Notes of papers read before the society through the Yangtse Gorges

Critics of spatial modeling make several damaging points: (1) results are often trivial; (2) they contradict a priori insights derived from theory or experience; and (3) they preclude an evaluation of the substantive coherence of theories. These critiques arise because analysts have selected criteria of statistical explanation over substantive interpretation. This paper reviews the trade‐off as exemplified by regression models. The paper then presents an alternative methodology, staged regression analysis, and discusses its three‐fold advantage over traditional regression models: (1) avoiding statistical‐substantive trade‐offs; (2) facilitating comparisons among spatial systems; and (3) evaluating and refining existing theory.     

Procedural and Substantive Fairness in Risk Decisions: Comparative Risk Assessment Procedures1

The issue of fairness often is central within environmental policy debates. The recent proliferation of state and local comparative risk projects for informing the selection of environmental policy priorities offers an appropriate setting to explore the issue of procedural fairness in risk-based decisionmaking. This paper describes and evaluates the process by which one of the initial state comparative risk projects, Washington's “Environment 2010,” attempted to include a broader range of participants in identifying, assessing, and generating preferred management strategies for a wide range of environmental hazards. The Washington case study suggests that comparative risk projects can be fairer procedurally, but that significant barriers remain. Noting that greater procedural fairness does not necessarily produce greater substantive fairness, the paper concludes that more attention needs to be directed at the process by which comparative risk projects translate their consensus upon risk priorities into subsequent actions.     

Legal geographies and ecological invisibility: The environmental myopia of evidence

This study shows how legal evidentiary rules intended to make trials fair also enable biodiversity loss, even in courts charged with environmental protection. The common law is premised on two types of rules. The first, substantive laws, set rules for how society should function—obstructing and punishing some behaviours while enabling and rewarding others. In contrast, procedural laws are intended to level the playing field when there is a dispute over substantive rules during litigation. This case study concerns a routine environmental dispute over land development in Sydney, Australia. It demonstrates how, by enabling courts to determine what evidence will and will not be considered, procedural rules and practices drive substantive outcomes by rendering certain places, dynamics, and connections visible and capable of judicial action while obscuring others. Specifically, the court’s efforts to use evidentiary tools to make litigation more efficient drove substantive outcomes in two ways. First, work to narrow evidence to address factual disputes also narrowed the court’s geographic scale of analysis to the property boundaries of the site, thus obscuring broader threats to a critically endangered ecological community. Second, these procedural evidentiary decisions drove substantive outcomes undermining biodiversity protection, while concealing their inherently substantive nature. Combined with the tendency of the court to use procedural informality to promote compromise between the parties, and a broader juridical treatment of intact ecological communities as species that can largely be moved at will, the evidentiary rules enabled an environmentally focused court to enable the victory of development over species protection.     

History of German Universities

This article has three main goals. Firstly, it intends to present the interesting but little-studied intellectual figure of Sir Francis Kynaston (1586ca.–1642), his educational enterprises, and his contributions to 17th-century English culture. Secondly, it aims to illustrate in detail his often neglected or, at best, misunderstood political ideas and connect them to the type of debates and controversies he was involved in at the end of the 1620s. In doing so, one of the principal objectives will be to revisit the traditional scholarly interpretations of Kynaston's place within the history of political thought in early modern England. In particular, attention will be paid to the language Kynaston employed to attack a specific political paradigm, that is parliamentarian “patriotism”. Finally, the essay will endeavour to show the interplay between Kynaston's educational project and cultural ideals, on one side, and his absolutist political doctrines and goals, on the other.     

