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Friday, November 29, 2013

Spain Has Been In The 'Wrong' Time Zone For 7 Decades


German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, talks with Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco, in Hendaye, France, October 23, 1940, in Hitler's railway carriage. Later, Franco moved Spain's clocks ahead an hour to be aligned with Nazi Germany.

German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, talks with Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco, in Hendaye, France, October 23, 1940, in Hitler's railway carriage. Later, Franco moved Spain's clocks ahead an hour to be aligned with Nazi Germany. AP

It was 1940 and World War II was raging. Nazi Germany occupied Norway, Holland, Belgium, then France. Fascist Italy had already joined with Adolf Hitler. The Fuhrer wanted Spain's support next.
So on Oct. 23, 1940, Hitler took a train to the Spanish border to woo Spain's Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco.

But Spain was in ruins from its own Civil War in the late 1930s, and Franco didn't have much to offer. He stayed neutral, but switched Spain's clocks ahead one hour, to be in line with Nazi Germany.

Ever since, even though Spain is geographically in line with Britain, Portugal and Morocco — its clocks are on the same time zone as countries as far east as Poland and Hungary.

Now, more than seven decades later, the Spanish government is weighing whether to change them back.

Late-Night Spaniards

Spaniards are notoriously late-night creatures. In Spain, the sun rises and sets much later than in the rest of the time zone it's in, called Central European Time, or CET.

Spaniards sleep 53 minutes less, on average, than other Europeans. They also work longer hours — but at lower productivity.

In an office park on the outskirts of Madrid, Emilio Sainz, 30, mills around waiting for his bosses to finish their afternoon siesta.

"Here you work too many hours, but you need to stop at midday for two or three hours, and then finish too late," he says. "It's something cultural."

Sainz is a freelance camera technician who just moved back to his native Spain from Britain, and is having trouble adjusting. He doesn't like working until 8 p.m., even with a big break at midday.

How do people fill that time?

"Go back home, take a big lunch — a typical Spanish meal. The siesta is optional, but if you have time you can do it," Sainz says, shaking his head. "But for me, it's sometimes more useful to keep English time. Like, to come back home earlier in the evening, to have some time on your own."

In many Spanish barrios, you can't get a cup of coffee before 9 a.m. The post office is open until 9 p.m. Of course, you'll have to wait even later than that for restaurants to start serving dinner.

Economists say Spain's time zone feeds that schedule — and costs the country dearly.

Time For A Time Change?

"We have no time for personal life or family life," says economist Nuria Chinchilla, who studies work and family life at Spain's IESE Business School. "Therefore we are committing suicide here in Spain. We have just 1.3 children per woman. And it's because we have no time."

Chinchilla is lobbying for Spain to go back to Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT — the time zone it was on before Franco changed it in the early 1940s.

"Because otherwise, we are not sustainable!" Chinchilla exclaims. "In the crisis, we have seen that the companies that are flexible, that have more rational schedules, then they are more productive too — and they are able to be more flexible in the way they are going out of the crisis."

Spain has already shortened its long holiday weekends to try to align work schedules with the rest of Europe. And this fall, a parliamentary committee approved a proposal by the Association for the Rationalization of Spanish Schedules to change back to GMT. The full legislature is expected to vote soon.

Old Habits Die Hard

But some doubt that Spanish culture — with its late-to-rise, late-to-bed habits — could be transformed by a simple change of the clocks.

"For me, it's difficult to think that it'll be different — really different — from now," says Angels Valls, a human resources expert at Spain's ESADE Business School. "From a practical point of view, there are cultural roots that explain why we have this long day. It's not enough to change the hour."

The siesta was a fixture in Spanish life for centuries. Before air conditioning, it was a way to get through the long, hot Spanish afternoon. Until the end of the 20th century, Spain was relatively poor, and Spaniards had to work two jobs — hence the long hours, Valls says.

"So you used to work in the morning at one job. Then it was necessary to stop to rest. And then there was another job in the late afternoon and evening — in order to earn enough money to survive," she says. "It's said to be the origin of our way of life now."

It's a way of life that could prove stubborn to change — especially in this economy. The 26 percent jobless rate has working Spaniards working more, frantic to hold onto their jobs.

For Emilio Sainz, the Spanish cameraman who's just moved home from Britain, Spain's time zone is the late dictator's final insult. Franco died in 1975.

"Franco changed a lot of things. He made a lot of mistakes," Sainz says with a shrug. "And here we are, carrying on with a lot of these outdated things."

Thursday, November 28, 2013

World Population Mapping Helps Combat Poverty, Poor Health

From the Science News

Nov. 27, 2013 — A team of researchers led by the University of Southampton has launched an online project to map detailed population information from countries around the world.


The WorldPop website aims to provide open access to global demographic data which can be used to help tackle challenges such as, poverty, public health, sustainable urban development and food security.

Geographer at Southampton Dr Andy Tatem, who is leading the project, says: "Our maps and data are helping charities, policy-makers, governments and researchers to make decisions which affect the quality of people's lives. These could be as diverse as predicting the spread of infectious diseases, planning the development of transport systems or distributing vital aid to disaster zones."

He continues: "For example, in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines with devastating effect, international organizations were able to download information about population density from our website to help with estimating impact and delivering aid efforts."

With principal funding coming from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (USA), WorldPop combines country specific data from national statistics services, household surveys and other sources to construct detailed population distribution maps. Satellite imagery is also exploited to provide information on the density of urban areas, land cover and transport networks, all of which are used to improve the accuracy of the population maps.

The website currently provides freely-available data for Central and South America, Africa and Asia -- providing maps of population numbers and age distributions, births, pregnancies, urban growth and rates of poverty. Each country has its own summary page and the user can choose from a range of high resolution maps of their particular area of interest to download.

Dr Tatem comments: "The global human population is growing by over 80 million a year, and is projected to reach the 10 billion mark within 50 years. The vast majority of this growth is expected to be concentrated in low income countries, and primarily in urban areas. The effects of such rapid growth are well documented, with the economies, environment and health of nations all undergoing significant change.

"High resolution, contemporary data on human population distributions and their compositions, which WorldPop provides, are necessary to accurately measure the impacts of population growth, in order to monitor change and plan interventions."

