Privacy and False Identification Risk in Geomasking Techniques

Recent years have seen an increase in location privacy research, including the application of geomasking procedures. Geographical masks aim to protect privacy and preserve spatial information through the displacement of point data. False identification, or the mistaken association of data with the incorrect person or household, is an unexplored issue in geomasking, despite legal protections against false association. This study introduces a topological framework for assessing identification risk and examines the risk of false identification in four masking techniques: random perturbation, donut masking, and the newer Voronoi and MGRS masking techniques. While Voronoi masking is found to best preserve the clustering properties of a sample of urban foreclosure data, the other three masking techniques result in better protection against correct and false identification.     

The Grant,the Hare,and the Survival of a Medieval Folk Belief

In the third book of Otia Imperialia (c. 1211), Gervase of Tilbury describes numerous wonders, among them an English belief regarding the Grant, a sparkling-eyed entity shaped like a bipedal foal, whose appearance racing through the streets forewarns of fire. This creature, attested to nowhere but in Gervase’s work, is something of a mystery for folklorists, who have tried to draw connections to other supernatural beings based on its name and its appearance. What has gone overlooked is the fact that the same elements of the Grant’s fire-omen belief existed well into the twentieth century in parts of England, albeit applied to hares. This article suggests that the Grant is an exaggerated hare, while exploring the larger topic of why it is that hares are so often associated with fire in European folklore.     

Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.     

Using SimBritain to Model the Geographical Impact of National Government Policies

In this article, we use a dynamic spatial microsimulation model of Britain for the analysis of the geographical impact of policies that have been implemented in Britain in the last 10 years. In particular, we show how spatial microsimulation can be used to estimate the geographical and socio-economic impact of the following policy developments: introduction of the minimum wage, winter fuel payments, working families tax credits, and new child and working credits. This analysis is carried out with the use of the SimBritain model , which is a product of a 3-year research project aimed at dynamically simulating urban and regional populations in Britain. SimBritain projections are based on a method that uses small area data from past Censuses of the British population in order to estimate small-area data for 2001, 2011, and 2021.