Post‐tropical/post‐tsunami: Climate and architectural discourse in South and Southeast Asia

Following the Indian Ocean tsunami on 26 December 2004, scenes of destruction overwrote representations of a benign tropical landscape on the eastern periphery of the Indian Ocean. The incongruous coupling of luxury resort hotels with devastated indigent fisher settlements in international media coverage had exposed the global inequities embedded in a tropical tourism industry subscribed to and abetted by states, institutions, developers and architects. As post‐tsunami reconstruction commenced, it became evident that the climatic trope through which regionalist aesthetics had been filtered thus far was incapable of providing expedient solutions to real social problems. In academia and in the profession, the complex discourse of so‐called tropical architecture shaping the debates has yet to be untangled and problematized. Implicating and haunted by colonial, nationalist, developmental and political renderings, and more recently by issues of globalization, such representations continue to undergird architectural debates and production. In the wake of recent reconstruction projects and provoked by related architectural student designs in Sri Lanka, this paper reviews the politics of the tropical agenda in architecture and some considerations for its demise.     

Forum on the Anthropocene

Geographers have been thinking and teaching about human interactions with the environment for centuries. Whether the phrase used to describe this area of scholarship is man‐land, man and nature, people‐environment, nature‐society, human dimensions of global change, or the Anthropocene, these studies are deeply rooted under the umbrella of geography. Scholars in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts have embraced the concept of the Anthropocene, and often employ it as a vernacular term with no implied connection to a so‐called golden spike, or stratigraphic layer of sediment or rock that would mark an official transition from one slice of geologic time to the next. This collection of essays explores ways in which the Anthropocene may be a helpful framework to organize geographical teaching and scholarship about ways in which people have interacted with and transformed planet Earth. The term Anthropocene was coined in the realm of Earth System science, but the authors who contributed to this Forum relate the idea to topics such as novel ecosystems and species assemblages, conservation, commodification of nature, global capitalism, and ways in which our species, Homo sapiens, has markedly transformed the Earth for at least thousands of years. The Forum also engages with the fact that the Anthropocene as a proposed new epoch of the geologic time scale may not make sense at the spatial and temporal scales at which geographers view the world. Geographers have an opportunity to address myriad unanswered questions about the Anthropocene.     

Women in agriculture: advocates for a gendered sustainable agriculture

A gendered consideration of rural geography has been barely discernible within Australian and New Zealand literature. The notable exceptions in this case have illustrated the complexity and merit of studying the gender patterns and relations of rural life. Outside geography, there is an expanding literature on rural women in Australia. These works parallel significant developments in the lives and politics of rural and agricultural women themselves. This paper reports selected findings from a study of the women in agriculture movement in Australia. As such, it illustrates the increased awareness of the gendered conditions of farming. The women in agriculture movement works to increase the recognition of women's contribution to agriculture. In doing so it affirms the legitimacy of women farmers’ voices and perspectives. There will be no sustainable rural systems while half the rural population is unseen or unheard. Women in agriculture demonstrate a social dimension of sustainability. They highlight the need to integrate gender equity and a ‘wider‐than‐economic’ conceptualisation of sustainable agriculture. Their actions can stimulate rural geographers to further consider the social and political aspects of rural sustainability beyond the conventional farm/industry and community service sites we usually consider.     

Becoming coca: A materiality approach to a commodity chain analysis of hoja de coca in Colombia

Coca is a controversial plant, existing on the boundary between legality and illegality. This study aims at providing an analytical technique for discussing the problematic of coca in Colombia. Using new theoretical propositions in human geography, a more‐than‐human approach is adopted to encounter coca holistically. The results are a narrative account of coca's social life as experienced by the researcher following its network of non‐cocaine derivatives. An analytical section invokes the Foucauldian dispositif to the drug trade and utilizes concepts of informed materials and technological zones to describe coca outside a political economy discourse. The research finds that coca's dynamic materiality complicates it as a commodity and that these conventional approaches do not fully encapsulate this complexity. By grappling with the messiness of coca's materiality, this paper reveals the multiplicity and interplay of coca's definitions, which lie at the heart of many conflicts.     