恩施州乡村旅游扶贫模式及其效应差异研究

为了回答如何判别旅游扶贫模式、旅游扶贫模式是否影响旅游扶贫效应等问题,提出了由区位—产业—文化组成的旅游扶贫资源多要素协同框架作为判别旅游扶贫模式的依据,以此为指导,利用访谈数据,将恩施州南部4县的22个旅游扶贫重点村划分为4种模式：优势景区依托模式、生态农业依托模式、民宿农家乐依托模式和民族文化依托模式。而后,利用问卷调查数据,运用方差分析法比较了不同模式扶贫村居民的旅游扶贫效应感知差异,结果发现：①不同旅游扶贫模式村居民对经济收益、经济成本、环境成本和社会成本的感知具有显著差异,说明旅游扶贫模式是影响旅游扶贫效应的因素;②与其他两种模式村相比,优势景区、生态农业依托模式村居民的旅游扶贫经济效益感知更高,同时经济、环境或社会成本感知也更高,表明旅游扶贫在带来经济效益的同时,也带来了较高的经济、环境和社会成本。最后,提出了促进民族地区旅游扶贫工作改进的对策建议。     

再論唐代的使職和職事官——李建墓碑墓誌的啓示

本文認爲:在唐代,舉凡沒有官品的實職官位,都是使職,如史館史官、知制誥等。由於沒有官品,使職常以"他官充某職"的方式來委任。使職的特徵,主要有三:(一)使職與掌權者之間有一種信任,有一定的"私"關係;(二)使職的權力和享有的好處,遠多於類似職位的職事官,以致職事官以爲使職"侵奪"了職事官原本的權益;(三)使職常不載於正規的政典和職官志,乃正常現象。本文還認爲:使職遠遠早於正規的職事官制,在人類最簡單的"遊羣"(band)組織階段就已形成,乃人類最本能的發明之一。到了帝制時代,當掌權者發覺正規職事官無效率時,重新委派使職來替代職事官,以致在唐後半期,使職取代了超過一半以上的職事官。這是一種"革新",是推動唐代官制演化的一大動力。     

Democracy,Equity and Common Property Resource Management in the Indian Subcontinent

This article addresses the relationship between democracy, equity and common property resource management in South Asia, both at the national and at the local level. Its substantive focus will be largely on forests, and its geographical concentration mostly on India, although other sectors (primarily water) and areas (Nepal and Bangladesh) will also be included. The article opens by looking at Garrett Hardin's (1968) three strategies to preserve the commons. It finds that democratic politics is compatible with both privatization and centralization as conserving strategies (although not necessarily successful). With the third approach—local control—democracy has at best a problematic relationship, for where governmental units are the relevant actors, there tends to be more interest in consuming than in conserving or preserving resources at the local level. Local user groups, however, do much better at common property resource management, because they can restrict membership and thus avoid free riders, and they can establish a close linkage in their members' minds between benefits and costs of participating in group discipline to maintain the resource.     

Setting the Table: Majority Party Effects in the United States Senate

This article joins the growing tide of research that studies party effects in the United States Senate. Previous work has shown that certain procedural tools disproportionately advantage the majority party at the expense of the minority. We build on this research by exploiting a new dataset that allows us to study motions to table amendments from the 91st to the 111th Congress. By examining the success of these motions, analyzing the voting calculus of individual senators on procedural and substantive votes, and simulating the aggregate impact of this tool, we provide some of the strongest evidence to date that political parties (and the majority party in particular) influence the legislative process and policy outcomes in the Senate. Our findings stand in stark contrast to the traditional vision of the Senate as an individualistic body.     

Ambitious deep energy retrofits of buildings to accelerate the 1.5°C energy transition in Canada

Scientists advise limiting global warming to 1.5°C with substantial actions by 2030. Our viewpoint argues that climate response strategies in Canada have underemphasized and underestimated the potential contribution deep energy retrofits can make to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, leading to inadequate responses in the building sector, and that Canada can (and should) be ambitious with building retrofits over the next decade. GHG savings from building retrofits can be realized more quickly than GHG reductions from other sectors, and either deliver net cost savings or are cost‐effective when compared to other mitigation measures. Retrofits can also provide social and economic benefits, such as improved health and comfort, and lower energy costs. This paper reviews energy use and building retrofits in Canada and argues the following should be implemented: (1) focus innovation on deep energy retrofit processes, not singular retrofit actions; (2) maximize both social and environmental benefits; (3) improve data gathering and availability for analysis and delivery; (4) innovate for a process of decisions and to avoid “dropouts” during the retrofit process; and (5) focus innovation on business models that maximize benefits.     

