Is distance really dying? Transportation and knowledge spillovers

Enhanced transportation infrastructure improves the frequency of travel and facilitates face-to-face communication. Will the resulting reduction in travel cost mitigate the geographical concentration of knowledge spillovers? Our empirical strategy exploits China's mass expansion of its intercity high-speed railway network as a natural experiment. Using patent citations as the proxy for knowledge spillovers, we find inventors increasingly rely on more distant knowledge after rail connection and newly connect cities' innovation performance improves substantially.     

我国古代女主临朝的特征及原因探析

“在中国封建社会,曾多次出现过女主临朝,女主临朝具有重用外戚、手段残酷、宠幸宦臣的特征;而女主临朝的原因大概有皇帝体弱多病、昏庸荒淫,嗣君年幼、不能亲政,后妃本人具有政治才能等。     

What is Geography? Perceptions of first year undergraduates in South Africa

Disciplines such as Geography are well placed to respond to the changing needs of society and the effective application of geographical knowledge to real-world problems. This project surveyed first year Geography undergraduates’ understanding of “What is Geography?”, both before and after an exercise in which geographic topics were identified within recent newspapers. The survey instrument employed was an anonymous, self-administered questionnaire, and was undertaken with first-year undergraduate Geography students at a university in South Africa. Results show that the exercise enabled students (n = 158) to more readily see the application of geographical knowledge to both environmental and social problems that they identified in the newspaper stories. Students also identified that studying Geography may be able to help them increase their skills, employment prospects and earning potential. These findings can help locate the disciplinary concerns and applicability of Geography in post-apartheid South Africa within the wider context of the twenty-first Century world.     

A missing link? Network analysis as an empirical approach for critical physical geography

Critical physical geography (CPG) calls for integrative research on material landscapes and the socio-political dynamics of scientific knowledge production. Network analysis, a rich tradition of tools and approaches for analyzing relational information, has seen little use in the CPG literature to date. This represents a fruitful opportunity, as many of CPG's core interests—knowledge politics, histories of scientific concepts, and ecosocial relations—can be effectively analyzed using network techniques. In this article, I argue for adapting network approaches to CPG. First, I provide an overview of various network concepts, approaches, and their origins. I then discuss bibliometric network techniques for “science mapping” including co-word, co-authorship, and citation analyses. Next, I describe discourse network analysis, a recent mixed-method approach from political science. Finally, I discuss overlaps with emerging approaches from qualitative and visual network analysis. In each section, I provide existing and hypothetical examples, as well as software and visualization techniques, that demonstrate how network approaches could add new insights to CPG and related scholarship. Linking CPG with the diverse traditions of network analysis has the potential to produce new empirical understandings and bring the field into conversation with a growing body of research that spans the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.     

明清时期汉水下游地区的地理环境与堤防管理制度

明清时期国家对于汉水下游的水利管理制度经历一个变迁的过程,与这一区域的水利问题的日益突出密切相关,垸田的发展以及带来的问题是主要的因素。钟祥至沙洋的汉江干堤极易溃决,并且关系到整个下游地区的安全,因此在人力组织、资金筹集、岁修维护上,国家的政策表现出明显的倾斜性,相对于沙洋以下的区域,给予了充分的重视。沙洋以下,天门、潜江、沔阳等州县所在区域主要以垸田为主,国家将这一区域的堤防修筑与维护主要交由地方来进行。垸堤岁修维护采取堤甲制的组织形式,由垸民完成,一方面没有固定的资金,另一方面在正常年景之下,垸民可以获得基本的物质生存,因此垸堤的维护面临相当的困难。