PANEL ON THE SOVIET UNION IN THE YEAR 2000

A panel of geographers debates possible future developments in the Soviet Union in regional and environmental policy, water resource management, agriculture, industry, energy, population, urban growth and planning, transportation, and foreign trade. The present emphasis on modernization of existing plant capacity in cities of the western, more heavily settled regions of the USSR seems destined to continue, although it will be constrained by a growing shortage of industrial labor, declining terms of trade and resource oversupply in increasingly competitive export markets, and the continued resistance of Central Asian populations to urbanization and industrial employment.     

News Notes

The settling of the Russians in Siberia is considered in the framework of three periods: (1) the 17th century, when the initial nucleus of the Russian population contingent was formed; (2) the 18th century and first half of the 19th, when in-migration declined and natural increase assumed a greater role in population growth; (3) the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when Eastern Siberia's population grew at about the same rate as that of Russia as a whole, mainly through natural increase. Differences in natural increase, migration, economic activity and ethnic composition accounted for a wide diversification of the settling process within the region, and a number of distinctive settlement areas are described and mapped for the last two periods. Except for the initial intensive migration flow that gave rise to the nucleus of Russian population, Eastern Siberia's population growth before the 1917 Revolution derived mainly from natural increase, with migration playing a subordinate role.     

DOGS, 'WATER' AND WALL

1 Sam 25 describes David and Nabal on a collision course diffused by Nabal's wife Abigail. Had she not been successful, David would not have left ''a single one who urinates against a wall'' (25,22.34). The phrase also appears a number of times in 1-2 Kgs. Much has been written about this phrase either in reference to dogs or male humans, but very little scholarship has discussed it in terms of canine realia. We intend to re-examine all of the verses and will attempt to show that some of the later Rabbinic commentary was sensitive to canine realia and maybe of help in determining the meaning of the phrase.     

The relation of form and function

Foley, William A., and Robert D. Van Valin. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. xii + 416 pp. including notes, references, and topics and language indices. $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.     

OCCUPATION AND ETHNICITY IN FIVE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITIES: A COLLABORATIVE INQUIRY

Abstract

Literary critics and historians often interpret authors and authors' works as more or less significant, but are reluctant to quantify those works. The interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, however, poses methods of quantifying the eminence of an author's works. This study uses four measures from that field (anthology entries, scholarly citations, entries in books of quotations, and auction sale records) and one measure from the fields of computational linguistics and data mining (ngrams using millions of books digitized by Google) to assess the eminence of John Milton's thirty-one prose works1. For the purpose of this study, Milton's short “A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth” (1659) was not included in the quantitative analysis out of concern with possible conflations and confusions with letters in Milton's Familiar Letters. and their relation to his greater achievement in epic poetry. These measures indicate the singular eminence of Areopagitica, Milton's 1644 tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing.