GEOGRAPHY A new series of food maps use ingredients synonymous with the region being mapped. Think India rendered in spices, New Zealand in kiwifruit, South America in citrus. (Nat Geo magazine) Use our MapMaker Kits to get started making innovative maps of your own. Teachers, scroll down for a quick list of key resources in our Teachers Toolkit. And be sure to click the links … Continue reading Food Maps Show Nations Are What They Eat
National Geographic Geography Intern Hadrien Picq is a recent geography graduate who grew up in periphery of Paris before escaping to California. He has a couple words of advice for those intending to visit the French’s capital: don’t feed the Parisians, prepare to be underwhelmed by the Mona Lisa, and take advantage of the high speed train to visit the countryside. Also, when ordering a … Continue reading Paris’ Doppelgänger
You might remember the map of Presidential campaign speech keywords we highlighted on the blog a couple months back. Well, a new tool lends more credence to the claim that where you live affects the vocabulary of what you talk, think, and care most about.
A website called StateStats
combines results from Google’s
Insights for Search tool with
data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Now
keyword searches tracked by Google are tied to location or “georeferenced” and
compared with information from the Census.
An example is the search-term “mittens.” States with high activity for “mitten” searches
are those at high northern latitudes that experience frost and chilly
temperatures like Vermont, Maine, Minnesota, and Alaska. It’s a bit obvious that where there is cold, there will be
mittens, but what if we try another popular winter-weather search?
The keyword “skiing” is frequently
searched in the states of Vermont, Montana, New Hampshire, and Maine; again states in high latitudes with a lot of frost. But StateStats
also shows that these states all have similar incomes, average ages, percent of
high school graduates and political leanings.
On the other hand, obesity, infant mortality and violent crime seem to
have a negative correlation, or opposite relationship, to the search-term
“skiing.”
So can we conclude that anyone who searches for “skiing” is
a skinny, wealthy, high school graduate from a northern latitude?
Continue reading “StateSats Combines Geography and Technology–An Unstoppable Duo!”
Here’s a great new–and fun–way to get your kids interested in geography and the world around them. With Geography + Information Postcards, kids (or kids-at-heart) can explore their environment and record information about climate, population and lifestyle, industry and resources, and land, water, and animals. Then once they are done, they can share their findings by sending the postcards and submitting them online to the … Continue reading Geography + Information Postcards
Here’s a great Q&A from Canada.com about “Mr. Geography,” a Toronto taxi driver named Mohammad Saaed Collins who offers a free ride to anyone who can answer a single geography question correctly. Why geography? As Collins puts it, it’s “the most important subject for humans.” “We’re standing on geography. People are born on geography. Moving from place to place is geography. If you study it … Continue reading Need a Ride? Call Mr. Geography
