Joshua Project: Christian Missionary GeoInfo for the World

The Joshua Project is an Evangelical Protestant effort to preach the Gospels to communities that have very small (or no) Christian population.  The project details the many various ethnic and national groups of countries around the world.  The website is generally map driven.

The bias in the project is that Catholic and various Orthodox faiths are considered good but not good enough.  For a population to be "fully reached" the website rates the group by number of Evangelicals.

A related project is Unreached People of the Day.  This website sums up the information of the Joshua Project into daily updates.

Help the World Health Organization by Mapping Libya

The World Health Organization (WHO) is currently trying to assist the recovery in post-civil war Libya.  However, their knowledge of medical facilities in the country is greatly limited.  They are creating a user edited map hoping that those who can fill in the gaps will help.  Here is a memo I received

We have so far collected more than 400 correct points using the great help of HOT, CrisisMappers and GISCorps but we need more! We know there where more than 1400 Centres in Libya in 2006. How many are there now?

We would need to try to fill the gaps you can see on this map, use it to add you data with just one click! Please ad all the locations you might know!

http://pierzen.dev.openstreetmap.org/hot/openlayers/libya_health.php

We need to locate people in Libya than can add new points on the map, using the on line web application (English and Arabic) or by using a paper map (we can provide help if needed), by sending an e.mail a twit or any other mean!

Please we need to develop a network of volunteers living in Libya or that have colleagues in the country that can provide information on where Health canters are located.

Contacts of great help would be people working on
1. Doctors (they might have some contact outside their hospitals)
2. Nurses and medical staff (same as doctors)
3. police officers (they know the territory)
4. Post offices (they are a source of information for locations! they deliver letters all over cities sand towns))
5. Teachers /school directors (they might know how to use a computer or know someone that can and know a lot of people)
6. Telephone outlets and Telephone companies (they normally use computers and know where their customers are)
7. Cybercafés (computers and knowledge on a single place)
8. Community radios (they can help us spread our message and questions)
9. electrical companies (they know a lot about the territory and they normally have cars to move)
10. Telecom companies (they might have some data regarding use of telephone networks,…
11. bus drivers (for remote locations. They criss-cross the territory)
12. NGO and associations working on the field 8they are on the terrain)
13. Any other person you might think!

Getting this data will help the community, the nation and the people of Libya go back to normality faster. We need all the help we can find!

There are areas where we know there are health facilities but we do not have them located on the map

Can you help?
Please, resend this message to anyone you think it can be interested, translate it to Arabic if you can and think your cooperation is crucial and greatly accepted in times of crisis

Maps of the Sex Industry Worldwide

The sex industry worldwide is huge.  About forty million people (0.5% of the world's population) are prostitute and three-forths of all prostitutes are between the age 13 and 25.  The United States has one million prostitutes, the same as Nigeria, while East Asian countries rank first with the amount of prostitutes.

Click to enlarge

The international sex tourism industry meanwhile is a pure Western phenomenon.  Americans tend to travel aboard to Latin America and South East Asia.  Europeans meanwhile travel to Africa, Kenya is an extreme hotspot, and Eastern Europe.

Blue countries have the sex tourists and red countries are the destination.  Click to enlarge.

(Hat tip: Washington Post)

The Keystone Pipeline, Perceptions and Attitudes, and Why It All Matters

The Keystone Pipeline debate is the latest in a series between environmentalists and those who argue the need for energy sources.  Previous battles include ANWAR and the Alaskan Oil Pipeline.  Groups such as Tar Sands Action oppose the Keystone project because they claim that obtaining the oil will ruin the environment around the tar sands.  The debate is currently involving the Obama administration as American environmentalists are pressuring him to end American cooperation with Canada.

There is a party who is quite upset with the American environmentalists: the Canadian government.  Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the angry point that Canadian environmental matters should be decided by Canadians and not Americans.  Harper went on to say that Canada was not a national park for America.

The statement signifies Canadian anger towards American attitudes towards Canada.  Canadians often feel that Americans take Canada for granted, assume that there is no national difference between the two peoples, and care little for the Canadian perspective.  This feeling is summed up well in Margaret Atwood's Through the One Way Mirror.  Americans deciding what is best based off Canada's environment and not Canada's economy has just inflamed this already existing resentment.

This anti-Americanism could have major consequence for the United States.  The pipeline helps Canada export oil from the Athabasca oil sands.  The current production from those oil sands is 1.3 million barrels a day.  That's slightly under the daily output of Qatar and the United Kingdom.  Harper has threatened that if the United States does not work with Canada to expand the Keystone Pipeline then Canada would have no problem selling the cheap, non-terrorist funding oil to the People's Republic of China.

American attitudes towards Canada and how Canada perceives American attitudes could have a huge impact on jobs, the economy, and who gets the fuel to power their superpower country.

NASA Imagery Shows Beijing Smog Cover

NASA has released imagery from January 10th and 11th showing the massive extent of smog coverage over Beijing and much of the nearby area.  Visibility on the ground was reduced to about two hundred yards (about 180 metres) as tens of thousands of square miles were covered in smog.

