geography

I’m happy to share our new George W. Bush Institute report, “Cities and Opportunity in 21st Century America.” This report is the first in our new Blueprint for Opportunity series, which aims to explore the challenge of expanding opportunity and economic mobility in America  read more »

A new Heartland Forward report, Does Geography Determine Destiny has been released today.  read more »

Everyone knows that Texas is big. In the self-storage world, Texas would be a 10x30 storage unit, the biggest of the bunch. But many people (namely, Yankees and Europeans) may not realize just how massive the Lone Star State really is. How that at 261,231 square miles of land, Texas would be the 39th-largest country by land area in the world, coming in just behind Zambia and ahead of Myanmar. Since there are, give-or-take, roughly 200 countries in the world, that means that most of them are in fact smaller than Texas.  read more »

Only two of the world's megacities (metropolitan areas or urban areas with more than 10 million people) have adopted names that are more reflective of their geographical reality than their former core-based names. It is likely that this will spread to other megacities and urban areas as the core jurisdictions that supplied the names for most become even less significant in the dispersing urban area.  read more »

Here's three items from the Washington Post's "Top Secret America" series:

The Series: We've long known that high-security businesses warp the statistics describing Edge Cities. No matter how sophisticated the data source you go to, you find anomalies in which the numbers just wildly do not match the office buildings, retail locations and expensive homes you can plainly see.  read more »

The European Commission has just made a Google Earth overlay available showing annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 10 square kilometer quadrants. The overlay can be manipulated to show estimates from every year beginning in 1970. One of the most fascinating features is the GHG emissions on the oceans, from shipping lanes. All are green (fewer GHG tons), but one route stands out as by far the busiest, from Hong Kong and Japan through the Straits of Malacca and the Suez Canal to northern Europe.  read more »

Do you know who is funding your local candidate? Most of them are probably not from your district, as Lee Drutman at Miller-McCune points out after looking at the results of new report by two University of Maryland professors. Lee writes:  read more »