Design thinking for city dashboard development: Recommendations from a study of smart asset management in Sydney,Australia

The city dashboard has become an integral component of smart city asset management systems. It leverages data collected from multiple sources to monitor performance and enable evidence-based decision making. This article investigates the use of a design thinking framework to develop a functional and easy to understand city dashboard. The Smart Social Spaces project is used as a case study to illustrate how design thinking can be employed to develop an asset management dashboard, enabling efficient management of public space and infrastructure. The article profiles the unique collaboration between a local government, a multi-disciplinary team of university academics, and a street furniture designer and manufacturer, all located in Sydney, Australia. We unpack some of the design practice nuances that led this project to receive national awards and international recognition, and most importantly, created a user-friendly system to track and maintain public micro assets. We conclude with lessons learnt and recommendations for dashboard development through a design thinking process.     

From stone to metal: New perspectives on the later prehistory of West Africa

Earlier views saw West Africa as culturally stagnant through much of the Holocene until stimulus or intervention from north of the Sahara transformed Iron Age societies. Evidence accumulating over the past 15 years suggests that stone-using societies from 10,000 to 3000 B.P. were far more diverse than previously thought. Against an increasingly detailed record of Holocene climate change, the complexity of local adaptation and change is becoming better understood. Although a strong case currently exists for the introduction of copper and iron to West Africa from the north in the mid-first millennium B.C., the subsequent development of metallurgy was strongly innovative in different parts of the subcontinent. Soon after the advent of metals, a dramatic increase in archaeological evidence for social stratification and hierarchical political structures indicates the emergence of societies markedly more complex than anything currently documented in the Late Stone Age. The best-documented examples come from the Middle Niger region and the Nigerian forest. In these areas, earlier diffusionist models in which complexity originated outside West Africa have yielded to evidence that indigenous processes were instrumental in this transformation. Trade, ideology, climate shifts, and indirect influences from North Africa, including the introduction of the domesticated horse to the Sahelian grasslands, are identified as factors essential to an understanding of these processes.     

THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY, AMENITIES AND FISCAL FACTORS ON AGE-SPECIFIC MIGRATION RATES

ABSTRACT. Migration models have considered several different categories of determinants, including economic opportunities, amenities, and state and local fiscal factors. Migration has also been shown to depend on the individual's position in the life cycle. This paper represents a first attempt to integrate all three categories of determinants of migration into a life-cycle framework. Empirical findings generated from a countrywide model of white male migration, over the period 1970 to 1980, reveal that all three types of determinants are important. Specifically, economic opportunities are most influential for males during their working years. Amenities are also found to follow a life-cycle pattern with older migrants more attracted to amenable locations than their younger cohorts. Finally, state income and death taxes display life-cycle effects; working males in their peak earning years are detracted by high income taxes while all migrants aged 55 to 69 avoid counties in states with high inheritance and estate taxes.     

Siberia and neighboring regions in the Last Glacial Maximum: did people occupy northern Eurasia at that time?

An updated analysis of Paleolithic sites in Siberia and the Urals ¹⁴C-dated to the coldest phase of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), with its timespan currently determined as ca. 23,000–19,000 BP (ca. 27,300–22,900 cal BP), is presented. It is demonstrated that people continuously occupied the southern and central parts of Siberia and the Russian Far East (up to 58° N latitude), and perhaps sporadically settled regions located even further north, up to 70° N, throughout the LGM. This is in accord with our previous data, but is now based on a larger dataset, and also on a paleoecological analysis of the major pre-LGM archaeological sites in Siberia and the Urals north of 58° N. It is clear that Paleolithic people in northern Eurasia were able to cope with the treeless tundra environment well in advance of the LGM, at least at ca. 34,000–26,000 BP (ca. 38,500–30,000 cal BP). Therefore, a high degree of adaptation to cold conditions allowed people to survive in Siberia during the LGM.     

Death by a Thousand Cuts: an archaeological assessment of souveniring and salvage on the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth (I)

In 2014, the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM) received reports from recreational divers that the shipwreck site of HMAS Perth (I) was being systematically salvaged by commercial divers. After extensive discussions with Indonesian Government departments and agencies the ANMM led the first Australian/Indonesian remote sensing survey of Perth in December 2016. This was followed by an in‐water survey in May 2017. These investigations revealed Perth has been devastated by systematic, large‐scale unauthorized salvage. Following the survey, ANMM and its Indonesian research partner Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional (ARKENAS), working in conjunction with the Royal Australian Navy and Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, successfully lobbied the Indonesian Government to have the site declared Indonesia's first Marine Protected Area.     

Archaeologist as anthropologist: Much ado about something after all?

It has been said that “archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” And so archaeologists have become conversant in and contributors to cultural theory. Other archaeologists have undertaken ethnoarchaeological studies on material culture when ethnographers have not supplied the data needed. Yet archaeologists might undertake more traditional participant-observation fieldwork to help nuance the cultural questions we ask and to render our tales of the past more convincing, in particular, when we purport to speak of the sensuous and meaningful experience of the “prehistoric other.” This article discusses the venturing of one archaeologist in Madagascar tracking aspects of the classic problem of state origins across archaeology, oral history, ethnoarchaeology, and ethnography. This process of joining objective analysis to lived experience is perhaps the most proper task of anthropology, the one that distinguishes it from other social science…     

Beyond NIMBY

Using survey data, this study tests competing hypotheses about the nature of opposition to a hazardous waste incinerator. Using a multivariate model, we challenge some of the basic assumptions of the Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) label typically used to characterize opposition. We find little evidence for components of the NIMBY label such as concern about property values and aesthetics, but find instead that opposition is related primarily to trust in government, fear of health consequences, and other ideological or demographic factors. We conclude with a discussion urging facility proponents to gain a better understanding of the nature of opposition and of the complexities of public opinion.