Project Titles and Abstracts - Spring 2014

Megan Chang

Prison Population and Representation Distortion

Prison gerrymandering is a problem where prisoners in local facilities count toward the local population although they neither come from the area nor have the legal right to vote. This gives districts with large prisoner populations a disproportionate amount of political clout. To investigate the occurrence of prison gerrymandering in California, I will map the locations of various prison facilities throughout the state and calculate their representation ratio (number of people represented per district) based on total population including inmates and again based on population without prisoners. If the representation ratio of districts with and without prison facilities are similar, then prison gerrymandering is nonexistent. I will also compare California Assembly districts, which are drawn based on population without inmates, to the national Congressional districts. This project will use these information and methods to analyze how the federal and California state government represents its citizens and whether or not they drew districts fairly.

Due to intensive water usage and increasing climate change, water scarcity is becoming a significant risk throughout much of the United States. In many counties, water demand outstrips the renewable water supply recharged through rainwater, and consequently more and more counties are relying on less readily renewable groundwater
to satisfy human, agricultural, and industrial needs. In California, annual estimates for 2005-2010 indicates that groundwater served 30-46% of the state’s total annual water supply, satisfying 39% of the state’s agricultural water usage and 41% of the urban water usage. Furthermore, inconsistencies in rainfall patterns are preventing effective recharge of watersheds; California recently entered its fourth year of the state’s hottest and driest drought in history and is consequently facing increasingly severe water shortages.

Using California as a case study, this research examines the drivers of groundwater depletion through a spatial overlay that compares changes in groundwater levels (points) with agricultural intensity, population density, and changes in precipitation. ArcMap Model Builder is used to compute, map, and overlay weighted sums of normalized values of the three measures. Areas with high agricultural intensity, high population density, and significant decreases in rainfall are highlighted and compared to observed recordings of groundwater depletion. By visualizing the spatial overlay of the drivers of groundwater depletion, such an approach can help identify regions most at risk for future groundwater shortages across the US.

In recent years, Milwaukee has been named the most segregated metro area in the United States. The most recent notable example is a 2013 analysis conducted by professors John Logan and Brian Stults from Brown University and Florida State University, respectively. Business Insider ranked the top 25 most segregated metro areas using the dissimilarity index to weigh white-black, white-Hispanic, and white-Asian dissimilarity scores. The result was that the Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis metropolitan area ranked number 1. Therefore, This study examines the history of racial segregation patterns in the city of Milwaukee to gain perspective on how this came to be. Census data from 1980-2010 is used o track race along with average household income and highest education attained for individuals 25 and over. The census data are have been adjusted by Geolytics so that they fit 2010 census tract boundaries. Other community based indicators, developed by non-profit organizations in the area such as the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, are also used to characterize places and residents. The quantitative work and visualization provides some historical perspective on how these patterns dvolved over the last 35 years.