Crime mobility: Spatial modelling of routine activities of arrestees and substance abusers in South Africa

Routine activity theory proposes that a crime will take place within a criminal's area of social interaction. This space is delimited by his/her workplace, residence and/or place of recreation. This theory, however, has not been tested to include substance use, especially in the South African context. Therefore, where such substances are obtained and used the location of subsequent criminal activities needs to be incorporated in this theory. Given this context, the paper tests the hypothesis that as drug users expand their activity sphere they also expand their crime space. The analysis is based upon an HSRC national survey of arrestees in which data on their place of work, residence, leisure and drug obtaining were collected. These data were linked by GIS and analysed to establish relationships between the social interaction sphere and drug obtaining of the respondents. This expected expanded behaviour is analysed spatially and used to identify hot spots and high priority areas for police intervention. These results assist in making predictions about places where substances can be expected to be obtained. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The spatial context of manpower policy: Implications of current Canadian policy on regional development and planning

Macro government policies are often considered outside the context of their spatial impact. Following recent discussions of the problem, this paper is concerned with a critical review of Canadian Manpower policy in the context of national efficiency, regional equity and their interaction. Thus Manpower policy is analysed with respect to its implications concerning regional development as well as implicit regional policy. It is contended that many of the problems of Manpower policy in the spatial context can be traced back to the implicit theoretical background of Manpower policy; Human Capital theory. A radical critique of Human Capital theory is presented and a brief discussion of the ‘functional’ relationship between regional inequality and national macro-planning is also noted. In general the paper concludes that Manpower and regional policies in Canada tend to be contradictory although more research is needed to analyse the spatial impact of macro-policy which may overwhelm spatial policy and significantly influence the future of the spatial economy.     

Saline groundwaters in the hercynian granites (Chardon Mine,France): geochemical evidence for the salinity origin

In this study, the chemical evolution of high Cl⁻ Chardon mine groundwaters is modelled as a mixing between an oxidising recharge and an old marine component on which the water–rock interaction is superimposed. Chemical and isotopic similarities with saline Carnmenellis mine groundwaters are emphasised and a general comparison with other brines is discussed.The cation content of deep granitic groundwaters is indicative of the water–rock interaction. In the case of Chardon and Carnmenellis groundwaters, the high Na/Cl ratio can still be related to the contribution of a brine of sedimentary origin to the water salinity. The differences in the hydrochemistry related to their geological context only appears at the trace metals level. On the contrary, brines in plutonic rocks which exhibit a low Na/Cl ratio represent groundwaters having a residence time in the host rock, long enough to equilibrate with secondary aluminosilicates. In that case, the brine origin is difficult to assess if only based on the water cation content.     

全球变化背景下的敏感性研究综述

敏感性研究是全球变化科学研究的重点领域,通过认识全球变化和生态安全之间的相互关系,为人类适应全球变化提供科学依据。基于对敏感性概念的辨析,探讨了全球变化背景下敏感性的科学内涵,提出了敏感性研究的框架,列举了敏感性分析与评价各自的研究方法、对象和目标,从生物学实验、实地观测、计算机模型以及统计分析4个方面系统总结了敏感性分析的方法与实践,概述了非脆弱性和脆弱性框架下的敏感性评价方法与实践。发现在很多研究中敏感性评价是脆弱性框架中的重要一部分,但是评价自然生态系统对环境变化的敏感性则往往不依赖于脆弱性框架,是独立完整的研究。最后总结了敏感性研究的阶段性特征,指出了未来的研究重点和发展方向。     

Three-Dimensional Back-Analysis of an Instrumented Shallow Tunnel Excavated by a Conventional Method

The excavation of a shallow tunnel induces deformations of the soil volume in the vicinity and above the tunnel and consequently on the nearby buildings. The range of these deformations depends among other on the geological conditions, the geometry of the tunnel, and the excavation method. In this context, this research focuses on the 3D numerical modeling of a shallow tunnel instrumented during its construction, located on the Toulouse (France) subway line B for which the excavation has been carried out in a conventional manner in an over consolidated molassic geological context. The objective of this analysis is to estimate the tunnel behavior in terms of vertical and horizontal movements of the surrounding soil and the deformations of the existing buildings. The explicit finite differences numerical code FLAC^3D is used to model the various implementation phases of the work where the fluid–soil interaction is taken into account through an undrained coupled analysis. The results of this 3D model are compared to those of the in situ measurements in order to validate the geotechnical characteristics of the molasses. The latter are a useful basis for the back-analysis of the different monitoring sections implemented in areas where the tunnel excavation is made by TBM with pressurized front.     

