A New Map Reveals the Geography of American TV News

From the Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/a-new-map-reveals-the-geography-of-american-tv-news/282443/

Most Americans—some 55 percent—get their news from television. That’s more than double the number who look to the web first, and more than five times the number who turn to print.
So television news steers, to a great degree, our political discourse. But unlike text on the page or screen, it remains more difficult to analyze. TV arrives as sound and moving images—both of which algorithms have a harder time making sense of.
That’s why a recent pilot project from the Internet Archive is so welcome. Using the Archive’s massive archive of television news, Georgetown scholar Kalev Leetaru tracked all the locations mentioned on U.S. television news between June 2009 and October 2013, then plotted them on a world map.
On the foundation’s blog, archivist Roger Macdonald writes that the map constitutes the “first large-scale glimpses of the geography of American television news, beginning to reveal which areas receive outsized attention and which are neglected.”

Internet Archive

Leetaru’s project isn’t the first to examine quantitatively how TV news represents the world. Last year, scholars in Germany and Israel examined how domestic TV news sources in different countries covered “foreign news.” MIT’s Media Lab, too, has mapped where the Boston Globe directs its attention; they’ve also looked at how often online news sources speak to men and women.
But the Internet Archive's map seems to be the first to depict the breadth of U.S. news. Looking at the map, I quickly found some rarely-covered areas that surprised me. Talking heads, apparently, rarely mentioned North Dakota, despite its booming economy.
To make the map, Leetaru used the massive library of closed captioning held by the Internet Archive. Macdonald explains the process, called “fulltext geocoding”:

These algorithms scan the closed captioning of each broadcast looking for any mention of a location anywhere in the world, disambiguate them using the surrounding discussion (Springfield, Illinois vs Springfield, Massachusetts), and ultimately map each location.

Underlying problems, therefore, might lurk in the data: “Two pairs of shoes” might be captioned—and thus interpreted—as “Two Paris of shoes.” But the prototype represents what’s now possible at the intersection of algorithmic text-reading and geographic visualization. Someday, data like this might inform more than the (worthy) world of media studies—it might help news organizations make decisions about where under-covered stories might be lurking.  
One more thing: I’d love to see this map with the population filtered out: Does the I-95 corridor’s large population justify its massive coverage, or is it indeed over-represented? (It’s hard not to think of this XKCD classic.) I’m struck, though, by the visualization’s similarity to the famous Earth at Night image. It seems an image so awesome, so unfathomable, we can only always be referencing it in maps like these.

Events of 1792

Nautical Exploration
Joseph Whidbey, an English naval officer, circumnavigated the island named after him in 1792,  on Captain George Vancouver's ship.

Never get involved in a land war in Asia

and never agree to transcribe 20 hours of meetings from an Australian business meeting.

That's what I've been doing for the last 4 days...utter nightmare. Could NOT understand their accents. Making it worse were the bad audio levels and the fact that a lot of the people preesnt insisted on talking over each other from all around the room except in front of the microphone... I will never transcribe ANYTHING every again.

Anyway, so sorry to be MIA from my blogs.

Geography to play larger role in health premiums

From SFGate: Geography to play larger role in health premiums

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Whether it's the densely populated Southern California coast or the mountains of rural Northern California, geography is going to play a larger role in the cost of health insurance under the federal health care overhaul set to take effect next year.

Health insurers are facing new rules and restrictions on how they set prices as part of the Affordable Care Act's aim to expand coverage to millions of Americans. No longer can insurers deny coverage because of a preexisting condition or place lifetime limits on medical care. While a person's age will remain a factor in setting rates, older customers cannot be charged more than three times what younger customers pay.

California also has rejected an option under the federal law that allows health insurance companies to charge smokers up to 50 percent more for their premiums.

All this leaves geography as one of the few ways insurers can adjust premiums. The premiums will not be set for most consumers under the law until summer, although estimates are available at the website of California's health benefits exchange, www.coveredca.com .

The federal government has proposed that a state should not create more than seven geographic rating areas to prevent insurers from charging excessively high premiums in certain areas.

To accommodate California's size and diversity, the state's health exchange is proceeding with 19 regions with the understanding that its plan eventually will receive federal approval.

