Disease, Death, and the Body Politic

More than a trillion dollars of public money is spent annually on health care in the United States. In order to inform policymakers, health advocacy groups, tax-paying constituents, and beneficiaries, it would be useful to present and analyze health outcome and health-related data at the U.S. congressional district level. Presently, health event data are not reported at this political unit; however, recent interest and advances in areal interpolation techniques are beginning to transcend the inherent limitations imposed by legacy data collection and analyses systems. In this paper, the authors use the dasymetric approach to illustrate how this areal interpolation technique can be used to transfer county-level mortality rate data from several causes of death to the U.S. congressional district level. The study’s primary goal is to promote areal interpolation techniques in the absence of a systematic and comprehensive national program for geocoding health events.

A Geographic Analysis of Public-Private School Choice in South Carolina, USA

Despite years of research and debate, household choice between public and private schools is not well understood. This article investigates factors associated with parental choice between public and private schools using unique census-based school enrollment data for school districts in South Carolina and for neighborhoods in the Columbia Metropolitan Area. This study extends the existing literature by examining patterns of public-private school choice for whites and blacks separately in order to control racial disparities in school choice. Results of multiple regression analyses for the whole population and subdivided racial groups generally support the assumption that public-private school enrollment rate is subject to socioeconomic status, racial proportion, and public school quality. Findings of this study not only suggests the reconciliation of the market-based theory and the racial preference theory, but also provides insights into education policies in terms of stemming white enrollment losses and fostering public school education in the United States.

Location Patterns of Section 8 Housing in Jefferson County, Kentucky

The controversial Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program is the largest federal low-income housing program. Using GIS-based spatial clustering analysis (Getis–Ord’s Gi statistic) and multiple linear regressions, in this paper, the authors examine the locational patterns of more than 13,600 Section 8 housing units in Jefferson County, Kentucky, and explore key social, economic, demographic, and locational factors underlying the spatial distribution of Section 8 housing. The findings reveal that Section 8 housing continues to concentrate in the central city area with predominantly black residents, a high proportion of families in poverty, and abundant low-cost properties. The Section 8 voucher policy has failed to successfully de-concentrate poor families from these urban areas. Residential mobility of low-income families has been restricted by various factors, most important of which is the lack of accessibility to public transportation across the metropolitan area.

Emerging Retail Strategies in Urban Canada

In this article, the authors examine the spatial distribution of major retail chains across Canada. Using store location data for 2001 and 2006, the geospatial approach adopted in this study allows for the analysis of retail chains’ store portfolios by the size of the resident population of the ‘markets’ within which they operate. The analysis presented highlights the dominance of chain locations within and proximal to Canada’s major urban markets and provides further evidence of increasing interest amongst a number of major chains in ‘small town’ (or ‘C’) markets. It points to a future in which these smaller markets will become more competitive with an increased presence of major retail chains. The findings reported can be seen as the locational imprint of the processes of corporate concentration taking place across Canada, fuelled by the interplay of increased competition, concerns over market saturation and the need to sustain growth.

Beyond Class Hours

Much has been written regarding the effectiveness of different teaching styles; however, considerably less has been written about the physical design of computer classrooms and their implications on education. To date, nothing has been written regarding building an informal learning community within a computer classroom, particularly outside of formal class hours. In this paper, the author examines designing an environment in which geography students feel at home, that is, a center of geographic education. Such a center could be defined as a place where students and faculty congregate to create and transmit geographic knowledge. A GIS lab can be such a place if deliberate care and effort are taken to ensure that the lab is multidisciplinary, dynamic, encourages creativity and discourse, and is a think tank for solving geospatial problems. This paper illustrates some proven methods for building such an environment.

Significant Advances in Applied Geography from Combining Curiosity-Driven and Client-Driven Research Methodologies

The central thesis of the 2005 Anderson Lecture is that significant achievements in applied geography occur when the principles and practices of curiosity-driven and client-driven research are combined in the statement of problem, the idealized and operational research design, and the procedures of evaluating results. A companion thesis extends the Anderson Lectures by Jack Dangermond, Brian Berry, and Tom Wilbanks by positing that the best of applied geography incorporates a commutative perspective when establishing the parameters of an inquiry. That is, using pairwise combinations for illustration, research study parameters such as epistemology-praxis, conceptual-empirical, spatial-aspatial, theory-hypothesis, method-technique, cause-effect, analysis-synthesis, and structure-function are necessary elements in applied research that validates geography as a science-based, societally-relevant discipline, and geographers as professional practitioners. The examples of remote sensing, optimization techniques, decision support systems, geographic information systems, and the Walking Security Index project are used to illustrate how significant advances in applied geography result from combining curiosity-driven and client-driven research methodologies.

Geospatial Workforce Trends in the United States

Because of definitional problems regarding what is meant by the term “geospatial workforce,” specific reliable data are difficult to obtain about this increasingly important employment sector. This study reviews pertinent literature and U.S. Department of Labor datasets to corroborate the general sense that the geospatial workforce in the U.S. will continue robust expansion well into the next decade. However, because of this strong growth, an imbalance will remain in which demand outstrips supply, particularly in the more sophisticated modeling, design, and research positions, in the geospatial workforce.

Critical Incident Management and Geographically–Based Systems

In the United States there is a strong dependence on decentralized policing services, distributed by thousands of police departments. As a primary police professional development management institute in the United States, the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT) identified that there existed a paucity of management development opportunities for police command staff engaged in critical incident management. This paper describes how LEMIT met this challenge and became a leading U.S. institute in this exciting field of operation.

The Use of Geospatial Technology in Disaster Management

The daily use of geospatial technology, such as the global positioning system (GPS), geographic information systems (GIS), and remote sensing (RS), is increasing. The use of geospatial technology in disaster management is a natural fit because almost every aspect of a disaster is referenced by location. This paper presents the results of a recent web-based survey of disaster management practitioners. Findings reveal that more than 60% of disaster management practitioners are currently using geospatial technology and 70% plan to use it in a future disaster management activity. However, the results indicate that most disaster management practitioners have a low level of knowledge of geospatial technology. The survey findings also show that geospatial technologies enhance situational awareness, cost is a major challenge for practitioners who would like to use them, and an opportunity exists for the academic community to engage with practitioners to help them raise their level of geospatial knowledge.

From Beats to Tracts

In this article, the author addresses the spatial incompatibility between different types of data that is commonly faced in crime analysis research. Socioeconomic variables have been proved valuable in explaining crime behaviors and in predicting crime activities. However, socioeconomic data and crime statistics are usually collected and aggregated at different spatial zonations of geographical space, making the integration and analysis of these data difficult. Simple areal weighting interpolation technique, although frequently employed, often leads to unsatisfactory results due to the fact that most types of crime do not distributed evenly across space. Using 2007 burglary crime in Houston, Texas, as an example, the author illustrates a remote sensing approach to interpolating crime statistics from police beat enumeration district used by Houston Police Department to census tract defined by the U.S. Bureau of the Census.