LYELL AND UNIFORMITARIANISM

T he centenary of the death of Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), the most notable earth scientist of the nineteenth century, was celebrated in 1975 by a special joint symposium of the International Union of Geological Sciences and the International Committee on the History of Geological Sciences. Much of what Lyell and his contemporaries regarded as "geology has become intrenched in "physical geography or in "geomorphology," so that any valid revaluation of Lyell's work is of as much significance to geographers as to geologists. It is appropriate at this time that his great contribution be recognized, but it is also a suitable occasion to re-examine some of its limitations.     

Wie sozialisiert man eine Hochschule? Die Eröffnungsfeiern der mittelalterlichen deutschen Universitäten und die Gründung der Erfurter Universität (28. April 1392)

In pre-Reformation Germany, nearly all university foundations culminated in elaborated opening celebrations which were closely linked to the local liturgy. This article tries to understand these well-recorded acts as rituals and asks how social knowledge of what a university actually was was transmitted to the non-academic environment. It shows that the opening celebrations were designed both to make the new institution acceptable and to distance it from its environment, thus reducing its vulnerability.     

Understanding Spatial Inertia: A Comment on Tellier and Vertefeuille

In this paper we address problems regarding the applicability of themathematical statements in a recent paper in this journal by Tellier and Vertefeuille (1995). These problems have a serious impact on the conclusions drawn in the work.     

An information-theoretic approach to the analysis of location and colocation patterns

The study of location and colocation of economic activities lies at the heart of economic geography and related disciplines, but the indices used to quantify these patterns are often defined ad hoc and lack a clear statistical foundation. We propose a statistical framework to quantify location and colocation associations of economic activities using information-theoretic measures. We relate the resulting measures to existing measures of revealed comparative advantage, localization, specialization, and coagglomeration and show how different measures derive from the same general framework. To support the use of these measures in hypothesis testing and statistical inference, we develop a Bayesian estimation approach to provide measures of uncertainty and statistical significance of the estimated quantities. We illustrate this framework in an application to an analysis of location and colocation patterns of occupations in US cities.     

Representation and Agenda Setting

We develop a new approach to the study of representation based on agenda setting and attention allocation. We ask the fundamental question: do the policy priorities of the public and of the government correspond across time? To assess the policy priorities of the mass public, we have coded the Most Important Problem data from Gallup polls across the postwar period into the policy content categories developed by the Policy Agendas Project ( Baumgartner & Jones, 2002 ). Congressional priorities were assessed by the proportion of total hearings in a given year focusing on those same policy categories, also from the Agendas Project. We then conducted similar analyses on public laws and most important laws, similarly coded. Finally we analyzed the spatial structure of public and congressional agendas using the Shepard‐Kruskal non‐metric multidimensional scaling algorithm. Findings may be summarized as follows: First, there is an impressive congruence between the priorities of the public and the priorities of Congress across time. Second, there is substantial evidence of congruence between the priorities of the public and lawmaking in the national government, but the correspondence is attenuated in comparison to agendas. Third, although the priorities of the public and Congress are structurally similar, the location of issues within the structure differs between Congress and the general public. The public “lumps” its evaluation of the nations most important problems into a small number of categories. Congress “splits” issues out, handling multiple issues simultaneously. Finally, the public tends to focus on a very constrained set of issues, but Congress juggles many more issues. The article has strong implications for the study of positional representation as well, because for traditional representation to occur, there must be correspondence between the issue‐priorities of the public and the government. We find substantial evidence for such attention congruence here.