To complicate matters, state lawmakers are scheduled to convene a special session next week, during which the Democrats who dominate the Legislature could come up with their own number.

"Should there be one rate for all of California, every zip code or something in between?" said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, which advocates for low-income families.

It's still too early to say just how much of a determining factor geography will be in setting premiums.

But one health plan rated the difference between east and west Los Angeles County by a factor of 50 percent, which could mean a difference of hundreds of dollars for a family of the same size and whose members are the same age.

Health plans argue that 19 rate-setting regions are necessary in California because premiums should reflect the underlying costs of care. Those costs include regional wage rates, number of hospitals and the amount of competition in the area for providing medical services.

Health policy experts say different regions carry different risks for disease and access to treatment. For example, the Central Valley has higher incidence of asthma because of its poor air quality.

But consumer advocates are concerned that smaller regions will give health plans the opportunity to target poor, rural or less healthy communities with higher rates, similar to how insurance companies have charged higher auto rates in some communities deemed higher risk.

California needs to balance the social benefit of spreading risk — defined as having healthy people subsidize care for those who are less healthy — against having people paying their own medical costs, said Marian Mulkey, director of the Oakland-based nonprofit California HealthCare Foundation's health reform initiative.

"There's probably some Goldilocks, just-right balance between there, but it's extremely hard to find," she said. "And that's why this is a sticky conversation and difficult to navigate."

California Secretary of Health and Human Services Diana Dooley said having seven rating regions is "completely unrealistic for California." The state is moving ahead with 19 regions with the understanding that the federal government will allow it.

"We're going to be making adjustments to this, certainly in the first few years and maybe over the course of the decade," she said. "When we see how this performs after a year or two, we may come back and make changes to those rating regions."

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is currently reviewing comments and plans to issue a new rule soon.

At this time, there is no geographic standard for setting premiums. Health plans typically have used nine rating regions in California because they also can use so many other factors in determining premiums, said Charles Bacchi, executive vice president of the California Association of Health Plans.

Health insurers had argued that California needs many rate-setting regions because the state is asking them to switch to a standard benefit design next year.

While it will allow consumers to make direct comparisons of health plans, insurers say the standardization of benefits could drive up premium costs. That is because it restricts the amount and the number of ways they can charge people for co-pays, co-insurance and deductibles.

Beyond the Geography Bee

From Directions Magazine:  Beyond the Geography Bee

Summary:

When was the last time you read about geography in the traditional media? Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg reads about it quite a bit, especially stories about local Geography Bees. The events and their coverage reinforce old ideas about the discipline, rather than showcasing its valuable use in today’s world.

I’m a serial news searcher. It’s my job to keep up with the news about GIS, geospatial technology, GPS, remote sensing, location-based services and related topics. But every now and then I break down and search the news for articles about geography, the discipline in which I hold two degrees.

When reading about geospatial technology news I get excited, jazzed and thoughtful. When I read about geography news I get depressed. Outside of a handful of analytical articles from the Atlantic Cities blog or efforts in local reporting like New Jersey Spotlight or the odd book review or interview with Jared Diamond or Simon Garfield, it’s all about Geography Bees.

 

It’s mid-January as I write this essay. Google News reports it found 523 articles, in the last week, about the announcement of, or the winner of, this or that Bee. This week marks the end of the qualifying period for school Bee events. The news stories, mostly from local papers, profile the event (how many students, in which grades, how they studied, what questions were hard), introduce the winner, and detail the next step in the competition. Martians reading our local papers would assume that geography is a game schoolchildren play, with the highest achievement being attendance at the National Geography Bee. They’d see geography as akin to the U.S. Super Bowl, only with far fewer sponsors and no pay at all for the middle school-sized players.

 

I understand why the local paper and local schools want to highlight their events. I applaud the paper for wanting to promote student achievements other than those found on the football or soccer field. I appreciate that the school cares enough about geography to participate in the event (and has the $100 registration fee to do so). Of course, pictures of smiling children with maps and medals make for eye-catching online or print features. Finally, we adults are always impressed to learn of children who know more than we do about geography. 

