<p> Mobile phones have become so popular in navigation. Empirical studies, however, have implied several pitfalls of using these mobile systems. First of all, the small size of the mobile screen fragmentizes the map information so that users have to interact with the display frequently for fear of disorientation. In addition, generated navigation guides with continuous displays of routing information relieves users&rsquo; cognitive load, but the excessive reliance on the displayed spatial information keeps the users being mindless of the environment that impacts their acquisition of spatial knowledge. Later, landmarks as important referents were suggested to help users integrate the current surroundings with further decision points to support their sense of direction and cognitive mapping. But the small display limited users to access the landmarks located out of the view. To address this issue, designs attempt to display distant landmarks at the edge of screen as a way to overcome the aforementioned limits. In order to enhance spatial orientation while using mobile devices, this study introduced an improved design that not only display the direction but also the distance concept of distant landmarks by changing in size as an indicator of the distance from a user&rsquo;s location. Built on this, two kinds of mechanism were designed to present the distance concept by icons of different sizes: one is based on ratio scale that icons change in size continuously based on an established ratio to the actual distance between the user and the distant location. The other mechanism is based on ordinal scale which assigns one of three different sizes to a certain range of distance implying near, middle, and far. A formal user study was carried out to compare efficiency of these two mechanisms in four types of distance comparison tasks. Results show that ordinal icons are more effective than ratio icons in visualizing relative distances between two distant landmarks. But for both mechanisms, users have challenges distinguishing distant landmarks from local landmarks when displayed on screen simultaneously. A further step is to explore some other feasible options of representing distance.</p>

<p> Federal, state and local officials are planning for a (M) 7.8 San Andreas Earthquake Scenario in the Southern California Catastrophic Earthquake Response Plan that would require initial emergency food and water resources to support from 2.5 million to 3.5 million people over an eight-county region in Southern California. However, a model that identifies locations of affected populations&mdash;with consideration for social vulnerability, estimates of their emergency logistical resource requirements, and their resource requirements over time&mdash;has yet to be developed for the emergency response plan.</p><p> The aim of this study was to develop a modeling methodology for emergency logistical resource requirements of affected populations in the (M) 7.8 San Andreas Earthquake Scenario in Southern California. These initial resource requirements, defined at three-days post-event and predicted through a probabilistic risk model, were then used to develop a relative risk ratio and to estimate resources requirements over time. The model results predict an &ldquo;at-risk&rdquo; population of 3,352,995 in the eight-county study region. In Los Angeles County, the model predicts an &ldquo;at- risk&rdquo; population of 1,421,415 with initial requirements for 2,842,830 meals and 4,264,245 liters of water. The model also indicates that communities such as Baldwin Park, Lancaster-Palmdale and South Los Angeles will have long-term resource requirements.</p><p> Through the development of this modeling methodology and its applications, the planning capability of the Southern California Catastrophic Earthquake Response Plan is enhanced and provides a more effective baseline for emergency managers to target emergency logistical resources to communities with the greatest need. The model can be calibrated, validated, generalized, and applied in other earthquake or multi-hazard scenarios through subsequent research.</p><p>

abstract: Economic inequality is always presented as how economic metrics vary amongst individuals in a group, amongst groups in a population, or amongst some regions. Economic inequality can substantially impact the social environment, socioeconomics as well as human living standard. Since economic inequality always plays an important role in our social environment, its study has attracted much attention from scholars in various research fields, such as development economics, sociology and political science. On the other hand, economic inequality can result from many factors, phenomena, and complex procedures, including policy, ethnic, education, globalization and etc. However, the spatial dimension in economic inequality research did not draw much attention from scholars until early 2000s. Spatial dependency, perform key roles in economic inequality analysis. The spatial econometric methods do not merely convey a consequence of the characters of the data exclusively. More importantly, they also respect and quantify the spatial effects in the economic inequality. As aforementioned, although regional economic inequality starts to attract scholars' attention in both economy and regional science domains, corresponding methodologies to examine such regional inequality remain in their preliminary phase, which need substantial further exploration. My thesis aims at contributing to the body of knowledge in the method development to support economic inequality studies by exploring the feasibility of a set of new analytical methods in use of regional inequality analysis. These methods include Theil's T statistic, geographical rank Markov and new methods applying graph theory. The thesis will also leverage these methods to compare the inequality between China and US, two large economic entities in the world, because of the long history of economic development as well as the corresponding evolution of inequality in US; the rapid economic development and consequent high variation of economic inequality in China. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Geography 2016

