Rates for the job. Measures of disease frequency in palaeopathology

Measures of disease frequency are discussed and their use in palaeopathology illustrated with examples, both hypothetical and real. It is shown that prevalence rates are the appropriate rates to use when calculating the frequency of diseases in skeletal populations. The extent to which prevalence rates accurately reflect those in the living population from which the skeletons were derived is also considered and it is suggested that they are a reasonable approximation for diseases that do not shorten life span, but not for those that do. Finally, suggestions are made for dealing with missing data.     

South Africa's Current Transition in Temporal and Spatial Context

This article analyses South Africa's current postapartheid transition in the light of earlier transformations of its social and economic order. The first of these prior transformations is the abolition of slavery and the shift to liberal capitalism, which took place in the early nineteenth century. The second is the rapid industrialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each of these transformations, as well as the current transition, is explained as being partly the outcome of a broad shift in capitalist practice, innovated in the metropoles of the global economy. Due to South Africa's situation within global economic networks, each of these shifts, at different times, raised the threat of a dislocation in South Africa's prevailing social order. However, each prior transformation and, it will be argued, the current transition, has been 'managed' by established elites so as to ensure minimal change to the overall distribution of privilege. This conservative 'management' of shifts in capitalist practice, it is suggested, has been facilitated through South African elites' historic engagement with cultural discourses circulating across a global terrain. In this article then, contemporary South Africa is located within both material and discursive networks which have historically influenced the country's distribution of privilege.     

Book Notes

Michael Ghertman and Margaret Allen, An Introduction to the Multinationals, London, Mac‐millan, for the Institute for Research and Information on Multinationals, Geneva, 1984, pp.143. $11.95 (paper).

June M. Hearn and W.A. Howard, Australian Industrial Relations: Case Studies, South Melbourne, Macmillan, 1984, pp.vi, 136. $12.95 (paper)

Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984, pp.308. $10.95 (paper).

W.E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, second edition, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1983, pp. 257. $16.50 (paper)

W.E. Connolly (ed.), Legitimacy and the State, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984, pp. 281. $15.95 (paper)

B. Guy Peters, The Politics of Bureaucracy, 2nd edition, London, Longman, 1984, pp. 294. $29.95 (paper)     

POISSON GRAVITY MODELS OF SPATIAL FLOWS*

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to bring together a number of results on spatial flow models, and to reformulate them within a unified probability framework based on Poisson frequencies. To do so, a class of discrete stochastic processes, designated as independent flow processes, is developed which not only yields a complete characterization of Poisson flow frequencies, but also allows a wide range of gravity-type flow models to be formulated within this distributional framework. In particular, a hierarchical classification of 12 model types is developed, and each model type is shown to be characterizable directly in terms of behavioral axioms on independent flow processes.     

ADDITIVE-RATIO MEASURES OF INTERACTMTY IN INPUT-OUTPUT SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT. A general axiomatic framework is developed for analyzing alternative measures of interactivity between the sectors of a given activity system (such as the industrial sectors of an economy). Within this overall framework, we analyze an ordinal class of additive-ratio measures which has been applied to a wide variety of systems, including both economic and ecological systems of activities. Our main result is to show that such measures can be characterized by four interactivity axioms. In addition, a wide variety of alternative measures are compared to additive-ratio measures in terms of this axiom system.     

Regional Weil-Being in Australia Revisited

There have been many studies of regional well-being in Australia, but few match the range of variables and spatial detail employed in this paper. Twenty two socio-economic variables were drawn from the 1986 census and used to classify all 148 Commonwealth electorates. Two procedures were adopted, both based on a principal components analysis, and compared to test the robustness of the classifications generated The first approach summed factor scores to provide a status index, and the second employed Ward's clustering algorithm. The resultant groupings are seen to both complement and reinforce each other and indicate the complex and often subtle variations in well-being across the country.