The researchers from the University of Southampton, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), University of Louisville (USA) and the University of Florida (USA) now plan to extend the project to cover all continents in the world. They also stress that the individual country datasets are regularly updated as necessary, as populations change over time and new input data arise.

For more information about WorldPop visit: http://www.worldpop.org.uk/about/

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Climate change refugee claim rejected by court

From the Toronto Star

By: Nick Perry The Associated Press, Published on Tue Nov 26 2013

A New Zealand judge on Tuesday rejected a Kiribati man’s claim that he should be granted refugee status because of rising sea levels.



HO / REUTERS FILE PHOTO

Kiribati, a string of atolls between Australia and Hawaii, has been identified by scientists as among the nations most vulnerable to climate change.
WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND—A New Zealand judge on Tuesday rejected a Kiribati man’s claim that he should be granted refugee status because of climate change.

Ioane Teitiota and his wife moved to New Zealand from the low-lying Pacific island nation in 2007. He argued that rising sea levels make it too dangerous for him and his family to return to Kiribati.

Immigration authorities twice rejected his claims, so he appealed to the High Court.

In his decision, Judge John Priestley said Teitiota did not fit the definition of a refugee under international guidelines because he was not being directly persecuted.

The judge said if he broadened the definition, millions more people worldwide suffering from natural disasters or warfare would be eligible to become refugees.

Since moving to New Zealand, Teitiota and his wife have had three children. All five are now likely to face deportation, because citizenship isn’t automatically granted by birth in New Zealand.

The judge said Teitiota and his children might have mounted a case to stay on humanitarian grounds had they not overstayed their visas.

“Unfortunately for the applicant, because he has chosen to remain illegally in New Zealand, he is, under current law, precluded from applying for an immigration permit on humanitarian grounds,” he said.

Kiribati, an impoverished string of 33 coral atolls located about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, has about 103,000 people and has been identified by scientists as among the nations most vulnerable to climate change.

Two months ago, an international panel of climate scientists issued a report saying that it was “extremely likely” that human activity was causing global warming, and predicted that oceans could rise by as much as 1 metre by the end of the century. If that were to happen, much of Kiribati would simply disappear.
But the judge said that wasn’t argument enough.

“The history of the last 3,000 years of human kind records huge movements of people, driven in some cases by overpopulation or scarce resources,” he said. “But the globe is currently divided between independent sovereign states which would certainly resist unimpeded migration across state boundaries.”

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Congratulations

The discipline of Geography continues to thrive in Ontario thanks to quality geographers such as those recently recognized for their achievements by the Ontario Association of Geographic and Environmental Educators (OAGEE) and the Royal Canadian Geographic Society (RCGS).

Congratulations to my good friend Anne Smith on receiving the Canadian Geographic Education Geographic Literacy Award. Anne is pictured here at the annual RCGS College of Fellows Dinner with husband Dickson Mansfield - also a Geographic Literacy Award Winner - and Mark Lowry, Past President of OAGEE. All three are members of the RCGS College of Fellows.

Well done Anne!

RCGA_awards-192

Congratulation also to friend and mentor Gary Birchall, (second from right) winner of this year's OAGEE Award of Distinction, and a new inductee into the RCGS College of Fellows.

Congratulations Gary - 2013 was a very good year!

Monday, November 25, 2013

What is an Atlas? An Overview and History of Atlases

By    at About.com



National Geographic World Atlas
National Geographic World Atlas, 9th Edition, 2010
National Geographic Society
An atlas is defined as a collection of various maps of the Earth or a specific region of the Earth such as the United States or Europe. The maps in atlases show items like geographic features, the topography of an area's landscape, political boundaries as well as the climatic, social, religious and economic statistics of an area.
Traditionally the maps that make up atlases are bound as books. These books are generally either hardcover for reference atlases or softcover for atlases that are meant for to serve as travel guides. In addition to atlases found in book form, there are also countless multimedia options for atlases today and many publishers are making their maps available for personal computers and the internet.


History of the Atlas


The use of maps and cartography to understand the world has a very long history. It is believed that the name "atlas" for a book meaning a collection of maps came from the mythological Greek figure Atlas. Legend says that Atlas was forced to hold the Earth and heavens on his shoulders as a punishment from the gods. His image was often printed on books with names and they eventually became known as atlases.

  The earliest known atlas is associated with the Greco-Roman geographer Claudius Ptolemy. His work, Geographia, was the first published work of cartography and it consists of the knowledge that was known about the world's geography around the 2nd century. Because maps and manuscripts were written by hand at the time, its earliest publications that still survive date back to1475 (Library of Congress).

In the late 1400s the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot and Amerigo Vespucci increased knowledge of the world's geography. In 1507 Johannes Ruysch, a European cartographer and explorer, created a new map of the world that became very popular and it was reprinted in a Rome edition of Geographia that year. In 1513 another edition of Geographia was published and it included a connected North and South America (Library of Congress).

The first modern atlas was printed by Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish cartographer and geographer, in 1570. It was called Theatrvm Orbis Terravrm or Theater of the World. It was the first book of maps where the images were uniform in size and design and the first edition consists of 70 different maps (Library of Congress). Like Geographia, Theater of the World was extremely popular and it was printed in numerous editions from 1570 to 1724.

In 1633 a Dutch cartographer and publisher named Henricus Hondius designed an ornately decorated world map that appeared in an edition of Gerard Mercator's (a Flemish geographer) Atlas that was originally published in 1595 (Library of Congress).

The works by Ortelius and Mercator are said to represent the beginning of the Golden Age of Dutch cartography as this is the period when atlases grew in popularity and became more modern. Throughout the 18th century the Dutch continued to produce many volumes of atlases while cartographers in other parts of Europe also began to print their works. In the late 18th century the French and British began to produce more maps and sea atlases because of their increased maritime and trade activities.

By the 19th century atlases began to get very detailed and look at specific areas such as cities instead of whole countries and/or regions of the world as in the earlier works. With the advent of modern printing techniques the number of atlases published also began to increase. Today modern atlases present large areas of the world as well as specific cities and countries. Technological advances such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have allowed modern atlases to include thematic maps that show various statistics of an area.


Types of Atlases


Because of the wide variety of data and technologies available today there are many different types of atlases. The most common are desk or reference atlases and travel atlases or road maps. Desk atlases are hardcover or paperback but they are made in a similar fashion as reference books and they include a variety of information about the area they represent.

