to do so and will be happy to answer any questions when looking for the program that would fit your interests the best.

All the best,

Robert


Also, you can find Oakland data here


Texas Geography Program . (Texas has a bit of $$$ for their students, and Austin is a great place to be for a few years.)


Texas Geography graduate courses 07-09




Books:
The Human Mosaic by Terry G. Jordan-Byschov


Space and Place by Yi-Fu_Tuan


Mapping it out by Mark Monmonier



Book on Brasilia for those who would like to know more:
The Modernist City by James Holston

Lorem Ipsum

For those interested, the website Lorem Ipsum (http://www.lipsum.com/) has a nice little history of the use of the text. To give you a sense of the thing:

Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC.

Fascinating little bit of reading that.

Project Powerpoint

template available here (ppt new format) or here (ppt old format).

Two More Maps in the Media

From today's NYT. Future teacher shortages mapped. Another article "Mapping the Cultural Buzz: How Cool Is That?" reports on research (title: "The Geography of Buzz") presented at the recent annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers.

Geocoding on the Web

The service Rebecca introduced us to is at batchgeocode.com. There's a blog about the service at batchgeocode.blogspot.com.

The blog mentions that Google has a geocode service too. It requires a bit more tinkering than batchgeocode, but looks interesting.

Facebook in Maps

Check out these maps and diagrams from this New York Times article about the expansion of Facebook.

Streets as Art

Ben Fry is a computer scientist and visualization expert who developed a wonderful tool called "Processing" for drawing pictures with computers. One project he worked on is called, simply, "All Streets." It's worth a look.

Strange Maps Blog

Check out the cartographic novella on this blog....

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Mapping the Housing Crisis

In the Economix blog of the New York Times today, a cool animated map showing changes in housing markets by state over past 30 years.

Case Study Sign-Up Sheet (click for PDF)

My flat in Prague

Here is the building I use to live in (2003-2005). I lived on the Fourth floor and, like my politics, my window is on the far left.
Na shledanou!

Putting Up Buildings (Google Earth and Sketchup)

Start Google Earth and Google Sketchup

Navigate to your desired location in Google Earth. Zoom in and center on your planned building site.

Go over to Sketchup and click the Get Current View button. After a few seconds, the result should be something like this:


(1) You can use the Orbit button to tilt the view a bit so you can see your building site better. (2) Use either rectangle, circle, or pencil tool to draw your building's footprint. (3) Use the Push/Pull tool to 3-dimensionalize your building.




Next, add whatever features you want to jazz up your building.

Finally, click the Place Model button.


Go to Google Earth. In the Places Table of Contents you should see a new entry referring to your drawing. Select this entry and right click and select properties and give it an appropriate name. Then right click and click Save Place As. You can save as KMZ format (compressed) or KML format (uncompressed).


Here is a link to the one that I just created following these steps:
New Vera Long Building

How Does GPS Work? Let YouTube Do the Teaching...

ArcGIS and GPS Data

Back to the Farm -- in a Map

An article in Sunday's NYT business section ("Farm Living (Subsidized by a Job Elsewhere)" - Andrew Martin)describes an increase in the number of farms in the U.S. but that many of them are small, part-time operations that are subsidized by the farmer having to work another job.

Maps and Politics

Brad Stone has a piece in today's NYT, "Prop 8 Donor Web Site Shows Disclosure Law Is 2-Edged Sword," on the controversial Web site eightmaps.com. It raises some interesting sociology of information issues as well as questions about privacy, free speech, and the ethics of activism.