Categories of Local Economic Development: An Empirical Analysis

In examining local economic development incentives, scholars have found it useful to employ typologies of development practices. Such typologies have been based on assumptions that techniques reflect functional categories, such as marketing and financial incentives, or can be organized by the nature of costs and benefits, or by the nature of incentive goals. While useful heuristic devices, little effort has been made to test these typologies empirically. This research note provides an empirically based typology of local economic development incentives, using data from 967 cities collected by the International City Management Association.     

Creative industries in a European Capital of Culture

This article examines the articulation of the benefits associated with staging the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) in Liverpool, England in 2008. It is argued that relevant policy documents, and policy discourses more generally, propose a strong influential role for the operations of the ECoC upon the creative industries. Such a strong relationship, however, is difficult to evidence either at a discursive level or from the attitudes expressed by those working within the creative industries locally. The idea that the ECoC can promote broadly ‘creative’ activity is thus posited as being merely one aspect of the ECoC’s major goal of attempted city rebranding, rather than anything more substantive; nevertheless the articulation of ‘success’ of the ECoC in this regard seems entrenched.     

Rethinking State Rail Policy

In the last two decades, many states established rail promotion programs in an effort to limit the contraction of their railroad networks. Now federal funds for rail projects are nearly exhausted, and states must decide whether to expand considerably their levels of internal funding for short line investments. Such a decision requires a careful articulation of policy goals, combined with sound cost-benefit techniques. Research shows, however, that states often fail to evaluate the full range of costs and benefits when considering rail investments. Instead, the economic development benefits of local rail service frequently are overstated, while the potential for rail investments to meet broader transportation planning needs is neglected. This paper evaluates the rationale behind state intervention in the rail industry, discusses the tendency of states to focus on economic development to the exclusion of other benefit categories, and presents summary results from an analysis of an investment project in North Carolina. The paper suggests that state funding for rail projects is more likely to be justified based on intermodal substitution benefits generated by local rail service, rather than the railroads' potential to increase jobs.     

Evaluating Comanagement for Social‐Ecological Fit: Indigenous Priorities and Agency Mandates for Pacific Walrus

Governance arrangements such as comanagement are regarded by many as promising arenas for effective natural resource management. However, measuring comanagement's success at achieving conservation goals has been equivocal. Our research evaluates the lack of conclusive outcomes through a critical consideration of how different goals and values inherent in comanagement affect the institutional (or policy) diagnostic of “fit.” More narrowly, sustaining natural resources requires that management policies foster fit between the scales of sociopolitical processes governing resource use and the scales of ecological processes regulating a resource. Without a process that encourages such harmonization, theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that comanagement regimes are unlikely to accomplish long‐term conservation goals. We use a case study of walrus comanagement under the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act to demonstrate that when the formal institutions preconditioning comanagement do not develop out of a deliberative process among comanagement partners, two major problems can arise: (i) Policy institutions mismatch ecological and social processes relevant to resources and communities; and (ii) data to assess the fit of institutions and support learning is more difficult to acquire. In our case study, both these factors constrain the ability of comanagement to foster walrus conservation or support the capacity of Native Alaskans to adapt to contemporary social and environmental conditions. Our research concludes that to achieve marine mammal conservation, previous institutional arrangements framing comanagement that are predicated on static conceptions of people and ecosystems must be redesigned to provide better policy fit across local to international priorities. To do so requires opening up deliberative spaces, where Western science and priorities are confronted with indigenous perspectives. However, the benefit of enhancing deliberation carries risks and costs related to trade‐offs between the values of democratic process, and protections for both wildlife species and indigenous groups.     