  Reference atlases are generally large and they include maps, tables, graphs, other images and text to describe an area. They can be made to show the world, specific countries, states or even specific locations such as a national park. For example the National Geographic Atlas of the World includes information about the entire world. It is broken down into sections that discuss the human world and the natural world and these sections include the topics of geology and plate tectonics, biogeography and political and economic geography. It then breaks the world down into continents, the oceans and major cities to show political and physical maps of the continents as a whole and the countries within them. This is a very large and detailed atlas but it serves as a perfect reference for the world with its many detailed maps as well as images, tables, graphs and text.

Similar to the National Geographic Atlas of the World but on a smaller scale is the Atlas of Yellowstone. This too is a reference atlas but instead of examining the entire world it looks at a very specific area. Like the larger world atlas it too includes information on the human, physical and biogeography of the Yellowstone region as well as a variety of maps that show areas within and outside of Yellowstone National Park.

Travel atlases and road maps are usually paperback and are sometimes spiral bound to make them easier to take while traveling. They often do not include all of the information that a reference atlas does but they instead include information that may be useful to travelers such as specific road or highway networks, the locations parks or other tourist spots and in some instances the locations of specific stores and/or hotels.
In addition to paper reference and travel atlases there are many different types of multimedia atlases available that can be used for reference and/or travel and contain the same types of information that a book format would.


Popular Atlases


The National Geographic Atlas of the World is a very popular reference atlas for the wide variety of information it contains. Other popular reference atlases include the Goode's World Atlas (developed by John Paul Goode) by Rand McNally and the National Geographic Concise Atlas of the World among many others. The Goode's World Atlas is popular in college geography classes because it includes a variety of world and regional maps that show topography, political boundaries as well as detailed information like the climatic, social, religious and economic statistics of the world's countries.

  Popular travel atlases include Rand McNally road atlases and Thomas Guide road atlases. These are very specific to areas such as the United States or even states and cities and they include detailed road maps that also show points of interest to aid in travel and navigation.

To view an interesting and interactive online atlas, visit National Geographic's MapMaker Interactive website.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

How can Geography Literacy be so bad at the age of Google Earth?


National Geographic calls Geography Literacy: “the ability to use geographic understanding and geographic reasoning to make far-reaching decisions”. It relies on three conceptual pillars:

  1.  Interaction:  The world is made of systems that are connected to one another & interact permanently in multiple ways, at multiple scales (of time & space).
  2. Connection: Peoples & places are connected to one another to form a global complex and dynamic network
  3.  Implication: The way we interact & build our world, so the decision-making process related to land & resource management as well as urban & rural planning, depends on how well we know the interactions and connections happening in our world.

The PhD and  Vice President of National Geographic Education makes a simple yet disturbing statement: “We have not invested in helping children understanding the world the way they will need to understand it in their adult’s life”. As revealed in this 2006 National Geographic study about young American geographical knowledge, “majorities of young adults fail at a range of questions testing their basic geographic literacy”:
  • Only 37% of young Americans can find Iraq on a map—though U.S. troops have been there since 2003.
  • 6 in 10 young Americans do not speak a foreign language fluently.
  • 20% of young Americans think Sudan is in Asia. (It’s the largest country in Africa.)
  • 48% of young Americans believe the majority population in India is Muslim. (It’s Hindu—by a landslide.)
  • Half of young Americans cannot find New York on a map.

Even if geographical knowledge goes far beyond the ability to place things on a world map (remember, it’s about understanding interaction, connection & implication), those numbers establish a very worrying baseline.

Basically, we are illiterate when it comes to know the world we are living in. So we make decisions to manage it (resources, land, transportation, energy, cultural relations, etc.) based on a very partial knowledge that does not recognize Interaction, connection and implication as key principles of it, from political level to individual one.

Then, why is Geography Literacy so bad at the most connected era of all times when everyone has Google Map on their phone ?


We actually know why. Imperialists nations have always cared a lot about geography, for conquest and colonization purposes. European peoples for instance started very early to map the world, explore it, describe and define it as accurately as possible to assess the values of lands in terms of military resources needed VS commercial potential. A lot of the geographical knowledge was built in that context (anthropology, botanic, species inventories, climatic event description, etc.).

When the last decolonization started in the early 1950, the western world entered a phase of recoil. Colonizing nations faced powerful forces pushing them out. Their empires fall apart, forcing European nations to withdraw on their home countries, and to abandon their overseas land possessions. The competition among nations became a technological one to replace the territory-size contest: most countries of the western world shifted all their efforts to industry, technology and technical innovation to keep their leading advantage over ex-colonies.

As a result, mathematics, physics and computer science became the most valued options in the academic & corporate worlds. Geography went into an existential crisis at that time, especially in the 1960′s: if we know everything about every places of the world now, what use can we make of such a field? Where can it stand in a world obsessed by productivity and technical progress?

Geography had to redefine itself. And it is not something that happened in six months. It took a couple of decades for geography to be re-born as a much wider discipline, now studying all forms of multiple and complex interactions people & societies have with their spaces, places and territories.
During that “redefinition period”, we were still teaching an old dusty geography, about where capital cities and biggest rivers are, where coal resources can be found on the planet, that kind of things. Nothing, in that catalogue of factual information, is neither scientific (there is no mechanism, no causal links established between phenomenon), nor useful as a set of skills.

No one feels smarter after learning by heart a list of all the capital cities of the world. And that’s why the way we define and teach geography today, in the 2010′s, has to catch up with actual complexity & interactivity of the world to become useful and recognized again.

How to fix it? 

