Alternative Population Dynamics in Selected HIV/AIDS Modeling Systems: Some Cross-National Comparisons

This paper examines how demographic representations for the different risk populations influence the epidemic outputs of a simple process-based HIV/AIDS model. Alternative demographic specifications are presented in conjunction with transmission rules for both community and regional settings. Then, the existence, or nonexistence, of equilibrium solutions to these various models is determined to evaluate whether the forecast AIDS series will persist indefinitely or eventually terminate. Last, simulations for countries with distinctive birth and death rates are used to summarize the effect of this variation on the timing and size of the epidemic. All the results assume an epidemic that is unaffected by the practice of safer sex.     

A review of archaeology in mainland Southeast Asia

This article outlines recent advances in establishing and understanding the prehistoric sequence in mainland Southeast Asia. Research has been unevenly distributed, varying from virtually none in Cambodia to a marked intensity in Hong Kong and the adjoining mainland. A new pattern is becoming apparent, due in no small part to the new findings in southern China. It is argued that despite its long history of occupation, beginning withHomo erectus almost a million years ago, tropical Southeast Asia was occupied by scattered inland groups and larger, possibly sedentary coastal foragers until exposed to intrusive agricultural societies during the third millennium BC. These communities, which originated ultimately in the Yangzi Valley, brought with them rice cultivation and were responsible for the wide distribution of Austroasiatic languages. The three divisions of this language superfamily are now distributed from eastern India to southern China. Following a relatively brief Neolithic period, small and autonomous communities, particularly in Lingnan and Bac Bo (Guangdong and Guangxi provinces of China and the area of the Red River Delta), were exposed to exchange contact with the Shang state of the Chinese Central Plains, and this brought exotic jades and bronzes. Within this context, a local bronze industry was established between 1500 and 1000 BC over much of Southeast Asia, but without any obvious social developments until the middle of the first millennium BC, when several major changes occurred. These incorporated iron smelting and forging and exposure in the southern parts of the region to Indian mercantile contact and along the northern margins to the expanding Chinese empire. Adaptations varied regionally, from the establishment of warrior chiefdoms to counter the Chinese to the construction of water control systems in the arid heart of Southeast Asia to alleviate environmental unpredictability. It is within these regional changes that we can identify trends toward the establishment of states, some of which persisted in an unbroken lineage to the present.     

ONABASULU MALE HOMOSEXUALITY: Cosmology,Affect and Prescribed Male Homosexual Activity among the Onabasulu of the Great Papuan Plateau

This paper examines what has been called ‘ritualized homosexuality’ in a single ethnic group in the Strickland-Bosavi region of Papua New Guinea. Prescribed male homosexual practices are examined in the context of cosmology and the context of affect in the ‘everyday’ rather than ritual life of the Onabasulu. The perspective is derived from a more general interest in the social construction of the ‘world’ in everyday social life.     

The Role of Bose-Einstein Statistics in Point Pattern Analysis

Bose-Einstein statistics are introduced as the least-biased definition of equal likelihood or randomness available to geographers studying point patterns. The Bose-Einstein distribution is shown to be an entropy-maximizing probability distribution which enables the information theoretic concept of redundancy to be used as a measure of the extent to which an unknown spatial process influences the evolution of the frequency distribution of points. Finally the method is applied to the frequency distribution of karst depressions in limestone regions and the distributions of factories in Greater Manchester.