Geography Commons^™

Making The Old City: Life Projects And State Heritage In Rhodes And Acre, Evan Taylor

Doctoral Dissertations

The “old city,” a widely recognizable category of urban space, has long been a locus of development projects, state monitoring, and mass tourism, while also being home to resident communities. This dissertation explores the intersections of community life and state-driven heritage projects in the Old Town of Rhodes, in the Greek Dodecanese, and the Old City of Acre (‘Akka), a Palestinian community in northern Israel/Palestine. Both old cities are UNESCO World Heritage sites and subjects of intense state-supported tourism development. However, their resident populations and their built environments, which coalesced mainly under Crusader and Ottoman rule, challenge the authorized ...

Evaluation Of Measurement Data Across Eight Gis Basemaps Using Drumlins: Combining Basemaps Is Optimal, Gretchen A. Wambach, Alexander K. Stewart

The Compass: Earth Science Journal of Sigma Gamma Epsilon

Choosing the best basemap for landform data collection and analysis is fundamental for accurate measurements and usability. Different types of basemaps may affect how we perceive relief through a map (Phillips et al., 1975); thereby, affecting the precision of data collected. This project collected length and azimuth data of 60 drumlins in Western, NY from four different, ArcGIS online (AGOL)-provided basemaps, as well as two parallel-to-strike and two perpendicular-to-strike hillshades (n=4). Testing the mean length (1,662m, ±529) and azimuth (171°, ±0.3) data for uniformity across basemaps determined if any basemap is more or less reliable for ...

Gigapan® Photogrammetry For Outcrop Description, 3d Modeling, And 3d Printing, Preston Liles, Logan Pearson, Samantha Barnett, Dakota G. Simpson, David B. Fitzpatrick, Erik B. Larson, Maurice Testa

The Compass: Earth Science Journal of Sigma Gamma Epsilon

The collection of 3D information on geological media is fundamental for field geology, however it can be both time consuming and expensive. This report proposes a new method for the collection of 3D information of outcrops using simple to use and inexpensive technology. GigaPan® systems can be used to take high resolution images of outcrops and these images then be either left in 2D for additional description of the outcrop in the lab, or they can be processed in Autodesk 3ds Max® to create realistic 3D models of the outcrops which can then be 3D printed. The collection of this ...

Machine Learning With Kay, Lasith Niroshan, James Carswell

Conference Papers

Computational power is very important when training Deep Learning (DL) models with large amounts of data (Wooldridge, 2021). Hence, High-Performance Computing (HPC) can be leveraged to reduce computational cost, and the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) provides significant infrastructure and services for research and development to both academia and industry. A portion of ICHEC's HPC system has been allocated for institutional access, and this paper presents a case study of how to use Kay (Ireland's national supercomputer) in the remote sensing domain. Specifically, this study uses clusters of Kay Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for training DL models ...

Regional And Elevational Patterns Of Extreme Heat Stress Change In The Us, Colin Raymond, Duane E. Waliser, Bin Guan, Huikyo Lee, Paul Loikith, Elias C. Massoud, Agniv Sengupta, Deepti Singh, Adrienne Wootten

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Increasing severity of extreme heat is a hallmark of climate change. Its impacts depend on temperature but also on moisture and solar radiation, each with distinct spatial patterns and vertical profiles. Here, we consider these variables' combined effect on extreme heat stress, as measured by the environmental stress index, using a suite of high-resolution climate simulations for historical (1980–2005) and future (2074–2099, Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5)) periods. We find that observed extreme heat stress drops off nearly linearly with elevation above a coastal zone, at a rate that is larger in more humid regions. Future ...

Mapping Narrations, Narrating Maps: Concepts Of The World In The Middle Ages And The Early Modern Period, Ingrid Baumgartner, Daniel Gneckow, Anna Hollenbach, Phillip Landgrebe

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

This volume offers the author's central articles on the medieval and early modern history of cartography for the first time in English translation. A first group of essays gives an overview of medieval cartography and illustrates the methods of cartographers. Another analyzes world maps and travel accounts in relation to mapped spaces. A third examines land surveying, cartographical practices of exploration and the production of Portolan atlases.

Why, New York City? Gauging The Quality Of Life Through The Thoughts Of Tweeters, Sheryl Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a resource for social data, Twitter’s platform has been used to measure the quality of life through sentiment analysis. This capstone project explores another methodological technique—querying Twitter data around specific keyword terms to determine dominant topics, word patterns, and sentiment leanings in a geographical area. Focusing on New York City and Los Angeles for comparative analysis, the keyword term “why” will be used to build a Python analysis around topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Using this approach, the analysis reveals social and cultural differences, the overall sentiment of tweets, and subjects of interest to tweeters.

GitHub Repository ...

Archetype, Story, And Myth Within Bulgarian Folklore And Black American Music, Wes C. Georgiev

University Honors Theses

The confluence of several disciplines is explored through the investigation of archetypes, stories, folklore, and myths within the realm of music composition. This research aims to draw fresh conclusions which contend with some of the meanings of being a human. All research is done in conjunction with the creation of a new body of compositions written and arranged for piano, upright bass, and drum set. The academic objective of these pieces is to combine many of the salient characteristics of Bulgarian Folk music with those of Black American music. The supporting research in this essay examines centuries of migration, conflict ...

Cityengine As A Tool For Visualizing Neighborhood Change: An Initial Study, Zach Noyes

City and Regional Planning

Urban planning is reliant upon genuine public engagement to ensure that planning and policy decisions reflect the ideas shared by the public. Because planning is a profession largely focused on the physical and built implications of more abstract planning concepts, effective graphic communication is critical to securing public support and understanding of policy decisions. ESRI's CityEngine uses procedural modeling technology to render personally-tailored scenes to non-planner members of the public, and shows potential to positively change the way that planners generate graphic representations of physical impacts of policy changes. This initial study establishes a methodology for determining the efficacy ...

Modeling And Predicting Geospatial Teen Crash Frequency, Sonu Mathew, Srinivas S. Pulugurtha, Sarvani Duvvuri

Mineta Transportation Institute Publications

This research project 1) evaluates the effect of road network, demographic, and land use characteristics on road crashes involving teen drivers, and, 2) develops and compares the predictability of local and global regression models in estimating teen crash frequency. The team considered data for 201 spatially distributed road segments in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, USA for the evaluation and obtained data related to teen crashes from the Highway Safety Information System (HSIS) database. The team extracted demographic and land use characteristics using two different buffer widths (0.25 miles and 0.5 miles) at each selected road segment, with the ...

Pronounced Changes In Thermal Signals Associated With The Madoi (China) M 7.3 Earthquake From Passive Microwave And Infrared Satellite Data, Feng Jing, Lu Zhang, Ramesh P. Singh

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Thermal variations in surface and atmosphere observed from multiple satellites prior to strong earthquakes have been widely reported ever since seismic thermal anomalies were discovered three decades ago. These thermal changes are related to stress accumulation caused by the tectonic activities in the final stage of earthquake preparation. In the present paper, we focused on the thermal changes associated with the 2021 Madoi M 7.3 earthquake in China and analyzed the temporal and spatial evolution of the Index of Microwave Radiation Anomaly (IMRA) and the Index of Longwave Radiation Anomaly (ILRA) based on 8-year microwave brightness temperature (MWBT) and ...

Our Streets: Increasing Equity In Active Transportation Planning Through Community Outreach, Jordan Hoy

Master's Projects and Capstones

ABSTRACT Significant research has demonstrated that active transportation infrastructure is essential for the growth and livability of San Francisco: it increases access to economic opportunities, promotes overall improved public health, encourages mobility without contributing to roadway congestion, prevents traffic injuries and fatalities, and supports the sustainability goals of the city. Despite the fact that communities of color will benefit the most from active transportation infrastructure development, historical disenfranchisement in tandem with a lack of diverse representation within public participation contributes to an inequitable distribution of walking and biking investments throughout the city of San Francisco. While research shows that Black ...

Degree Of Satisfaction Of Elderly About The Services Provided To Them In Social Care Houses In White Beds Association, Yousef Mohammed Al-Shurman, Ferdous Hasan Omari

Al-Balqa Journal for Research and Studies البلقاء للبحوث والدراسات

This study aims at identifying the degree of satisfaction of the elderly about the (social, health, entertainment, psychological) services provided to them in social care houses. The sample of the study includes all residents of the White Beds Association for the care of the elderly in Amman. The researcher designed a questionnaire to use in the interviews with the elderly. The questionnaire has four items, and each item includes a group of questions about the service provided to them. The researcher interviewed all the members of the White Beds Association, whose health condition allowed this, (75 elderly people: 44 men ...