Historic Barrel Vaults Undergoing Differential Settlements

ABSTRACT

A principal reason of damage in historic masonry vaults consists in relative displacements of the vaults’ abutments. Excluding the case of seismic-induced damage, cracks are often produced by differential settlements generated by the lateral wall instability or soil degradation (e.g., due to stress concentrations, non-uniform soil stratigraphy, flooding phenomena etc.). When dealing with historic vaults, the effects of long-term deformation processes cannot often be linked directly to causes, which may also be unknown. In this article, the effects of differential settlements on historic masonry barrel vaults are investigated. An efficient 3D contact-based model was developed to reproduce experiments on a scaled pointed barrel vault (representative of a typology of late-medieval barrel vaults in Scotland) under non-uniform differential settlement. First, the numerical model is used to simulate the experimental campaign, achieving good agreement in terms of crack pattern (longitudinal shear) and transverse-longitudinal deformation profiles. Then, further analyses are carried out to gain insight on the effects of several plausible uniform and non-uniform settlement patterns on representative historic barrel vaults. Various settlement configurations were analysed and complex failure patterns observed. This study could help analysts in understanding the nature of on-going deformation process in historic masonry vaults and engineers in the design of strengthening strategies.     

VOLUNTEERS, NIMBYs, AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: DILEMMAS OF DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE

The principle of environmental equity constitutes a challenge to local autonomy and democratic practice. Community protest is sometimes hailed as an expression of local autonomy, sometimes derided as NIMBYism. To disentangle these issues we must reexamine environmental justice in light of the distinction between distributional and procedural justice. A search for just procedures for distributing environmental burdens represents an unnecessarily truncated view. Procedural equity entails democratic participation not only with regard to distribution but in prior decisions affecting production of costs and benefits. Two brief case studies illustrate the possibility of reconciling environmental equity with local autonomy. Geographers concerned with environmental inequity might turn from mapping the distribution of burdens to mapping power relations between local communities and the structures producing those burdens.     

Surviving Between the Trenches: Planning Research,Methodology and Theory of Science

Planning research-understood as research aiming to improve the body of knowledge on which spatial planning is based-includes issues rooted both in the social sciences, natural science and the humanities. Spatial planners need knowledge about the likely consequences of different alternatives of action, as well as understanding of the role of plans and planning processes in the development of society. This is reflected in the two-fold focus of planning research on both substantive and procedural issues. Whereas research on the role of plans and planning processes takes place mainly within a non-positivist social science paradigm, the research aiming to provide planners with the knowledge needed in order to make good plans is often situated in the battlefield between opposing positions within theory of science. Because planning research has both society and the physical as its subject of inquiry, a reflective opinion about the interaction between the physical environment and human actions is crucial. Traditionally, many spatial planners have conceived of this in a quite näive way, assuming that human behaviour can to a high extent be shaped or controlled by manipulating the physical environment. During recent decades, this view has been sharply criticized by anti-positivist scholars, and some theorists point out the great uncertainty, close to impossibility, in predicting human actions, even at an aggregate scale. The latter position has dramatic implications to spatial planning, as it would then be impossible to assess whether a certain physical solution is likely to have positive or negative social and related environmental consequences, e.g. in terms of travelling distances and modal split. Our own position is that the physical environment, along with a number of individual and non-physical structural factors, influences human activities and quality of life. To some extent, this influence can be predicted at an aggregate scale, but not for a particular individual (except those actions rendered impossible by the laws of physics). How strong influence the physical environment exerts, is a question requiring empirical research in order to be answered.     

