Extended depth of focus image for phytolith analysis

This paper proposes a new phytolith analysis method by extended depth of focus technology. The extended depth of focus image is sharp throughout by the image processing of a series of photos, while each acquisition of the original photo will be compromised and show certain parts of the specimen in and out of focus. Consequently, the extended depth of focus image is suitable for computer-assisted morphometrics analysis. Meanwhile, the extended depth of focus image can be used for three-dimensional reconstruction images. Experiments on rice husk multi-cell panel show that the three-dimensional reconstruction image method can reconstruct multiple double-peaked phytoliths at one time. We also measure the parameters of multiple double-peaked phytoliths from the reconstructed three-dimension image. Comparative experiments show that the reconstructed three-dimensional image is precise enough for rice identification. Based on the above experiments, we recommend the extended depth of focus method as a promising tool in phytolith research.     

创新网络研究进展述评与展望

创新网络解读主要从网络尺度、网络演化及网络机理等方面展开研究,本文对创新网络已有研究成果及新转向进行评述及展望：①网络尺度视角,已有研究多对不同尺度进行区分研究,缺乏对不同尺度的整合;多强调发达国家网络发展模式,忽略对发展中国家特有结构及路径的理论总结;因此多尺度耦合网络研究成为未来的方向。②网络演化视角,经历了从网络节点结构到网络联系演化的转向,将多层联系结合进行整体网络演化的研究需更关注包括各类组织、个人、技术及空间等网络情境在内的整体分析。③网络机理研究关注多维邻近、网络管制及外部创新情境作用,而多维临近综合作用分析及我国特定情境嵌入全球网络等问题都值得进一步深入探讨。     

Some approaches to traditional Māori knowledge

In this essay I review two books of rather different focus, but with a common thread that is oral tradition: age-old tales passed orally down the generations to maintain the histories and used to educate the young. The focus of the Metge book is traditional methods of education, while McRae’s focus is on the stories themselves.     

Feminist geographies and intersectionality

In this intervention, I raise questions for feminist geographers who use intersectionality in their work. First, I invite feminist geographers to consider their expertise in relation to the significance of locality and the role of social context as a crucial factor in intersectional analyses. Second, I query the focus on multiple axes of difference and question the need to focus on specific axes over others and how this may be resolved. Finally, the issue of methods in research about intersectionality is explored and I reflect upon research with ethnic and religious minority young people that adopted an approach informed by intersectionality in order to provide a focus for this discussion.     

Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation

Foodways have been a component of archaeological research for decades. However, cooking and food preparation, as specific acts that could reveal social information about life beyond the kitchen, only became a focus of archaeological inquiry more recently. A review of the literature on cooking and food preparation reveals a shift from previous studies on subsistence strategies, consumption, and feasting. The new research is different because of the social questions that are asked, the change in focus to preparation and production rather than consumption, and the interest in highlighting marginalized people and their daily experiences. The theoretical perspectives the literature addresses revolve around practice, agency, and gender. As a result, this new focus of archaeological research on cooking and preparing food is grounded in anthropology.     

BLOOD FOR THE GHOSTS: READING RUIN'S BEING WITH THE DEAD WITH NIETZSCHE

A focus on roots, localizations, usurpations, and obliterations together with commemoration and different fields of scholarly research, along with a thematic focus on Homer's Nykia, permit Hans Ruin to revisit the foundations of history in Being with the Dead. Ruin draws on cultural sociology, including the work of Alfred Schütz, as well as Heideggerian historicity and the dead of the distant past, including archaeology and ethnography, paleography and physical anthropology. Ruin also engages Michel de Certeau's Writing of History and its focus on the other in a necropolitical account tracked through interdisciplinary fields. In my reading I supplement Ruin's critical focus on Homer scholarship beyond the twentieth century with a return to Nietzsche's nineteenth-century emphasis on the “blood” needed to bring the voices of the past to speak in his own reading of Homer. To do this, I note the dead-silenced (“zombie”) scholarship haunting Nietzsche's voice in his field of classical philology in addition to Nietzsche's source scholarship and his hermeneutic methodology of historiographical research for the sake of ethnography, archaeology, and Nietzsche's lectures on pre-Platonic philosophy.     

