Upcoming Event: 2014 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)

Readers of my blog know that I have been attending the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) for the past two years. While these meetings took place in some of the largest and most international cities in the USA (New York in 2012 and Los Angeles in 2013), the AAG decided to hold the 2014 meeting in Tampa, FL. There’s nothing wrong with this – I love Florida and it should be nice and warm there in early April – but I can’t help but be a little afraid that the city will be more or less overrun by geographers over the course of the conference week. Also, there seem to be mostly two types of accommodation in Tampa: either luxury hotels that break my budget (even at the “discounted conference rate” of USD 199 per night in select hotels) or shady motels far away from the conference venue…

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IGU2013: Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Bicycle Commuting Behavior in the Greater Tokyo Area Using a Micro-Scale Persontrip Database

I just finished my first presentation of the 2013 IGU Regional Conference in Kyoto. In this presentation, co-authored by my academic advisor Prof. Yuji Murayama from the Division for Spatial Information Science at the University of Tsukuba, I talked about some very early findings of one of our most recent research projects analyzing the use of bicycles in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. We are especially interested if and how the use of bicycles is integrated in routine commuting activities. We are doing this by analyzing a large-scale database of persontrip information.

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Upcoming Event: 2013 Regional Conference of the IGU

From August 4th to 9th 2013 the International Geographic Union (IGU) will hold their 2013 Regional Conference at the International Conference Center in Kyoto. There, at the birthplace of the famous Kyoto Protocol, geographers from all over the world (theoretically – personally I expect a majority of fellows from Asia, hence the “Regional” in the conference name) will gather to discuss, exchange and network for 6 days. The theme of the conference is “Traditional Wisdom and Modern Knowledge for the Earth’s Future”, and what country could be better suited for this dialog between old and new than Japan, where this opposition can be observed everywhere and all the time.

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