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abstract: Citizen Science programs create a bi-directional flow of knowledge between scientists and citizen volunteers; this flow democratizes science in order to create an informed public (Bonney et al. 2014; Brown, Kelly, and Whitall 2014). This democratization is a fundamental part of creating a science that can address today’s pressing environmental, economic, and social justice problems (Lubchenco 1998). While citizen science programs create an avenue for sharing knowledge between the public and scientists, the exact program details and dynamics leading to different outcomes have not been studied in detail. The current shortcomings in the literature fall into three categories. First, the concept of ‘volunteer’ is used as a catch-all without considering how different demographics (e.g. young, old, wealthy, poor, differently abled, local inhabitants, and visitors) affect both volunteer and scientific outcomes of citizen science. The second shortcoming: there are no standards to assess the quality of citizen science datasets. The third shortcoming: the volunteer and scientific outcomes of these programs are not routinely, or strategically, measured, or integrated into policy and planning (Brossard, Lewenstein, and Bonney 2005). This research advances the understanding of tourist volunteers in citizen science by examining these three shortcomings through a case-study in Denali National Park and Preserve. This case study included the development of the Map of Life-Denali citizen science program is a “tourist-friendly” program. Volunteers of the program use the Map of Life- Denali mobile application to record wildlife observations in the park. Research conducted on this program shows that tourists can be successful citizen science volunteers, and when compared to resident volunteers produce similar data, and have positive volunteer outcomes. The development of a fitness for use assessment, called STAAq is also a part of this research. This assessment is shown to be an effective method for assessing citizen science data quality. Throughout the development and launch of the program, stakeholders (the Park Service, and Aramark) were consulted. The Map of Life-Denali program will be integrated into the park’s shuttle and tour bus systems as an educational tool, however, the scientific merits of the program are still disputed. / Doctoral Dissertation Geography 2017

<p> This thesis presents a general tsunami hazard assessment for the City of Long Beach, California. Although relatively rare, tsunamis from a variety of potential sources threaten Long Beach. An anisotropic, least cost path Geographic Information Systems methodology was utilized to model approximate population exposure numbers within a number of evacuation scenarios. The variables used in the model were evacuation speed and warning time. Potential vertical evacuation sites were deduced and included within the model to compare population exposure numbers with and without the use of a vertical evacuation strategy. </p><p> The results in accordance with the literature reviewed suggest that the implementation of a vertical evacuation strategy, in addition to increased community education and preparedness, could dramatically mitigate risk and reduce the population of Long Beach's vulnerability to tsunamis, and that different areas may benefit from varying risk mitigation strategies. The implementation of vertical evacuation sites in the model decreased the population exposed by an average of 79 percent (with a mode of 99 percent). </p>

<p> The explosion of web-based GIS technologies and the opening up of mapping technologies to common citizens in the past decade have resulted in a whole range of VGI communities like OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi and Wikimapia, that are used to assist emergency management operations on a large scale. However, most crowd sourced systems currently being used for disaster recovery have multiple obstacles like accessibility, ease of use, dependency on social media and requirement of special skill sets on the part of the public participants that serve as limitations to the fulfillment of the democratization potential of VGI.</p><p> Hence an improved Android mobile application was developed which is much more accessible, usable, reliable without any dependency on social media like Facebook to collect and transmit data, thus not only ensuring participation equality but also universal accessibility to quality and timely geographic information during emergency situations.</p>