Agricultural Transformation and the Politics of Hydrology in Northern Thailand

Tensions over water resources in upland areas of northern Thailand are often attributed to reductions in water supply caused by forest clearing. This article argues that the hydrological evidence for such reductions in supply is very weak and that, rather, the key hydrological issue in upland catchments is a significant increase in water demand, especially during the dry season. The arguments are illustrated with a detailed examination of the Mae Uam catchment, located in Chiang Mai province, where the development of dry–season soybean cultivation appears to have tested the hydrological limit of the catchment, and even exceeded this limit in drier years. The author argues that a shift in focus from water supply to water demand has fundamentally important political implications. As long as the focus of public debate is on water supply, the regulatory focus will be on those resident in the forested upland areas that are seen as being crucial in securing downstream flows. But if the water management focus is shifted to water demand, then regulatory attention must shift to the diverse sources of demand that exist throughout the hydrological system.     

Characteristics of Collaboration in Product Innovation in the Regional System of Innovation of East Gothia

The focus of this article is on product innovations introduced by firms (establishments) and the collaborations they enter into with other firms and organizations in carrying out this activity. The theoretical framework combines innovation theories with the literature on regional innovation systems and the knowledge-based economy. Empirically we have investigated characteristics of collaboration among manufacturing establishments in the region of East Gothia in Sweden, with specific focus on the number of employees involved in the innovation projects, mechanisms of knowledge transfer between organizations, as well as financing and patenting in relation to product innovations.     

A Few Considerations on Democracy in Africa

Recent moves towards greater political liberalization in Africa, with the widespread introduction of multi-party elections in many states since 1989, do not necessarily constitute evidence of successful democratization. In particular, the focus on elections to the exclusion of other essential features of a properly functioning democracy has vitiated much recent analysis of the 'democratic transition' in Africa. By examining in turn the roots, meaning and limits of democratization in Africa, the author shows that a focus on accountability rather than on democracy per se would be more appropriate.     

Situating (Young) teenagers in geographies of children and youth

The past decade has been an exciting and productive period in the study of children's and young people's geographies. The principal aim of this paper is to contribute to this field of research by presenting the arguments for a more substantive focus on teenagers' geographies. Firstly, the terms ‘children’ and ‘young people’ are constructed as synonymous and used interchangeably and the complex transitional positioning of young teenagers—situated between childhood, youth and adulthood—has been relatively neglected. Secondly, many researchers have been engaged in developing methods, which aim to challenge unequal power relations between adult researchers and young participants but little focus has been placed on utilizing participants' own constructions of themselves. The final argument for a more coherent focus on teenagers' geographies rests on the contribution that geographers can make to challenging negative stereotypes of teenagers within policy and the media. The paper concludes by outlining what form an emphasis on teenagers' geographies may take.     

Recent research in the archaeology of architecture: Beyond the foundations

Although architectural remains have always been a principal focus of archaeological investigation, research on such remains, particularly small-scale structures, has taken on new importance because of the information they can offer on human behavior. This article provides a review of recent trends in the archaeology of architecture (mainly domestic in nature), including current work in household archaeology and spatial patterning analysis of architectural remains, and discusses the new models and methodologies being generated to interpret these remains. The main areas covered in this review include the New World, Mesoamerica in particular, Europe, and general focus on recent work in the Near East.     

Social geographies of rural mental health: experiencing inclusions and exclusions

A dominant urban focus in previous research on the social geographies of mental health has obscured the experiences of people with mental health problems living in rural localities. Critiquing this urban focus, we report on research conducted in the rural and remote Scottish Highlands. Evidence derived from in-depth interviews with over 100 users of psychiatric services in the Highlands is deployed to investigate the complex socio-spatial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion experienced by these users on a daily basis. A discussion of the explanations that users themselves offer of their experiences is accompanied by a theoretical framing of these issues pivoting on relations of proximity–distance and intimacy–repulsion.     

New Approaches to Innovation Policy: Some Norwegian Examples

The paper describes and assesses three Norwegian innovation policy tools. The tools cover three different models of strengthening firms' innovation capability, i.e. direct financial support, broker and advisory systems and technology or knowledge centres. The tools include some new elements in innovation policy design, and thus, some elements of good practice. Guidelines for good practice includes an interactive perspective on innovation support, a focus on innovation systems, context sensitivity and a regional focus, learning in the support system and receiver-oriented and proactive working methods.     

Communities and Other Social Actors: Rethinking Commodities and Consumption in Global Historical Archaeology

The relationships between people and commodities, and the processes through which goods are entangled with people's lives can be better understood with a focus on the community. The concept of community offers a way to understand the entanglement of individuals and small groups with global processes. In addition, a focus on the community allows historical archaeologists a scale of analysis to consider the links between people, communities, and global networks of exchange, as commodities are exchanged in and out of local, regional, or global arenas.     

