Earthquakes and Typhoons for Data

Recently, I did a presentation at the Bluewater District School Board during their Professional Development Day. The keynote speaker for the day was David Warlick from the Landmark Project.

David and Doug Photo courtesy of Ron Millar, Waterloo DSB

David's talk dealt with the "New Literacy" and he did an exemplary job of tying Reading/Understanding with Mathematics with the access of information on a global scale. His message also addressed the importance of Critical Literacy. Yes, you can read; Yes, you can write; Yes, you can do the math but there is so much more.

"Merging the study of formal technique with social critique is not simple but this project is no more and no less "political" than any other kind of literacy program. The position taken by critical literacy advocates is that no pedagogy is neutral, no learning process is value-free, no curriculum avoids ideology and power relations. To teach is to encourage human beings to develop in one direction or another. In fostering student development, every teacher chooses some subject matters, some ways of knowing, some ways of speaking and relating, instead of others. These choices orient students to map the world and their relation to it."
Shor, Ira. "What is Critical Literacy." The Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism & Practice. 1 Oct 2006 <http://www.lesley.edu/journals/jppp/4/shor.html>.

Mr. Warlick used data from December, 2004 in his example. If you recall, a horrible typhoon hit in south-east Asia at this time. The United States Geological Survey keeps records of earthquake activity online as a matter of fact and record. Unless you know what to do with this data, it may well be just another collection of useless information.

However, if you know what to do with it, and how to interpret the results, then we can dig into the social impact of this. For example, were the events in South-East Asia the only thing that happened that month? If they weren't, why was this event so significant? Did it have more to do with preparedness, intensity, size, duration, or was it something else?

The data from the USGS is online for all to explore.
http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/epic/epic_global.html

From the search page, you can set the parameters for the date, the intensity, or any number of attributes. David zeroed in on December 2004 with the data formatted to display data in a spreadsheet format.

If you replicate this with a minimum magnitude of 1 and a maximum of 9.9, you'll see the sum total of activity for the month. In fact, the database records a total of 2747 earthquake observations during the month. Since the data is returned in a spreadsheet format, you could copy and paste it into a spreadsheet and do some manipulation. However, since the Ministry of Education has licensed both Tinkerplots and Fathom, we can use the data even quicker.

In this case, I'll use the Fathom application. Open Fathom and position it and your web browser on the screen at the same time. Drag the icon for the URL onto an open area of your Fathom desktop. This will cause Fathom to open a connection to the website and import the data.

click for larger image

Select the collection and drag the Case Table to your desktop. You'll notice that Fathom has faithfully imported all of the data from the webpage. Now, with the collection still selected, drag a new chart onto your desktop.

From the Case Table, drag the Longitude attribute to the horizontal axis and the Latitude attribute to the vertical axis.

click for a larger image

Can we now make some observations about the data that we see. Does this give us more insights about building construction, quality of living, geographic wisdom, and so much more?

Are all earthquakes created equally? As a final step, drag the magnitude attribute to the graph and drop it in the middle. Take a look at the scale. Does this add more information to the discussion? Can we now ask these important questions on a regional basis?

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