Finding Resilience Through Research: Completing A Ph.D. While Parenting An Intellectually Disabled Adult “Child”, Lorraine M. Hutton

The Qualitative Report

Unlike the progression of most traditional-aged, college or university students, my non-traditional, academic trajectory as a parent-caregiver to an intellectually disabled (ID) adult has been fraught with barriers, disruption, and discouragement. Motivation to complete my doctorate rests on a commitment to disability issues, caregiver activism, and intellectual capacity-building of my self. Guided by the “evocative” autoethnographic methodology of Bochner and Ellis (2016), this “insider’s” narrative retrospective autoethnography will attempt to shed light on and evoke an understanding of a doctoral student caregiver’s context and experience in the academy. It encompasses embodiment, a geographically constrained sense of place, marginalization ...

Interrogating Race And Place-Based Inequities In Hiv And Covid-19, Rohan Khazanchi

MD Honors Theses

Over the last four years, I have developed a research focus examining the intersections of race, place, and health. My M.D. Honors Thesis reflects a snapshot of these efforts. In this collection of brief research reports, I leverage area-based measures to investigate structural inequities in three contexts: the HIV epidemic in our hyperlocal community, the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and clinical trials for novel COVID-19 therapeutics. I apply novel social epidemiologic tools to measure and explore disparate outcomes. And, in reflecting upon my findings, I discuss concrete implications for clinicians, researchers, and policymakers alike.

Chapter 1: Neighborhood-Level ...

The Spatial Associations Between Crime And Economy In Chicago 2015-2020, Hongtao Huang

Honors Capstones

The severity of the crime is often the most intuitive reflection of whether a region is safe and the top factor for the public when evaluating a region. Economist's list of the safest cities in seven major North American cities, Chicago was ranked at six, just above Dallas. Chicago scored the lowest in personal security, which is closely tied to the crime. Against the backdrop of higher unemployment and prices, this study is interested in how property-based crimes are related to the economic decline in Chicago geographically. The study used the heterogeneity analysis tool Geodetector to investigate the correlation ...

From The Abacus To Big Data: The Evolution Of Data-Driven Planning In The U.S. And Where The Field Will Be Headed, Keuntae Kim

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

The nature of planning involves a set of decision-making processes to fulfill people’s needs and expectations of where they live, work, and play. Dealing with the nature of planning—complexity, uncertainty, and disagreement—requires specific tools to explore various aspects of the built environment as a whole. Various types of data have been extracted, transformed, and loaded to describe the past and current conditions of the built environment, and planners have developed and applied data-driven planning tools to explore the knowns and unknowns of the urban futures and transform them into a set of actions based on the goals ...

Exploring The Spatial Distribution Of Air Pollutants And Covid-19 Death Rate: A Case Study For Los Angeles County, California, Akhil Mandalapu, Junfeng Jiao, Amin Azimian

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

Objective

Since March 2020, COVID-19 has rapidly spread across the world with over 240 million cases and over 5 million deaths as of November 2021. It has been unclear what role air pollutants may play in exacerbating respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19 due to their interaction with the respiratory system. The association with air pollutants and COVID-19 severity has been explored at the regional and metropolitan area, however it is unclear if such an association is consistent at the neighborhood level.

Methods

Weekly death rates from COVID-19 from March 2020 to November 2021 were compared using one-sided unpaired t-tests across ...

Nevada Economic Development And Public Policy 2022-2026: A Sustainable Future For All Nevadans, The Lincy Institute, Brookings Mountain West

Policy Briefs and Reports

This report evaluates economic development efforts in the State of Nevada since the 2011 publication of Unify, Regionalize, Diversify: An Economic Development Agenda for Nevada; assesses demographic and economic trends for Nevada and its regions; examines how state and federal actions since the onset of COVID-19 can position Nevada and its regions to address long-standing economic, educational, and social deficits; and offers policy recommendations to be implemented in the next four years to facilitate a sustainable future for all Nevadans.

Evaluation Of Staten Island's Wetland Services And Environmental Costs Of Removal, Gracyn Cole

Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Showcase

In 2017, the New York City Council approved a zoning variance allowing the demolition of 28-acres of wetlands near Staten Island’s Graniteville neighborhood in order to build a BJ’s Wholesale grocery store, a gas station, and a parking lot for 835 cars. This action raised concern for the people living within this neighborhood due to the amount of water detention the wetlands provide during natural disaster events. Specifically, the Graniteville Wetlands have protected the surrounding neighborhoods from severe natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy which, in turn, has allowed these neighborhoods to contribute less to flood mitigation through ...