Why New Maps Plus?
The New Maps Plus graduate programs at the University of Kentucky offer students a challenging, intensive, digital mapping curriculum that emphasizes the acquisition of technical skills—coding, GIS, web development—while also preparing students to critically address the complexity of today’s information ecosystem.
Read more about how New Maps Plus is unique: newmapsplus.uky.edu/all-about
Part of the 44th Annual Ellen Churchill Semple Day
Aprill 22, 2016 Department of Geography College of Arts & Sciences University of Kentucky
Mrach 25, 2016 - 3:30pm 234 Classroom Building Rich Donohue, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky
The 22nd annual Conference on Critical Geography was hosted at the University of Kentucky this past October. In between sessions, conference participants had the opportunity to participate in a video booth project, titled Love Is.... Here, participants were asked to share their thoughts and opinions on the nature of love.
Everyone knows the classic normal distribution—the “bell curve,” where most observations cluster around the mean, and the frequency falls off toward either end, with well known statistical properties. Lots of things in nature are more-or-less normally distributed, but lots of things are not. In some cases distributions are “heavy-tailed,” such that for example there are many of the small ones, and increasingly fewer as size increases. Famous examples are the distribution of earthquake magnitudes, rank-size distributions of cities, and the distribution of wealth in societies.
Models of avalanche size distributions in (mathematically-simulated) sand piles were seminal in developing ideas about self-organized criticality and power laws, both in geomorphology and in general. Unfortunately even real sandpiles, much less more complex systems, are not necessarily well described by the models.
Landform and landscape evolution may be convergent, whereby initial differences and irregularities are (on average) reduced and smoothed, or divergent, with increasing variation and irregularity. Convergent and divergent evolution are directly related to dynamical (in)stability. Unstable interactions among geomorphic system components tend to dominate in earlier stages of development, while stable limits often become dominant in later stages. This results in mode switching, from unstable, divergent to stable, convergent development. Divergent-to-convergent mode switches emerge from a common structure in many geomorphic systems: mutually reinforcing or competitive interrelationships among system components, and negative self-effects limiting individual components. When the interactions between components are dominant, divergent evolution occurs. As threshold limits to divergent development are approached, self-limiting effects become more important, triggering a switch to convergence. The mode shift is an emergent phenomenon, arising from basic principles of threshold modulation and gradient selection.
Scientists, including geographers and geoscientists, are easily seduced by repeated forms and patterns in nature. This is not surprising, as our mission is to detect and explain patterns in nature, ideally arising from some unifying underlying law or principle. Further, in the case of geography and Earth sciences, spatial patterns and form-process relationships are paramount.
Unfortunately, the recurrence of similar shapes, forms, or patterns may not tell us much. Over the years we have made much of, e.g. logarithmic spirals, Fibonacci sequences, fractal geometry, and power-law distributions—all of which recur in numerous phenomena—only to learn that they don’t necessarily tell us anything, other than that several different phenomena or causes can lead to the same form or pattern. The phenomenon whereby different processes, causes, or histories can lead to similar outcomes is called equifinality.
Center pivot irrigation in Kansas, USA (USGS photo).
