Identifying the Impacts of Land-Use Spatial Patterns on Street-Network Accessibility Using Geospatial Methods

While the land use-street network nexus is well acknowledged, evidence for the one-way impacts of land-use patterns on street accessibility is still inadequate. The measurements of land-use patterns and street accessibility lack systematic knowledge. Their empirical correlations also lack geographical variability, constraining site-specific land-use practices. Therefore, this study overcame the aforementioned limitations by examining the two-level spatial models to formulate accessibility-oriented land plans, using a well-developed Chinese city as an example. Firstly, two landscape metrics—Euclidean Nearest-Neighbor Distance (ENN) and Similarity Index (SIMI)—were used to quantify the intra- and inter-land-use configurations, respectively. Both city-level and local accessibility were measured using spatial design network analysis. Performing both ordinary least squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models, results identified the statistically significant effects of inter-land-use patterns on two-level street accessibility. An exception was that land-use configurations within residential and industrial regions were irrelevant to street accessibility. We also found GWR was a better-fitting model than OLS when estimating locally-varied accessibility, suggesting hierarchical multiscale land-use planning. Overall, locally heterogeneous evidence in this study can substantialize land use-street network interactions and support the decision-making and implementation of place-specific accessibility-oriented land use.     

The Middle Stone Age in East Africa and modern human origins

East Africa, the region where Merrick Posnansky started his professional career, has long been accepted as the major centre for the study of the origins of hominids and their technological systems. Recently, human geneticists and some palaeoanthropologists have also proposed an African origin for anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), although much of the proof cited is from non-African sources — mainly Europe and the Middle East. Fortunately these models have stimulated reassessment of the sub-Saharan Middle Stone Age (MSA), the archaeological phase between 200,000 and 30,000 years ago which represents the beginnings of regional variation in technology and cultural adaptation as well as the period in which modern humans appeared. Long ignored by East African archaeologists in favour of the earliest cultural record, or, at the other extreme, Neolithic and Iron Age research, the MSA is critical to the evaluation of models of the emergence of our own species. This paper reviews the current arguments concerning the origin and dispersal of modern humans, and the importance of the MSA for the resolution of the problem. It also describes the results from a 1990 survey for MSA sites conducted in southwestern Tanzania within the framework of these current models.

---

Résumé L'Afrique orientale, où Merrick Posnansky commença sa carrière professionnelle, est depuis longtemps reconnue comme un centre important pour l'étude des origines des hominides et de leurs systèmes technologiques. Récemment, des généticiens et des paléoanthropologues ont aussi suggéré que les humains anatomiquement modernes (Homo sapiens sapiens) auraient des origines africaines, bien qu'un grand nombre des preuves citées proviennent de sources non-africaines, principalement d'Europe et du Moyen-Orient. Heureusement, ces modèles ont encouragé la réévaluation de l'âge de pierre moyen (MSA) sous-saharien, phase archéologique d'il y a 200.000 à 30.000 ans, qui représente les débuts des variations régionales sur le plan de la technologie et de l'adaptation culturelle. C'est aussi la période durant laquelle les étres humains modernes sont apparus. Longtemps ignoré par les archéologues d'Afrique orientale en faveur de témoignages cultures plus anciens ou, à l'autre extrême, des recherches de l'âge néolithique et de l'âge de fer, le MSA est crucial pour l'évaluation de modèles d'émergence de notre propre espèce. Cet article examine les arguments actuels concernant l'origine et la dispersion des humains modernes, et l'importance du MSA pour la résolution de ce problème. Il décrit également les résultats d'une recherche de sites MSA menée en 1990 dans le sud-ouest tanzanien, dans le cadre de ces modèles actuels.