Exploring the Spatiotemporal Pattern of Cyberbullying with Yik Yak

Cyberbullying is an emerging social issue along with the prevalence of social media. Previous studies have used extensive surveys or firsthand data primarily from conventional social networks¹1 Social media whose users primarily use their real name and provide identifiable information, although some might use pseudonyms (e.g., Facebook and Twitter).View all notes (e.g., Twitter) to study cyberbullying, which often ignores the factor of anonymity and location. Considering the sensitive nature and contagious effect of cyberbullying, a better understanding of the spatiotemporal pattern in cyberbullying is sorely needed to develop effective policies to combat this toxic social behavior. Grounded in the dramaturgy theory and the emerging literature on technoself, this study aims to compare cyberbullying in the anonymous social media (Yik Yak) with the conventional social media (Twitter) and explore its spatiotemporal patterns. A support vector machine is used to help identify records with bullying content. Average nearest neighbor, kernel density, and Ripley's K-function are used to explore the spatiotemporal patterns of cyberbullying behavior. We have found that cyberbullying is more likely to occur in anonymous than conventional social media. We also detected a clustering pattern corresponding to the student population, which can be explained by the dramaturgy theory and recent studies on technoself. In addition to making suggestions to help reduce cyberbullying in the future, this article also sheds light on the need for future studies.     

Using Audience Physiology to Assess Engaging Conservation Messages and Animal Taxa

Abstract

We used heart rate change as a tool to study how positive and negative wildlife conservation messaging impacts a viewer, and which types of animal images stimulate greatest reaction. We used scenes from five wildlife conservation videos available from environmental organization websites and YouTube, with positive and negative messaging. We found both very positive and very negative messaging in videos may be similarly effective in engaging viewers. A trend in greater changes in heart rate when insects, mammals, and birds appear on the screen suggests generally high human interest in these taxa, potentially due to avoidance and attraction responses. The number of scenes (N?=?54) in which various taxa appear reflects bias toward mammals (65%) and birds (17%) to capture viewers’ attention. Arousal is a primary step in engaging an audience to attend to a message. Physiological research offers innovative new techniques to evaluate public responses to communications about biodiversity conservation.     

How does the ownership of land affect household livelihood pathways under conditions of deagrarianization? ‘Hanging in’, ‘stepping up’ and ‘stepping out’ in two north Indian villages

In rural parts of the global South, livelihoods are diversifying away from agriculture. Nevertheless, agriculture typically still remains the backbone of rural life and is usually considered the prime source of economic security, social prestige and self‐identity. The task of narrating these somewhat contradictory processes in a conceptually coherent fashion has proven a major challenge for research. This paper responds to this problem by deploying an adapted version of Andrew Dorward's schema of households ‘hanging in, stepping up or stepping out’ of their landed interests. Dorward's middle‐ground theory provides an appropriate analytical vehicle for capturing the vagaries and situated complexities of the land‐livelihoods nexus. However the theory fails to fully appreciate the extent to which household livelihood decision making rests on complex entanglements that leverage land‐based and nonfarm activities against one another. We demonstrate the critical importance of these processes through the results of in‐depth interviews with 32 households in two north Indian villages. These interviews lead us to propose that land factors in livelihood aspirations in three fundamental ways: an arena for interpenetrated agrarian and nonagrarian livelihood streams; a base for social reproduction; and a bulwark of food (and by extension, livelihood) security through own‐production capabilities.     

A GeoAgent‐based framework for knowledge‐oriented representation: Embracing social rules in GIS

