Sunday, January 2, 2011

The Year in Maps (Part 2)


19.)    Funny Mental Maps (NOT Politically Correct!) (thanks, Jenn Brisbane, for sending)


Very hilarious mental maps!  Definitely NOT politically correct, so be forewarned!


20.)    How Segregated is your City? Dot Map (thanks Jonathan Halabi, for sending)



21.)    A Plague of Prisons

I wanted to draw your attention to a new book by Ernie Drucker that some of you may be interested in.  It's called "A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America."  (See attached book blurb.)
Some of you may be familiar with Ernie and his work.  At one time he was a Visiting Scholar in our department at Lehman, and we continue to work together on various environmental and health projects and proposals. Ernie is also a huge proponent of GISc (always a plus, in my estimation!)  So take a look at the attached book blurb.  Let me know if you are interested, and I will try to get Ernie to come up to Lehman to give a talk in one of our department's classes, or to the wider Lehman community, if there is sufficient interest.

A PARADIGM - SHIFTING LOOK AT OUR CRIMINAL
JUSTICE SYSTEM THAT S E E S PRI SONS AS THE
PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION
Ernie Drucker has long been a leader in new ways of thinking about issues of crime and drugs. He’s helped us to imagine a true public health approach to these problems.
—MARC MAUR, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE SENTENCING PROJECT
When Dr. John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Taking the same concepts and tools of public health that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS over the intervening one hundred and fifty years, Ernest Drucker makes the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic.
Drucker, an internationally recognized public health scholar and researcher, spent twenty years treating drug addiction and studying AIDS in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx. He compares mass incarceration to other, well-recognized epidemics using basic public health concepts—“prevalence and incidence,” “outbreaks,” “contagion,” “transmission,” “potential years of life lost.” He argues that imprisonment—originally conceived as a response to individuals’ crimes—has become “mass incarceration”: a destabilizing force that undermines the families and communities it targets, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime. This book demonstrates that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and selfperpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
Sure to provoke debate and shift the paradigm of how we think about punishment, A Plague of Prisons offers a totally novel perspective on criminal justice in twenty-first-century America.
Ernest Drucker is a professor of family and social medicine and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, as well as an adjunct professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He is an NIHfunded researcher, editor-in-chief of the  International Harm Reduction Journal, a Soros Justice Fellow, and a founder and former chairman of Doctors of the World.

22.)    World Map of Touristy-ness

The readers’ comments rightfully pick up on some of the problems with this map (which follows pretty closely the night-time lights maps which we have all seen) but it is interesting, nonetheless. 


23.)    The Revolution will be Mapped (thanks for sending, Jenn Brisbane)

Greetings, everyone, and Happy Father's Day.  Thanks, Jenn, for sending the link below to an article, The Revolution Will Be Mapped.  No, I had not seen this before, and I actually get Miller-McCune every month!  Go figure.  The one time they have an interesting article on GIS, I don't see it!  One of the things I found noteworthy about this link is the opinion expressed in some of the comments about the article from readers.  When you have been studying environmental injustice for a couple of decades, you forget that there are people in this country to whom the concept is totally new (and dare I say, foreign to them, and displeasing). The general tone of some of these comments runs along the lines of:  "I'm sure the analysts could have equally easily found an affluent white neighborhood close to the water plant that also didn't have piped-in town water." yeah. right. But my favorite comment was: "I, for one, welcome our new ESRI Overlords."  LOL! 



24.)    Gulf Oil Spill Map (Thanks, Allan Frei, Katie Gill, and Jingyu Wang, who all sent me this)

Yeah, when you click on the link below, you can enter the name of a location to see how much the oil spill would cover.  I entered, of course, Bronx, NY, and guess what? The plume (if centered on the Bronx) would cover NY State almost up to Albany, half of Connecticut, most of Long Island, at least two-thirds of New Jersey, Pennsylvania as far west as Harrisburg, and all of NYC.  That's a BIG area!  Mapping it on land makes it really obvious and gives a whole new perspective on how big this mo-fo really is.  Unbelievable.  Don't forget to watch Toxic Towns on CNN tonight, btw.  I saw most of it last night and it was very good.  Tonight is Part 2.  Shows the impotence of federal and state agencies to do anything at all against big industry.  sad and depressing. 
Thanks, Jing Yu, for sending us the link.  JAM



Apologies for cross posting but this is a great mapping project - something to show your students if you're teaching summer classes or to use in the fall ... or just to know/visualize. 

If you put Syracuse, NY as the location you will see how much of NYState the oil disaster would take up.
-katie
To help visualize the size of the oil spill, put it wherever you want to:


25.)    Mapmaking in New York can be a dark artform

Interesting piece on re-districting New York State's Senate and Assembly Districts.  How could you resist reading an article that starts off with: "Mapmaking in New York can be a dark art form"?
Former Republican State Senator Guy Velella customized his own district, which included parts of the Bronx and southern Westchester, block by block. Not only does it carefully exclude the home of his former challenger, but it also includes Rikers Island -- a way of adding about 13,000 people. When Mr. Velella was convicted of bribery in 2004, he served his jail time in his home district, on Rikers Island.









26.)    City of Endangered Languages

Yes, we all know that Queens is the most linguistically diverse place on the planet, but here is an interesting piece in the NY Times about how there are languages spoken in NYC that are so rare now-a-days that New York may have more speakers of these languages than the places where the people originally came from.  And check out all the cool linguistic maps of the city that are behind the talking heads in the video.  as well as the nice snippets of Garifuna music (Arawak language from the Caribbean).
I was recently in a cab where the driver was speaking on a cell phone (of course!) and I asked him what language he was speaking, because I didn't recognize it at all.  He told me Aramaic - the language spoken by Jesus.  He was from Syria.  He also spoke Arabic, of course, but not amongst his closest friends and family, then they only spoke Aramaic together, and this is very rarely spoken anymore in Syria (or anywhere else).  Do we live in a great city, or what.   JAM

article:

video:


27.)    The 10 Weirdest Urban Ecosystems On Earth (from Andrew Maroko)

Greetings, everyone, and Happy Earth Day!  I am forwarding a link from Andrew which is very interesting and worth checking out.  I knew about some of these places, but some (the Battleship City in Japan, and Sub-Tropolis, for instance) are new to me.  I object to the Gowanus Canal as being on this list!  It's not that weird!  and I especially object to the moronic person who commented "How could they do that to their own drinking water?" Huh? DUH.  The Canal is polluted sea water, not fresh water, and in any event New Yorkers have been drinking water from the Croton, Catskills, and Delaware watersheds, several hundred miles away, for 150 years or more.  I don't think any one has ever taken drinking water from the Gowanus, even before it was polluted! Not even the first indigenous inhabitants of these islands!  Anyhoo, enjoy,  JAM



28.)     Your Food Environment Atlas – Interactive maps (thanks, Hal Strelnick, for sending)

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