Three‐Dimensional Neurointerpolation of Annual Mean Precipitation and Temperature Surfaces for China

Climatic variables such as annual mean precipitation and temperature display complex and nonlinear variation with latitude, longitude, and elevation. Neural networks are universal approximators and very good at detecting and representing nonlinear relationships between dependent and independent variables. In this paper we use resilient backpropagation (Rprop) neural networks to interpolate annual mean precipitation and temperature surfaces for China. Climate surfaces are interpolated from a total of 288 long‐term climate station data points using latitude, longitude, and elevation derived from a 5‐kilometer resolution digital elevation model. Initial trials of Rprop suggested very fast learning, insensitivity to selection of learning parameters, and a tendency not to overtrain. Cross‐validation was used to determine the best network structure and assess the error inherent in climate interpolation. With the error explicit, the final neurointerpolations of annual mean precipitation and temperature were constructed using all 288 climate station data points. Maps of residuals are also presented. The neurointerpolation of temperature was very successful and captures most of the regional trends found in established climate maps of China as well as significant topographically defined detail. For annual mean temperature the Rprop neural network was found to be an accurate and robust global spatial interpolator. However, the precipitation surface captures only the major latitudinally and continentally defined trends and misses many subregional rainfall features probably because of the influence of other nonparameterized atmospheric and topographic factors.     

Locational Disadvantage and Household Locational Decisions: Changing Contexts and Responses in the Cessnock District of New South Wales,Australia. 1964–1999

Following the rapid demise of local coalmining in the 1950s and early 1960s, the former coal towns of the Cessnock area have survived in their newfound dormitory role, with cheap serviced housing acting as a major constraint on out–migration and an incentive for in–migration for low–income householders, mainly engaged in external commuting or outside the workforce. Behavioural responses to widening local job deficits in the early 1960s were reported in this journal (Holmes, 1965). From household surveys and other sources, Holmes examined the interplay between individual, household and locality variables and presented a spectrum of projected future outcomes for localities, according to accessibility, size and service provision, either attached to the Newcastle–Maitland labour market as low–income outer suburbs or experiencing varying rates of decline while providing low–cost welfare housing. While these broad trends have continued over the last 35 years, significant variants, not predictable in 1965 have emerged, notably: the increased residential attractiveness of some small localities; the strengthening of welfare migration, notably from Sydney; the increase in non–workforce households; and, some evidence of emerging socio–economic polarisation in larger towns. In these respects, Cessnock localities can be viewed as a microcosm of wider trends in Australian society, trends which are most fully revealed in disadvantaged metropolitan peripheral localities.     

Virtual zooarchaeology: building a web-based reference collection of northern vertebrates for archaeofaunal research and education

Osteological reference collections are a crucial tool in archaeofaunal analysis, but few are comprehensive; most lack a broad range of taxa or multiple individuals per taxon. This problem is especially prominent in arctic zooarchaeology, where difficulty in obtaining, transporting, and processing northern taxa has led to a dearth of appropriate reference collections. The Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project, or VZAP, seeks to develop a comprehensive virtual comparative assemblage for the skeletons of northern vertebrates. VZAP (http://vzap.iri.isu.edu) is designed to assist with identifications in the lab or field and provides significant educational value, for both classroom demonstration and personal consultation. The VZAP website presents high-resolution digital photographs and 3D models of skeletal elements via an intuitive graphical user interface, designed to mimic the visual experience of working with a real comparative collection. This custom-built interface, the Dynamic Image Engine, represents a new way to present heritage media in an interactive and engaging format. VZAP also implements unique 3D scanning protocols to increase the realism of 3D models, and delivers them on a platform that allows for point to point measurements, cross-sections, morphological labels, and anatomical orientations.     

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TRAVEL: SOME EXPLORATIONS

International business travel is now an omnipresent feature of working life for many millions of people around the globe. Whatever the organizational reason, it is now the likelihood that many individuals are engaged in undertaking work outside of the formal workplace in an irregular pattern which has become an almost ordinary aspect of their working-life. Such is the magnitude of international business travel that it is now highly significant for bringing multi-million dollar expenditure to countries and the global airline and hotel sectors, and supporting an international business travel management industry. Yet, surprisingly, little has been written on the agency of international business travel, beyond vignettes of the organizational requirement for physical proximity. In this introduction (and special issue) we consider what further academic analyses of business travel must do to extend knowledge and understanding of the growth and use of travel in the twenty-first century. The article is in five parts. First, we consider the function of international business travel in firms as part of strategies to tie-together spatially distributed subsidiaries. Second, we unpack the modes and spaces of business travel. Third, we discuss the impacts of business travel on both the traveller, but also the environment. Fourth, we introduce the major arguments and contributions of the four articles in this special issue. Finally, we identify future research agendas that should develop existing theory and understanding of the compulsion for international business travel.     

INVASIVE LIFE,COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE,AND COMMUNITIES OF FATE

The article starts from the premise that invasive life has the capacity to produce human communities. Invasive life is conceptualized as a way in which humans categorize proliferating organisms as ‘non‐native’ to a particular territory. The article focuses on the kind of relationship of human beings to invasive life that invokes a sense of ‘being under attack’ on the human side. It is argued that the threat of invasive life produces ‘communities of fate’, which are theorized for the sake of this article in close relation to the concept of ‘communities of practice’. The social dynamics set in motion by such community formation are further analysed in relation to two different case studies: (1) the emergence of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic in Mexico, and (2) the invasive plants eradication campaign of a group of activists in Germany. The article concludes by discussing the merits of analysing social dynamics and community formation in relation to challenges posed by invasive life.     

A psycho-historical source: the Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent

Medievalists turn to Guibert of Nogent's Memoirs (1116) for the account of the Laon uprising they contain. And yet this account is poor history. It is didactic and self-righteous in tone; one senses that the writer consistently sacrificed historical truth to the moral point he was trying to make. Scratch this twelfth- century ‘historian’ and you will find underneath a guilt-ridden cleric, haunted by vivid sexual reminiscences of his mother and by the terrible chastening reality of the Virgin Mary. A sensitive reading of the confessional sections of the Memoirs may yield up crucial unconscious impulses in a medieval man's psyche: his ‘masculine’ ambitions for glory, his need to prove his manhood, and yet also his ‘feminine’ desire for selfless submission to God, and his need to achieve a kind of passive holiness and innocence. These opposing impulses may account for the ‘demon’ that tortured Guibert of Nogent.After isolating certain psychological themes in the Memoirs it is possible to relate these themes to various nuances in the psychological ‘milieu’ of twelfth-century France. It is also possible to relate some of these themes to a ‘milieu’ not altogether different from that of twelfth-century France — twentieth-century southern Italy. For in southern Italy, we find that the psychological relationship between masculinity and femininity and (perhaps as a result of this relationship) the prominence of the Virgin Mary in the lives of the people corresponds closely to the situation in twelfth- century France. But this cross-cultural analysis is meant only to illuminate some of the possibilities of psychohistory. At the very least, a psychohistorical consideration of a text such as Guibert of Nogent's Memoirs should reveal some useful correlations between the single psychological current and the larger tides of cultural history.