While current Geographic Information Systems (GISs) can represent observational spatial data well, they have limited capabilities in representing some non‐observational social elements and goal‐driven behaviours that can be important factors in a wide range of geographic issues. Such social components may include laws, regulations, polices, plans, culture, and customs, as well as their relations and interactions with the geographic environment at different scales. Getting beyond traditional data‐centred approaches, this research presents a knowledge‐oriented strategy in order to address these issues within a GIS context. We incorporate two major conceptual elements. First, extending from conventional agent notions and their geographic applications, geographic agents (GeoAgents) are considered as a basic representation component to specifically address social rules and goal‐driven behaviours that impact the Earth and environmental systems. Second, in order to incorporate GeoAgents with current space–time representation, a new conceptual representation framework, called ‘fields, objects, time, GeoAgents, and relations’ (FOTAR), is introduced to address the cross‐scale processes of both social and natural interactions. A Java‐based prototype, GeoAgent‐based Knowledge System (GeoAgentKS), is described to implement this framework by integrating agent technologies with multiple data and knowledge representation techniques, such as expert systems, concept maps, mathematical models, and geospatial databases. The application of this prototype in a case study is also presented, investigating scale‐dependent human–environment interactions under different emergency situations for community water systems in Central Pennsylvania, USA. In this case study, a systematic set of methodologies of knowledge acquisition, representation, and confirmation for constructing GeoAgents' knowledge bases by using expert systems were explored to formalize high‐level knowledge and social behaviours in the FOTAR‐based representations. The results show that the proposed conceptual representation framework is achievable at both implementation and application levels, and the prototype tool is demonstrated to be valuable in facilitating knowledge sharing, policymaking, municipal management, and decision‐making, especially for real‐world emergency management.     

Issues of Globalization and Reflexivity in the Japanese Tourism Production System: The Case of Whistler,British Columbia

This article examines contemporary Japanese overseas tourism from a supplier‐side perspective using the concept of production systems. We first outline characteristics of the evolving structure of Japanese overseas tourism, with an emphasis on the global spread of Japanese travel companies. This provides a frame for presenting an empirical account of the transactional relationships in the Japanese package tour production system in Whistler, British Columbia, where Japanese tour operators play a pivotal role. We conclude that the recent expansion of Japanese travel companies is fostering the functional integration of the global tourism production system and exhibits increasing reflexivity.     

Land Cover Classification Using High‐Resolution Aerial Photography in Adventdalen,Svalbard

A methodology was tested for high‐resolution mapping of vegetation and detailed geoecological patterns in the Arctic Tundra, based on aerial imagery from an unmanned aerial vehicle (visible wavelength – RGB, 6 cm pixel resolution) and from an aircraft (visible and near infrared, 20 cm pixel resolution). The scenes were fused at 10 and 20 cm to evaluate their applicability for vegetation mapping in an alluvial fan in Adventdalen, Svalbard. Ground‐truthing was used to create training and accuracy evaluation sets. Supervised classification tests were conducted with different band sets, including the original and derived ones, such as NDVI and principal component analysis bands. The fusion of all original bands at 10 cm resolution provided the best accuracies. The best classifier was systematically the maximum neighbourhood algorithm, with overall accuracies up to 84%. Mapped vegetation patterns reflect geoecological conditioning factors. The main limitation in the classification was differentiating between the classes graminea, moss and Salix, and moss, graminea and Salix, which showed spectral signature mixing. Silty‐clay surfaces are probably overestimated in the south part of the study area due to microscale shadowing effects. The results distinguished vegetation zones according to a general gradient of ecological limiting factors and show that VIS+NIR high‐resolution imagery are excellent tools for identifying the main vegetation groups within the lowland fan study site of Adventdalen, but do not allow for detailed discrimination between species.     

Between the "Global" and the "Local": On Global Locality and Local Globality

This study offers new perspectives on the impact of global and local interactions on cities today. We look at two opposing ways of integrating global processes with the local functioning of cities. The first mode relates to a city representing unique local significance that is recognized and valued on the global scale. This globality is not economic but it affects the global interactions of individuals, institutions, and businesses in these cities. We term this type of city a global locality. The second mode is a city that serves as a local cultural and economic gateway to its region. Whether located higher or lower on the World Cities roster, at the local and regional scale it serves as both business center and cultural hub. We term this type of city a local globality. In this article, we discuss both city types using Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Jerusalem as examples.     