Social geography,spatial structure and social structure

This paper adopts a positivist approach to social geography, which is viewed as a study of the two-way relationship between spatial structure and social structure. This relationship is examined in cities in contemporary Britain and the United States. The concept of social structure is discussed in the first section. It is suggested, after Blau, that social structure may be delineated by parameters which demarcate the lines of differentiation among people, created in their social interaction. Area of residence may be considered such a parameter. Social structure comprises a complex configuration of these parameters. In general, coinciding parameters limit social mobility and lead to an atomised society. The processes by which social structure takes on spatial expression are discussed in the second section. The salience of various parameters of social structure in a spatial setting is assessed first. Behaviouralist, managerialist and structuralist approaches to residential differentiation are reviewed. It is argued that most insight will come from studies of the interaction between groups of households and the major institutions of the housing market in the context of characteristics of the housing supply. The impact of neighbourhood on social structure is examined in the third section. The role of propinquity in social interaction is discussed along with the role of neighbourhood as a status symbol. Individuals may change their position along structural parameters as a consequence of their residential location. Residential segregation is also a means, through its role in circumscribing contacts, by which the continuation of the stratification system is ensured in the next generation. In conclusion, it is noted that the isolation of racial minorities in the disadvantaged parts of the city poses a danger to social stability.     

Modelling dynamic deformation in natural rock slopes and underground openings with DDA: review of recent results

We present validations and applications of the numerical Discontinuous Deformation Analysis method (DDA) for different cases of dynamic loading in the context of rock mass deformation. Following a review of 2D and 3D-DDA validations against analytical solutions for single and double face sliding, we present dynamic DDA applications in natural rock slopes and underground openings. Modelling dynamic rock slope deformation is demonstrated using the case of Masada rock slopes, with some new findings on the dynamic deformation of overhanging cliffs in general. Modelling underground deformation is demonstrated using the case of an active open pit mine in Israel developed in a rock mass containing multiple karstic caverns. The DDA method is shown here to be a powerful numerical tool for modelling dynamic rock mass deformation when the interaction between multiple discrete elements dictates the expected global deformation.     

Morphometric and landsliding analyses in chain domain: the Roccella basin,NE Sicily,Italy

The dynamic interaction of endogenic and exogenic processes in active geodynamic context leads to the deterioration of the physico-mechanical characteristics of the rocks, inducing slopes instability. In such context, the morphometric parameters and the analysis of landslide distribution contribute to appraise the evolutive state of hydrographic basins. The aim of the study is the morphometric characterization of the Roccella Torrent basin (Rtb) located in South Italy. Landsliding and tectonic structure dynamically interact with the drainage pattern that records these effects and permits the definition of the evolutive geomorphic stage of the basin. The Air Photograph Investigation and field surveys permitted to draw the main geomorphic features, the drainage pattern of the Rtb, to calculate the morphometric parameters and to delimit the landslides’ bodies. Detailed analysis about the landslide distribution within a test site 17 km² wide were carried out to elaborate indicative indexes of the landslides type and to single out the lithotypes that are more involved in slope instability phenomena. The morphometric parameters indicate the rejuvenation state within the Rtb where the stream reaches show the effects of increased energy relief in agreement with the geological settings of this sector of the Apennine–Maghrebian Chain.     

冰冻圈变化对经济社会系统的综合影响及其适应性管理策略

冰冻圈是气候系统影响最直接和最敏感的圈层。在全球变化背景下,冰冻圈变化与生物圈、岩石圈、水圈、大气圈、人类圈之间的相互作用日趋加剧。特别地,冰冻圈快速变化对其影响区经济社会系统产生了广泛而深刻的负面影响,甚至危及人类福祉、经济社会系统的健康、和谐、持续发展。鉴于冰冻圈区位劣势及其较为落后的经济水平,其应对冰冻圈变化的能力极为有限。目前,适应仍然是冰冻圈应对气候变化的主要途径。冰冻圈变化对经济社会系统的综合影响分析是适应冰冻圈快速变化的基础,其适应性管理战略则是减轻冰冻圈快速变化不利影响、降低自然和经济社会系统防御其不利影响脆弱性的最终目标。     

中国东部大陆边缘晚新生代构造演化及板块相互作用过程重建

晚新生代中国东部大陆边缘的构造活动主要集中于东海东缘。中新世以来菲律宾海板块俯冲、冲绳海槽弧后张裂、台湾弧-陆碰撞等一系列重大构造过程,塑造了现今琉球沟-弧-盆体系、台湾碰撞造山带和南海东北部的构造-地貌格局。本文基于对重磁和多道地震资料的解译,并结合前人研究成果,恢复了冲绳海槽构造演化史,阐明了冲绳海槽弧后张裂和台湾弧-陆碰撞之间的关系。在此基础上,重建了中新世以来欧亚板块、菲律宾海板块、南海板块之间的相互作用过程模型。本研究有助于进一步理解板块汇聚背景下东亚大陆边缘深部动力-热力过程对浅部构造格局变迁的制约和影响。     