 

Sadly, though, these articles about the Geography Bees and the children’s encyclopedic knowledge do not help highlight the important role geography and related technical and spatial skills play in the students’ and parents’ everyday lives. Nor does the coverage explore the way the participants’ cities, states or territories, and country are organized (or not) or how they work together with other cities/states/countries (or not). Instead, the Bee reinforces geography as mostly memorization. I know the questions are getting better, with more of them based on map interpretation, physical geography and the like, but too few address the role of geography in today’s world. Those that do rarely make it into the paper.

 

The Geography Bee homepage includes these two resources for those planning to study for the Bee:

1. “...The National Geographic Bee Ultimate Fact Book: Countries A-Z, chock-full of all the facts kids need to know to become a geography expert.”
2. “Simply memorizing terms and place locations can be tedious and even boring. One solution is to make the task fun with an atlas-based scavenger game.”

Sigh.

 

How might the National Geographic Society get at the compelling applications of geography? I suggest a National Geography Fair, akin to a National Science Fair. The students could pick a current geographic problem (local or regional, alone or in groups) explore it, offer analysis and even suggest one or more ways to address it. I’d be happy to be a judge and I’d be far more likely to tune in to the finals on TV where some hip geography teacher interviewed each of the presenters. 

 

I know this sort of teaching and learning is more complex than memorization and that grading the projects and selecting winners would be harder than the current tests used in the Bee. Still, project-based learning is the “in thing”; perhaps project-based competition will be, too? And, in the real world we do projects, not tests!

 

It’s not lost on me that quiz-show host Alex Trebek hosts the National Geography Bee finals on TV. We need to rebrand geography from a category in a quiz show to an activity that people do.

 

Ice Age in the Hudson Valley: A Geographical History

From Hudson Valley Magazine:  Ice Age in the Hudson Valley: A Geographical History

When you or I stand upon the great lawn at the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, we picture ourselves living the grand lifestyle of fin de siècle Hudson Valley aristocracy, of opulent balls and market-rigging business deals held amid the stunning landscape of river and mountains. When Johanna and Robert Titus stand on that same lawn, they picture something a bit different. In their minds’ eye, they are knee-deep in water, at the edge of a vast lake that stretches from the middle of the eastern Valley counties to the middle of the western ones, and from somewhere near Glens Falls all the way to the Atlantic Ocean (which is about 100 miles further out and 400 feet lower than it is now). The couple also envisions gigantic glaciers, which cover the continent from mid-Long Island, through Chicago and Omaha, to the Dakotas, Montana, and the Great Northwest — and are in the process of melting back to the Arctic.
The Tituses, you see, are standing at the Vanderbilt Mansion circa 15,000 years BP (the geological term meaning “before present”). Robert has a Ph.D. in geology and teaches at Hartwick College; Johanna has a master’s in molecular biology and teaches at SUNY Dutchess. You may know them as columnists for Kaatskill Life and other newspapers. They recently published a delightful book called The Hudson Valley in the Ice Age: A Geographical History and Tour (Black Dome Press, $17.95). Part popular science, part travelogue, it is that rare science book that is both challenging and entertaining. Readers learn about arcane geological formations like moraines, alluvial fans, and rock drumlins. Better yet, they discover where to find the remnants of these formations via hikes and drive-bys at dozens of easily accessible spots around the Valley. Consider these locales postcards from the ice age.
We asked the Tituses to pick a handful of their favorite locations where interested parties can launch their own geological time travel. Once you start, our beautiful Valley will never look quite the same again:
The floor of glacial Lake Albany
That’s what the previously mentioned lake is known as, and the site of the Vanderbilt estate is just one of many places where you can easily imagine the soft, flat lake bottom. “Get used to the idea that anytime you see flat landscapes, you may well be literally on the floor of the lake,” Robert says. The thruway south of Kingston, for instance, was built on such a flat stretch of land, which is the result of deposits left behind as mud on the floor of the lake. “Flat isn’t all that interesting, until you realize you are at a lake bottom,” he says.

