Lab - Census 2000, population maps

This map here shows the distribution of Asian population across United States. This map clearly shows that almost 90 percent of United States has less than 1 percent Asian people. Most of the Asians are concentrated in big industrial cities, so I had to be really careful while creating my boundaries. I made 6 classes which would carefully separate 0%-20% from 20%-46% with different colors to emphasis on population above 9%.

This map here shows the distribution of Black population across United States. This map clearly shows that almost 30 percent of United States is heavily populated with African-American people. Most of them are concentrated in South-East part of United States, so I had to be really careful when created my boundaries. I made 6 classes which would carefully separate 0%-30% from 30%-90% with continuous gradient colors to emphasis on population above 30%.

This map here shows the distribution of White population across United States. This map clearly shows that almost 90 percent of United States is heavily populated with White people. Most of the White States are concentrated in middle and north areas of United States, so I had to be really careful when created my boundaries. I made 5 classes which would carefully separate 0%-40% from 40%-99% with dark and light blue colors to emphasis on population close to 90-99%.

Lab7 - DEM

 
    This is a part of Glendale in CA. I like and chose this area because i live there and it has many hills and mountains. I thought that this area would be great to demonstrate on 3D model, because of difference in topography. It is too bad i cannot include 3D buildings and roads in this map. That would be a great model for computer game developers. Still, this is a great tool, i loved it.

EXTENT INFO:
Top - 34.24dd
Down - -118.068dd
Left - -117.876dd
Right - 34.085dd

Spatial Reference - GCS_NORTH_AMERICAN_1983
Datum                   - D_North_American_1983

Lab5 - Projections

1) How many decimal degrees does the equator span? - 360 dd

2) What about the northern- or southern-most 

graticule line on the map? - 180 dd 

3) What do these two lines in fact represent? - latitude(equator)

 and longitude(meridean)

4) how many miles separate Washington, D.C. and 

Afghanistan when crossing the Atlantic? - 7,000 miles

5) Is Alaska really bigger than Brazil? - No

6) What about Greenland? - No

7) How far is Washington, D.C. from Kabul now? - 10,100 miles

Just like any other projection, the Mercator projection distorts shapes and sizes of the true layout of the Earth's surface. The Mercator projection makes areas far from the equator much bigger then in reality. For instance, Greenland takes as much area on the map continent Africa, but in reality Africa's area is much greater than Greenland. Alaska takes as much area on the map as Brazil whereas it is far larger than Alaska. And lastly Antarctica appears as the biggest continent, but actually it is smaller than N America, S America, Eurasia, and Africa. Because of these vast distortions, this projection is not widely used as a good reference of the world map. Nevertheless, Mercator projection is still used commonly for navigation. This projection is still widely used for areas near the equator where distortion is minimal.

The Stereographic projection comes from geometry. It is basically mapping sphere onto plane. The projection is defined on the entire sphere, except at one point — the projection point. This projection preserves angels meaning it is conformal. This looks much alike to Mercator projection, and it also does not preserve the distance and area.  

The Cylindrical equal-area projection is an “equal-area projection” as the name might tell already. As you look closely onto this projection, the longitudes and latitudes are perpendicular and they are (meridians) separated equally. By the nature of their construction type, cylindrical projections stretch distances east-west. My second equal-area projection is Bonne projection. Parallels of latitude are concentric circular arcs, and the scale is true along these arcs. Of you look carefully, the projection is maintaining shapes (areas) on the prime meridian. On this projection the distance is not preserved.

My first equal-distant map projection is Aitoff projection which displays the world on an ellipse. The basic idea behind the Hammer-Aitoff projection was first, to place the whole world in one hemisphere by the simple expedient of dividing all longitudes by two, then to compensate for that, stretch the map out twice as wide. My second projection is Equidistant Conic projection. These equidistant conic projections are well suitable for showing lands that shows some continues feature like temperature or elevation. It is clearly obvious that the projection was done by having North Pole as a center of conic projection, which created big distortion in the areas below equator, especially South Pole.  

Lab 4

    ArcGIS is a great software that helps organize maps. With ArcGIS, users also can create interactive maps with different layers. Different colors make these layers distinctive and attractive for the users as well.

    

    ArcGIS 9.3 makes is easier to create and share good quality maps for all purposes. It was fun to make a new road on the real map, name it something. In addition, ArcGIS includes labeling and more control over where labels are placed inside and around polygons.

    
    I like that you can have a background color and shade to make the map more attractive. I think the interface is very important for software’s users. I also think it is not so hard to use. The part where you could insert map legend, the direction, and map scale was really nice.

    
       I had couple of problems with ArcGIS 9.3. Sometimes when I tried to drag one layer up or down, the mouse cursor would show not allow sign. Every time I had that problem, I had to restart the program. Another problem I encountered was during “start editing”. It would show error messages and, well pretty much you are stacked. I had to restart whole project again.