Review: Groundwater management and groundwater/surface-water interaction in the context of South African water policy

Groundwater/surface-water interaction is receiving increasing focus in Africa due to its importance to ecologic systems and sustainability. In South Africa??s 1998 National Water Act (NWA), water-use licenses, including groundwater, are granted only after defining the Reserve, the amount of water needed to supply basic human needs and preserve some ecological integrity. Accurate quantification of groundwater contributions to ecosystems for successful implementation of the NWA proves challenging; many of South Africa??s aquifers are in heterogeneous and anisotropic fractured-rock settings. This paper reviews the current conceptualizations and investigative approaches regarding groundwater/surface-water interactions in the context of South African policies. Some selected pitfall experiences are emphasized. The most common approach in South Africa is estimation of average annual fluxes at the scale of fourth-order catchments (??500 km²) with baseflow separation techniques and then subtracting the groundwater discharge rate from the recharge rate. This approach might be a good start, but it ignores spatial and temporal variability, potentially missing local impacts associated with production-well placement. As South Africa??s NWA has already been emulated in many countries including Zambia, Zimbabwe and Kenya, the successes and failures of the South African experience dealing with the groundwater/surface-water interaction will be analyzed to guide future policy directions.     

Rethinking responsibility and care for a postcolonial world

Both responsibility and care have much to offer in thinking through the relationalities that make up a postcolonial world. Although contemporary political systems often posit responsibility and care within the context of individuated and autonomous selves, geographers have done much to relocate responsibility and care within narratives of interdependency - spatially and temporally. They have argued that both terms offer a route for thinking about ethical geographical relations between myriad places. In this article we take this project further, by looking at how the nature and shape of these relationships might be construed in a postcolonial world. We suggest that, through a more critical engagement with postcolonial thinking, any exploration of existing practices of responsibility and care will not only reveal the enormous potential of imagining these geographies as forms of existing and evolving relationalities, but will also lead us to interrogate the deployments of these terms in the context of past and present inequalities. We show that routing care and responsibility through postcolonial geographies moves us towards a more pragmatic responsiveness, one that involves a ‘care-full’ recognition of postcolonial interaction.     

Socio-geographical transition in the rural areas of the Carpathian Euroregion

Cross-border cooperation is starting to overcome the isolation of frontier regions where interaction under the socialist system was minimal. Change has been particularly apparent in areas where trans-frontier organisations on the ‘Euroregion’ model have emerged. The Carpathian Euroregion is the first exclusively East European example of this approach and it has already made a positive impact in overcoming backwardness in an area where four East European countries were in contact with the Former Soviet Union. The paper outlines the challenge facing the Euroregion – and the national and local governments in the five countries concerned – in providing non-agricultural employment for a large rural population augmented by return-migration from the towns since 1989. Many small farming businesses have been started as a survival strategy but they cannot be economically viable in a market situation. Although most people are satisified with their rural lifestyle, the inevitability of radical consolidation in a future EU context could be politically destabilising if more jobs are not generated in manufacturing and in an expanding tertiary sector. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Searching for metadata using knowledge bases and topic maps in Spatial Data Infrastructures

Concern for environmental issues has become a reality in all sectors of society, mainly among researchers and professionals who work directly with environmental status. In this context, several studies have been undertaken on sustainable development of the Brazilian Amazon, generating a large amount of data and information. Environmental area characterization involves the knowledge about their natural, economic and social resources, as well as understanding the interaction and correlation among them. Such interdisciplinary character requires new solutions for knowledge representation. This study proposes to minimize metadata recovery problems in Spatial Data Infrastructures by using Topic Maps and Thesaurus. This approach applied to an interface aims to allow users to visually recover information from metadata catalogs.     

地质微生物学及其发展方向

地质微生物学是在20世纪末发展起来的新的地学分支,主要研究地质环境中的微生物活动过程及其形成的各种地质地球化学记录。通过对现代及地质历史上的各种地质环境,包括极高温,高压,极端酸性,碱性,高盐度,极高放射性,地球深部等环境中微生物的生存和演化,及其和地质环境的相互作用而形成的各种地球化学记录的研究,探讨微生物在过去、现在和将来对生命活动最重要的元素(C,H,O,N,S,Fe等)在全球或局部尺度上的循环作用,从而对微生物的风化作用、成矿作用、地质环境下的微生物生态链及其环境的研究提供重要的科学证据。微生物与矿物的相互作用、极端环境下的微生物和生态及分子地质微生物学是当前地质微生物学研究的重要方向。     

