Accelerating ethics, empathy, and equity in geographic information science.

Science has traditionally been driven by curiosity and followed one goal: the pursuit of truth and the advancement of knowledge. Recently, ethics, empathy, and equity, which we term "the 3Es," are emerging as new drivers of research and disrupting established practices. Drawing on our own field of GIScience (geographic information science), our goal is to use the geographic approach to accelerate the response to the 3Es by identifying priority issues and research needs that, if addressed, will advance ethical, empathic, and equitable GIScience. We also aim to stimulate similar responses in other disciplines. Organized around the 3Es we discuss ethical issues arising from locational privacy and cartographic integrity, how our ability to build knowledge that will lead to empathy can be curbed by data that lack representativeness and by inadvertent inferential error, and how GIScientists can lead toward equity by supporting social justice efforts and democratizing access to spatial science and its tools. We conclude with a call to action and invite all scientists to join in a fundamentally different science that responds to the 3Es and mobilizes for change by engaging in humility, broadening measures of excellences and success, diversifying our networks, and creating pathways to inclusive education. Science united around the 3Es is the right response to this unique moment where society and the planet are facing a vast array of challenges that require knowledge, truth, and action.

Randomness and order in the topology of settlement systems.

"The frequency distribution of settlement links forms the basis of a linear programming methodology which can be utilized to analyze the structure of settlement systems. The resulting index of system topology is compared to a more conventional measure, Geary's contiguity coefficient, which may be applied when the problem is conceptualized as one of spatial autocorrelation on a k-color map. The index of linkage similarity that is introduced appears to have a useful advantage over the Geary measure. The Geary and linkage similarity indices are used to examine the topology of four Canadian and two hypothetical settlement systems."

Intransitivity, the spatial interaction model, and U.S. migration streams.

"The flows predicted by a large class of spatial interaction models are transitive, yet US migration tables have been shown to contain large numbers of intransitivities. This paper investigates a number of possible conditions under which flows regulated by the spatial interaction model might be observed to be intransitive. A singly constrained gravity model is calibrated for a number of flow tables, and distorted by sampling error, by aggregation over strata, and by an independently distributed error term.... The results of the calibration of the spatial interaction using US interstate migration flows, 1935-1970, are given and compared with others previously published."