Analysis of Errors Due to Demand Data Aggregation in the Set Covering and Maximal Covering Location Problems

In this paper, we extend the concepts of demand data aggregation error to location problems involving coverage. These errors, which arise from losses in locational information, may lead to suboptimal location patterns. They are potentially more significant in covering problems than in p-median problems because the distance metric is binary in covering problems. We examine the Hillsman and Rhoda (1978) Source A, B, and C errors, identify their coverage counterparts, and relate them to the cost and optimality errors that may result. Three rules are then presented which, when applied during data aggregation, will reduce these errors. The third rule will, in fact, eliminate all loss of locational information, but may also limit the amount of aggregation possible. Results of computational tests on a large-scale problem are presented to demonstrate the performance of rule 3.     

Neighbor-based Properties of Some Orderings of Two-dimensional Space

An ordering of a two-dimensional matrix assigns consecutive integers to the cells in that matrix. This paper evaluates such orderings by concentrating on the differences between each cell's order key and the keys of its spatial neighbors. In all, ten systematically generated orderings and two hundred random trials from a newly defined class of orderings are compared. The row-by-row (raster) ordering often used in remote sensing and in matrix ordering within computer programs minimizes the mean absolute difference, the root-mean-squared difference (and hence the Geary statistic), and the mean maximum absolute difference for both 8-by-8 and 256-by-256 matrices; of the quadrant-recursive (“quadtree-compatible”) orderings examined, the Morton order had the lowest values for both mean absolute difference measures, whereas the Hilbert order had the lowest root-mean-squared neighbor difference. The Morton order has the overall minimum value for the Moran statistic. Heuristic search procedures applied to the 8-by-8 case found orderings which had considerably “better” values for these statistics (higher for Moran; lower for the others) than did any of the above, suggesting that it will be possible to define new systematic orderings with better scores than any ordering currently in the literature.     

The ‘Political’ Economies of Central America: Foreign Aid and Labour Remittances

This paper reviews recent literature to show how foreign aid and labour remittances have transformed Central America's macroeconomy, state apparatus and class structure over the last ten years. They have lifted real exchange rates, changed the composition of investment, lowered food prices, and directly supported large numbers of people. Control over these resources is now a major focus of political activity and donors play a greater role in economic policy. Project administration has become a major function of the state. Planning and public sector personnel management have become more difficult. Foreign funds have favoured decentralization and increased participation, but they have also weakened the core capacity of the state to execute policies. Transfers have fomented new social groups including sectors supported by remittances, foreign-financed soldiers, public employees, non-traditional export producers, financial intermediaries who channel remittances and refugees.     

Armed peace: Militarization of Rio de Janeiro's favelas for the World Cup (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Rio de Janeiro city's policy of Pacifying Police Units (UPP) for strategically located favelas is part of the state's reconfiguration of the city, involving military occupations, evictions and gentrification in the lead‐up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. Yet since the author arrived in Rio to carry out doctoral research on young people's experiences with the UPP, the flaws in the project have become increasingly exposed as the policy appears to be experiencing a crisis. This paper describes this current crisis in the global context of mega‐events and the elitization of urban space.     

From Oblivion to Post-History: Sublime Othering in Rider Haggard and W. E. B. Du Bois

This article addresses the ways in which art and philosophy have been discursively used to conceptualize critical political changes and frame narratives of liberation by including and excluding primitive consciousness simultaneously. More concretely, it analyzes the contribution of art and philosophy to the understanding of history and post-history through different representations of black bodies, black desires, and black agencies in the novels She (1886) by Rider Haggard and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) by W. E. B. Du Bois. At stake is the question of the archeology of the past as a living memory in the post-historical time. This past is politically relevant especially if its cognitive fossils negate the idea of exhausted primitive consciousness in the modern world and give meanings to incongruous bedfellows such as civilization and slavery, neoliberalism and poverty, democracy and Nazism, globalization, terrorism and racism, liberalism and homophobia. Arguably, the triumph of scientific ideas has left us with a perpetual quest for liberation rather than the actualization of liberation as a world phenomenon. I hypothesize the relation between exhaustible elements of technical consciousness simulating progress and their inexhaustible materiality at critical historical junctures as a struggle for taste and self-determination. Critical in this relation is the sense that not only primitive stages of consciousness are never fully exhausted at historical junctures, but that one never comes close to thinking about genuine liberation without engaging with real world matters both domestic/intimate and foreign.