Well, I am not pretending to answer such a complex question by myself today, but here are a few simple statements we can start from, and some in the geographer community already did:
  • Stop reducing geography to maps: maps are a tool to illustrate and communicate information. Its a subjective representation of the world. A monkey drawing a map is not necessarily a geographer. It takes a deep understanding of the mechanisms behind the map to actually be able to produce a relevant one.
  • Stop pretending that math can explain everything: human behaviours do not get explained by so called rational over-simplified formula. The least effort principle does not explain how human work and make decisions every day. Reality is much more complex (too complex for us to modelize it with algorithms for the moment) and permanently changing. By the time you would finish your calculation, your conclusions would be obsolete already, because people act & react constantly in an infinity of ways.
  • Admit complexity & find a way to process it: While we will see the world as the over-simplified flat rectangular world map we all have in mind when thinking about “the world”, nothing will move. To embed interactivity, connectivity and implication in our knowledge, we need to process complexity. Massive, huge, even hard-to-concieve amounts of data, both qualitative & quantitative. Counting things one by one won’t work. It’s about opening new dimensions in terms of tools and theories.
  • Integrate everyone’s world in “the world”: The very image of what “the world” is should be more of a 3D interactive movie than a flat boring map hanging on the classroom wall. The bus ride you took in the morning to go to school, the landscape you’ve seen from the window, the place described in the novel you were reading, the place you dream about when you’re bored, the imaginary map of your video game, THEY ARE ALL FORMS OF GEOGRAPHY LITERACY.

You know more about the world than you think. Now it’s just a matter of being provided with the right educational resources to help develop & complete that knowledge: to build connections with other’s world, integrate interactivity & understand the patterns behind it – Then we will be able to make informed decisions.

Friday, November 22, 2013

Volcano raises new island in seas near Japan

Published in the Toronto Star November 21, 2013

Volcano raises new island in seas near Japan; Tokyo pleased with added territory
Advisories from the coast guard and the Japan Meteorological Agency said the islet is about 200 metres in diameter.

Volcano raises new island in seas near Japan; Tokyo pleased with added territory

Smoke billows from a new island off the coast of Nishinoshima, seen left above, a small, uninhabited island in the Ogasawara chain, far south of Tokyo on Thursday. (AP)


TOKYO—A volcanic eruption has raised an island in the seas to the far south of Tokyo, the Japanese coast guard and earthquake experts said.

Advisories from the coast guard and the Japan Meteorological Agency said the islet is about 200 metres in diameter. It is just off the coast of Nishinoshima, a small, uninhabited island in the Ogasawara chain, which is also known as the Bonin Islands.

The approximately 30 islands are 1,000 kilometres south of Tokyo, and along with the rest of Japan are part of the seismically active Pacific “Ring of Fire.”

The coast guard issued an advisory Wednesday warning of heavy black smoke from the eruption. Television footage seen Thursday showed heavy smoke, ash and rocks exploding from the crater, as steam billowed into the sky.

A volcanologist with the coast guard, Hiroshi Ito, told the FNN news network that it was possible the new island might be eroded away.

“But it also could remain permanently,” he said.

The last time the volcanos in the area are known to have erupted was in the mid-1970s. Much of the volcanic activity occurs under the sea, which extends thousands of metres deep along the Izu-Ogasawara-Marianas Trench.

Japan’s chief government spokesman welcomed the news of yet another bit, however tiny, of new territory.
“This has happened before and in some cases the islands disappeared,” Yoshihide Suga said when asked if the government was planning on naming the new island.

“If it becomes a full-fledged island, we would be happy to have more territory.”

The Japanese archipelago has thousands of islands. In some cases, they help anchor claims to wide expanses of ocean overlying potentially lucrative energy and mineral resources.

Japan has plans to build port facilities and transplant fast-growing coral fragments onto Okinotorishima, two rocky outcroppings even further south of Tokyo, to boost its claim in a territorial dispute with China.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Canada's parks and historic sites now on Google Street View

A great new resource for the Canadian Geography course!

Virtual tours include Yoho, Banff, Grasslands, Green Gables, Louisbourg, Signal Hill

Originally posted by:  CBC News                                                                                                   Posted:Nov 20, 2013 11:14 AM ET

The Google Maps team visited Banff National Park and about 70 other Parks Canada sites this past spring and summer, collecting imagery using its Street View cars and on foot using its Trekker backpack technology.

The Google Maps team visited Banff National Park and about 70 other Parks Canada sites this past spring and summer, collecting imagery using its Street View cars and on foot using its Trekker backpack technology. Google/Parks Canada


Hikes through spectacular national parks such as Banff and tours of historic sites such as the Viking settlement at L'anse au Meadows in Newfoundland are now available on Google Street View.

Google-Trekker-Louisbourg

You can now visit the Fortress of Louisbourg on Google Street View and 'walk up and down the village streets, hike along trails inside and outside of the fortress walls and check out the huge battlements.' (Google Blog)

Google and Parks Canada announced today that more than 70 Parks Canada locations across the country can now be explored online.

"From planning a summer vacation to augmenting classroom lesson plans, the partnership between Parks Canada and Google will better connect Canadians to the amazing places and geography that defines this country," wrote Parks Canada's Michael White on the Google Canada blog.

The Google Maps team visited the sites this past spring and summer, collecting imagery using its Street View cars and on foot using its Trekker backpack technology.

Green-Gables-Google-Street-View

Virtual visitors can tour the rooms and hallways of historic sites such as Green Gables on Prince Edward Island, home of author Lucy Maude Montgomery's fictional Anne. (Google/Parks Canada)

It started with the Fortress of Louisburg National Historic Site in Nova Scotia, which was celebrating its 300th anniversary.

White said you can now "walk up and down the village streets, hike along trails inside and outside of the fortress walls and check out the huge battlements."

Other virtual tours take users inside the rooms and corridors of historic sites such as the Halifax Citadel and up trails showcasing the natural beauty of parks such as mountainous Yoho National Park in B.C.

