Ukraine and CNN's Mixed-up Geography

Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych has been having a very good time being president. He managed to get Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to back down, placated Russia by all but saying that the Black Sea Fleet can stay in Crimea past the 2017 deadline, and showed the West that he is an independent player by first traveling to Brussels and not Moscow.

However, he packed his time in the West with two big geographic errors. First, when discussing Serbia, Yanukovych confused Montenegro with Kosovo and followed it up by confusing North and South Ossetia. Sadly this is not the first time Montenegro and Kosovo have been mismatched by Yanukovych.

Meanwhile, CNN newsman Rick Sanchez thought the Galapagos Islands were actually the Hawaiian Islands... and he was using Google Earth at the time. On the plus side, the clip below proves CNN really does love their maps. Just look at all those maps!

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Geocurrents Takes on Continents

The geographers over at Geocurrents have two good introductory posts on why the generalized theory of "continents" is flawed. The series is started by Nonsense about Continents and finished with How Many Continents Are There? The posts briefly describe a point brought up in blogger Dr. Martin Lewis' book The Myth of Continents.

In my previous post, Where is Asia?, I wrote how Asia was an artificial construct made by the Greeks to describe the lands and people east of them. And how today what we consider Europe, Africa, and Asia actually spill into each other.

Other geographers feel that continents are a flawed way of studying and examining the world. Dr. Harm de Blij uses "geographic realms" in his textbooks books. These realms are lands of similar cultural traits and physical landforms.

Continents are a good starting point for learning about the world but as one advances one quickly realizes that the physical and cultural landscape is so much more interrelated and complex than first imagined.

Best Affordable Suburbs in America 2010

Business Week has released their study of the best affordable suburbs in the United States. One can navigate the report's website by clicking on the map of the states. Each state has a brief profile of the best affordable suburb.

The criteria was chosen by "the selected suburbs were limited to towns within 25 miles of the most populated city in the state, with populations of 5,000 to 60,000, median family incomes of $51,000 to $120,000, and lower-than-average crime rates. We weighted a variety of factors including livability (short commutes, low pollution, green space), education (well-educated residents, high test scores), crime (low personal and property crime), economy (high job growth, low unemployment rate, high family income), and affordability (median household income, cost of expenditures). Affordability was most heavily weighted in our calculations. We penalized places with bad weather, a lack of racial diversity, high divorce rates, and few children."

I understand most of the variables except racial diversity. Who cares if the suburb is overwhelmingly ethnic Vietnamese or practically an enclave of Sweden?

Map of Hamburger Fast Food Restaurant Dominance in the United States

Long-time reader and good friend Torgo Jr. has sent me a link to the above map of hamburger fast food restaurant dominance in the contiguous United States of America.

Torgo Jr. and another reader have been sharing their thoughts about the map with me. One thing pointed out is how Dairy Queen controls much of Texas. There is a saying that Dairy Queens are "Texas Stop Signs." Wendy's core is in Ohio which is where the chain first began. Meanwhile Sonic seems mostly contained to the South. Surprisingly McDonald's does not control much of America's geography. However, it does have a vise grip on the greater New York area, Washington DC, and Chicago. These areas contain a good sized minority of the country's population and can lead to the false impress of McDonald's overall control of the hamburger fast food landscape.

One thing that caught me off guard is how the western coast, especially California, is still an open free land of choice and competition. Also, besides cores in Texas and around Salt Lake City there is no major clusters of hamburger fast food dominance west of a line formed by the western borders of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Variety is the hamburger special sauce of life out west.

Colombia Continues its March to Peace and Democracy

At the dawn of the twenty-first century things were looking bad for Colombia. The Communist terrorist group FARC used cease fires to create their own narco-insurgent state called the El Caguan "Demilitarized Zone." Meanwhile nacro-mafias, other Communists groups such as the National Liberation Army (ELN), and rightist drug groups like the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) were involved in a never ending game of attacks on each other and civilians.

