Land use change in Northeast China in the twentieth century: a note on sources,methods and patterns

Studies of historical change in cultivated land use in Northeast China have become important in the discussion of food supply safety and the reconstruction of land use/cover changes in China. This paper subjects a number of sources relating to land use change in the three provinces of Northeast China to comparative analysis. The data examined include Russian survey data (1914), data from local and regional Chinese governments during the Republic of China (1931), data from the Japanese Society of Manchuria Railway (SMR) for 1940 and various sets of contemporary Chinese data for the second half of the 20th century. A unified method of reconstructing the data and estimating the rate of cultivated land use change in Northeast China during the 20th century is developed here. A relational model is proposed for this purpose. It establishes a general framework for relating the various sets of data generated in different time periods and indicates ways in which the data have to be calibrated to ensure their comparability. The calibration of the data involves correlation and regression analysis. The results of the comparative analysis show that the area of and rate of change in cultivated land use in Northeast China increased until the last decade of the twentieth century. Increase rates were particularly high between 1914–1931 and 1950–1960.     

Diet and the diseases of the twentieth century

Trowell, Hugh, Denis Burkitt and Kenneth Heaton, eds. Dietary Fibre, Fibre‐Depleted Foods and Disease, London: Academic Press, 1985. xiv + 433 pp. including index. $64.50 cloth.

Bjoerntorp, Per, George V. Vahouny and David Kritchevsky, eds. Dietary Fiber and Obesity. New York: Alan R. Liss, 1985. ix + 115 pp. including chapter references and index. $22.00 cloth.     

Skeletal biology in the twentieth century: From Piltdown to the present

Spencer, Frank. The Piltdown Papers 1908–1955. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. xii + 282 pp. including references and name and subject indices. $65.00 cloth

Spencer, Frank. Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. xxvi + 272 pp. including references and name and subject indices. $24.95 cloth

I?can, Mehmet ?a?ar, and Kenneth A.R. Kennedy, eds. Reconstruction of Life from the Skeleton. New York: Alan R. Liss, 1989. xv + 315 pp. including chapter references and index. $49.50 cloth.     

The Sherrington–Cushing connection: A bench to bedside collaboration at the dawn of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT

British physiologist Charles Sherrington (1857–1952) and American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing (1869–1939) were seminal figures in the history of neuroscience. The two came from different worlds, one laboratory-based and the other largely clinical. Their scientific intersection, beginning in July 1901, provides a glimpse into a nascent form of “bench to bedside” collaboration, which carried with it the potential to extend the arm of neurophysiological experimentation from Sherrington’s laboratory to Cushing’s operatory. I reviewed extensive primary source materials archived at Yale University School of Medicine Library. Sherrington viewed Cushing’s bedside work as an opportunity, in humans, to extend his bench-side physiological observations on higher primates, at times almost directing Cushing in the clinic. Cushing would indeed take Sherrington’s observations on apes and extend them to his patients, and the work would eventually overturn the prevailing notion that the motor and sensory cortex were intermixed across the Rolandic fissure.     

Public debt and financial crises in the twentieth century

The costs of wars have been the main driver of public debt in the Western World during the modern era. The late twentieth century stands out as a period that saw a pronounced increase of government debt to GDP ratios in peacetime. This paper assesses the role that financial crises have played in shaping the public debt trajectory in the twentieth century. Focusing on the experiences of 14 industrial economies, I show that financial crises have long and lasting effects on public finances. I provide evidence that the costs of financial crises have increased strongly in the second half of the twentieth century and that the costs of financial crises grow with the size of the financial sector. In many countries, the rising costs incurred from stabilizing the economy after financial crises were an important cause of the peacetime surge of public debt ratios in the late twentieth century. In today's highly financialized economies, financial crises have become a key risk for public finances.     

Lost primacy: crime in Italy at the end of the twentieth century

This article attempts to answer four questions. First: has Italy today, or has it had in the last thirty years, rates of theft, robbery and homicide that are higher than those in other western European countries? Second: have crime statistics in Italy followed the same pattern as in other European countries in the same period? Third: have crime statistics become more or less comparable in the western European countries in this period? Fourth: what factors have determined changes in crime rates in Italy in recent decades?