Geocommons, enviro-sceptics and names around the world

Categories: Advanced Higher, s1 and s2

Found some really useful student resources tonight on my virtual travels. I was directed to an excellent map maker through googlemapsmania. Geocommons allows you to use either your own data and/or the data listed through their site to create your own personalised maps. These can be represented through a number of techniques, including choropleth and proportional symbol mapping. I'm thinking that this would be an essential site for use with Advanced Higher projects, and saves ages searching the internet for a map which doesn't really serve all of your purposes. I'll maybe schedule a session to look at these on Friday.

Still with Advanced Higher, and I have a fantastic article courtesy of Stephen Schwab on sln for Martin's Issues essay, in case I forget to tell you! This is a great viewpoint regarding Britain's contribution to reducing global warming, and just the kind of strong opinionated article which you can really critique.

Finally, first year have enjoyed looking at their surname profiler and I am posting the link since many asked for this. We were looking at surname spreads as a link with migration, and later, migration to Brazil. As most expected, there were strong links to UK and Ireland, but it was interesting that many Scottish or Irish surnames (such as mine) show larger concentrations in places like Australia, New Zealand and the USA than they do inScotland or Ireland, and led into some short discussion about the reasons for this- the clearances , the famine, the language, family etc.