Israeli feminist geography: women,gender and queer geographies

Abstract

This article charts the changing knowledges within Israeli feminist geography in the last few decades. It briefly reviews some of the topics that characterize Israeli scholarship, and in particular the ways in which the academic knowledge changed from the focus on women’s geography, to feminist and gendered analysis of spaces, to a more recent focus on sexuality and gender. We argue that it is not that one knowledge replacing others, but rather all knowledges and approaches exist simultaneously within Israeli geography today.     

Cash Crop Production and the Process of Transformation

The state aided commercialization of the small farm is the focus of this paper. In theory, subsidies and price support policies are intended to give small farms access to capital inputs to encourage cash crop production. However, only larger holdings can afford to take advantage of state interventionist policies and profit thereby. State subsidies have now become an integral part of the production process. The unit of analysis is the household, viewed in the context of the village and the wider economy. The focus is on family labour relations and the process by which agricultural commercialization transforms the internal relations of the household. Commercialization accompanied by mechanization tends to intensify the work undertaken by women. Since the process of commoditization ties once subsistence farms to market forces, production relations cannot avoid being influenced by the wider economy. Only with a combination of macro and micro data, with focus on both internal and external household relations, can the position of women in rural areas realistically be conceptualized.     

Human Trafficking and Online Networks: Policy,Analysis, and Ignorance

Dominant anti‐trafficking policy discourses represent trafficking as an issue of crime, “illegal” migration, victimhood and humanitarianism. Such a narrow focus is not an adequate response to the interplay between technology, trafficking and anti‐trafficking. This article explores different levels of analysis and the interplay between human trafficking and technology. We argue for a shift from policy discourses with a very limited focus on crime and victimisation to more systemic understandings of trafficking and more robust micro‐analyses of trafficking and everyday life. The article calls for an agnotological understanding of policy responses to trafficking and technology: these depend upon the production of ignorance. We critique limitations in policy understandings of trafficking‐related aspects of online spaces, and argue for better engagement with online networks. We conclude that there is a need to move beyond a focus on “new” technology and exceptionalist claims about “modern slavery” towards greater attention to everyday exploitation within neoliberalism.     

Focus‐Pocus? Thinking Critically about Whether Aid Organizations Should Do Fewer Things in Fewer Countries

The OECD Development Assistance Committee and G7 Finance Ministers have suggested that many bilateral and multilateral aid organizations are too dispersed, pursuing too many objectives in too many countries and too many sectors with too many partners. These organizations are accused of lacking critical mass, failing to follow their comparative advantage, failing to find and exploit a niche, and having high transactions costs and low effectiveness. Such aid organizations are being told to ‘focus’, ‘concentrate’, or be more ‘selective’ in order to become more effective. This article analyses the arguments in favour of greater focus by aid organizations and suggests that, while some of these arguments are valid, some are not and others need to be more nuanced. There are many possible dimensions along which an aid organization could focus and the link — if any — between focus and aid effectiveness is complex along each of those dimensions. The debate so far has also ignored the possibility that less focus may promote more effective aid. There is no clear, simple link between focus and aid effectiveness, but this finding should not be interpreted as carte blanche for spreading aid programmes indiscriminately. Dispersion, like focus, needs careful thought and justification.     

《历史》与命运:希罗多德命运观初探

对人类命运的关注是希罗多德《历史》最突出的主题。这个主题的形成与他所处的时代氛围密切相关。古希腊自然哲学直接启发了希罗多德对命运的思考,史诗和悲剧更进一步促成了他对人类命运的关注和同情。希罗多德敏锐地把握到了命运的变化无常,作品着力于人物命运的书写,传达了历史的变易意识。命运对希罗多德而言,既是变化不定、不可把握和预测的,又是命中注定、无从逃脱的,一切生灭变化导致了命运的无常,命运本身就是变化,就是无常,无常是命运的永恒特性。他对命运的思考既充满了哲学的深邃,又力显史家情怀,诗家笔法。这使得他的《历史》历久弥新,吸引着一代代的史家和普通读者。因为命运不拘何时,总是牵动着人心,人类面对的根本问题从未改变。     

The politics of migration

This editorial introduces the Virtual Special Issue on the Politics of Migration by presenting a review of migration and refugee related articles published in Political Geography. We have identified two major shifts in scope during the last 30 years. First, the scalar focus has changed from nation-state policies to supranational migration agreements and transnational migrant experiences. Second, the theoretical focus has moved from geopolitics to biopolitics. Ten selected articles illustrate three central themes: regulation of migration, practices of border enforcement and migrant experiences.