Monthly Archives: December 2013

Dec 14 2013

Meet The Humble Container That Moves The Global Economy

The unsung hero of the global economy: the shipping container.

Seth Dixon‘s insight:

At the last RIGEA steering committee meeting, Matt Hodge mentioned that NPR’s Planet Money has produced an 8-part series following the commodity chain of the T-Shirt.  This series explores cotton production, textile mills, sweatshops, outsourcing and in this podcast, the transportation infrastructure that moves goods globally.  This podcast touches on the same topic as one of my favorite TED talks, how containerization enabled globalization.

See on www.npr.org

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Dec 5 2013

How many Islands in Rhode Island?

I recently received this question and immediately thought that this is a great geographic question, but one that geographic tools can be used to find the answer.  I downloaded all the Rhode Island names listed by the United States Board on Geographic Names and filtered out all the listed Islands (108 is the answer!!).  A spreadsheet of data isn’t as helpful to visualize this data so I created this interactive map.  Only 1 of the locations didn’t have coordinates, some are scarcely more than rocks, and this is only according to the the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, but this is the most complete map of islands in the state of Rhode Island that I could produce.  Additionally, here is an article about some sailors who sought to explore every island of the Narragansett Bay.     

See on www.arcgis.com

Dec 4 2013

Click that ’Hood!

I had the shapefiles for the various neighborhoods of Providence and the good folks at “Click that ‘Hood” were gracious enough to upload it and make a local quiz based on the the 25 neighborhoods of Providence (as defined by the city government officials).  In addition to city neighborhood quizzes, they also have quizzes for regions such as Africa, South America and Europe.  This is a crowd-sourced database, so if you have the right data, you can help them to create more online quizzes.  

See on click-that-hood.com