1. Internet Infrastructure: The Tangled Web We Weave – M. Murphy
2. The Geographic Variation of Tattooing Technology – C. Motley
3. Globalizing “Miller Time”: Industrial Location of the American Beer Industry – S. Oberhauser
4. The Geography of Golf: Conquering the World and the Environment – S. McKeown
5. The Changing Political Landscape of Post-Katrina New Orleans – K. Kiss
6. The Spatial Diffusion of Reggeaton – J.Cortez
7. A Nursing Shortage in The United States – P. Catlett
8. The Geography of the Hearing Impaired – C. Rosenberry
9. The Geography of Jazz -J. Pleasant
10. The Geography of Counter-Stike: A Global Phenomenon – M. Murphy
11. The Dances of North Africa and the Middle East – J. Jackson
12. Cancer Incidence Around the World – J. Stathos
13. The Geography of Beatlemania: The Atlantic Echo-Chamber – M. Schaeder
14. Disparity of Internet Access in Urban and Rural America – P. Thompson
15. Invaded Country: The Pre-September 11 Military Invasions of Afghanistan – T. Lacy
16. A Cultural Geography of the Diffusion of Opera – J. Slohada
17. The Geographic Signficance of High School Drop Out Rates – D. Bryant
18. The Ukrainian Diaspora: One Family’s Journey – F. Bakke
19. The Forum of Sao Paulo: a 2005 Assessment of Communism’s Resurgence in Latin America
20. Where is Margaritta-ville? The Geography of Jimmy Buffett songs

To the candidate, I would like to say that it is fantastic that the GIS Team you assembled are applying the technology in some very interesting ways. I wonder if the other campaigns are running their GIS teams as effectively. I offer the floor to the techno-critics over at the Low Tech Times for their position on the role of technology in presidential campaigns.

Give up? Barack Obama is taking a crowdsourced, collaborative approach to his GIS Operations. Will Obama be the first Open-Source President? As an academic advisor, I would suggest to any student working on the campaign to treat this like a laboratory of ideas worthy of doctoral dissertations. But remember, there will also be a lot of boring old production cartography. Either way, the Obama Campaign has embraced an important technology and an interesting method of crowdsourcing.

Also, the Low-Tech Times has asked that you not use the GIS as a  campaign SPAM-building effort.

Anyway, below are my notes from my sample lecture about Boundary-Making Processes in Washington DC, as well as a statement of my teaching philosophy.

Teaching Philosophy

• Conversational
• I am No Smarter Than You, I have Only Read More about Geography
• A Student’s Work Has Value Beyond The Classroom
• The Student Should be able to teach a concept
• Assignments should be Personally Relevant
• Authentic Assessment Strategy
  • Class Participation: Successfully Conversant
  • Homework: Engage the concepts
  • Final Project: Editorial Standards
  • Final Examination: Open Book, Research Based
  • Self-Assessment
  • Washington DC Example: Boundary-Making
    • Map: What is the first thing you notice about the DC Boundary
      • Yes, its square
      • Notch Cut out where Arlington lies

      How many things in nature are diamond? Even diamonds are not diamond shaped in nature. Since it is not a natural phenomenon, how did the DC boundary become shaped like a diamond

      The History is that it was designed by Pierre L’Enfant and Benjamin Banneker appointed by George Washington in 1791

      What I want you to take away from this discussion of the Washington DC Boundary and boundary-making in general, is an understanding that the phenomena we cover in Human Geography are not random.

      • A Pool of Human Decisions
        • Individual decision made over Time by a large group: Not Random, but Evolutionary
        • International Level
          • Treaty
          • War
      • Natural Boundaries
        • It was still a decision!

      In this course, we will cover

      • The Types of Questions Geographers Ask
      • The Tools Geographers Use to Answer these Questions

      Lesson Plan

      • Class Discussion: Theorize the boundary of a nation
      • Assignment: Pick a Nation and research how its boundary was formed.

Washington DC Boundary Example

As a PhD applicant actively seeking Graduate Funding, any one of these topics is a viable PhD dissertation topic. There are observable geographic patterns of Internet Activity that can be measured and statistically modelled within commonly understood models of Industrial Location.

• Mutually Beneficial Economic Development as Optimization Variable in Industrial Location: A Google, Government and Energy Management Case Study
• Patterns of Starbuck Store Closure: A Correlation with the Commercial and Residential Development Market.
• Geographic Patterns of Crowdsourced Loans: A Prosper.com Case Study (for Academic purposes, Prosper offers a download of its entire dataset).
• The Economics the Pioneer Fringe: An Empirical Revisit to Isaiah Bowman
• Pre-Revolutionary Land Use Patterns and Concepts of Ownership
• Open-Source Micro-Franchising: A Distributed Distribution Method for Incubating Crowdsourced Content
• The Geography of Long Tail Economics-(Perhaps this one actually is killing the record store).

• A student’s work has value beyond the classroom.

• Student’s should tailor their work, papers and presentations, to the class not the professor.

• The professor is no more intelligent than you. They have only read more than you.

• The professor should not view themselves as a lecturer but as a developer of colleagues.

• Conversations are more informative than lectures.

• Its not what you know, but how to find it.

• Focus on quality, not the grades.

• You learn more by being wrong than you do by being quiet. Speak Up!

• A student is an early stage of professional life and should be expected to act and work in a professional manner.

• A professor should be able to use the tools of their students and vice versa.

• To Reiterate: A student’s work has value beyond the classroom. The professor’s job is to show the student that value.