Geography

Question

This piglix contains articles or sub-piglix about Geography

Answer 1

Edgelands

Edgelands are the transitional, liminal areas of space to be found on the boundaries of country and town - with the spread of urbanisation, an increasingly important facet of the twenty-first century world.

The concept of Edgelands was introduced by Marion Shoard in 2002, to cover the disorganised but often fertile hinterland between planned town and over-managed country. However a century and a half earlier, Victor Hugo had already highlighted the existence of what he called "bastard countryside...ugly but bizarre, made up of two different natures, which surrounds certain great cities"; while Richard Jeffries similarly explored the London edgeland in Nature near London (1883). Alice Coleman (Kings College London, dept geography) in 2nd Land Use Survey of Great Britain, refers to "rurban fringe". Indicating a similar landscape but with negative overtones.

Nevertheless it was only in the last decades of the twentieth century - as a distinct realm of Nature increasingly disappeared beneath the commodifying impact of globalising late capitalism - that the significance of the unstructured borderlands between organised town and organised country, part man-made, part natural, both for wildlife and for human exploration, came into fuller focus. Psychogeography charted the London orbital, while bombsites, canal banks and brownfield sites were documented in poetry and prose, film and photography; and the borderlands as an untapped, transgressive resource became almost the object of a new cult.

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Wikipedia

Answer 2

Extreme environment

An extreme environment contains conditions that are hard to survive for most known life forms. These conditions may be extremely high or low temperature or pressure; high or low content of oxygen or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; high levels of radiation, acidity, or alkalinity; absence of water; water containing a high concentration of salt or sugar; presence of sulphur, petroleum, and other toxic substances.

Examples of extreme environments include the geographical poles, very dry deserts, volcanoes, deep ocean trenches, upper atmosphere, Mt Everest, outer space, and the environments of every planet in the Solar System except the Earth. Any organisms living in these conditions are often very well adapted to their living circumstances, which is usually a result of long-term evolution. Physiologists have long known that organisms living in extreme environments are especially likely to exhibit clear examples of evolutionary adaptation because of the presumably intense past natural selection they have experienced.

The distribution of extreme environments on Earth has varied through geological time. Humans generally do not inhabit extreme environments. There are organisms referred to as extremophiles that do live in such conditions and are so well-adapted that they readily grow and multiply.

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Answer 3

Feminism and GIS

Feminism and GIS refers to the use of geographic information system (GIS) for feminist research and also how women influence GIS at technological stages. Feminist GIS research is aware of power differences in social and economic realms.

Feminist GIS is considered part of a larger discourse on Feminist Geography, critical cartography, and critical GIS, arenas of study that has been ongoing since the 1990s and before that critiques the acceptance of GIS as a practice for producing neutral and objective representations of space. Feminist GIS scholars are especially concerned with "whether GIS methods are inherently incompatible with feminist epistemologies through interrogating their connection with positivist scientific practices and visualization technologies." Feminist geographers, in general, "recognize the partiality and situatedness of all knowledge and the importance of critical reflections on one's subject position relative to research participants, the research process, and the knowledge produced (reflexivity)."

In practice, researchers have found that Volunteered geographic information research can be influenced by feminism and GIS, along with critical and participatory GIS, to produce socially inclusive development and research.

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Answer 4

Fluvio-glacial

Fluvio-glacial is the water created by the melting of glaciers. It literally means "Water Glacier", but is also commonly called 'melt water', or glacial milk when combined with rock flour.

Fluvio-glacial can also mean sediments deposited by the glacier meltwater. Fluvio-glacial landforms differ from glacial landforms. Such fluvio-glacial landforms include outwash plains, varves, braided streams, eskers, kames (and kame terraces), kettles (or kettle holes) and proglacial lakes.

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Answer 5

Fundamental plane (spherical coordinates)

The fundamental plane in a spherical coordinate system is a plane which divides the sphere into two hemispheres. The latitude of a point is then the angle between the fundamental plane and the line joining the point to the centre of the sphere.

For a geographic coordinate system of the Earth, the fundamental plane is the equator. Celestial coordinate systems have varying fundamental planes:

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Answer 6

Geo-literacy

As defined by National Geographic, geo-literacy is "the ability to use geographic understanding and geographic reasoning to make decisions".

The term "geo-literacy" arose from the National Geographic Society's "Fight against Geographic Illiteracy." The organization released various media to help explain the concept to the general public. In an editorial, Daniel C. Edelson, vice president for education at National Geographic, said, "The National Geographic Society's concern for geo-literacy comes from our mission. We see geo-literacy as providing the tools that will enable communities to protect natural and cultural resources, reduce violent conflict, and improve the quality of life worldwide. However, having a geo-literate populace is also critical for maintaining economic competitiveness, quality of life, and national security in our modern, interconnected world.", and have released various media to help explain it to the general public. In addition, the National Geographic Society set up the Fund for Geo-literacy, in which donations help fund the printing of materials for education, professional development for the educators, and programs to help build awareness of the importance of geo-literacy.

According to Edelson, the 3 components of geo-literacy are:

"Kid World Citizen", a site which provides "multicultural, educational activities to teach...kids about the world", and who, listed the following "age-appropriate lessons to increase geo-literacy in primary school students":

In 2012, InTeGrate ("a community effort to improve geoscience literacy and build a workforce that can make use of geoscience to solve societal issues") held a Module Author Meeting from May 16–18 on the topic.

