IS THERE A NEAR-FIELD FOR SMALL-TO-MODERATE MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKES?

The major hazard posed by earthquakes is often thought to be due to moderate to large magnitude events. However, there have been many cases where earthquakes of moderate and even small magnitude have caused very significant destruction when they have coincided with population centres. Even though the area of intense ground shaking caused by such events is generally small, the epicentral motions can be severe enough to cause damage even in well-engineered structures. Two issues are addressed here, the first being the identification of the minimum earthquake magnitude likely to cause damage to engineered structures and the limits of the near-field for small-to-moderate magnitude earthquakes. The second issue addressed is whether features of near-field ground motions such as directivity, which can significantly enhance the destructive potential, occur in small-to-moderate magnitude events. The accelerograms from the 1986 San Salvador (El Salvador) earthquake indicate that it may be unconservative to assume that near-field directivity effects only need to be considered for earthquakes of moment magnitude M 6.5 and greater.     

THINKING HISTORICALLY ABOUT THINKING HISTORICALLY: IS HISTORICAL THEORY A HISTORICAL OR A METAHISTORICAL PRACTICE?

This intimidating and massive collection of twenty‐nine extended, diverse essays by distinguished scholars, organized around the general theme of the current state and future direction of historical theory, raises some fundamental questions about historical theory as practiced over the past half century as well as about the distinctive nature of historical theory within the broader context of the production of historical knowledge. The editors of the volume suggest that the postmodern linguistic turn in historical theory, especially as articulated by Hayden White and Michel Foucault, marked a decisive, epochal turning‐point in human historical self‐consciousness, the attainment of a mature stage of autonomous metahistorical reflection on the essential nature of what it means to be historical, on historicity per se. What came before is imagined as a series of preliminary stages, what came after as a working out of implications and consequences. I suggest that a close reading of the implicit and explicit arguments of the individual essays reveals a rather different kind of historical moment, one in which postmodern historical theory has increasingly been demystified of its alleged metahistorical status, and has emerged as a situated object of historical reflection and thus has itself become increasingly defined as historical, recognized in its particularity as a temporally and culturally framed form of historical knowledge.     

THE HENSBACKA: A SUBSISTENCE STRATEGY OF CONTINENTAL HUNTER-GATHERERS,OR AN ADAPTATION AT THE PLEISTOCENE-HOLOCENE BOUNDARY?

Summary. In this paper, three aspects of the Hensbacka/Fosna assemblage are discussed. Although significant features of the inventory have been touched upon, emphasis is placed on two issues: firstly, the environmental premise of the assemblage and, secondly, the origin(s) of the group(s) behind the assemblage. In this regard, it is suggested that the Hensbacka/Fosna assemblage is an 'expression' that reflects subsistence strategies of Continental hunter/gatherers at the close of the Late Glacial. In support of this proposition, a discussion has been initiated that addresses the diagnostic features of tanged points and the rationality of human behaviour.     

CHEMISTRY VERSUS DATA DISPERSION: IS THERE A BETTER WAY TO ASSESS AND INTERPRET ARCHAEOMETRIC DATA?

Given the common use of chemical concentration data to define ceramic groups that aid in the exploration of ancient technology, trade and provenance, it is important to reflect on how we collectively establish and define both chemical groups and outliers. In this paper, we argue that commonly used data analysis procedures, such as principal component analysis and centred log‐ratio principal component analysis favoured in the examination of ceramic chemical data, although rapid and easy, may overlook existing chemical groups and outliers, especially when the ratio of non‐diagnostic to diagnostic elements is high. To evaluate whether geochemistry is more important than data dispersion in data assessment, we re‐examine chemical concentration data from previously published ceramic, clay and daub samples from the lower Ohio River Valley. We begin by briefly discussing steps we took to ensure that the data set reflects geochemical differences, rather than analytical or data transfer errors. Next, we use bivariate plots, as well as PCA and CLR–PCA, to examine different versions of our altered data, using varying numbers of element combinations. We propose that the careful examination of bivariate plots is critical in establishing the elements that should be included in PCA and other multivariate analyses.     

MULTICULTURALISM,OR THE UNITED COLORS OF CAPITALISM?