Shape analysis and multispectral classification in geological remote sensing

This paper discusses the usage of mathematical morphology in image processing of remotely-sensed data for geologic interpretation. Particular attention is given to noise-reducing transformations of spectral bands before and after different methods of classification, and to the usage of textural context. The development of a viable processing strategy requires a multidisciplinary approach and expert knowledge in different areas: (a) geology, geomorphology, and vegetation in a study area, (b) properties of the sensor for imagery photointerpretation, (c) spectral/spatial properties of the digital data within an integrated dataset (remote sensing and ancillary data), and (d) data-processing tools including mathematical morphology theory. Examples of geometric characterization of Canadian LANDSAT scenes are described in which shape measurements are obtained using a PC-based hybrid image-processing and geographic information system, termed ILWIS, which was developed at ITC, in the Netherlands. Classes from supervised and unsupervised classification are compared to guide in geological mapping. Classes over individual occurrences of broad vegetation-landform units are studied to aid in environmental mapping. Field knowledge is the context necessary to construct expert procedures to drive sequences of data-processing steps toward a target result such as optimal classification, enhancement, or feature extraction. The interaction between expert rules and the image-processing steps can be based on synthetic measurements of shape to quantize the information either spatially or spectrally. Many useful geometrical transformations of spatially-distributed data are extensions or generalizations of spatial analysis functions typical of geographic information systems.     

A chlorine-36 study of regional groundwater flow and vertical transport in southern Nevada

Chlorine-36 data for groundwater from the Death Valley regional flow system is interpreted in the context of existing conceptual models for regional groundwater flow in southern Nevada. Chlorine-36 end member compositions are defined for both recharge and chemically evolved groundwater components. The geochemical evolution of ³⁶Cl is strongly controlled by water-rock interaction with Paleozoic carbonate rocks that comprise the regional aquifer system, resulting in chemically evolved groundwater that is characteristically low in ³⁶Cl/Cl and high in Cl. Groundwater from alluvial and volcanic aquifers that overlie the regional carbonate aquifer are generally characterized by high ³⁶Cl/Cl and low Cl signatures, and are chemically distinct from water in the regional carbonate aquifer. This difference provides a means of examining vertical transport and groundwater mixing processes. In combination with other geochemical and hydrogeologic data, the end members defined here provide constraints on aquifer residence times and mixing ratios.     

Intrusion of shoshonitic magmas at shallow crustal depth: <Emphasis Type="Italic">T</Emphasis>–<Emphasis Type="Italic">P</Emphasis> path,H<Subscript>2</Subscript>O estimates,and AFC modeling of the Middle Triassic Predazzo Intrusive Complex (Southern Alps,Italy)

The multi-pulse shoshonitic Predazzo intrusive complex represents an ideal igneous laboratory for investigating the chemical and physical conditions of magma emplacement in a crustal context, since numerical models can be constrained by field evidence. It constitutes the most intriguing remnant of the Middle Triassic magmatic systems of the Dolomitic Area (Southern Alps), preserved by the Alpine tectonics. Predazzo Intrusive Complex comprises silica saturated (pyroxenites/gabbros to syenites), silica undersaturated (gabbros to syenites), and silica oversaturated (granites and syenogranites) rock suites. In this paper, we modeled its emplacement and evolution with a multiple thermo-/oxy-barometric, hygrometric, and EC-AFC approach. At odds with what proposed in literature but according to the field evidence, the emplacement of the Predazzo Intrusive Complex occurred at shallow depth (<?6 km). In this context, the different pulses differed slightly in bulk water content, but shared a common thermal regime, with temperatures between 1000 and 1100 °C and ~?600 °C at low-to-moderate oxidizing conditions (? 0.1 to +?0.7 ΔFMQ). The interaction between the intrusion and the shallow crustal rocks was minimal, with Sr and Nd isotopic compositions indicating an average of 5–6% assimilation of crust. A thermo- and oxy-barometric comparison with the nearby Mt. Monzoni also enabled to speculate about the solidification time of the intrusion, which we infer took place over about 700 ka.     

Thermo-mechanical controls on intra-plate deformation and the role of plume-folding interactions in continental topography

Thermo-tectonic age and inherited structure exert the main controls on the bulk strength of the lithosphere in intraplate settings. Mechanical decoupling within the lithosphere strongly affects the interaction between deep Earth and surface processes. Thermo-mechanical models demonstrate the particular importance of the rheological stratification of the lithosphere in the preservation of ancient cratonic blocks, in the surface expression of plume- and mantle lithosphere interactions and their impact on the “dynamic” topography in general. The same is true for the effect of large-scale lithospheric folding on intraplate basin formation and associated differential vertical motions. Initiation of continental lithosphere subduction, crucial for linking orogenic deformation to intraplate deformation, appears to be facilitated by plume–lithosphere interactions. We present a discussion of these aspects, focusing on better process- understanding of continental deformation, in the context of a number of well-documented cases of intraplate deformation.