IS IT ROSLYN OR IS IT CICELY? REPRESENTATION AND THE AMBIGUITY OF PLACE

Representations or images of place are widely recognized as contributing to how people understand the places in which they live, work, and study. Increasingly they are being seen to contribute to the production of places as well. This paper addresses the relationships between representation and place as social processes by examining the blurring of Cicely, the Alaskan town in the television show Northern Exposure, and Roslyn, the town in Washington state where outdoor scenes of Northern Exposure are shot. Two main points are raised. First, the production of place-images by the entertainment industry has material repercussions for the residents of places. Second, the relationship between Roslyn and Cicely helps advance an epistemology of place that recognizes that the entire set of boundaries we use to define places limits our understanding of places as open, ambiguous, and, therefore, political social processes.     

THE PANOPTICON'S CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT. Over the past two centuries, surveillance technology has advanced in three major spurts. In the first instance the surveillance instrument was a specially designed building, Bentham's Panopticon; in the second, a tightly controlled television network, Orwell's Big Brother; today, an electronic human‐tracking service. Functionally, each technology provided total surveillance within the confines of its designated geographical coverage, but costs, geographical coverage, and benefits have changed dramatically through time. In less than a decade, costs have plummeted from hundreds of thousands of dollars per watched person per year for analog surveillance or tens of thousands of dollars for incarceration to mere hundreds of dollars for electronic human‐tracking systems. Simultaneously, benefits to those being watched have increased enormously, so that individual and public resistence are minimized. The end result is a fertile new field of investigation for surveillance studies involving an endless variety of power relationships. Our literal, empirical approach to panopticism has yielded insights that might have been less obvious under the metaphorical approach that has dominated recent scholarly discourse. We conclude that both approaches—literal and metaphorical—are essential to understand what promises to be the greatest instrument of social change arising from the Information Revolution. We urge public and scholarly debate—local, national, and global—on this grand social experiment that has already begun without forethought.     

Creating and delivering augmented scenes

An augmented scene delivery system (ASDS) creates and distributes annotated cartographic products in real time from captured still imagery. An ASDS applies augmented reality technology to the visualization of unrestricted exterior viewsheds through an adaptive, perspective‐based surface resampling model. This paper describes an ASDS testing platform, introduces a client/server model for distributing augmented scenes over the Internet, presents a linear‐time algorithm for resampling dense elevation models for perspective imaging and conducts an execution analysis of the algorithm's implementation, demonstrating that augmented scenes can be constructed and delivered efficiently. The paper also presents a migration path to mobile ASDS platforms with a discussion of the remaining technological problems associated with its implementation.     

Multiscale structure in sedimentary basins

Hierarchies of superimposed structures are found in maps of geological horizons in sedimentary basins. Mapping based on three‐dimensional (3D) seismic data includes structures that range in scale from tens of metres to hundreds of kilometres. Extraction of structures from these maps without a priori knowledge of scale and shape is analogous to pattern recognition problems that have been widely researched in disciplines outside of Geoscience. A number of these lessons are integrated and applied within a geological context here. We describe a method for generating multiscale representations from two‐dimensional sections and 3D surfaces, and illustrate how superimposed geological structures can be topologically analysed. Multiscale analysis is done in two stages – generation of scale‐space as a geometrical attribute, followed by identification of significant scale‐space objects. Results indicate that Gaussian filtering is a more robust method than conventional moving average filtering for deriving multiscale geological structure. We introduce the concept of natural scales for identifying the most significant scales in a geological cross section. In three dimensions, scale‐dependent structures are identified via an analogous process as discrete topological entities within a four‐dimensional scale‐space cube. Motivation for this work is to take advantage of the completeness of seismic data coverage to see ‘beyond the outcrop’ and yield multiscale geological structure. Applications include identifying artefacts, scale‐specific features and large‐scale structural domains, facilitating multiscale structural attribute mapping for reservoir characterisation, and a novel approach to fold structure classification.     

Transnationalism,emotion and second‐generation social mobility in the Filipino‐Canadian diaspora

Through the case of Filipino‐Canadian youth experiences, this paper examines socio‐economic mobility among the children of immigrants in the context of transnational social fields and emotional engagements with the diasporic homeland. The Filipino‐Canadian experience is distinctive in terms of immigration patterns, settlement trajectories, policy frameworks and the historical and contemporary construction of ethno‐racial identities. Using educational attainment as a proxy for a wider process of social mobility, the paper shows that outcomes among Filipino youth have been anomalously poor. The explanations for this situation are multiple, but this paper draws particular attention to the ways in which negative emotional engagements with the Philippines as a diasporic homeland may shape self‐esteem and aspirations among Filipino youth in Canada and thereby play a role in social mobility.     