FDR’s Springwood is perched on the edge of an ice age delta

North Lake The area’s many lakes and rivers are all remnants of the Hudson Valley glacier, which preceded and then was overridden by the Laurentide Ice Sheet that covered all of the northern reaches of North America. As the ice advanced, it left scratches in the rock, called striations. One of the best places to find these is along the eastern shore of North Lake in Haines Falls. “Look at the bedrock at the edge of the water, and you’ll see the footprints of glaciers,” Robert says.
The Kaaterskill Clove When deltas, like the one the Vanderbilt Mansion sits on, are carved into gorges by rivers, they are called cloves. In the Catskills, the Kaaterskill Clove — which contains Kaaterskill Falls and the Red Chasm — is an example of this; at its bottom is Palenville, which sits on a formation known as an alluvial fan. Streams from the retreating glacier all headed into this delta in a fan-shaped formation, cutting through rock, sand, and clay to create the landscape. Johanna recommends that you stop at Red Chasm. “This is a really scenic spot — many use it to swim — and you can really see how the waters from the melting ice carved the canyon,” she says.
What’s most important about this site, the Tituses say, is that this landscape carved by melting glaciers became the touchstone of the Hudson River School of Art. “Thomas Cole painted his first paintings there, and they figure so importantly in the cultural history of the Hudson Valley,” Robert says. “And that all comes out of the ice age.”

The High Falls spillway in Greene County once drained a glacial lake

The Mansions The big houses built on the eastern edge of the river, including Vanderbilt Mansion and FDR’s Springwood, are all positioned on ice age deposits at the bottom of glacial Lake Albany. Hyde Park rests on one of the lake’s biggest deltas, and the mansions sit on the crest of that delta. “The aristocracy didn’t know it, but 150 years ago [when they were building their mansions] they were following the path of the glaciers,” Robert says.
They also didn’t know that one day, their houses might slip toward the river valley. The houses are not built on bedrock; they sit on soft sediments like clay. Whenever you hear of a home damaged by a landslide, usually after a heavy rain, it’s the result of land like this sliding down the slope of the prehistoric lake bed. “The sediments are very prone to landslides,” Robert says. “We have met people who lost homes that slid downhill, and we have visited homes to evaluate their threat of slides and had to tell them they were threatened. It is a present danger anywhere in the Valley where these deposits exist.”
The Tituses say they have seen evidence of the bigger mansions installing new drainage systems to shore up the grounds on which they sit. “But there is no way to know when a landslide might happen,” Robert says. “It could be 1,000 years, or 10,000 years, or in March if we get a lot of rain.” He doubts the latter, though. “The land has been there 15,000 years, so I don’t think there is an immediate threat.”

Patterson’s Pellet in Minnewaska State Park, a glacial erratic

The Pine Bush These days, the Pine Bush Preserve in Albany County is a foliage-covered plot of hilly, sandy soil. Just after the glaciers retreated, though, it was a small desert not unlike something you’d see in Lawrence of Arabia. “All that was missing were camels,” Robert says. The sand was blown in from what is now Schenectady County, which then was one of Lake Albany’s biggest deltas. As the lake retreated, the sandy deposits at its bottom were blown by the west winds and dropped here, forming the dunes and swales that have since been overgrown. “Stand on top of the dunes and imagine what the area looked like 12,000 years ago,” he suggests.
There are many more spots where you can pick up the ice age trail. Along their upper edges, the Shawangunks reveal erratic striations left by the passage of ice. Frederic Church’s Olana near Hudson sits atop a rock drumlin, a hill shaped like an inverted spoon bowl, which is a signature of glacial advance. “Each location has its own chapter. We suggest you pick up the book and go see what we saw,” Robert says, “because it is an autobiography of our great adventures.” Adventures that can take you to the dawn of your own homeland.

Speaking of ice...

The Tituses discuss their book at:
• Mine Kill State Park at the Power Authority. Off State Hwy. 30, North Blenheim. Feb. 2, call for time (weather permitting); 518-827-6111
• John Boyd Thacher State Park Nature Center. 87 Nature Center Way, Voorheesville. Feb. 23 at 2 p.m.; 518-872-0800
• The Albany Institute of History and Art. 125 Washington Ave., Albany. March 10 at 2 p.m.; 518-463-4478 or www.albanyinstitute.org

 

OMG!

Never realized I hadn't posted in over 2 weeks!

Sorry, folks

Things have just gotten away from me the last week and a half...posting should be back on schedule starting this weekend.