Understanding family experiences as a means for developing relevant curriculum for children in a pre-kindergarten classroom.

This study examined the households of three preschool students and their families. The study consisted of three main areas of study. One area of investigation was the personal interviews relating to family histories, educational histories and work histories of the family (three lower middle income families). Another area was the sociodramatic play development of the children. The last area of investigation was the home inventory of the living environment of the children. The information gathered from this study was then used to help create a more appropriate child centered curriculum for these students

Towards a compact representation of temporal rasters

Big research efforts have been devoted to efficiently manage spatio-temporal data. However, most works focused on vectorial data, and much less, on raster data. This work presents a new representation for raster data that evolve along time named Temporal k^2 raster. It faces the two main issues that arise when dealing with spatio-temporal data: the space consumption and the query response times. It extends a compact data structure for raster data in order to manage time and thus, it is possible to query it directly in compressed form, instead of the classical approach that requires a complete decompression before any manipulation. In addition, in the same compressed space, the new data structure includes two indexes: a spatial index and an index on the values of the cells, thus becoming a self-index for raster data.Comment: This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 BIRDS GA No. 690941. Published in SPIRE 201

Enhancing spatial accuracy of mobile phone data using multi-temporal dasymetric interpolation

Novel digital data sources allow us to attain enhanced knowledge about locations and mobilities of people in space and time. Already a fast-growing body of literature demonstrates the applicability and feasibility of mobile phone-based data in social sciences for considering mobile devices as proxies for people. However, the implementation of such data imposes many theoretical and methodological challenges. One major issue is the uneven spatial resolution of mobile phone data due to the spatial configuration of mobile network base stations and its spatial interpolation. To date, different interpolation techniques are applied to transform mobile phone data into other spatial divisions. However, these do not consider the temporality and societal context that shapes the human presence and mobility in space and time. The paper aims, first, to contribute to mobile phone-based research by addressing the need to give more attention to the spatial interpolation of given data, and further by proposing a dasymetric interpolation approach to enhance the spatial accuracy of mobile phone data. Second, it contributes to population modelling research by combining spatial, temporal and volumetric dasymetric mapping and integrating it with mobile phone data. In doing so, the paper presents a generic conceptual framework of a multi-temporal function-based dasymetric (MFD) interpolation method for mobile phone data. Empirical results demonstrate how the proposed interpolation method can improve the spatial accuracy of both night-time and daytime population distributions derived from different mobile phone data sets by taking advantage of ancillary data sources. The proposed interpolation method can be applied for both location- and person-based research, and is a fruitful starting point for improving the spatial interpolation methods for mobile phone data. We share the implementation of our method in GitHub as open access Python code.Peer reviewe

Geographical and temporal weighted regression (GTWR)

Both space and time are fundamental in human activities as well as in various physical processes. Spatiotemporal analysis and modeling has long been a major concern of geographical information science (GIScience), environmental science, hydrology, epidemiology, and other research areas. Although the importance of incorporating the temporal dimension into spatial analysis and modeling has been well recognized, challenges still exist given the complexity of spatiotemporal models. Of particular interest in this article is the spatiotemporal modeling of local nonstationary processes. Specifically, an extension of geographically weighted regression (GWR), geographical and temporal weighted regression (GTWR), is developed in order to account for local effects in both space and time. An efficient model calibration approach is proposed for this statistical technique. Using a 19-year set of house price data in London from 1980 to 1998, empirical results from the application of GTWR to hedonic house price modeling demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority to the traditional GWR approach, highlighting the importance of temporally explicit spatial modeling

Dasymetric distribution of votes in a dense city

[EN] A large proportion of electoral analyses using geography are performed on a small area basis, such as polling units. Unfortunately, polling units are frequently redrawn, provoking breaks in their data series. Previous electoral results play a key role in many analyses. They are used by political party workers and journalists to present quick assessments of outcomes, by political scientists and electoral geographers to perform detailed scrutinizes and by pollsters and forecasters to anticipate electoral results. In this paper, we study to what extent more complex geographical approaches (based on a proper location of electors on the territory using dasymetric techniques) are of value in comparison to simple methods (like areal weighting) for the problem of reallocating votes in a large, dense city. Barcelona is such a city and, having recently redrawn the boundaries of its census sections, it is an ideal candidate for further scrutiny. Although previous studies show the approaches based on dasymetric techniques outperforming simpler solutions for interpolating census figures, our results show that improvements in the process of reallocating votes are marginal. This brings into question the extra effort that entails introducing ancillary sources of information in a dense urban area for this kind of data. Additional research is required to know whether and when these results are extendable. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness under Grant CSO2013-43054-R.Pavia, JM.; Cantarino-Martí, I. (2017). Dasymetric distribution of votes in a dense city. Applied Geography. 86:22-31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2017.06.021S22318

Can dasymetric mapping significantly improve population data reallocation in a dense urban area?

