Recent Debates on the Fate of the German Population in Upper Silesia 1945-1950

This article presents an analysis of the Polish-German scholarlyand public debate of the last decades dedicated to the fateof the German population in Upper Silesia after the ending ofthe Second World War. In the introduction, three determiningfactors of the current discussion are mentioned: first, thepublic debate on this topic, which evolved especially afterthe turning point of the democratization in Poland in 1989,and which created a certain social climate for these scholarlydebates; secondly, the history of the Polish-German conflictin Upper Silesia, which conditioned the post-war situation inthe region; and thirdly, the main historiographical paradigmsto the subject before 1989 in both countries, whose fixationand whose deficits weighed heavily upon the research directionchosen in this period. From among these three aspects—the camps built for theGerman population, their resettlement, and the politics of nationalitytowards former German citizens, who were then recognized asowners of Polish nationality and who could remain in their homes—thearticle concentrates on the first one. The last few years sawthe most fundamental revision concerning the camps for the Germanpopulation, and our knowledge is here relatively complete. Itis worth underlining that most advances here have been achievedby Polish historians from various disciplinary directions.     

Pleistocene frogs from the Darling Downs,southeastern Queensland,and their palaeoenvironmental significance

Systematic collecting from fluvial late Pleistocene deposits from the Darling Downs, southeast Queensland, Australia, has led to the recovery of the first fossil frogs from the region, ail from the Myobatrachidae, a family of ground dwelling and burrowing frogs. The most common species recovered, Limnodynastes tasmaniensis, is extant on the Darling Downs. The fossil taxa include species whose extant populations inhabit arid zones(Limnodynastes sp. cf. L. spenceri), montane forests (Kyarranus spp.), and open woodlands (Neobatrachus sudelli), and indicate the existence of a mosaic of habitats during the Pleistocene. The absence of the Hylidae (tree frogs), a family common throughout the Darling Downs today, may be explained by a taphonomic bias that favours non-arboreal forms. Alternatively, hylids may have been rare or absent on the Darling Downs during the Pleistocene.     

WHERE IS THE ECONOMICS IN SPATIAL ECONOMETRICS?*

ABSTRACT Spatial econometrics has been criticized by some economists because some model specifications have been driven by data‐analytic considerations rather than having a firm foundation in economic theory. In particular, this applies to the so‐called W matrix, which is integral to the structure of endogenous and exogenous spatial lags, and to spatial error processes, and which are almost the sine qua non of spatial econometrics. Moreover, it has been suggested that the significance of a spatially lagged dependent variable involving W may be misleading, since it may be simply picking up the effects of omitted spatially dependent variables, incorrectly suggesting the existence of a spillover mechanism. In this paper, we review the theoretical and empirical rationale for network dependence and spatial externalities as embodied in spatially lagged variables, arguing that failing to acknowledge their presence at least leads to biased inference, can be a cause of inconsistent estimation, and leads to an incorrect understanding of true causal processes.