Google plans to visit dozens of other Parks Canada sites and eventually include 120 of them on Google Maps. But so far, you can explore:
  • Fort Langley National Historic Site.
  • Thousand Islands National Park.
  • Signal Hill National Historic Site.
  • Bellevue House National Historic Site.
  • Woodside National Historic Site.
  • Fortifications of Québec National Historic Site.
  • Rideau Canal National Historic Site.
  • Halifax Citadel National Historic Site.
  • Merrickville Lockstation.
  • HMCS Haida National Historic Site.
  • Fort Walsh National Historic Site.
  • Province House National Historic Site.
  • Carriage Shed.
  • Glacier National Park.
  • Skyline Trail.
  • Prince Albert National Park.
  • Ardgowan National Historic Site.
  • L.M. Montgomery's Cavendish National Historic Site.
  • Fort Battleford National Historic Site.
  • Redoute Dauphine.
  • York Redoubt National Historic Site.
  • Mount Revelstoke.
  • Morraine Lake.
  • Johnston Canyon.
  • The Forks.
  • Red Rock Canyon Trailhead.
  • Fort Wellington National Historic Site.
  • Waterton Lakes National Park.
  • Emerald Lake.
  • Bow Lake.
  • Green Gables Heritage Place.
  • Black Rapids Lockstation.
  • Grasslands National Park.
  • Fort Rodd Hill National Historic Site.
  • Cape Spear.
  • Jeremys Bay.
  • Port-la-Joye–Fort Amherst National Historic Site.
  • Ottawa Lockstation.
  • Hawthorne Cottage National Historic Site.
  • Gros Morne National Park.
  • Lake Louise.
  • Kingston Mills Lockstation.
  • Arsenal Foundarie.
  • Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site.
  • Montmorency Park National Historic Site.
  • Cave and Basin.
  • Gulf Islands National Park.
  • Yoho National Park.
  • Kejimkujik Dark Sky Preserve.
  • Castle Hill National Historic Site.
  • Ramparts of Quebec City.
  • Hogs Back Lockstation.
  • Grand Pre National Historic Site.
  • Batoche National Historic Site.
  • Cape Breton Highlands National Park.
  • Cabot Tower.
  • Hartwell's Lockstation.
  • Monument-Lefebvre National Historic Site.
  • L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site.
  • Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site.
  • Jakes Landing.
  • Meadows in the Sky Parkway.
  • Banff National Park.
  • Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site.
  • Kootenay National Park.
  • Riding Mountain National Park.
  • Elk Island National Park.
  • Dalvay-by-the-Sea National Historic Site.
  • Carleton Martello Tower National Historic Site.
  • Riel House National Historic Site.
  • St Andrews Rectory National Historic Site.
  • Prince Edward Island National Park.
  • Alexander Graham Bell National Historic.
  • Officers Quarters.
  • Lévis Forts National Historic Site.
  • Terrasse Dufferin.
  • Artillery Park.
  • Fisgard Lighthouse National Historic Site.
  • Cartier-Brébeuf National Historic Site.
  • Promenade des Gouverneurs.
  • Fort Anne National Historic Site.
  • Jones Falls Lockstation.
  • Balsam Lake.
  • La Mauricie National Park.
  • Giant Cedars Boardwalk Trail.
  • Skunk Cabbage Boardwalk. 

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

China to Ease Longtime Policy of 1-Child Limit

Former students will remember our studies of China's One Child Policy. The following article, from the New York Times, provides an update on the policy as a result of the recent Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee.

The New York Times - November 15, 2013


HONG KONG — The Chinese government will ease its one-child family restrictions and abolish “re-education through labor” camps, significantly curtailing two policies that for decades have defined the state’s power to control citizens’ lives, the Communist Party said Friday.

The changes were announced in a party decision that also laid out broad and potentially far-reaching proposals to restructure the economy by encouraging greater private participation in finance, vowing market competition in several important parts of the economy, and promising farmers better property protection and compensation for confiscated land.

Senior party officials, led by President Xi Jinping, endorsed the 60 initiatives at a four-day Central Committee conference that ended Tuesday, but details were released Friday. Mr. Xi described the document as a bold call for economic renewal, social improvement and patriotic nation-building — all under the firm control of one-party rule.

“We must certainly have the courage and conviction to renew ourselves,” he said in a statement accompanying the decision. Both were issued by the official news agency, Xinhua.

Mr. Xi, who assumed China’s top party leadership post a year ago and the presidency eight months ago, has tried to project an image as a leader who can pursue a potentially conflicting agenda: making China’s economy more responsive to market forces and giving its people greater social and economic freedom while fortifying traditional one-party rule.

For months, analysts have speculated about the economic policies that could be introduced at the meeting. But the planned changes to population policy and punishment, two areas where overhauls have been debated, and delayed, for years, gave the decision significance beyond the economy. They could stir public expectations of even bolder changes under Mr. Xi and Prime Minister Li Keqiang in the decade they are likely to spend in office.

“Xi Jinping may have the most concentrated power of any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping,” said Xiao Gongqin, a professor of history in Shanghai who closely follows Chinese politics and advocates “neo-authoritarian” rule to protect the march of market overhauls. “Politically, he has pursued an ideological tightening, because he wants to prevent the kind of explosion in political demands that could come in a relaxed environment. That’s the biggest danger for any government entering a period of reform.”

For decades, most urban couples have been restricted to having one child. That has been changing fitfully, with rules on the books that couples can have two children if both parents are single children. But that policy will now be further relaxed nationwide. Many rural couples already have two children, and some have more.

“This is the first time that a central document has clearly proposed allowing two children when a husband or wife is an only child,” said Wang Guangzhou, a demographer at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “Now it’s just talking about launching this, but the specific policies have to be developed at the operational level.”

If carried through, the relaxation would be the first significant nationwide easing of family size restrictions that have been in place since the 1970s, said Wang Feng, a demographer who teaches at both the University of California, Irvine, and Fudan University in Shanghai. He estimated the policy could lead to one million to two million more births in China every year, on top of the approximately 15 million births a year now.

“This step is really, I think, the middle step toward allowing all couples to have two children, and eventually taking away the state’s hand,” Professor Wang said. “But this shift is historical. It’s fundamental. To change the mentality of the society of policy makers has taken people more than a decade.”

The one-child restrictions were introduced to deal with official fears that China’s population would devour too many resources and suffocate growth. But they have created public ire and international criticism over forced abortions, and have created a population of 1.34 billion, according to a 2010 census, that is aging relatively rapidly, even before China establishes a firm foothold in prosperity. Experts have for years urged some relaxation of the controls.

The party leaders also confirmed an announcement made earlier this year, and then abruptly retracted, that they intend to abolish re-education through labor, which since the 1950s has empowered police authorities to imprison people without any real judicial review. Experts and officials have debated whether to adjust or abolish the system of camps since the 1980s. Now abolition is closer.

“Abolish the system of re-education through labor,” said the decision, which proposed expanding community corrections to partly replace the system.

“This is a significant step forward,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher who specializes in China with Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization based in New York.