Things changed in 2002 when Colombian voters rejected the ruling center-right Conservative in exchange for the independent, center-left Liberal Alvaro Uribe. Uribe combined the Liberal Party's platform of social democracy and government-supported welfare, the Conservative Party's desire for free trade, and his own desire to crush the various insurgent groups. He increased Colombian participation in Plan Colombia, aggressively sought to deny FARC territory, and offered demilitarization plans to various groups including the AUC. There have been a combination of amnesties for foot soldiers and criminal trials for terrorist leaders because of the demilitarization programs. Meanwhile the war against Communist, narco, and counterrevolutionary rebels has scored great victories as the various insurgent leaderships have been culled and national authority is once again returning to the country side.

Their was a potential blight on the march to peace and democracy though. President Uribe took a page out of the Hugo Chavez playbook by trying to start the process to end term limits to allow himself to be reelected for a third term. The supreme court rejected these measures and a potential showdown loomed. Fortunately President Uribe is following the court's ruling by announcing he will not seek another reelection and will step down at the end of his term.

The political landscape has changed as well in the last ten years. The long standing divide between Conservative and Liberal parties has been more or less annihilated by Uribe. He managed to form of an alliance of Conservatives, centrist Liberals, and members of the center-left Radical Change party. His newish party, the Social National Unity Party, now competes against the Alternative Democratic Pole which is itself an alliance of a range of groups from anti-Uribe centrists to pro-FARC communist Liberals. Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe's former Defense Minister, of the Social National Unity Party is easily leading in the polls. The big question this election is whether or not Uribe's coalition will hold or if the parties will each run their own candidate in the first round of the election. Some business even worry that a deeply divided left-right coalition will lead to an leftist electoral victory. The possibility of this happening is small because to win one needs fifty percent of the vote and Uribe's policies are popular in Colombia. While the political chaos is worrying some it is good to see democracy is alive and well in Colombia.

Karen Jacobsen: The Voice of GPS

Karen Jacobsen is the most downloaded (thanks commenter!) voice for GPS units around the world. Both the Houston Chronicle and Sydney Morning Herald had features on her this past week.

Her voice, with a slight accent, is more pleasing to many ears rather than the harsh American voices. A friend once told me that he prefers Karen to others because she did not "judge" him like the American female voice At the time I was dumbstruck by such a statement but I can now understand his point-of-view. A GPS is like a driving partner who travels along on many of one's life adventures. Having a seemingly nice personality who a driving partner is a must. How many times have we wanted to physical harm family members on long car drives? We probably rarely wished ill will to Karen.

However, one's GPS unit may still wish harm on you, though.

Bad Maps: RT Recognizes Georgia's Territorial Integrity

Today we introduce a new feature entitled Bad Maps. Bad Maps are posts which will discuss how map mistakes change a message the map maker or map maker's supporters try to convey either in the map or elsewhere.

State-Owned Russian press become lazy with proofing their base maps and accidentally recognized Georgia's territorial integrity when it comes to Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

During the wake of the 2008 Russia-Georgia War the Russian Federation recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries. Getting other countries to do so has been difficult for Russia, though. Nicaragua quickly joined in by recognizing the de facto republics but since then only Venezuela has followed suit. In December 2009, Nauru recognized Abkhazia in exchange for aid from Russia yet it is still unclear if they extended the same honor to South Ossetia.

There has been an international effort by Russia to get geographers and neogeographers to recognize the independence of the two breakaway regions. The Commission of Geographical Names and other official Russian government agencies make maps showing the breakaway republics as independent. But in the private-world the Russians have had so-so luck. The online mapping site Yandex has South Ossetia and Abkhazia but the other major Russian online mapping site Kosmosnimki does not.

Here is where the bad map comes in. RT, previously known as Russia Today, is a state-run news agency that broadcasts in English throughout the world. As a branch of the Russian government one would expect it to follow government guidelines including the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

But human error at RT trumps its stated efforts elsewhere recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Most of the time maps are not made by geographers or properly-trained cartographers but instead graphic artists who can make something pretty but have no clue what they are drawing. Such is the case with RT which uses a base map that shows Abkahzia and South Ossetia as part of Georgia. The image, top, is taken from a segment on arts and crafts in the Vologda region of Russia. While the Georgian-part of the map has nothing to do with the story it does show that the map editing process has not gone under the scrutiny one expects from the Kremlin.