The issue of reallocating population figures from a set of geographical units onto another set of units has received a great deal of attention in the literature. Every other day, a new algorithm is proposed, claiming that it outperforms competitor procedures. Unfortunately, when the new (usually more complex) methods are applied to a new data set, the improvements attained are sometimes just marginal. The relationship cost-effectiveness of the solutions is case-dependent. The majority of studies have focused on large areas with heterogeneous population density distributions. The general conclusion is that as a rule more sophisticated methods are worth the effort. It could be argued, however, that when we work with a variable that varies gradually in relatively homogeneous small units, simple areal weighting methods could be sufficient and that ancillary variables would produce marginal improvements. For the case of reallocating census data, our study shows that, even under the above conditions, the most sophisticated approaches clearly yield the better results. After testing fourteen methods in Barcelona (Spain), the best results are attained using as ancillary variable the total dwelling area in each residential building. Our study shows the 3-D methods as generating the better outcomes followed by multiclass 2-D procedures, binary 2-D approaches and areal weighting and 1-D algorithms. The point-based interpolation procedures are by far the ones producing the worst estimates.We wish to thank three anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions and comments, the Spanish Official Statistical Agency (INE) for their first-rate assistance in producing, from individual records, the benchmark variables analyzed in this research and Marie Hodkinson for revising the English of the paper. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness under Grant CSO2013-43054-R.Pavía, JM.; Cantarino Martí, I. (2017). Can dasymetric mapping significantly improve population data reallocation in a dense urban area?. Geographical Analysis. 49(2):155-174. https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.12112S15517449

A framework for interpolating scattered data using space-filling curves

The analysis of spatial data occurs in many disciplines and covers a wide variety activities. Available techniques for such analysis include spatial interpolation which is useful for tasks such as visualization and imputation. This paper proposes a novel approach to interpolation using space-filling curves. Two simple interpolation methods are described and their ability to interpolate is compared to several interpolation techniques including natural neighbour interpolation. The proposed approach requires a Monte-Carlo step that requires a large number of iterations. However experiments demonstrate that the number of iterations will not change appreciably with larger datasets

A population density grid for Spain

This is an author's accepted manuscript of an article published in "International Journal of Geographical Information Science"; Volume 27, Issue 12, 2013; copyright Taylor & Francis; available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13658816.2013.799283This article describes a high-resolution land cover data set for Spain and its application to dasymetric population mapping (at census tract level). Eventually, this vector layer is transformed into a grid format. The work parallels the effort of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, in collaboration with Eurostat and the European Environment Agency (EEA), in building a population density grid for the whole of Europe, combining CORINE Land Cover with population data per commune. We solve many of the problems due to the low resolution of CORINE Land Cover, which are especially visible with Spanish data. An accuracy assessment is carried out from a simple aggregation of georeferenced point population data for the region of Madrid. The bottom-up grid constructed in this way is compared to our top-down grid. We show a great improvement over what has been reported from commune data and CORINE Land Cover, but the improvements seem to come entirely from the higher resolution data sets and not from the statistical modeling in the downscaling exercise. This highlights the importance of providing the research community with more detailed land cover data sets, as well as more detailed population data. The dasymetric grid is available free of charge from the authors upon request.The authors acknowledge financial support from the BBVA Foundation-Ivie research programme and the first author also acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, ECO2011-23248 project. Results mentioned, but not shown, are available from the authors upon request. The grid numbers are also available from the authors.Goerlich Sanchis, FJ.; Cantarino Martí, I. (2013). A population density grid for Spain. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. 27(12):1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2013.799283S117271

Proyecto de Cooperación Internacional para la Creación de un Comedor Comunitario en el Resguardo Jellusira en la Guajira.

Los altos índices de desnutrición y muertes asociadas a esta causa han motivado a la estructura de este proyecto de cooperación internacional con el fin de implementar un comedor comunitario en el resguardo Jellusira, ubicado en el municipio de Manaure en la Guajira, a partir del cual se garantiza la ración de desayuno y almuerzo a 75 habitantes de esta comunidad, impactando directamente en su calidad de vida, mejorando la seguridad alimentaria e indirectamente a la promoción de su actividad económica principal que es la artesanía. Apuntando al segundo, al tercer y octavo objetivo de desarrollo sostenibles relacionados con hambre cero, salud y bienestar y la promoción del crecimiento económico. Este comedor comunitario garantizará la sanidad alimentaria para todos sus habitantes, la atención a necesidades prioritarias de la comunidad, promoviendo el trabajo de los locales en el avance de su producción artesanal, la capacitación en el manejo de alimentos en las condiciones que ofrece su región, en el marco de la cooperación internacional y la participación de entidades gubernamentales de la región, empresas privadas a nivel nacional e internacional, y voluntarios que quieran aportar cualquier recurso para mejorar la calidad alimentaria en este resguardo indígena.The high rates of malnutrition and deaths associated with this cause have motivated the structure of this international cooperation project in order to implement a community dining room in the Jellusira reservation, located in the municipality of Manaure in La Guajira, from which guarantees the breakfast and lunch ration to 75 inhabitants of this community, directly impacting their quality of life, improving food security and indirectly promoting their main economic activity, which is handicrafts. Aiming at the second, third and eighth sustainable development goals related to zero hunger, health and well-being and the promotion of economic growth. This community dining room will guarantee food safety for all its inhabitants, attention to priority needs of the community, promoting the work of locals in the advancement of their artisanal production, training in food handling in the conditions offered by their region, within the framework of international cooperation and the participation of government entities in the region, private companies at the national and international level, and volunteers who want to contribute any resource to improve food quality in this indigenous reservation

The places parents go: understanding the breadth, scope, and experiences of activity spaces for parents

The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-015-9690-yNeighborhood environments are related to parenting behaviors, which in turn have a life-long effect on children’s health and well-being. Activity spaces, which measure individual routine patterns of movement, may be helpful in assessing how physical and social environments shape parenting. In this study we use qualitative data and GIS mapping from four California cities to examine parental activity spaces. Parents described a number of factors that shape their activity spaces including caregiving status, the age of their children, and income. Parental activity spaces also varied between times (weekends vs. weekdays) and places (adult-only vs. child-specific places). Knowing how to best capture and study parental activity spaces could identify mechanisms by which environmental factors influence parenting behaviors and child health