As we approach the beginning of the new term, preparation for our classes is well under way. Many of our GIS classes are full but there are seats remaining in a few classes such as Joel Wainwright's Climate Justice course (Geography 5801). The course meets Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:50-2:45 PM and has no prerequisites.

Recent news includes the arrival of our new colleague Steven Quiring who is now in town. His office is 1124 and he will be getting settled shortly. Max Woodworth is back from his research in Asia, and we are expecting Joel Wainwright any day from his sabbatical at the University of British Columbia. See more about UBC here: they have a very inventive and informative home page.

Harvey Miller, Morton O'Kelly and Young Jaegal have been working on their Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) funded effort to use archived data to improve traffic data collection and modeling. The effort is centered in Allen County Ohio which provides many unique features designed to test out capabilities. Partners include Westat and PB Consulting.

Our undergraduate student Rachel Beery continues to have a successful summer internship at the National Geographic. We look forward to hearing more upon her return to campus. She was also able to meet and greet with Dean Jan Box Steffensmeier during her recent visit to DC. Arts and Sciences will be featuring news about Rachel in an upcoming issue.

This week marks the beginning of Dan Sui's term at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and we look forward to updates and hearing from Dan about how the NSF works from the inside.

A project worked on by Becky Mansfield entitled a “Proposal for Programming Leading to a Science and Technology Studies (STS) Center” has been funded for the cluster of colleagues working on this area in the Arts and Humanities. It supported by Dean Hahn under the Humanities & Arts Discovery Theme (H&ADT) Grant.  Great to have a geographer involved. 

Kevin Cox’s book The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the American Exception will be published this fall by Syracuse University Press. Kevin is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in our department. In his book, Kevin addresses the question of why US policy is so unique. In doing so, he illustrates the essential characteristics of American regional development through a series of case studies including housing politics in Silicon Valley; the history of the Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport; and a major redevelopment project that was rebuffed in Columbus.

Finally this week, Diane Carducci has worked hard with the Chair and with our available resources to develop a TA assignment roster for the coming term. With Diane’s knowledge and experience, the tricky task of balancing student preferences and teaching needs has been solved and achieves a very high degree of satisfaction. We can't make everyone happy all the time, particularly with imbalances in our graduate recruitment, but we expect the results will be excellent for our undergraduate classes.