A diamond in the rough?: an examination of the issues surrounding the development of the Northwest Territories

Over a period of approximately five decades, the federal government of Canada has transformed the predominantly nomadic hunting and gathering society of the Northwest Territories (NWT) to one which is based largely on wage and/or transfer income, and life in permanent communities. Several decades of planning for regional development and the expenditure of large sums of public monies have failed to give rise to a viable economic system in the region. This paper argues that the inefficacy of these past policy approaches stems at least partly from a failure to recognize explicitly the interrelationship between the economy of the region, its constitutional status and that of its Native population.
Au cours d'une période d'approximativement cinq décennies, le gouvernement fédéral du Canada a transformé la société principalement nomade de chasseurs et cueilleurs des Territoires du Nord ouest en une société d'une part basée sur le revenu salarié et/ou de transfert et d'autre part composée de communautées établies de façon permanente. Plusieurs décennies de planification en vue d'un développement régional ainsi que des dépenses importantes des deniers public n'ont pas réussi à mettre en place un système économique viable dans la région. Le présent article défend la thèse que l'inefficacité de ces anciennes politiques provient en partie à l'incapacitéà reconnaître explicitement les interrelations entre l'économie de la région, son statut constitutionel et sa population autochtone.     

Analysis of the Story of an Hour——From the Perspective of Feminism

The Story of an Hour is a short story written by Kate Chopin on April 19,1894,and originally published in Vogue on December 6,1894.By describing series of emotions that Louise Mallard endures after hearing of the death of her husband,it reveals the heroine——Mallard's pursuit of freedom and enlightenment of feminist thought.The Story of an Hour successfully created a female image of desiring for freedom,longing for a new life even at the expense of life in a patriarchal society.     

Having an impact? Academics,the music industries and the problem of knowledge

This article reflects upon recent interest in knowledge transfer from higher education to the creative industries, using the UK music industries as a case study. It suggests that traditional academic values of impartiality and concern with research methodology can come in to conflict with instrumentalist agendas that see research as valuable only insofar as it fits with pre‐existing worldviews and policy ends. In this setting, knowledge resistance is often more significant than knowledge transfer and may be expected to frustrate any attempts to have an ‘impact’.     

Criteria for Determining an Engineering—Geographic Boundary of the North of the USSR

Reductions of the cost increments of northern development depend to a large extent on the manufacture of machines and equipment with northern specifications designed for operation under low temperatures. Existing definitions of the northern regions of the USSR are not suitable for this purpose. An engineering-geographic regionalization of the USSR is therefore proposed, defining the area of application of specially designed northern machines on the basis of a harshness scale that relates climatic harshness to its effect on machines. The key threshold values on this harshness scale are 4.6, above which ordinary structural steel loses strength and is subject to harshness-related ruptures; 5.3, above which ordinary structural steel becomes brittle and is affected by a fifty-fold increase of ruptures; and 7.9, above which ordinary steel can no longer perform.     

Tibet set up an electric circuit in the whole region

The total installed capacity of electric power in theTibet Autonomous Region is nearly 0.5 million kilo-watts,the annual electric energy,production achieved12 hundred million kilowatts-hour.Nearly everyCounty in Tibet realized electrification.By the end of 2004,the population which used elec-tricity has reached more than 1600000,the rate of elec-tricity used population covered 57% of the whole re-gion,71% of the small towns and 40% of the villagesin Tibet have been electrified.In 1965,when the Tibet Autonomous Region was     

The arts as an instrument? Notes on the controversy surrounding the value of art

In the last decade of the twentieth century a shift occurred in the way western governments defended their cultural policies. New, instrumental arguments were put forward. This collided with the way the arts had learned to see themselves in the twentieth century: autonomous, with a value of their own. This article elaborates this confrontation of the arts and policy in two ways. First, it is shown that the distinction between an instrumental and an intrinsic value of the arts originates in a misperception of recent history. It was the political constellation of the Cold War that made governments in the second half of the twentieth century support the arts to be free and independent. Next, an attempt is made to anchor the value of art in a unique kind of instrumentality. With the help of philosophers and historians of culture, it is argued that the arts should be considered instruments of experience.     

Geographers and the Discourse of an Earth Transformed: Influencing the Intellectual Weather or Changing the Intellectual Climate?

This article considers how geographers might choose to respond to many geoscientists' claims that we are entering ‘the age of humans’. These claims, expressed in the concepts of the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and global tipping points, make epochal claims about Earth surface change that are also far‐reaching claims upon Earth's current inhabitants. The scale and scope of their normative implications are extraordinarily grand. After describing the content and wider context for these claims, the history of some geographers' engagement with global change research is sketched and their current contributions described. Wider alterations in the modus operandi of global change scientists seem to offer a perfect opportunity for geographers to demonstrate the intellectual and societal value of their discipline's ‘integrative’ aspirations. However, the article suggests that this opportunity is likely to be used in a rather conservative way that downplays the sort of wide, deep and plural forms of integrative analysis that a post‐Holocene world surely calls for. Such forms exist in geography but are currently not, by and large, feeding into wider debates in global change research about how to understand and influence the future of Earth and humanity. The question is: how might they serve to alter the intellectual climate prevailing in global change research as Future Earth becomes the new umbrella for its next phase of development?     