In this paper I examine the political manipulation of the meanings of “race” and nation in the context of increasing Pacific Rim ties and multinational capitalist development in Vancouver. As many wealthy Hong Kong Chinese move to Vancouver in advance of 1997, racist incidents and urban social movements aimed at preserving neighborhood “character” have increased, thus discouraging international business activity and blocking capital flow into and through the city. As racism and localism hinder the social networks necessary for the integration of global capitalisms, businesspeople and politicians interested in increasing Vancouver's integration have sought to counter these processes through ideological production. The liberal doctrine of multiculturalism has become linked with the attempt to smooth racial friction and reduce resistance to the recent changes in the urban environment and experiences of everyday life in Vancouver. In this sense, the attempt to shape multiculturalism can be seen as an attempt to gain hegemonic control over concepts of race and nation in order to further expedite Vancouver's integration into the international networks of global capitalism.     

CAN WE GET OLD HERE? SENIORS' PERCEPTIONS OF SEASONAL CONSTRAINTS OF NEIGHBOURHOOD BUILT ENVIRONMENTS IN A NORTHERN,WINTER CITY

Populations around the world are ageing. In response, the World Health Organization (WHO) has developed initiatives to encourage cities and regions to become age‐friendly for seniors. This work examines WHO's age‐friendly domains in the context of a northern, winter city in Canada. The urban centre of Edmonton, Alberta experiences both a climate characterized by long, cold winters and a sprawling, built environment with very low population densities. The research found that seniors did report a difference in built environment preferences in summer and winter and that some of those preferences match the elements of the eight WHO domains. However two additional important findings also emerged. First, winter weather was the dominating concept for discussion of the environment regardless of the time of year, and these weather concerns conflated seniors' perceptions of public–private spaces, pointing to the need to carefully examine how this conflation might influence civic participation. Second, participants almost unanimously spoke to the need to make individual adaptations in order to navigate their environments as their mobility decreased. In other words, instead of expecting environmental adaptations to meet their changing needs, seniors accepted and individually managed – to the best of their ability – the ongoing challenges. These findings provide empirical results that can be used to develop supportive built environments in winter cities, with an emphasis on ‘upstream’ health geography and public health imperatives that enable safe and vibrant neighbourhoods to support healthy aging, which has implications for geographers, planners, and public health personnel.     

NO DISCORD,OR, AN AREA WITHOUT SIGNIFICANT POLITICAL STAKES?

The aim of this paper is to give a broad sketch of the Swedish cultural policy discourse during the twentieth century, with special reference to the specific features of Swedish history, notably the hegemony of the social democratic Folkhem period from the 1930s to the 1980s. The discourse may be divided into four different periods. Each of these periods, in various respects, goes back to the ideas behind the Folkhem. The paper argues that the discourse still shows the same logic even after the downfall of the Folkhem model in the 1980s. The regulative principle being that there no longer exists, from the 1950s, any competitive concept of culture to the conventional aesthetic concept of high culture.     

THE CRISIS OF HUMANITY: OR,WHAT IF WE HAVE NEVER BEEN HUMAN?

This collection of nine essays brings together a variety of responses to the question of the “nonhuman turn” within the humanities and the social sciences, understood broadly as a developing concern with overcoming anthropocentrism in its diverse manifestations. Emerging from The Nonhuman Turn conference held at the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee in 2012, which was hosted by the Center for 21st Century Studies, it represents the first attempt to account for and consolidate the many intellectual approaches and developments that may now be regarded as constituting the nonhuman turn. The nonhuman turn is contextualized as both “yet another” turn but also a necessary one, and as something critically distinct from “the posthuman turn”—whereas the posthuman turn is concerned with what comes after the human (ways of being, ways of thinking), the nonhuman turn insists (according to editor Richard Grusin) that “we have never been human.” My reading of this volume suggests that this claim is not borne out across the chapters it contains, and that the notion that we have never been human, though a noble gesture to Bruno Latour's widely lauded claim that “we have never been modern,” does not enable a new philosophy, nor does it advance the two primary streams of philosophical thought featured here: object‐oriented ontology (OOO) and new materialism.     

SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO A STRICTLY QUASI-CONCAVE CONTINUOUS UTILITY FUNCTION? OR,HOMO ECONOMICUS,PART TWO‘

Those who have stuck with modelling since those heady days have largely been able to do so, I suspect, by restricting the nature of the questions they ask. (Harvey 1989, 212)
One can imagine a world, perhaps, in which the growth of knowledge was interestingly philosophizable. But it doesn't seem to be our world. (McCloskey 1988, 245)