“It doesn’t mean that China is going to be kinder to dissent and to its critics,” Mr. Bequelin said. “But it’s an important step to do away with a system that not only profoundly violated human rights, but was also standing in the way of any further legal reform.”

Re-education through labor was introduced under Mao Zedong to lock away those considered political opponents, and it expanded into a system of incarceration holding more than 100,000 people, many of them working in prison factories and on farms. Sentences are determined by the police, and defendants have scant chance to appeal imprisonment that can last up to four years.

The document gives no date for bringing labor re-education to an end, or for introducing the changes to family planning policy. And there is the possibility that the government will delay or dilute the changes, or introduce similar restrictions under another name, Mr. Bequelin said. The decision also leaves in place labor camps that are part of the general penal system for those convicted in court.

In a country that carries out more executions than the rest of the world combined, the document pledged to gradually reduce the number of crimes that can result in the death penalty. But it gave no details about which crimes may be affected.

Under Mr. Xi, the government has pursued a broad crackdown on political dissent, critical opinion and rumors on the Internet, and perceived ideological threats. But the decision promised fairer and more predictable treatment from the police and the courts, hinting at support for long-discussed measures intended to make judges more independent of the local officials in their jurisdictions.

“Improve the transparency and public credibility of the judiciary,” Mr. Xi said in his statement. But he also promised more stringent controls on the Internet: “Ensuring order, national security and social stability in the dissemination of information on the Internet has become a real and pressing problem facing us.”

The bulk of the Central Committee decision dwelt on economic changes intended to rejuvenate growth by encouraging private investment, more efficient use of bank capital and the leasing of land by farmers into larger, more viable holdings.

“Reform of the economic system is the focal point of comprehensively deepening reform,” the decision said. “The core issue is properly handling the relationship between the government and the market.”

The most important changes propose to reduce risks and distortions in government finances, which give local administrations many tasks but relatively few sources of revenue, forcing them to rely on taking land from farmers for relatively little compensation. Other proposals include introducing more market-based pricing into areas such as energy and water.

But these changes could encounter resistance from government ministries, large state-owned companies, local governments and consumers potentially hurt by price rises. “They’ve gone a long way to meet market expectations, and everyone is going to look at implementation,” said Stephen Green, head of Greater China research for the banking and financial services company Standard Chartered.

Mia Li contributed research from Beijing.

Education: The Critical Importance of Geography

Once more, a defence of the importance of geography - this time from the "Burkean Library: Conservative Perspectives on Political Issues"

http://burkeanlibrarian.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/education-the-critical-importance-of-geography/


One of the woeful effects of liberal education in recent decades is the decline of geography in primary, secondary, and higher education.  A lot of this has occurred due to the 1960′s emphasis on the vapid euphemism of social studies instead of solid and rigorous intellectual grounding in specific disciplines such as history, geography, economics, and political science.  Understanding geography is critically important if we are to understand local, state, regional, national, and international political, economic, historical, cultural, military, diplomatic, and social events.

Let’s start on the local level.  If we live in a city, we live on streets or boulevards which connect to other streets and boulevards taking us to destinations we frequent regularly such as work, the grocery store, schools, churches, government offices etc.  How many people can tell exactly how they get from their home to workplace without using a GPS or a traditional paper map?  I doubt many could.  How many people can say which rivers or other bodies of water are in our near their residence?  Can they tell where those bodies of water originate and where they flow to.  For instance, I live near the Wabash River which originates in Ohio, flows through north central Indiana before heading southwest and flowing into the Ohio River.  The Ohio River, in turn, flows southwest into the Mississippi River, which flows south into the Gulf of Mexico.  How many people can tell how to get from their home town or county to their state’s capitol city without resorting to a map?

People need to understand geography to be able to understand the economic patterns and agricultural characteristics of the areas where they live.  Here in my part of Indiana, corn and soybeans play particularly important roles.  In other areas of the country, agricultural products as varied as cotton, citrus fruits, fruits such as cherries and strawberries, various vegetables, pork, poultry, and seafood products assume precedence.  When we go to the grocery store or farmer’s market to get food we should know exactly where that food came from regardless of its domestic or international origins.

Geography’s importance is also important in political representation.  I live in  Indiana’s 4th Congressional District which covers a significant percentage of western Indiana and is represented by conservative Republican Todd Rokita.  Indiana’s 7th district is in Indianapolis and represented by liberal Democrat Andre Carson.  Congressional, state, and local legislative districts around the U.S. and in other countries are drawn to produce particular political results in legislative elections.  Some districts are more politically competitive than others and the competitiveness and partisan nature of these districts can change over time given evolving economic, demographic, and social conditions and beliefs.  Individuals and nations also need to understand how geography affects the weather in the region where they live.  Residents of western U.S. states know that water is a particularly important and scarce commodity due to the aridity inherent in many parts of that country.  During the summer of 2012, residents of  Indiana and other midwestern states experienced the consequences of drought which impacted the aesthetic appearance of our yards and the prices we paid for food.  Whether this drought was part of naturally recurring climatic cycles or human-caused climatic change, we were impacted by this climatological phenomenon regardless of our beliefs on what caused this drought.

Geography influences the interests, prosperity, and fortunes of nation-states.  For many years, the U.S. was protected from international conflicts by the water barriers of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  That ended during the 20th centuries and the U.S. is now vulnerable to nuclear assault, terrorist attack, and cyber attack just like all other nations are.  For centuries, the United Kingdom rose to and achieved unparalleled global power without a large standing army because of the strength and power projection capabilities of the Royal Navy.  Germany and Russia became globally significant powers because of their armies.  China’s increasing wealth is allowing it to become a major economic and military power with global reach.  Numerous countries in the Indo-Pacific region are affected by  China’s rise including Australia, Japan, India, and the United States and are working to develop methods to mitigate China’s potential challenge and threat.

Our global economy is heavily dependent on international trade through the air and, most prominently, by oceanic trade.  Many of the goods and services we buy in the U.S. have to cross thousands of miles of ocean to reach the U.S. before traveling even further to reach local marketplaces or online vendors.  If these trade routes are cut off by natural or human caused disasters, it affects us in many ways including higher prices and the potential long-term cutoff of potentially important medicine, food, software, or other products.

