This post is inspired by President Obama’s recent remarks about higher education, and Governor Corbett‘s recent announcement that there will be additional cuts to public universities in Pennsylvania. The above is a map of educational attainment by state using information from below, which originally comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. FYI: the list is sortable.  [ Read More ]

This Google Fusion Tables Map is inspired by President Obama’s State of the Union address where he backs natural gas fracking [1, 2] and Andy Arthur‘s map. I’ve placed the locations of natural gas wells over a map of property values in Pennsylvania (the full map can be found here). I lived in Broome County,  [ Read More ]

Above is a map of Pennsylvania median property values (2000) by zip code created with Google Fusion Tables. Google Fusion Tables is a great tool, but it can be 1) a bit intimidating 2) difficult to use without knowing how to get shape files. While problem #1 can be solved with practice and playing around,  [ Read More ]

Google Fusion Tables is a useful (free) tool for visualizing data. You can create maps, scatter, bar, and pie charts using one or more data tables. Perhaps the best feature is the custom map function. Above is a map of cancer incidence rates from the CDC for Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Here  [ Read More ]

Cities, Volume 28, Issue 4, August 2011, Pages 340-346. Although Spanish-Colonial Revival architecture and place-names dominates Southern California’s landscape, one also finds simulated Middle Eastern bazaars, references to Ancient Egypt, and the frequent use of iconography from the non-European Old World. While the region’s landscape is a product of bricolage and postmodern sensibilities, this article  [ Read More ]

This article looks at the way in which nature and wildfires have been used to legitimize not only urban development, but the way in which homes are bought and sold in Southern California. In particular, it looks at the seemingly incongruous ways in which Shelter-in-Place (SIP) practices have been sold, deployed and discussed in both  [ Read More ]

Roundtable Presentation @ American Sociological Association in San Francisco, CA (August 2009). In recent years large wildfires have plagued Southern California’s landscape. The most notable set of fires was in October of 2003, in which multiple fires scorched an area the size of small eastern states. In San Diego County alone, over 280,000 acres were burned before  [ Read More ]

Presentation for the Pacific Sociological Association in San Diego, CA (April 2009). In early twentieth century, Spanish-Colonial Revival became embedded in the local culture of Southern California. Through community celebrations, literature, film, and place names, images of the romantic Spanish past proliferated in mass media. However, perhaps most important of all was Spanish-Colonial Revival’s implementation  [ Read More ]