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John A. Matthews’s Followers (1)
John A. Matthews
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Geography: A Very Short Introduction
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published
2008
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16 editions
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The Ecology of Recently-deglaciated Terrain: A Geoecological Approach to Glacier Forelands
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published
1992
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3 editions
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Geografia - Uma brevissima introducao
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The Encyclopaedic Dictionary Of Environmental Change
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published
2001
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America's #1 Mexican cook book: 600 Mexican recipes
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published
1987
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Unifying Geography: Common Heritage, Shared Future
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published
2004
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The SAGE Handbook of Environmental Change
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published
2011
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4 editions
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Quantitative and Statistical Approaches to Geography: A Practical Manual
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published
1981
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3 editions
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Encyclopedia of Environmental Change
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published
2013
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5 editions
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Glaciers: the New Legacy: Inaugural Lecture, 1997
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“The Geographical Experiment gave geography the chance to establish itself as a university discipline. The breadth of its terms of reference was both a strength and a weakness. The strength was that it included nature and culture and their relationship, a concept no other discipline had claimed. This breadth remains a contested topic in modern geography despite the opportunities it presents of ever-increasing relevance. The weakness is the spread of interest over such a wide field and an ‘anything goes’ mentality. This weakness becomes most apparent when different parts of the discipline relate to different intellectual traditions. The touching points then become very few or non-existent. It is fair to say that most physical geography today is evolving within the research framework of the natural and mathematical sciences, whereas most human geography draws upon and interrelates with the traditions of the humanities and social studies. It is possible to recognize a definite lacuna in which physical and human geography interact, but for many this is a minority interest.”
― Geography: A Very Short Introduction
― Geography: A Very Short Introduction
“Of the early founders, the most eminent proponent of physical geography as a scientific entity was undoubtedly the German polymath Alexander von Humboldt. On his many travels, he combined observations with measurements of temperature, pressure, and the Earth’s magnetic field, and made generalizations about the geographical distribution of vegetation, global-scale patterns of temperature (depicted by isotherms on maps), the ways in which temperature falls and vegetation varies with increasing altitude (on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, for example), the alignment of volcanoes, and the course of ocean currents. In his major works, written around the middle of the 19th century, such as
Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe
, published in 1849, he emphasized not only relationships within the natural geo-ecosphere but also linkages to human societies. A year earlier, Mary Somerville, based at the University of Oxford, published
Physical Geography
and defined the subject as ‘a description of the Earth, the sea and the air, with their inhabitants animal and vegetable, of the distribution of these organized beings and the causes of that distribution’.”
― Geography: A Very Short Introduction
― Geography: A Very Short Introduction
“The ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography required the discipline to adopt an explicitly scientific approach, including numerical and statistical methods, and mathematical modelling, so ‘numeracy’ became another necessary skill. Its immediate impact was greatest on human geography as physical geographers were already using these methods. A new lexicon encompassing the language of statistics and its array of techniques entered geography as a whole. Terms such as random sampling, correlation, regression, tests of statistical significance, probability, multivariate analysis, and simulation became part both of research and undergraduate teaching. Correlation and regression are procedures to measure the strength and form, respectively, of the relationships between two or more sets of variables. Significance tests measure the confidence that can be placed in those relationships. Multivariate methods enable the analysis of many variables or factors simultaneously – an appropriate approach for many complex geographical data sets. Simulation is often linked to probability and is a set of techniques capable of extrapolating or projecting future trends.”
― Geography: A Very Short Introduction
― Geography: A Very Short Introduction
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