Updated Info About Centers

Hello All. I just wanted to post and tell you what I have found after playing around with ArcMap for a while.

First off, what you see in the above picture is the Geometric Center of the United States. I do not remember who said it in class, but you do have to dissolve the state boundaries in order to get an accurate depiction of the geometric center. This is easy enough to do, just make sure when you use the dissolve function you do not weight it by anything.

Also, one of the errors that was often seen today, when performing the mean center function, was the data used was not projected. One way to fix this is after you perform the mean center function, you then need to project the point that was created. This will correct the problem if you are receiving a message that the data you are using is not projected.

In addition, I wanted to post the vector format of this map on this blog for download. That way, this map could possibly be used for the activity next week. You can not directly post pictures in vector format in this blog. So what I did was include a link to my web page from UNO. The following link is a downloadable EPS file of this map:

http://myweb.unomaha.edu/~jpence/US%20Geom%20Center.eps

The file should just be ready to download as normal. I also tried to link it with SVG, but this did not work. I assume if I uploaded this with PDF or AI file vector file formats, they would automatically download. In the future, I will zip these files and they should be ready to download.

I will try to get a correct household center map out tomorrow, with the right files.

Until then