Australia and the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence network: the perils of an asymmetric alliance

Aside from NATO, the Five Eyes intelligence network between the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is the world’s most enduring multilateral arrangement of its type. While the Five Eyes network does not constitute a formal security alliance in the classic sense of the term, it does emulate significant features of how alliances operate in practice, including active burden-sharing and intra-alliance bargaining. Most analysts claim that the USA dictates in hierarchical fashion the terms and conditions of how the Five Eyes network functions, and that junior partners have little alternative but to fall in line if they want to preserve the flow of high-grade intelligence from Washington. Using Australia as a case study, this article shows that a more fluid relationship has been at play, one that challenges conventional assumptions about asymmetrical alliances and the role of junior partners.     

Population change in an urban system — the examples of the republic of Ireland and Scotland

State of the Scottish Environment 1991. By T.C.D. Dargie and D.J. Briggs, 296 × 210 mm, 73 pp, Scottish Wildlife and Countryside Link, Perth, 1992, pbk, ISBN 0–9518582–0–3, £5.00.

Ice Age Earth. By Alastair G. Dawson, 233 × 155 mm, xx + 293 pp, Routledge, London and New York, 1991, pbk, ISBN 0–415–01567–7, £17.99.

Fundamentals of Weather and Climate. By Robin McIlveen, 246 × 190 mm, 497 pp, Chapman and Hall, London, 1992, pbk, ISBN 0–442–31476–0, £19.95.

Environmental Hazards: Assessing Risk and Reducing Disaster. By Keith Smith, 233 × 155 mm, xx + 324 pp, Routledge, London and New York, 1991, pbk, ISBN 0–415–01217, £16.99.

Global Shift: the Internationalization of Economic Activity (Second edition). By Peter Dicken, 244 × 172 mm, xv + 492 pp, Paul Chapman, London, 1992, pbk, ISBN 1–85396–142–6, £15.95.

Geographic Information Systems: Developments and Applications. Edited by L. Worrall, 238 × 155 mm, 244pp, London, Belhaven, 1991, hbk, ISBN 1–85293–1620, £45.00.

Grieve on Geddes. By Robert Grieve, 208 × 148 mm, iv + 53 pp, Sir Patrick Geddes Memorial Trust, Edinburgh, 1992, pbk, no ISBN, £5.00.

The Changing Scottish Landscape 1500–1800. By Ian and Kathleen Whyte, 233 × 155 mm, 251 pp, Routledge, London, 1991, hbk, ISBN 0–415–02992–9, £40.00.     

‘The fieldworker not in the head's office’: an empirical exploration of the role of an English rural primary school within its village

This paper presents the findings of a project exploring the role of an English primary school inside its rural village. The fieldwork discovered that the school had lacked a full-time head teacher for a number of years and the paper explicates three dynamics to unravel why: (1) interpersonal issues (high staff turnover and the legacy of a former head); (2) the political–economic development of the village and its shifting local ‘squirearchy’; and finally (3) the construction of the spatial environment of the village (post-war expansion and the situation of amenities). These three dynamics possessed a synergy and this was key in seeing the complexities of this rural environment and its bearing upon social relations such as the absent head. It therefore supports recent theorising positioning interpersonal power alongside the temporal and spatial character of a local environment. The paper concludes by using this insight to consider what problems the school—and any new head teacher—might face in the immediate future. The research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2009–2011.Using a multi-strategy research approach, the paper draws upon participant observation, interview, documentary, visual and historical material in support of its analysis.     

Does the Structure of an Urban System Affect Income Disparities?

In this paper I analyze the impact of basic training and specialized training on the distribution of skill, income disparity, social welfare, and on the structure of a decentralized specialized city system. This is done in a spatial general-equilibrium model of a closed economy producing a single consumption good. The economy is populated with a continuum of unskilled labor with potential heterogeneous ability. The only consumption good can be produced by specialized technology or by general technology. Specialized technology requires specialized training that enables each worker to transform his potential ability into productivity. General technology requires basic training that enables all workers, independent of their potential ability, to produce the good at a constant marginal product. In this framework I show that such an equilibrium exists uniquely and is efficient. Then I characterize the conditions that lead to a different distribution of skills, a different system of cities, and generate income disparity endogenously. Thus, the paper presents a link among income disparities, social welfare, and the structure of an urban system that is new to this literature.     

Multilateralism and the Shaping of an ‘Active Foreign Policy’: Sweden during the preparatory phase of the CSCE

This article deals with the early reactions of Swedish decision-makers and diplomats on the idea and preparations for the convocation of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), mainly during the years 1969–1971. On the basis of recently declassified diplomatic sources from the archive of the Swedish Foreign Ministry, the study outlines the role of Swedish diplomacy in the preparatory phase of the security conference as part of the wider context of European neutrality during détente. It is the very first contribution to the historiography of the Helsinki process based on Swedish archival material, and suggests that the picture of Sweden's widely mentioned active foreign policy at that time should be further scrutinized. It also sheds new light on the paradox between Swedish involvement in European and global politics.     

General Circulation of the Atmosphere as an Essential Link in the System: Sun—Climatic Change

The author reviews the work done by himself and by Bezrukova-and Rubashev at the Pulkovo Observatory in relating fluctuations in the characteristics of the general circulation of the earth's atmosphere over the Northern Hemisphere to fluctuations in solar activity, on the one hand, and to climatic fluctuations, on the other. The general circulation of the atmosphere is thus found to meet the requirements of an intermediate link in the research system: sun—climatic change. This paper was read at the New York conference on solar variations, climatic change and related geophysical problems in January 1961.