Educational institutions at all levels need to quit wasting their time teaching fraudulent flimflam like diversity and promote the vital importance of geography to their students and faculty.  Contemporary technology makes it possible to present geography in a variety of exciting and informative ways.  Any reasonably intelligent man or woman should be able to identify where they live on a map, be able to tell how to get from their home to work or other significant locations without using a computer, and be able to understand how weather affects their local geographic areas and international geographic areas as the tragic typhoon which recently struck the  Philippines demonstrates.  When we hear that the mayor of Toronto, Ontario, Canada is in legal and political trouble for smoking crack we should know exactly where Toronto is located geographically in relationship to our own home and understand that, since this is Canada’s largest city, it would be like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg getting in political and legal trouble for the same offense.  We need to become familiar with the locations of geopolitical crisis regions like the Gulf of Aden, Malacca Strait, Taiwan Strait,  38th parallel in Korea, the South China Sea, and Arctic Ocean.

We may want to hide behind our social networks and personal computing devices and think we can ignore geography.  However, geography does not ignore us and we are exposed to it every time we leave the comfort of our houses and local residences and venture out into the broader world.  Geography must be understood as a concrete and continually evolving reality and not  interpreted through the distorted ideological lenses of leftist imaginations racked by the delusions of racism, sexism, patriarchalism, homosexual romanticism, imperialism, secularism, structural inequality, critical studies, and other residues of diseased hearts and minds.

Monday, November 18, 2013

Volcano Discovered Under a Kilometer of Ice in West Antarctica

Nov. 17, 2013 



In January 2010 a team of scientists had set up two crossing lines of seismographs across Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica. It was the first time the scientists had deployed many instruments in the interior of the continent that could operate year-round even in the coldest parts of Antarctica.

Like a giant CT machine, the seismograph array used disturbances created by distant earthquakes to make images of the ice and rock deep within West Antarctica.

There were big questions to be asked and answered. The goal, says Doug Wiens, professor of earth and planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the project's principle investigators, was essentially to weigh the ice sheet to help reconstruct Antarctica's climate history. But to do this accurately the scientists had to know how Earth's mantle would respond to an ice burden, and that depended on whether it was hot and fluid or cool and viscous. The seismic data would allow them to map the mantle's properties.
In the meantime, automated-event-detection software was put to work to comb the data for anything unusual.

When it found two bursts of seismic events between January 2010 and March 2011, Wiens' PhD student Amanda Lough looked more closely to see what was rattling the continent's bones.

Was it rock grinding on rock, ice groaning over ice, or, perhaps, hot gases and liquid rock forcing their way through cracks in a volcanic complex?

Uncertain at first, the more Lough and her colleagues looked, the more convinced they became that a new volcano was forming a kilometer beneath the ice.

The discovery of the new as yet unnamed volcano is announced in the Nov. 17 advanced online issue of Nature Geoscience.

Following the trail of clues

The teams that install seismographs in Antarctica are given first crack at the data. Lough had done her bit as part of the WUSTL team, traveling to East Antarctica three times to install or remove stations in East Antarctica.

In 2010 many of the instruments were moved to West Antarctica and Wiens asked Lough to look at the seismic data coming in, the first large-scale dataset from this part of the continent.

"I started seeing events that kept occurring at the same location, which was odd, "Lough said. "Then I realized they were close to some mountains-but not right on top of them."

"My first thought was, 'Okay, maybe its just coincidence.' But then I looked more closely and realized that the mountains were actually volcanoes and there was an age progression to the range. The volcanoes closest to the seismic events were the youngest ones."

The events were weak and very low frequency, which strongly suggested they weren't tectonic in origin. While low-magnitude seismic events of tectonic origin typically have frequencies of 10 to 20 cycles per second, this shaking was dominated by frequencies of 2 to 4 cycles per second.

Ruling out ice

But glacial processes can generate low-frequency events. If the events weren't tectonic could they be glacial?
To probe farther, Lough used a global computer model of seismic velocities to "relocate" the hypocenters of the events to account for the known seismic velocities along different paths through the Earth. This procedure collapsed the swarm clusters to a third their original size.

It also showed that almost all of the events had occurred at depths of 25 to 40 kilometers (15 to 25 miles below the surface). This is extraordinarily deep -- deep enough to be near the boundary between the earth's crust and mantle, called the Moho, and more or less rules out a glacial origin.

It also casts doubt on a tectonic one. "A tectonic event might have a hypocenter 10 to 15 kilometers (6 to 9 miles) deep, but at 25 to 40 kilometers, these were way too deep," Lough says.

A colleague suggested that the event waveforms looked like Deep Long Period earthquakes, or DPLs, which occur in volcanic areas, have the same frequency characteristics and are as deep. "Everything matches up," Lough says.

An ash layer encased in ice

The seismologists also talked to Duncan Young and Don Blankenship of the University of Texas who fly airborne radar over Antarctica to produce topographic maps of the bedrock. "In these maps, you can see that there's elevation in the bed topography at the same location as the seismic events," Lough says.

The radar images also showed a layer of ash buried under the ice. "They see this layer all around our group of earthquakes and only in this area," Lough says.

"Their best guess is that it came from Mount Waesche, an existing volcano near Mt Sidley. But that is also interesting because scientists had no idea when Mount Waesche was last active, and the ash layer is sets the age of the eruption at 8,000 years ago. "

What's up down there?

The case for volcanic origin has been made. But what exactly is causing the seismic activity?

"Most mountains in Antarctica are not volcanic," Wiens says, "but most in this area are. Is it because East and West Antarctica are slowly rifting apart? We don't know exactly. But we think there is probably a hot spot in the mantle here producing magma far beneath the surface."

"People aren't really sure what causes DPLs," Lough says. "It seems to vary by volcanic complex, but most people think it's the movement of magma and other fluids that leads to pressure-induced vibrations in cracks within volcanic and hydrothermal systems."

Will the new volcano erupt?

"Definitely," Lough says. "In fact because of the radar shows a mountain beneath the ice I think it has erupted in the past, before the rumblings we recorded.

Will the eruptions punch through a kilometer or more of ice above it?

The scientists calculated that an enormous eruption, one that released a thousand times more energy than the typical eruption, would be necessary to breach the ice above the volcano.