In 2002, Robert E. Nolan of the Education Resources Information Center published a research report/journal article entitled "Geo-Literacy: How Well Adults Understand the World in Which They Live", which included "a test of physical and geopolitical geography...completed by 321 adults". The years of formal education and age were correlated with geographic literacy, and informal learning, such as travel, reading, media, was used as the primary source of geographic knowledge for those with higher educational attainment. A notable finding was that women, regardless of education level, scored significantly lower than men."

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Wikipedia

Answer 7

Geo-replication

Geo-replication systems are designed to improve the distribution of data across geographically distributed data networks. This is intended to improve the response time for applications such as web portals. Geo-replication can be achieved using software, hardware or a combination of the two.

Geo-replication software is a network performance-enhancing technology that is designed to provide improved access to portal or intranet content for uses at the most remote parts of large organizations. It is based on the principle of storing complete replicas of portal content on local servers, and then keeping the content on those servers up-to-date using heavily compressed data updates.

Geo-replication technologies are used to provide replication of the content of portals, intranets, web applications, content and data between servers, across wide area networks WAN to allow users at remote sites to access central content at LAN speeds.

Geo-replication software can improve the performance of data networks that suffer limited bandwidth, latency and periodic disconnection. Terabytes of data can be replicated over a wide area network, giving remote sites faster access to web applications.

Geo-replication software uses a combination of data compression and content caching technologies. differencing technologies can also be employed to reduce the volume of data that has to be transmitted to keep portal content accurate across all servers. This update compression can reduce the load that portal traffic place on networks, and improve the response time of a portal.

Remote users of web portals and collaboration environments will frequently experience network bandwidth and latency problems which will slow down their experience of opening and closing files, and otherwise interacting with the portal. Geo-replication technology is deployed to accelerate the remote end user portal performance to be equivalent to that experienced by users locally accessing the portal in the central office.

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Wikipedia

Answer 8

Geographic targeting

Geographic targeting is a viable way for resource allocation, especially to alleviate poverty in a country. In this context, public expenditure and policy interventions can be deployed to reach the neediest people in the poorest areas.

Geographical targeting for poverty alleviation employs a variety of techniques, such as database, and geographic information systems to construct poverty maps.

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Wikipedia

Answer 9

Geographical cluster

A geographical cluster is a localised , usually an excess of something given the distribution or variation of something else. Often it is considered as an incidence rate that is unusual in that there is more of some variable than might be expected. Examples would include: a local excess disease rate, a crime hot spot, areas of high unemployment, accident blackspots, unusually high positive residuals from a model, high concentrations of flora or fauna, physical features or events like earthquake epicenters etc...

Identifying these extreme regions may be useful in that there could be implicit geographical associations with other variables that can be identified and would be of interest. Pattern detection via the identification of such geographical clusters is a very simple and generic form of geographical analysis that has many applications in many different contexts. The emphasis is on localized clustering or patterning because this may well contain the most useful information.

A geographical cluster is different from a high concentration as it is generally second order, involving the factoring in of the distribution of something else.

Identifying geographical clusters can be an important stage in a geographical analysis. Mapping the locations of unusual concentrations may help identify causes of these. Some techniques include the Geographical Analysis Machine and Besag and Newell's cluster detection method.

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Wikipedia

Answer 10

Geocriticism

Geocriticism is a method of literary analysis and literary theory that incorporates the study of geographic space. The term designates a number of different critical practices. In France, Bertrand Westphal has elaborated the concept of géocritique in several works. In the United States, Robert Tally has argued for a geocriticism as a critical practice suited to the analysis of what he has termed "literary cartography".

Some of the first expressly geocritical writings emerged from symposia organized by Westphal at the University of Limoges. Westphal's foundational essay, "Pour une approche géocritique des textes" constitutes a manifesto for geocriticism. Westphal's theory is elaborated in greater detail in his Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, translated by Tally, who also provides a brief introduction. But there are also many works addressing similar themes and using similar methods that might be considered geocritical, even if the term "geocriticism" is not used.

In Westphal's theory, geocriticism is based on three theoretical concepts: spatio-temporality, transgressivity, and referentiality.

The idea that space and time form a continuum (space-time) is a tenet of modern physics. In the field of literary theory, geocriticism is an interdisciplinary method of literary analysis that focuses not only on such temporal data as relations between the life and times of the author (as in biographical criticism), the history of the text (as in textual criticism), or the story (as studied by narratology), but also on spatial data. Geocriticism therefore has affinities with geography, architecture, urban studies, and so on; it also correlates to philosophical concepts such as deterritorialization.

Following the work Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Lefebvre and Mikhail Bakhtin, among others, a geocritical approach to literature recognizes that representations of space are often transgressive, crossing the boundaries of established norms while also reestablishing new relations among people, places, and things. Cartography is no longer seen as the exclusive province of the state or the government; rather, various agents or groups may be responsible for representing the geographic spaces at the same time and with different effects. In practice, therefore, geocriticism is multifocal, examining a variety of topics at once, thus differentiating itself from practices that focus on the singular point of view of the traveler or protagonist.

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Wikipedia