Flies,manure, and window screens: medical entomology and environmental reform in early-twentieth-century US cities

This paper traces responses to house flies in US cities as health departments attempted to control pollution and disease in the early twentieth century. It speaks to other historical geographies about the state, citizens, and the urban environment by showing how medical entomology prescribed contradictory changes to civic and domestic space, and how urban people and nature resisted these changes. With the advent of medical entomology, health reformers came to see house flies as agents that wove the entire city together as an interconnected ecology, carrying diseases from neighborhood to neighborhood and across the threshold of the home. But different reformers argued for quite distinct exercises of power in the urban landscape and ecological processes. Some physicians and entomologists argued that the state must modernize networks of fly-breeding organic matter, most notably horse manure and human waste. Such interventions were intended to be preventive and holistic, and aimed to protect all city dwellers. Other reformers, however, doubted the capacity of the state to tame material flows of waste, and instead sought changes to domestic space that would require householders – especially women – to shore up the boundaries of the house against flies. When city governments adopted these distinct interventions they encountered quite distinct sorts of resistance because of the house fly's tight links with urban nature and domestic practices.     

Embedding the War on Terror: State and Civil Society Relations

The global war on terror was used by the Bush administration and its allies to defend a US dominated geopolitical configuration. To this end, counter‐terrorism measures (CTMs) were introduced which strengthened the alignment of development aid with diplomacy and defence. The broad, adverse effects of CTMs on civil liberties and human rights are well documented. Despite the advent of a new US administration and a ‘soft power’ approach to international relations, the legacy of the war on terror remains embedded in the laws, policies and attitudes of many states and regimes that continue to enclose the lives of citizens. This article describes the experiences of civil society organizations (CSOs) as ‘securitization’ processes unfolded. Studies over two years involving some forty countries provide an on‐the‐ground view to probe the gains and losses of securitization, both for governments in the US‐led ‘coalition of the willing’ and for civil society in terms of the pressures emerging from a development‐for‐security agenda. The authors identify some of the perverse zero‐sum effects on governments of CTM philosophy and the means employed. Findings also show asymmetry between northern and southern CSOs in terms of their negative‐sum subordination, found in the definition of security and in the vulnerability to new risks involved in undertaking development work.     

Adaptive Cell Tower Location Using Geostatistics. 基于地统计学的适应性基站发射塔选址研究

In this article, we address the problem of allocating an additional cell tower (or a set of towers) to an existing cellular network, maximizing the call completion probability. Our approach is derived from the adaptive spatial sampling problem using kriging, capitalizing on spatial correlation between cell phone signal strength data points and accounting for terrain morphology. Cell phone demand is reflected by population counts in the form of weights. The objective function, which is the weighted call completion probability, is highly nonlinear and complex (nondifferentiable and discontinuous). Sequential and simultaneous discrete optimization techniques are presented, and heuristics such as simulated annealing and Nelder–Mead are suggested to solve our problem. The adaptive spatial sampling problem is defined and related to the additional facility location problem. The approach is illustrated using data on cell phone call completion probability in a rural region of Erie County in western New York, and accounts for terrain variation using a line‐of‐sight approach. Finally, the computational results of sequential and simultaneous approaches are compared. Our model is also applicable to other facility location problems that aim to minimize the uncertainty associated with a customer visiting a new facility that has been added to an existing set of facilities.     

Citizenship,the Nation and the Race: China and the International Opium System, 1912–1931

This article analyzes China’s attempts to participate in and use the negotiations about reforming the international opium control system in the interwar period. China had a contentious relationship with the international opium control system from its creation in the International Opium Convention of 1912 through the League of Nations opium control system of the 1920s and 1930s. The Chinese government wanted to gain acceptance for China as a modern state no longer in need of tutelage from the international community. They also wanted to portray the Chinese people as a modern race as a way of undermining colonial opium monopolies, which made a disproportionate amount of their profits from sales to Overseas Chinese. While they were not fully successful in either of these efforts, China did manage to win some support, drawing the United States into closer agreement with China’s positions. Engagement with the international system also had a considerable impact on China’s domestic opium politics and its broader diplomatic relationship with the major powers.     

The early history of the neuroscience of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Research on the neurobiology and pharmacotherapy of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has grown exponentially since 1980. A reasonable question is whether this research has improved our understanding and treatment of ADHD. This article describes relevant developments that took place roughly between 1900 and 1970. During this time, the efficacy of stimulant therapy for the disorder was established and the symptoms of ADHD were linked to many possible nervous system disorders including in the brain-stem, reticular formation, diencephalon, basal ganglia, frontal lobes, and cortex. In 1970, the catecholamine hypothesis of ADHD was proposed. It is concluded that early theories about the neurobiologic basis of ADHD anticipated core ideas of modern theory.