On the other hand a subglacial eruption and the accompanying heat flow will melt a lot of ice. "The volcano will create millions of gallons of water beneath the ice -- many lakes full," says Wiens. This water will rush beneath the ice towards the sea and feed into the hydrological catchment of the MacAyeal Ice Stream, one of several major ice streams draining ice from Marie Byrd Land into the Ross Ice Shelf.

By lubricating the bedrock, it will speed the flow of the overlying ice, perhaps increasing the rate of ice-mass loss in West Antarctica.

"We weren't expecting to find anything like this," Wiens says.

Journal Reference:
Amanda C. Lough, Douglas A. Wiens, C. Grace Barcheck, Sridhar Anandakrishnan, Richard C. Aster, Donald D. Blankenship, Audrey D. Huerta, Andrew Nyblade, Duncan A. Young, Terry J. Wilson. Seismic detection of an active subglacial magmatic complex in Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica. Nature Geoscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1992

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Resources For Tphoon Haiyan

For my students, with thanks to Mark Lowry from the Toronto District School Board!
Typhoon Haiyan Resources



A great example to emphasise the specifics of Geographic Inquiry?

When looking at a typhoon and specifically Haiyan (Yolanda) we should be able to identify and describe:

“What is Where?”

Discuss and Analyse:

“Why There?”

Apply and act upon

“Why Care”
Resources
(please review to make sure they are age and grade appropriate)
Also check out vast amount of Material on Twitter  #Haiyan
Typhoon Haiyan
Typhoon Haiyan (Wikipedia), also known as Typhoon Yolanda, is a tropical cyclone that devastated the Philippines. It first made landfall at Guiuan, Eastern Samar on the morning of November 8, 2013, and then proceeded to Tacloban City (map), where a storm surge laid waste to much of the area. The typhoon then caused destruction in northern Cebu, Panay island, and northern Palawan before exiting the country towards Vietnam.
Data , maps & shape files to create your own analysis and inquiry
Other sources and Resources
The head of the Red Cross in the Philippines has described the devastation caused by Typhoon Haiyan as "absolute bedlam".
Good report and video
Satellites trace sea level change
Scientists have reviewed almost two decades of satellite data to build a new map showing the trend in sea levels. Globally, the oceans are rising, but there have been major regional differences over the period.
Philippine sea is the rising the fastest
In pictures: Rescuers race to reach victims of Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines

Here's an #infographic on what you need to know about the impact of Typhoon #Haiyan on the Philippines pic.twitter.com/tWYNn1iR60

Typhoon Haiyan In Pictures
The true devastation of Typhoon Haiyan has been revealed in a truly shocking series of photographs.
Global news agencies have been on the scene to capture the shocking images which are been shown around the world.
So far, up to 10,000 people are feared dead in the storm which has caused wide-spread destruction throughout the Philippines.

Philippines prepared for Typhoon Haiyan, but evacuation sites couldn’t withstand storm surges
Hours before Typhoon Haiyan hit, Philippine authorities moved 800,000 people to sturdy evacuation centers —

Oxfam appeal: super typhoon Haiyan in Philippines

Typhoon prompts 'fast' by Philippines climate delegate
The head of the Philippines delegation at UN climate talks in Poland has said he will stop eating until participants make "meaningful" progress.
Typhoon Haiyan: Philippines urges action to resolve climate talks deadlock
The Philippines government has firmly connected the super typhoon Haiyan with climate change, and urged governments meeting in Poland on Monday to take emergency action to resolve the deadlocked climate talks.
Videos show Typhoon Haiyan’s charge across Philippines
Typhoon Haiyan, or Yolanda as it is known locally, made its first landfall early Friday morning on Samar island in the central Philippines before charging westward across a number of other islands. Authorities estimate the death toll from the storm could reach 10,000 people.
Super Typhoon Haiyan: The Most Powerful Cyclone in History?
The eye of Super Typhoon Haiyan is a thing of terrible perfection: a gyre of furious thunderstorms anchoring one of the most powerful cyclones to ever menace the Pacific. One American meteorologist thinks it might be the most powerful in recorded history to hit land, although problems with measuring winds makes that unknown for now.
Which Is It? Hurricane, Typhoon Or Tropical Cyclone?
What's the difference between a hurricane, a typhoon and a cyclone? Nothing more than location.
Monster Typhoon in the Philippines - it's not just our disaster –
Here's how Filipinos abroad can help
#YolandaPH #Haiyan victims. #ReliefPH pic.twitter.com/YRJjH93TXw

Once-Thriving City Is Reduced to Ruin in Philippines
Weakened Typhoon Lands in Northeastern Vietnam
Useful @UNOCHA map show #Haiyan landfall and path taken so far:

Storm-chaser says Yolanda was 'off the scale'
For professional storm-chaser James Reynolds, whose day job involves capturing typhoons, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions at heart-stoppingly close range, intense danger goes with the territory.
Canada launches matching fund to help those impacted by Typhoon Haiyan

The Best Resources For Learning About Typhoon Haiyan
Blogster who is collecting great educational info
Typhoon Haiyan Devastation: New Storm On Way

Canadian charity works to help Typhoon Haiyan victims
In the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, a Canadian charity is rushing to help provide clean drinking water for those affected by the devastating storm.
How do hurricanes form?
Hurricanes are the most awesome, violent storms on Earth. People call these storms by other names, such as typhoons or cyclones, depending on where they occur. The scientific term for all these storms is tropical cyclone. Only tropical cyclones that form over the Atlantic Ocean or eastern Pacific Ocean are called "hurricanes."Whatever they are called, tropical cyclones all form the same way

9 Ways to Help Victims of Typhoon Haiyan
Typhoon Haiyan ripped through the Philippines on Friday, causing a 20-foot rise in sea waters and packing winds of up to 147 miles per hour. Authorities are calling it one the country's worst natural disasters on record.
Storm Trackers Plot Super Typhoon Haiyan's Next Steps
Super Typhoon Haiyan roared through the Philippines with sustained winds up to 195 miles per hour, making it a candidate for the strongest storm ever observed.
Typhoon Haiyan. November 9. From the ISS

Mapping Disasters Like Typhoon Haiyan for First Responders
What may well be the largest and most powerful storm ever recorded — Typhoon Haiyan — is currently hitting the Philippines. But when disaster strikes, the internet can spring into action.
Tracking Haiyan: NASA images from space capture scope of the storm