AN ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF KUHN'S DUAL FOR THE STEINER-WEBER PROBLEM A NOTE*

In this paper, we given an economic interpretation of Kuhn's dual of the Steiner-Weber problem. It depends essentially on the notion that different transportation systems arerelevant for the primal and the dual. Moreover, the Euclidean metric underlies the interpretation of the primal, the block one that of the dual.     

Occupational neurotoxicity and movement disorders: a historical perspective

It is shown that while metal toxicity has been known to be associated with risks to the health of miners and other workers for over a thousand years generally little was done before the 19th century to enquire into the relationship between lead, mercury, and manganese and neurological movement disorders. Reasons for this are suggested.     

Search and Fetter's Law of Markets

Fetter's law, a classical result of location theory, is respecified to include search costs. Then the implied partition of the market space is derived.     

Agricultural brokers

Pigs worked as brokers of agrarian life in the early medieval west in two ways. First, they converted organisms and spaces that humans did not directly exploit into a ‘commodity’ that humans did value. And the material work that pigs did made possible a second kind of brokerage, this one conceptual: the animals facilitated (or provoked) ways of seeing local phenomena in the context of wider ecological and social systems. Pigs’ ability to make use of a range of habitats, and humans’ interest in exploiting that work despite the trouble that pigs routinely caused, demonstrated that seemingly small things could influence and illuminate early medieval economies, social status, justice, and even metaphysics.     

The evolution of human culture during the later Pleistocene: Using fauna to test models on the emergence and nature of “modern” human behavior

It has often been argued that the success and spread of modern humans ∼50,000 years ago was due to a series of key behavioral shifts that conferred particular adaptive advantages. And yet, particularly during the African Middle Stone Age (MSA), some of these “modern” behaviors see only patchy expression across time and space. Recent models have proposed a link between the emergence of modern behaviors and environmental degradation and/or demographic stress. Under these models, modern behaviors represent a form of social/economic intensification in response to stress; if this were the case, signs of subsistence intensification should be more common during periods in which these behaviors are manifested than when they are not. In order to test these models, I analyzed faunal remains from Sibudu Cave (South Africa), focusing on the Howieson’s Poort (HP), a phase in which modern behaviors are evidenced, and the post-HP MSA, when classical signatures of such behavior have disappeared. Significant variability in hunting behavior was identified. While much of this variability appears to correspond with changes in the local environment, evidence for resource stress was more common during the HP. The implications of these results to our understanding of the evolution of human culture are discussed.