Pastoralists’ perceptions and realities of vegetation change and browse consumption in the northern Kalahari, Namibia

Pastoral production around artificial watering points in semi-arid environments affects the density and composition of plant communities. In the Kalahari desert of southwestern Africa, bush encroachment is often regarded as the major form of land degradation resulting from pastoral production around watering points. We investigated the OvaHerero pastoralists’ perceptions of the extent of vegetation change since the establishment of artificial watering points in the northern Kalahari desert of Namibia, and related this to ecological data on vegetation change. We determined the utility of woody vegetation to pastoralists’ livelihoods in terms of provision of construction material, fuel wood and browse. We quantified local knowledge of cattle browse consumption and correlated this with field data. We also assessed the purposes for which major livestock types were used. Our results showed that: (1) pastoral knowledge of bush encroachment and browse consumption was consistent with concurrently collected field data, (2) the current level of bush encroachment was perceived to be beneficial for pastoral production, and (3) cattle played an important role in the production of milk and milk by-products for domestic use, and served as a source of cash income, while sheep and goats were primarily kept for meat consumption. This result contrasts with historical studies that mainly portray cattle as a symbol of social status among OvaHerero pastoralists.     

Time, idealisation and international development: promoting Canadian co-management in northern Russia

In this article, I trace the efforts of a development team working to promote a Canadian approach to natural resources management in the Russian North. These development workers used two communication strategies related to time and history to render Canadian knowledge mobile and applicable to a new location: (1) imagining today's Russian North as equivalent to the Canadian northern past and (2) reframing and idealising the Canadian past and present to make the governance export less discursively 'messy' for an outside audience. The relative failure of these communicative strategies points to the need for richer dialogue in efforts to move knowledge cross-culturally.     

The role and value of local knowledge in Jamaican agriculture: adaptation and change in small-scale farming

Local knowledge has played an active role in the lives of rural communities in virtually every part of the world. In Jamaica, traditional cropping systems based on local informal knowledge have been practiced since the days of slavery and play a vital role in meeting food security. Yet, some negative attitudes remain about the legitimacy and relevance of small-scale farmers' local and traditional knowledge. This paper discusses some conceptual and empirical issues related to the application of local knowledge among small-scale food farmers in central Jamaica. The paper argues that contextually speaking, local and traditional knowledge is valuable, adaptable and necessary in coping with risk and uncertainty in a changing world, while cautioning against a misguided notion of traditional knowledge as a panacea to all the ills of local agriculture.     

Awkward geographies: Spatializing academic responsibility, encountering Sri Lanka

This paper responds to recent postcolonial geographical scholarship that sets forth transformative agendas in order to create more cosmopolitan theoretical projects within the discipline. For many geographers the challenges they face are located within not only their own disciplinary parameters, but also those of other specific research communities within which their work situates them. By bringing geography and area studies into productive conversation, this paper explores the tensions between negotiating one's academic voice, position and responsibility within geography as well as within a specific area studies community. More specifically, as a UK-based geographer I reflect on some of my own fairly unremarkable, yet extremely awkward, encounters during the course of scholarly praxis in Sri Lanka in order to raise questions over the spatialities of responsibility and political engagement in such academic praxis. I seek to theorize the chasms that open in such awkward encounters between notionally situated 'local' and 'foreign' scholars respectively and, in particular, develop ways of engaging and reorienting those chasms in ways that might enable the production of theoretically rich, yet richly contextualized postcolonial knowledges committed to the site of one's scholarly praxis – not just to the advancement of a more cosmopolitan theoretical project within geography.     

Time–frequency representation of earthquake accelerograms and inelastic structural response records using the adaptive chirplet decomposition and empirical mode decomposition

In this paper, the adaptive chirplet decomposition combined with the Wigner-Ville transform and the empirical mode decomposition combined with the Hilbert transform are employed to process various non-stationary signals (strong ground motions and structural responses). The efficacy of these two adaptive techniques for capturing the temporal evolution of the frequency content of specific seismic signals is assessed. In this respect, two near-field and two far-field seismic accelerograms are analyzed. Further, a similar analysis is performed for records pertaining to the response of a 20-story steel frame benchmark building excited by one of the four accelerograms scaled by appropriate factors to simulate undamaged and severely damaged conditions for the structure. It is shown that the derived joint time–frequency representations of the response time histories capture quite effectively the influence of non-linearity on the variation of the effective natural frequencies of a structural system during the evolution of a seismic event; in this context, tracing the mean instantaneous frequency of records of critical structural responses is adopted.The study suggests, overall, that the aforementioned techniques are quite viable tools for detecting and monitoring damage to constructed facilities exposed to seismic excitations.     

论防震减灾科普宣传与培训教育工作

文章从如何做好防震减灾科普知识的宣传与培训教育工作,提高群众在地震发生时的自救、互救能力和抢险救灾能力等方面进行了论述,并提出了相应的想法和建议。对切实提高社会公众防灾减灾的能力、普及防震减灾知识有一定的参考价值。     

基于尺度的GIS空间资料表达模型

介绍了基于层的GIS空间资料表达方法易于进行空间查询与空间分析处理的优点,针对其引起的地图难以进行扩展与图像显示转换困难的缺点,提出了基于尺度(比例尺)的空间资料表达新方法.在基于尺度的空间资料表达方法中,地图可以由空间对象,区域,尺度视图三级尺度模型表达.对尺度方法下的地图结构,地图组织,指标结构,地图扩展等在理论上作了探讨,提出了基于尺度的方法与已广为使用的基于层的方法的有效集合,将有可能成为地理信息表达研究的最重要研究方向.     

论空间数据挖掘和知识发现的理论与方法

首先分析了空间数据挖掘和知识发现（SMDKD）的内涵和外延；然后分别研究了用于SDMKD的概率论，证据理论，空间统计学，规则归纳，聚类分析，空间分析，模糊集，云理论，粗集，神经网络，遗传算法，可视化，决策树，空间在线数据挖掘等理论和方法及其进展；最后展望了SDMKD的发展前景。