Category: geography

Michelle and I saw Syriana recently and I’m still thinking about it. The movie is superb, and I think it’s probably the best synthesis of the knot of our issues in the middle east. I recommend everyone see it, think about it, then realize how stable and rich your lives are.

My GIS II group just presented our term project last night. The topic was payday lending in the Portland Metro area, and our timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The same day as our presentation, the Willamette Week cover story was on the booming payday lending industry in Oregon.

Our project followed a study by Dr. Steven Graves that compared the economic and demographic characteristics of neighborhoods with payday lenders and the surrounding community as a whole. The purpose was to identify if there was any significance to the claim that payday lenders target poor and minority neighborhoods. His study found this to be true in urban Cook County, Illinois and Orleans Parish, Louisiana. We were curious if the same pattern existed in Portland.

We compared census tracts with payday lenders to all census tracts in the metro region to see if there were any significant difference between several economic and demographic measurements. Our results? Payday lenders are located in significantly poorer neighborhoods, and in neighborhoods with a higher Hispanic population. There’s more, but that’s the relevant bit.

Our project was really just the start of what could and should be a larger examination of an unsavory business practice. One obvious problem with our research is the proximity of lenders to high-traffic arterials (82nd, 99E, 99W, Powell, Farmington Rd. etc) which is usually zoned commercial. Potential for a thesis topic? maybe….

update(s): The maps disappeared for some reason. Now they’re back.

NASA can’t afford to keep many of its satellite programs funded, so several projects like LANDSAT, EOS, and other land use and climate monitoring systems are being canceled or put at risk of having major service interruptions.

Since many of these satellites give us an idea of what global climate change may be occurring, or how it may be affecting land cover and such, I can’t help but think of this as the current administration turning a high-tech blind eye on the whole climate change argument. The logic of the move? My guess is that it comes down to this:

“If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”

I realize these budget things take a long time, but it seems that the cost of disasters like Katrina and the importance of remote sensing would underscore the importance of satellite programs. I guess this plays in to another suspicion of mine – that cuts like this are huge boosts to private companies like Geo Eye (recently merged) that can provide some remote sensing services. I know nothing of the politics involved, but the benefit that these public satellite programs is almost immeasurable, and benefit more than just the folks that can afford the data.

Wednesday is International Women’s Day. I’ve been messing with 2000 census data for a GIS project and noticed that there was a difference between the median income for men and women in the various census tracts. For all the census tracts in the Portland Metro area, this is the average:

Mean Median Income Women 30,743
Mean Median Income Men 40,926

Just an observation. Here’s the visualization. Click for a larger image.

Median Income for Females in Portland Metro Area

Difference between Male and Female Median Income in Portland Metro Area

Last night I joined several PSU geography students and FOG members for a geo quiz night at Tugboat. Our team faired well, but didn’t win a single category, so we had to pay for our beer. Winning beer was about the only thing that could have improved the already perfect intersection of beer, trivia and geography. Next time, victory will be ours.

There’s quite a bit of activity going related to Google Earth as is evident by the volume of uses cataloged on the Google Earth Blog. Google Earth has the potential to replace other GIS programs for public participation and visualization exercises, as well as serve small niche uses. Obviously, there’s tons of room for fun; like a public data set for the Cheney shooting.

Our own PortlandMaps has made several data layers available in KML format.

In the same spirit, I used an ArcMap plugin to make a PDX Beer layer from the data I collected for my beer bar & brewpub maps.

With amazing powers of observation come great discoveries. Like finding gigantic curse words written in wheat fields with Google Earth.

via Oogle Earth

My class just read GIS versus the community: Siting power in southern West Virginia which discusses what has been a popular view among GIS users that GIS software provided objective analysis. Towers, the author, discusses a case in West Virginia where the USFS sites a new high-tension power line on private land after doing analysis that found the private land to be less valuable, and the response of the community, who congregated to fight the results and argue about the subjectivity of the analysis.

Questioning the authority of maps is not new, but the community’s use of GIS to carry out its own analysis is the start of Public Participation GIS (PPGIS). This isn’t the first time a community has been involved in the weighing and planning of some project, but a beginning of the use of GIS as a consensus builder among stakeholders. Who would have thought ArcMap could be so touchy-feely?

I’ve poured over Trimble’s support material but there isn’t really anything that describes COM port conflict resolution besides “Turn off the application using the port.” Yeah, that helps.

Growing ever desperate, I backed up the unit and did a hard reset. This removed TerraSync (uh-oh) and failed to resolve the GPS/PocketPC connection problem, so I restored the backup (whew).

What I don’t get is how to restart the GPS service without being connected to it. A hard restart didn’t help, and there’s no way to communicate with the device with the COM3 conflict. I guess I’ll head in to the lab and see if there are any other experience-hardened individuals there who know how to fix this. Or maybe let me use a different unit.