     

American graffiti: deconstructing gendered communication patterns in bathroom stalls

Bathroom graffiti, in both its text and pictorial form, represent viable means for strangers to communicate with each other. The text or drawings in the bathroom stalls, while written or drawn in a private space and presumably during a very private moment, are meant to be public, as they transmit ideas, images, and even responses. Using data collected in 10 bathroom stalls at a university (five men's bathrooms and five women's bathrooms), this study examines differences in communication patterns in women's and men's bathroom stalls through an analysis of graffiti content and style. Findings reveal that while communication patterns tend to be supportive and relationship-focused in women's bathrooms, the graffiti in men's bathroom walls are replete with sexual content and insults, in the course of the construction of hegemonic masculinity. In addition, an analysis of the response-and-reply chains suggests that, in the bathroom stalls, hierarchies of power are established and reinforced even in anonymous, unmoderated spaces, and even when no humans are physically present.     

The mandible and dentition of the Early Cretaceous monotreme Teinolophos trusleri

Rich, T.H., Hopson, J.A., Gill, P.G., Trusler, P., Rogers-Davidson, S., Morton, S., Cifelli, R.L., Pickering, D., Kool, L., Siu, K., Burgmann, F.A., Senden, T., Evans, A.R., Wagstaff, B.E., Seegets-Villiers, D., Corfe, I.J., Flannery, T.F., Walker, K., Musser, A.M., Archer, M., Pian, R. & Vickers-Rich, P., June 2016. The mandible and dentition of the Early Cretaceous monotreme Teinolophos trusleri. Alcheringa 40, xx–xx. ISSN 0311-5518.

The monotreme Teinolophos trusleri Rich, Vickers-Rich, Constantine, Flannery, Kool & van Klaveren, 1999 Rich, T.H., Vickers-Rich, P., Constantine, A., Flannery, T.F., Kool, L. & van Klaveren, N., 1999. Early Cretaceous mammals from Flat Rocks, Victoria, Australia. Records of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery 106, 1–34. [Google Scholar] from the Early Cretaceous of Australia is redescribed and reinterpreted here in light of additional specimens of that species and compared with the exquisitely preserved Early Cretaceous mammals from Liaoning Province, China. Together, this material indicates that although T. trusleri lacked a rod of postdentary bones contacting the dentary, as occurs in non-mammalian cynodonts and basal mammaliaforms, it did not share the condition present in all living mammals, including monotremes, of having the three auditory ossicles, which directly connect the tympanic membrane to the fenestra ovalis, being freely suspended within the middle ear cavity. Rather, T. trusleri appears to have had an intermediate condition, present in some Early Cretaceous mammals from Liaoning, in which the postdentary bones cum ear ossicles retained a connection to a persisting Meckel’s cartilage although not to the dentary. Teinolophos thus indicates that the condition of freely suspended auditory ossicles was acquired independently in monotremes and therian mammals. Much of the anterior region of the lower jaw of Teinolophos is now known, along with an isolated upper ultimate premolar. The previously unknown anterior region of the jaw is elongated and delicate as in extant monotremes, but differs in having at least seven antemolar teeth, which are separated by distinct diastemata. The dental formula of the lower jaw of Teinolophos trusleri as now known is i2 c1 p4 m5. Both the deep lower jaw and the long-rooted upper premolar indicate that Teinolophos, unlike undoubted ornithorhynchids (including the extinct Obdurodon), lacked a bill.

Thomas H. Rich [trich@museum.vic.gov.au], Sally Rogers-Davidson [srogers@museum.vic.gov.au], David Pickering [dpick@museum.vic.gov.au], Timothy F. Flannery [tim.flannery@textpublishing.com.au], Ken Walker [kwalker@museum.vic.gov.au], Museum Victoria, PO Box 666, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia; James A. Hopson [jhopson@uchicago.edu], Department of Organismal Biology & Anatomy, University of Chicago,1025 East 57th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA; Pamela G. Gill [pam.gill@bristol.ac.uk], School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1RJ, U.K. and Earth Science Department, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, UK; Peter Trusler [peter@petertrusler.com.au], Lesley Kool [koollesley@gmail.com], Doris Seegets-Villiers [doris.seegets-villiers@monash.edu], Patricia Vickers-Rich [pat.rich@monash.edu], School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia; Steve Morton [steve.morton@monash.edu], Karen Siu [karen.siu@monash.edu], School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia; Richard L. Cifelli [rlc@ou.edu] Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73072, USA; Flame A. Burgmann [flame.burgmann@monash.edu], Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy, 10 Innovation Walk, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia; Tim Senden [Tim.Senden@anu.edu.au], Department of Applied Mathematics, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200, Australia; Alistair R. Evans [alistair.evans@monash.edu], School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia; Barbara E. Wagstaff [wagstaff@unimelb.edu.au], School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia; Ian J. Corfe [ian.corfe@helsinki.fi], Institute of Biotechnology, Viikinkaari 9, 00014, University of Helsinki, Finland; Anne M. Musser [anne.musser@austmus.gov.au], Australian Museum, 1 College Street, Sydney NSW 2010 Australia; Michael Archer [m.archer@unsw.edu.au], School of Biological, Earth, and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia; Rebecca Pian [rpian@amnh.org], Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024-5192, USA. Received 7.4.2016; accepted 14.4.2016.     

