A Multi-objective Optimization Approach for Disaggregating Employment Data

In many countries, including South Africa, data on employment is rarely available on a downscaled level, such as building level, and is only available on less detailed levels, such as municipal level. The aim of this research was to develop a methodology to disaggregate the employment data that is available at an aggregate level to a disaggregate, detailed building level. To achieve this, the methodology consisted of two parts. First, a method was established that could be used to prepare a base data set to be used for disaggregating the employment data. Second, a multiobjective optimization approach was used to allocate the number of employment opportunities within a municipality to building level. The algorithm was developed using an Evolutionary Algorithm framework and applied to a case study in a metropolitan municipality in South Africa. The results showed favorable use of multiobjective optimization to disaggregate employment data to building level. By enhancing the detail of employment data, planners, policy makers, modelers and other users of such data can benefit from understanding employment patterns at a much more detailed level and making improved decisions based on disaggregated data and models.     

Book reviews

THE ADAPTABLE COMMONWEALTH. F. H. Soward, 1950 (London, O.U.P., pp. 62). 2/‐.

EUROPE IN DECAY: A STUDY IN DISINTEGRATION 1936–1940. By L. B. Namier. 1950. (London. MacMillan, viii+330. 16s.).

EDUCATION AND SOCIETY IN MODERN GERMANY. R. H. Samuel and R. H. Thomas. Routledge and Kegan Paul (Int. Lib. of Soc. & Soc. Recon.). London 1949.

THE IDEA OF CONFLICT. By Kurt Singer. (Melbourne University Press. pp. 181).     

HOW CHILDREN PLACE THEMSELVES AND OTHERS IN LOCAL SPACE

This study examines the ways in which children aged 11 to 15 in six adjacent neighbourhoods in a medium-sized Swedish town place themselves and others in local space. Special attention is given to how they discuss a neighbourhood stigmatized in the public discourse and how children who live in this neighbourhood react to the negative representations of the place in which they live. The study is based on group interviews and maps. The study shows that children construct representations of their own neighbourhoods as "quiet" neighbourhoods and place objects of "trouble" and "danger" somewhere else. It is argued that this is done both in relation to their personal knowledge of the neighbourhood and in relation to local and/or media representations of their own and other neighbourhoods. It is shown that the children are influenced by media representations of a stigmatized neighbourhood, but also that they are not passive reproducers of these discourses and that some of them are able to offer counter-discourses. The children living in this neighbourhood experience difficulties in defending it as the quiet place which they perceive it to be to outsiders because of the negative discourses.     

Soil formation in archaeological pits and adjacent loess soils in Southern Germany

The soil formation in a number of pits on a neolithic excavation was compared with that in adjacent loess soils (Hapludalfs) under forest and arable and in Bavaria, Southern Germany. The differences between the soils under consideration were mainly characterized by micromorphological quantification of the illuviated fine clay. In the archaeological pits the amount of illuviated fine clay proved to be nearly twice as much as that in the undisturbed soils. The amount of illuviated coarser matrix components (fine and coarse clay and fine silt) in the neolithic pits did not differ significantly from that in the natural soils. The large amount of illuviated fine clay in the pits was ascribed to the presence of potash during the period of their formation. The formation of coarse grained illuviation cutans was related to deforestation, after which illuviation of the fine clay decreased in intensity and came to a stop.