Bank Erosion in the Bellinger Valley,New South Wales: Definition and Management

Lateral channel migration is normal or autogenic, with bank erosion often on concave and accretion on convex banks. Where bank erosion occurs, particularly at an accelerated rate through land abuse and an increase in flood magnitude and frequency or allogenic, it threatens human use of the flood plain. There is a demand for protection, often with very little understanding of the erosion hazard. Measurements based on photogrammetry were used to define bank erosion and accretion, as well as width changes, in eight meander arcs (11 sections in each) over 41 years. It was concluded that, if this rate continued over the next century, 82 ha of alluvial land, 6.2 km of roads, two bridges, 9 homes and 51 home sites could be lost. Various management options, costs and benefits are given in order to show how future planning and protection can be more rational.     

Legitimacy and Public Policy: Seeing Beyond Effectiveness,Efficiency, and Performance

Studies of failure typically assess public policies through the lenses of effectiveness, efficiency, and performance. Here I wish to propose a further dimension to the evaluation and assessment of policy failure—legitimacy. The substantive elements of public policies and the procedural steps taken by authoritative decision makers during the policy cycle affect the perception of policy legitimacy held by both stakeholders and the public. In substantive terms, policy content should align with the dominant attitudes of the affected policy community and, ideally, the broader public. Procedurally, factors such as policy incubation, the emotive appeals deployed to gain support for an initiative, and the processes of stakeholder engagement shape the legitimacy of public policies and the governments who promote them. This argument is based on a comparison of education reform in two Canadian provinces during the 1990s. Governments in Alberta and Ontario pursued common agendas of education reform, but while Alberta achieved success, the Ontario government experienced a series of setbacks and lost the support of education stakeholders and the public. The root of Ontario's failures lies in the realm of legitimacy. These findings highlight the fact that the strategies used for enacting policy change may fail to bring about the necessary consensus among societal actors to sustain a new policy direction and calls attention to our need to better understand how governments can achieve meaningful public participation while still achieving legislative success in an efficient fashion.     

钚-239的生产与苏联核计划

苏联核计划中使用的核裂变材料主要有钚-239和铀-235,其中钚-239的生产率先取得成功,1949年8月29日苏联试爆的第一颗原子弹РДС-1所使用的核裂变材料便是钚-239。1949年之前,钚-239的生产具有试验性特征,1949年之后,钚-239进入了工业规模化的生产阶段。在钚-239的工业生产阶段,反应堆技术、放射化学技术和化学冶金技术都不断完善,实现了产能提高、成本下降、安全生产等目标,形成了完善的钚工业综合体,不仅为俄罗斯联邦留下了丰厚的钚产品,还为其钚-239的生产奠定了坚实基础。     

The war on terror in American grand strategy

The 9/11 attacks made the war on terror the central plank of American grand strategy. Yet despite its importance in shaping US policy choices, there has been considerable confusion over how the war on terror relates to foreign policy goals. This article attempts to locate the war on terror within American grand strategy and makes three claims. First, it argues that the Bush administration's approach to the war on terror rests on a false analogy between terrorism and fascism or communism. This has led to misinterpretations of the goals of the war on terror and to a persistent misuse of American power. Second, it suggests that the central purpose of the war on terror should be to de‐legitimize terror as a tactic and to induce states to assume responsibility for controlling terrorists within their borders. American grand strategy should be focused on creating a normative anti‐terror regime with costly commitments by linchpin states—defined as great powers and crucial but endangered allies such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—rather than on conducting regime change against rogue states on the margins of the international system. Success in the war on terror should be measured not by the perceived legitimacy of discrete US policy choices, but by the number of these crucial states who accept the de‐legitimation of terrorism as a core foreign policy principle and act accordingly. Third, it argues that bilateral enforcement of an anti‐terror regime imposes high costs for US power and puts other elements of American grand strategy— including the promotion of democracy and the promotion of human rights—at risk. To reduce these costs and to preserve American power over the long‐term, the US should attempt to institutionalize cooperation in the war on terror and to scale back ambitious policy choices (such as achieving a democratic revolution in the Middle East) which increase the risks of state defection from the anti‐terror regime.