Mapping Market Areas Using Nonparametric Smoothing

A new method is proposed to map firms' principal market areas using shipment data. The new method is a general one which could prove just as useful in mapping the incidence of disease as in mapping market areas. This method is applied to agricultural data for feeder cattle sales at a video cattle auction. Transportation costs appear to be the main determinant of market area boundaries, but there are many cases where transportation costs alone cannot explain the market areas found. The size and shape of market areas for feeder cattle buyers are large, irregularly shaped, and extensively overlapping.     

Georges Ungar and memory transfer

The idea that memories could be transferred from one organism to another by administration of a "trained" donor brain to a naive recipient seized both scientific and public attention in the 1960's and early 1970's. Georges Ungar was one of the earliest and strongest proponents of this idea, and he provided it extensive theoretical and experimental support. This paper reviews Ungar's work on memory transfer (and in particular on the scotophobin molecule), with an analysis of its successes and failures.     

City size distributions and urban density functions: some interrelationships

This paper is concerned with "relating the apparent regularities of the population distribution within individual cities to the regularities with which the urban population of a nation is distributed among cities....An attempt is first made to draw the two distributions together in mathematical terms. The discussion then turns to a theoretical consideration of possible interrelations between the two distributions, after which the temporal variation of the parameters of each distribution is examined. This leads to the outlining of an evolutionary model of urban-system development, based on the passage through a number of stages." The analysis focuses on urban systems in Europe and North America.