Discussion Questions

1. Explain the concepts of smoothness and irregularity of geographic data.
2. What is spatial heterogeneity?
3. What is the First Law of Geography and how does it relate to the term spatial autocorrelation?
4. Explain the taxonomy of spatial objects.
5. What is the difference between natural and artificial objects?
6. What is point pattern analysis?
7. Explain spatial independence, spatial clustering, and extreme spatial autocorrelation.
8. What is a sampling intercal and what does it mean to say that spatial autocorrelation is scale dependent?
9. Sierpinski's carpet is said to be self-similar at different spatial resolutions.  Explain.
10. Geographic data are only as good as the sampling scheme used .  Explain the difference between a simple random and a spatially systematic sampling scheme.
11. Spatially systematic sampling schemes are vulnerable to periodicity in data.  Explain.
12. A stratified random sampling scheme avoids the problem of periodicity.  Explain how and why.
13. How might you adapt either the simple or statified sampling design to a study area for which the variable you are sampling is spatially heterogeneous in part of the study area and homgeneous in another part?
14. Distance decay can be described differently for different variables.  Describe the conceptual (not mathematical) differences between linear, negative power, and negative exponential distance decay.
15. What does isotropic mean as it pertains to how something varies in space?
16. What are isopleth maps and what types of data do they display?
17. What is a choropleth map and what is the difference between one that displays a spatially extensive variable and a spatially intensive variable?
18. What is a contiguity weights matrix?
19. Without getting into the math, what do the Moran's statistic and Geary Index measure?  What do they really mean?
20. When using regression analysis to measure the direction and strength of the association between property value and floor space, which is the independent variable and which is the dependent variable?
21. What is a regression residual?
22. The assumption of zero spatial autocorrelation that is made by many methods of statistical inference is in direct contradiction to Tobler's Law. Explain.
23. What is multicollinearity?
24. The length of a coast is scale-dependent.  Explain.