On January 10th smog covered much of the North China Plain

On January 11th winds changed and the smog was blown away

Happy Birthday Nicolas Steno, Founder of Geology

Nicolas Steno: Sort of a geological Catholicgauze.  As Bishop he sold his bishop's cross and ring and donated the money to the poor.

Nicolas Steno was a Danish Renaissance man who believed in proving to himself long held beliefs and disgrading things shown to be false.  This strong drive for the truth led him to become the founder of geology and laid the ground work for the development of archaeology and paleontology.  His first major test was analyzing his Lutheran beliefs.  When Steno reasoned that Catholicism was more grounded in traditional Christianity than Lutheranism Steno converted.  He would study and follow his new faith all the way to becoming a bishop.

But geographers and other earth scientists better know Steno for his geological work.  Early on Nicolas Steno realized that glossopetrae – literally 'tongue stones' were not fallen moon rocks or weird natural growths but instead fossils of shark teeth.  Later on Steno discovered rock strata were actually layers of rock which formed on top of each other over time.  He stated the deeper one digs into the earth the older the material.  Before Steno this was too much a leap for scientists to realize due to the general scientific disinterest in anything below the Earth's surface unless it was for alchemy.  His discovery also ended the belief in an unchanging creationist Earth.  Since then all science has agreed the Earth is dynamic.

Steno's birthday is January 11th and his popularity has spiked today due to Google celebrating his life with a "Google Doodle" showing strata.

Israel Preparing to Resettle Syrian Alawites in the Golan Heights

Israeli Chief of Staff Benny Gantz said that Israel is preparing to resettle potential Alawite refugees in the Golan Heights, the valuable highlands which oversee much of northern Israel and the Syrian capital of Damascus.  If this plan is true and it is implemented then it will be one of the most odd, complex geopolitical schemes in Middle East history.

For background, Alawites are a religious-tribal minority in Syria comprising ten percent or so of the country's population.  They believe Ali, cousin of Muhammad, was God incarnate.  They also believe Jesus was God in the Trinity and Alawites practice Communion as the body and blood of Christ.  Orthodox Islamic scholars have traditional classified Alawites as a Christian sect, a Shia heresy, or a pagan religion that disguises itself in the majority religion.  Some modern scholars have declared it a strange sect of Islam, but there have been charges that these scholars are merely making propaganda for governments which desire closer relations with Syria.  However, a recent New Republic article claims that in the past decades Alawite religion has been Sunnized by the Alawite-controlled Syrian government. 

The Alawites have run Syria under the Assad family since the 1970s.  The regime has been secular, Arab (national) Socialist which regards religion as more of a private matter if not a threat when mixed with politics.  The battle between the Arab Sunni majority and the minority alliance of the Alawites and various Catholic/Orthodox Christians has been bloody before.  The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the Muslim Brotherhood rebellion which was brutally crushed by the brutal assault on Hama, the "Islamic capital" of Syria, which killed somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 people.  Now, the Arab Spring wave has reached Syria and the old battle between Sunnis (the anti-government forces) and the minority alliance (pro-government) has reached the point of civil war.

The fear of ethnic displacement is very high in Syria, much higher even in post-Arab Spring Egypt.  The fear of ethnic displacement comes from the probability of the victimized Sunni Islamists seeking revenge on the Alawites if the Assad government falls.  The crackdowns against the Sunni Islamists in the past were so harsh that Syrian Muslim Brotherhood propaganda commonly features statements along the lines of "kill all Alawites" and attacks against Alawite civilians has become a new disturbing trend in Syria.

So as a bit of a propaganda coup, and perhaps geopolitical smartness, Israel is making it known that it is willing to resettle Alawites in the Golan Heights.  The propaganda coup portion comes from the fact Syria's Alawite-controlled government has been demanding the return of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the Six-Day War, for decades.  It would be deeply ironic for the Israel-annexed Golan Heights to be the Alawites' safe haven from Sunni Syria.

The intelligence of this geopolitical move is straight-forward: entrenching the Golan Heights with an anti-Syrian population.  Currently the Golan Heights' population is about 40,000 Druze (who in the past have been pro-Assad Syria and part of the minority alliance; however, they have been silent during the current Arab Spring uprising), 16,500 Israeli Jews, and about 2,000 Sunni Muslims (who would have good reason to support a Sunni Syria).  There are about three-and-a-half million Alawites in Syria.  Even if just one percent were to move to the Golan Heights that would be 35,000 new settlers who would be willing to make a pragmatic agreement with Israel to prevent Syria from retaking the Golan Heights.

It is a little bit of a leap though to assume that Alawites would first flee to Israel but that does not mean an eventual move is unlikely.  A potiential alternative would for the Alawites to flee to Lebanon, which has a small Alawite population.  However, any disruption in the delicate religious-ethnic balance in Lebanon would likely end in bloodshed.  Hezbollah, Syria's Shia friends in Lebanon, are unlikely to be accommodating to such a large influx of needy, non-Shia.  Neighboring Turkey has long had its own problem with respecting non-Turkish people.  So if ethnic displacement does occur it would likely be an internationally scattering with perhaps some realizing the Golan is their only chance of sticking together.

If that is the case then Israel's offer may pay dividends in its efforts to keep the Golan Heights.

See also:  Israel's Point-of-View of Vulnerable Geography