The role of social resource of indigenous people in local ecological resource management in China: A preliminary case in Zhangye, Northwestern China

Social resources of indigenous people are valuable wealth, including the social norms, the relational network, belief, attitude as well as the social system which is accumulated from generation to generation. Those social resources are very important for local ecological resource management, which can help diffuseness and communion of skills and traditional conservation techniques for conserving and restoring the ecological sites. Social capital is one indicator of social resources, which is accepted widely. In order to investigate the role of social resources of indigenous people in local ecological resource management, the authors studied the relation between social capital of indigenous people and local ecological resource management, taking Zhangye City as an exam-ple. In this paper, social capital of indigenous people is quantified by constructing social capital index, composed of structural so-cial capital and cognitive social capital; local ecological resource management is quantified by constructing "Grain for Green Pro-ject" performance index. Based on correlation analysis approach and logistic regression analysis approach, the authors analyzed the relation between social capital and "Grain for Green Project" performance index, as well as the relations between "Grain for Green Project" performance index and other factors such as per capita net income, medical treatment and so on. Results showed that the correlation between social capital and "Grain for Green Project" performance index was positive, the coefficient was 0.761, with P<0.01. An increase of 1 unit in social capital is associated with an increase of 1.550 units in "Grain for Green Project" per-formance. With factor, such as faction, per capita net income, medical treatment, increasing 1 unit, the "Grain for Green Project" performance index will increase 3.912, 1.039 and 1.005 units, respectively.     

Artificial Neural Networks in Proglacial Discharge Simulation: Application and Efficiency Analysis in Comparison to the Multivariate Regression; A Case Study of Waldemar River (Svalbard)

Artificial neural networks were applied to simulate runoff from the glacierized part of the Waldemar River catchment (Svalbard) based on hydrometeorological data collected in the summer seasons of 2010, 2011 and 2012. Continuous discharge monitoring was performed at about 1 km from the glacier snout, in the place where the river leaves the marginal zone. Averaged daily values of discharge and selected meteorological variables in a number of combinations were used to create several models based on the feed‐forward multilayer perceptron architecture. Due to specific conditions of melt water storing and releasing, two groups of models were established: the first is based on meteorological inputs only, while second includes the preceding day's mean discharge. Analysis of the multilayer perceptron simulation performance was done in comparison to the other black‐box model type, a multivariate regression method based on the following efficiency criteria: coefficient of determination (R²) and its adjusted form (adj. R²), weighted coefficient of determination (wR²), Nash–Sutcliffe coefficient of efficiency, mean absolute error, and error analysis. Moreover, the predictors' importance analysis for both multilayer perceptron and multivariate regression models was done. The performed study showed that the nonlinear estimation realized by the multilayer perceptron gives more accurate results than the multivariate regression approach in both groups of models.     

A Geography of Children's Vulnerability: Gender,Household Resources,and Water‐Related Disease Hazard in Northern Pakistan*

Water‐related diseases continue to pose major threats to children's survival and well‐being in many places in the developing world. This article develops a theoretical perspective on the ways in which children's vulnerability to water‐related disease hazard is produced within the everyday circumstances of livelihood and child care. Central to this analysis is the role that household resources play in mediating or shaping particular microenvironments of health risk. Further, the effects of local geographies of gender on how household resources are accessed and on how child care is structured are examined. Children's vulnerability is evaluated in a community in the District of Gilgit in northern Pakistan, a region presently undergoing tremendous social and economic transformation. The case study highlights household‐level response and adaptation to child health risks associated with diarrheal disease transmission and infection in this mountain environment. The case study draws from ethnographic fieldwork involving qualitative household microstudies and interviewing to elicit mothers' resource and risk‐response strategies in the context of changes in livelihood systems and household dynamics.