Australian conservation organisations' perspectives on tourism in national parks: a critique

Australia's conservation and parks organisations have become actively involved in the debate over tourism use of national parks and their associated wilderness areas. To date, at least seven organisations have produced at least ten formal policy statements and submissions. This paper presents an analysis of these policy statements.The policies reviewed use a narrow definition of tourism, based on the presence or absence of commercial, private sector activity. If commercial activity exists, then tourism exists; if not, then it is considered to be recreation. This distinction reflects the widely held opinion among many environmentalists that non-commercial use of national parks is acceptable, but that commercial use is essentially unacceptable, even though the groups may be participating in the same activity. The author argues that while making a number of valuable suggestions, these policies suffer from major conceptual flaws that minimise their contribution to the debate on acceptable human uses of parks.The author concludes by making a number of recommendations to rectify the conceptual flaws inherent in the policies.     

Use of Systematic, Palaeoflood and Historical Data for the Improvement of Flood Risk Estimation. Review of Scientific Methods

The catastrophic floods recently occurring in Europe warn of the critical need forhydrologic data on floods over long-time scales. Palaeoflood techniques provideinformation on hydrologic variability and extreme floods over long-time intervals(100 to 10,000 yr) and may be used in combination with historical flood data (last1,000 yr) and the gauge record (last 30–50 yr). In this paper, advantages anduncertainties related to the reconstruction of palaeofloods in different geomorphologicalsettings and historical floods using different documentary sources are described.Systematic and non-systematic data can be combined in the flood frequency analysisusing different methods for the adjustment of distribution functions. Technical toolsintegrating multidisciplinary approaches (geologic, historical, hydraulic and statistical)on extreme flood risk assessment are discussed. A discussion on the potential theoreticalbases for solving the problem of dealing with non-systematic and non-stationary data ispresented. This methodology is being developed using new methodological approachesapplied to European countries as a part of a European Commission funded project (SPHERE).     

Sounding the dark cosmos

Bruce Bassett, Bob Nichol and Daniel J Eisenstein explain why the Wide-Field Multi-Object Spectrograph will need to look so far into the universe, over such a wide area, in order to map sound waves from the dawn of time.     

Rural women and technology in South Africa: Case studies from KwaZulu-Natal Province

This article contributes to a greater understanding of the linkages between women's roles, responsibilities and their use of technology in poor rural communities. The ways in which poor rural women conceptualize technology is examined. Furthermore, how they use their knowledge and skills to develop, modify and adapt the techniques and technical processes in which they are involved are also explored. Additionally, the links between indigenous and modern technologies in relation to gender considerations in poor rural contexts are examined. This article draws from findings of primary research undertaken in two marginalized rural communities in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. The study reveals that the use of technologies are highly gendered and differentiated among women. Poor rural women utilize a range of technologies in both productive and reproductive activities which are central to their livelihood strategies, especially at the household level. Furthermore, although women are adapting and innovating technologies their expertise remains largely unrecognized. A range of problems and constraints exist which limit women's access to and use of technologies. A key tension identified in the study is that between the use of locally-based, indigenous technologies and modern, external technologies. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A method for estimating the sub-wavelength sway of a sonar towfish

The essentially random motion of the towfish in a side scan sonar system limits the fidelity of the resultant image. Although corrective techniques have been developed to deal with the gross departures from a set of regular amplitude versus range samples along a straight locus as well as the gross rotational errors, sub-wavelength displacement errors are mostly ignored. This paper suggests a technique to estimate the appropriate displacement errors from the statistics of the measured data when there are few or no strong scatterers on an otherwise featureless sea floor. As it happens, the proposed technique is somewhat similar to an existing optical technique but is new to underwater sonar. We show in a series of simulated trials that it is possible to estimate the resultant sub-wavelength horizontal departure from a straight locus under some (hopefully) realistic operating conditions     

On the u.v. source of the night-time E region

The photo-ionization produced in the night-time E region by the total stellar u.v. continuum is considered. It is shown to be approximately equal to that produced by the scattered Lyman β above about 115 km.