Posts by geogadmin

The UCSB Department of Geography is proud to announce the induction of 19 new graduate students into its program. These gifted students are the academic cream of the crop of applicants for 2013, and we are both honored and privileged to have them join our Department. The Grad Student bulletin board in the Department’s main office area is updated with photos and details of our new grad’s goals and prior academic...

Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, leaders of the Google “Big Picture” visualization research group in Cambridge, MA, recently unveiled a project that shows a fluid, time-lapse animation of wind speeds across the U.S. According to the artists, “An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us–energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future…This...

“In addition to the well-known social issues of illiteracy and innumeracy, there also should be such a concept as “immappancy,“ meaning insufficient geographical knowledge. A survey with random American schoolkids let them guess the population and land area of their country. Not entirely unexpected, but still rather unsettling, the majority chose “1-2 billion” and “largest in the world“,...