Segregation and Economic Geography

The main focus of class this week was the topic of segregation, mainly in Northern Ireland. Ethnic encloues include language, visible signs, and busisness. Throughout the world there are many different towns or neighborhoods that are segregated. Some popular segregated neighborhoods include Chinese, Mexican, Hmong, and Polish. At Carthage we are segregated in many ways such as sex, athletics, teacher's departments, etc. In society segregation happens both vuluntarily and invuluntarily. Buying a house is an issue that is in regards to segregation. When one buys a house he or she takes into consideration the distance from work, if it meets his or her needs, nice, and urban. Segregation is a scientific way to think about segregation. The science uses the segregation index which measures the amount of segregation from 0-1.
In economic geography location matters. There are three sectors, but there might be four, or even five. The three sectors are primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary deals with raw goods, secondary deals with manufacturing, and the tertiary sector deals with services. The possible fourth sector, the quarentary sector deals with information, and the fifth sector, the quinary sector, consists of very high wealth.

Culture

Culture is the main focus in class this week. Culture region includes food, atire, language/dialect, daily routines, and holidays in a specific region. In different regions their are different forms of culture that are acted out in that society. Carthage has a lot of cultural aspects. Here at Carthage the classes are small about 17-30 students on average, a lot of students here are athletes, most students are of the ages 18 to 22 years old, and their are many forms of different culture in each floor of the dorms. The Midwest also has many forms of culture. In the Midwest their is cottage cheese, brats, a lot of different kinds of beers, a lot of differnt kinds of cheeses, corn, sourkraut, hot dogs, and seven layer salads. All these cultural aspects make the Midwest very unique. The South also has many aspects of culture. In the South their is macaroni and cheese, collard greens, fried okra, meat and three, crawdads, sweet tea, barbeque, and cheese grits. Food is a very noticable product to identify a regions culture. The Southwestern region includes mexican food, tex-mex, fish tacos, hot and spicy food, chiles, green chiles, and salsas. All of these aspects of culture are given to us through images on the television.

Spatial Diffusion

This week in class we began to discuss about the topic of spatial diffusion. Spatial diffusion is when something occurs in a certain area, and if it turns out to be a good occurance it will later spread. In class we talked about how flip flop sandles are a good example of spatial diffusion because they started out in the beaches in the south, moved inland to Georgia for example, then ended up northward. We also looked at imagery and the affects of GIS. In class we used google to use maps to locate anywhere we wanted. The advancements in GIS and mapping have had a great affect on privacy. Terroserver is downloaded and imported into GIS and contains 1m resolution. Spatial resolution can be found on google and has a 25 cm resolution. The imagery from google comes from the USGS which updates from satelites. Then we discussed the topic of vectors. Vectors carry disease from one person to another. Certain diseases are picked up in certain geographic regions and brought back to other regions through vectors. Lastly Tobler gives us his First Law of Geography which states that everything is related to everything else, and those things that are closer are more related.