The romance of the Inland Isle: Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the landscape of Providence

Nearly two centuries after its publication, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1990a) remains among the most influential accounts of American political culture. This essay argues that the rhetorical foundation of the Democracy's enduring cultural power is its “imaginative geography” (Said 2000), about which I make two, interrelated claims. The first has to do with the Democracy's identification of the American land with divine Providence. I claim that the providential landscape is the chief means by which Tocqueville contains and organizes the account of the tension between achieved liberty and natural freedom that drives the Democracy. My second focus is on the romantic character of the providential landscape. Cosgrove (2005, p. 302) reflects upon the “tenacity of the island condition on the Western imagination” as frame and vessel of “imagination, desire, hopes and fears.” I argue that the Democracy's “Inland Isle,” as I call it, is a metaphorical island in this sense, and that its theoretical capacity and exhortative power derive from Tocqueville's use of an idiom expressive of a distinctively French tradition of landscape theorizing in which garden metaphor was used to construct meanings of equality and freedom, and voice and identity, in an emerging national, bourgeois order.     

The Levite's Concubine: New Light on a Dark Story

Previous commentators accept that an adulterous wife dared return to her father's house and a benign husband sought to retrieve her, or they stipulate a unique meaning for the phrase . By understanding in a sense attested elsewhere in the Bible, this essay both resolves the crux of implausibility and obviates the need for singular translation. A close literary reading also presents a new interpretation of the entire chapter, demonstrating that the theme of Judges 19 is neither hospitality nor the abasement of women but Israel's Sodom-like abnegation of commitment and compassion down to that last stronghold of security—the family unit. Contrary to other feminist readings, this feminist interpretation reveals the biblical author's empathy toward the concubine, his contempt for the guilty, and his imposition of punishment on the wrongdoers.     

The Media Prism and Reflections on Insécurité

This article considers media coverage of the theme of insécurité in the French presidential election of 2002, at which the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the French nation by winning a place in the second round contest against the incumbent President Jacques Chirac. We examine the much-publicised accusation that the media contributed to Le Pen's success by excessive, distorting coverage of insécurité, the polemic surrounding this charge, and issues of media responsibility. While much writing on the topic has focused on thematic media analysis or on the interaction of politicians, the media and the electorate in setting the election agenda, this article discusses the findings of a number of quantitative media studies and focuses on the terms and nature of media discourse. Through a discussion of insécurité, the article highlights the misleading potential of simplistic labelling and vague emotive terminology, amplified in sensational coverage by competing media outlets.     

Imperial nostalgia: mythologizing Habsburg Trieste

This article reviews three recently published books on Habsburg Trieste, inquiring into the reasons for increased interest in this topic. The author suggests that this represents a type of 'imperial nostalgia' for the world we have lost, in particular for a political experiment in religious and ethnic diversity (as embodied by the flourishing of imperial Trieste's Jewish community) outside of the nation-state form. This nostalgia, in turn, reflects current concerns with identity, including scholarly attempts to theorize the contemporary situation in which the power of the nation state has been transformed. The analysis reveals that certain authors misread the realities of imperial Trieste through the lens of contemporary meanings of cosmopolitanism and tolerance. As an alternative, the article sketches out what the 'actually existing cosmo­politanism' of the Habsburg city consisted in.