DAMS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN MALAYSIA: DEVELOPMENT,DISPLACEMENT AND RESETTLEMENT

Large dams have proliferated in Malaysia in recent decades. Constructed mainly to meet mounting domestic demand for water and energy, they have destroyed large tracts of species‐rich tropical rain forest and displaced many already poor and marginalized indigenous groups from their homes and ancestral lands without their consent. Evicted indigenes were promised a better life in resettlement villages, but for the most part this has not occurred. Invariably traumatized by resettlement and widely forced into cash‐based economies for which they were ill prepared, many resettled indigenes suffered from frayed social relationships, high rates of unemployment and enduring poverty, in large part because the authorities failed to internalize project costs. The consequences for indigenous groups of dam‐induced environmental change and development‐forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR) are explored through a critical reading of the literature on four large dams: Sungai Selangor, Babagon, Batang Ai and Bakun. More large dams are under construction and many others have been proposed, resulting in threats to the future well‐being of many indigenous communities. Generally speaking, the experiences of Malaysia's dam‐affected indigenes mirror those of other indigenous minorities in the greater Southeast Asian region.     

A Visual Analytics System for Space–Time Dynamics of Regional Income Distributions Utilizing Animated Flow Maps and Rank-based Markov Chains

Regional income convergence and divergence has been an active field of research for more than 20 years, and research papers in this field are still being produced at a prodigious rate. Despite their importance for the study of dynamics of income distribution, interactive visualization tools revealing spatiotemporal dimensions of the income data have been sparsely developed. This study introduces a visual analytics system for the space–time analysis of income dynamics. We use state-level US income data from 1929 to 2009 to demonstrate the visual analytics system and its utility for exploring similar data. The system consists of two modules, visualization and analytics. The visualization module, a Web-based front-end called Rank-Path Visualizer (RPV), draws inspiration from the cartographic technique of flow mapping, originally developed by Tobler and embodied in his canonical Flow Mapper application.