A Generic Method for Identifying Regional Koala Habitat using GIS

The conservation status of the koala in Australia is not a homogeneous entity but is subject to regional variation according to the predicament of each population with respect to disease and habitat availability. Habitat is the primary factor affecting koala population dynamics in both critical decline and expansion. Key koala management and planning decisions necessitate a regional identification of potentially suitable koala habitat. The environmental factors constituting preferred koala habitat were identified and existing GIS databases used to combine Eucalyptus species preferred and utilised by koalas with soil properties to predict optimal, sub-optimal and unsuitable koala habitat in the southern Mt. Lofty Ranges. The methodological framework is flexible and particularly suited to regional koala management in Australia.     

Peace without social reconciliation? Understanding the trial of Generals Ríos Montt and Rodriguez Sánchez in the wake of Guatemala’s genocide

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the legal trial against Generals Efraín Ríos Montt and José Mauricio Rodriguez Sánchez for genocide and crimes against humanity has evidenced the interplay between the complex factors shaping post-conflict reconstruction and social reconciliation in post-genocide Guatemala, and, ultimately, the disjunctive impact of the country’s peace process. The ‘genocide trial’ then is more than a legal process in that it represents a thermometer for Guatemala’s peace process and, ultimately, for testing the nature and stability of the post-genocide/post-conflict conjuncture. Interiorization of human rights frameworks and justice mechanisms by indigenous and human rights activists, including of the Genocide Convention, has consolidated a partial rights culture. However, the trial and the overturning of its verdict have simultaneously evidenced the instability, fragility and disjunctive nature of post-conflict peace and the continuing impact of the profound legacy of the genocide and of social authoritarianism. The article argues that while the trial has wielded broad impact within both state institutions and society, consolidating indigenous political actors, it has simultaneously fortified spoilers and evidenced indigenous collective memory as a fragmented and contested sphere.     

DRS. MUTH AND MILLS MEET DR. TIEBOUT: INTEGRATING LOCATION‐SPECIFIC AMENITIES INTO MULTI‐COMMUNITY EQUILIBRIUM MODELS*

ABSTRACT We consider the problem of integrating spatial amenities into locational equilibrium models with multiple jurisdictions. We provide sufficient conditions under which models that assume a single housing price in each community continue to apply in the presence of location‐specific amenities that vary both within and across communities. If these conditions are satisfied, the models, estimation methods, and results in Epple and Sieg (1999) are valid in the presence of (potentially unobserved) location‐specific amenities. We also show how to construct sufficient statistics that capture location specific spatial heterogeneity. We apply these techniques using data from the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. We find that these amenity measures capture proximity to important local employment centers as well as heterogeneity in school quality within a given school district.     

Financialisation as Monopoly Profit: The Case of US Banking

Different economic measures afford different ways of seeing processes of financialisation. In the prototypical case of the US economy, the most compelling evidence of post‐1970s financialisation is found in corporate profits measures. This much has been clear for at least a decade. What remains much less clear, however, is the explanation for the long‐term maintenance and amplification of extreme financial‐sector profitability that financialisation in the United States has and continues to entail. With a specific focus on banking, this article turns to post‐Marxian scholarship on profit rate trends to explain this phenomenon. It argues that limited and declining levels of competition within the US banking sector during recent decades—rooted in high levels of industry concentration, collusive behaviour, and substantial entry barriers—have contributed to sustaining and boosting abnormal sectoral profitability. In doing so, the article theorises financialisation in the United States explicitly in terms of monopoly profit.     

Locational decision-making on a Scottish estate prior to enclosure

Before the main burst of agricultural improvements, taking place in Scotland in the latter part of the eighteenth century, farming was carried out from fermtouns; these were groupings of farmsteadings and their fields. This paper seeks to determine the factors underlying the decisions that were taken in the location of the farmsteads and the different elements into which the agricultural land was divided. Isolated for examination are the distance-decay function and natural environmental factors, basically those of soil conditions. The importance of natural soil drainage conditions appears to decide the location of both intensively and extensively cultivated land while in many cases the farmsteadings also lie closest to the permanent arable land. Definite statements about the decision-making process cannot, however, be made due to our present rudimentary understanding of the stability of settlement sites and the true origins of the infield-outfield system.     

Comparison of four ballistic and thrusting target materials: An experimental and Bayesian approach using static testing of stone and steel arrow tips

Researchers use a variety of target materials, and sometimes combinations of materials, in their archaeological experiments to examine thrust-spear or projectile penetration, impact angle, durability, and other issues involving prehistoric hunting weaponry. This variety of target materials is beneficial to archaeological science in several ways, but it may also hinder the comparison of results because many of these target materials do not necessarily share similar physical properties. Here, we assess the penetration properties of four different target materials—store-bought meat, clay, and two types of gelatin—via static penetration tests of a modern broadhead-tipped arrow and a stone-tipped projectile attached to an Instron Universal Materials Tester. Our analyses of load-deflection curves, peak load, and work energy demonstrate how the four target materials are similar in some ways but different in others, which suggests that researchers may strategically employ one or several depending on the question asked or hypothesis tested.     

UNDERPOPULATION, TELEVISION ECONOMIES, AND THE POWER OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION

This article addresses the power of popular geographical ‘imaginations’ and ‘knowledges’ to foreclose public debate and, in the process, to reinforce often contentious policies or practices. It argues that historically, a prominent example of such a powerful geographical knowledge has been that of ‘ overpopulation’. The concept of ‘underpopulation’, meanwhile, has been much less discussed, but in this article I argue that it, too, needs to be queried in much the same way that critics have examined claims of overpopulation. I make this case first at a generic level, describing some of the main situations in which notions of underpopulation are popularly invoked, before substantiating it in much greater detail in one specific context: that of the television economy in New Zealand, a country, it is frequently said, with ‘too few people’ to support a publicly funded broadcaster. I show that in this particular instance the underpopulation thesis is backed by flawed arguments, but that none the less it is widely accepted and seldom countered, hence serving to protect its protagonists from disclosing in public debate the real reasons for the television policies they pursue and which the idea of underpopulation actively allows.     

On the Performativity of Pill Pricing: Theory and Reality in the Economics of Global Pharmaceuticalization

One often‐highlighted contemporary phenomenon in the pharmaceuticals industry is the use of “tiered pricing”, where essential medicines are sold more cheaply in low‐income than high‐income countries to widen access. With economists having for decades championed the applicability of such pricing to pharmaceuticals, this could be interpreted as a textbook case of “economic performativity”—the economic world increasingly conforming to economic models. In reality, however, tiered pharmaceutical pricing remains rare. Yet this article nonetheless urges retention of the performativity concept, albeit suitably reworked. For, insofar as the industry demonstrates nominal commitment to the model and to the social principles associated with it, it performs valuable political work. Moreover, it does help perform the pharmaceutical economy, by reproducing it in its existing form: repeatedly questioning the model's workability, Western manufacturers are able to continue to avoid putting it widely into practice and, in the process, jeopardizing the profits generated by conventional pricing.