A Decision Support System for the Evaluation of Eco-engineering Strategies for Slope Protection

A decision support system (DSS) has been developed to assist expert and non-expert users in the evaluation and selection of eco-engineering strategies for slope protection. This DSS combines a qualitative hazard assessment of erosion and mass movements with a detailed catalogue of eco-engineering strategies for slope protection of which the suitability is evaluated in relation to the data entered. The slope decision support system (SDSS) is a knowledge based DSS in which knowledge is stored in frames containing rules that can evaluate the available information for a project, stored as project specific information (PSI) in a data file. The advantages of such a system are that it accepts incomplete information and that the qualitative nature of the information does not instil the user with a sense of unjustified exactitude. By its multidisciplinary and progressive nature, the DSS will be of value during the initial stages of an eco-engineering project when data collection and the potential of different eco-engineering strategies are considered. The accent of the output of the DSS is on the application of eco-engineering strategies for slope protection as an environmentally-friendly solution aiding sustainable development. For its acceptance within the engineering community, the DSS needs to prove its predictive capacity. Therefore, its performance has been benchmarked against successful and unsuccessful cases of slope stabilisation using eco-engineering. The target audience and the areas of application of this DSS are reviewed and the strategies for further development in this area suggested.     

Special issue introduction: New research directions and critical perspectives on diaspora strategies

As more countries acknowledge the potential resources represented by their emigrant populations, the diaspora strategies of migrant sending countries are gaining policy and academic attention internationally. ‘Diaspora strategies’ describe initiatives aimed at mobilising emigrants for the purposes of economic development and/or nation building. This special issue in Geoforum identifies new research directions for the study of diaspora strategies. While extant scholarship has focused on state-driven diaspora strategies so far, this special issue introduction suggests that considering a wider range of social actors that engage in diaspora strategising across different spaces and scales will reveal new and productive insights for the study of diaspora strategies. Framing this introduction is an approach that deploys topological analyses as a way of keeping in view the variety of social actors involved in diaspora strategising, their connections to one another, and an evolving constellation of power relations ranging from contestation to collaboration. The special issue introduction draws attention to, first, the subjectivities constituted by diaspora strategies; second, the array of social actors found within webs of diaspora connections; and third, the ethical considerations arising from the power geometries of diaspora engagement. In so doing, it argues for the importance of studying diaspora formations dialogically which means deploying an analytical lens that is attentive to how the actions of different social actors and institutions from one country towards a diaspora population can influence the attitudes and actions of that diaspora towards another country that also claims their loyalty and contributions.     

Value of Climate Forecasts for Adjusting Farming Strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sustaining and increasing crop production and productivity has to be a major policy thrust for developing countries. Using a simulation approach different production strategies were evaluated conditioned on climate information to derive optimal strategies to help farmers reduce risk and increase productivity. By examining the existence of options in this case planting dates the study provides an analyses of the expected value and risks associated with changing decisions based on the availability of climate forecasts. The 15-March planting date produced the highest mean yield for the two cultivars examined although 1-April, 15-April and 1-May plantings had one to zero probability of crop failures compared to 15-March with crop failures in 4 out of 20 years. Results indicate losses of between 25 and 35 kg/day due to delays in planting from 15-March planting to 1-June planting for the 120- and 150-day cultivar. El niño years were associated with positive yield deviations for both cultivars and most planting dates. Farmers are known to make tactical adjustments to their management in light of information perceived relevant to the prospects of forthcoming crop. Although in its present form most current forecast products do not provide information on onset of the rainfall, however the information they do provide could play a crucial role in helping farmers reduce the risks posed by climatic variability.     

The rationalization of neoliberalism in Ontario's public education system, 1995-2000

The globalization of neo-liberal policy solutions to education problems has gained increasing dominance in recent years. In Ontario, Canada the success of this ideological discourse, particularly during the past decade, has been hard to combat due to the ideal message that it conveys to the general electorate, that is one based on efficiency, accountability and equity of resources across different school boards in the province. Despite protests from many activist groups (i.e. unions, educators, parent-groups) the implementation of such policies has been largely successful. By tracking education policies, statements and events, newspaper articles and other policy reports from 1995 to 2000, this paper seeks to understand the nature of its success during the early years of restructuring. I argue that part of the success lies in understanding the techniques and strategies of implementation or the process of rationalization. I argue that policies formulated at one spatial level operate quite differently at another and the spatial disjunctures that arise as a result of this process lead to the continued success of neo-liberal ideologies and inequalities in education.     

Value of Climate Forecasts for Adjusting Farming Strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sustaining and increasing crop production and productivity has to be a major policy thrust for developing countries. Using a simulation approach different production strategies were evaluated conditioned on climate information to derive optimal strategies to help farmers reduce risk and increase productivity. By examining the existence of options in this case planting dates the study provides an analyses of the expected value and risks associated with changing decisions based on the availability of climate forecasts. The 15-March planting date produced the highest mean yield for the two cultivars examined although 1-April, 15-April and 1-May plantings had one to zero probability of crop failures compared to 15-March with crop failures in 4 out of 20 years. Results indicate losses of between 25 and 35 kg/day due to delays in planting from 15-March planting to 1-June planting for the 120- and 150-day cultivar. El niño years were associated with positive yield deviations for both cultivars and most planting dates. Farmers are known to make tactical adjustments to their management in light of information perceived relevant to the prospects of forthcoming crop. Although in its present form most current forecast products do not provide information on onset of the rainfall, however the information they do provide could play a crucial role in helping farmers reduce the risks posed by climatic variability.     

比较中美两国大气科学研究的几点认识

通过对中美两国大气科学研究在经费、管理、人才战略等方面的一些简单比较，说明我国大气科学研究，无论在成果、人力物力资源、管理体制和人才战略思想等方面，均与美国有不小的差距。需要我们从管理制度、评价体系、资源信息共享机制、人才战略等方面切实加以改进。     

Barcelona's planning strategies: from 'Paris of the South' to the 'Capital of West Mediterranean'

Planning strategies in Barcelona are linked to its capital city aspirations. Like other European cities, capitals and non-capitals, Barcelona throughout the course of the 20th century has drawn upon a number of different planning strategies, directed towards reinforcing its prestige at both a national and international level. During this period Barcelona has sought to become Spain's second capital, the cultural capital, the industrial capital, capital of Catalonia, capital of the West Mediterranean, etc. Always in competition with Madrid, the aspirations of capital status ranking have been ambiguous. The dream of the great monumental Barcelona of the start of the century tried to emulate the European capital cities (especially Paris). By contrast more recent strategies emphasise the new role that Barcelona can play within a south-west European macro-region. The subject raised in this paper then is two-fold. On the one hand the continuity or not in the capital aspiration starting from the recuperation of Catalonia's autonomy, with its corresponding urbanistic and architectonic connotations. On the other hand the originality and analogies between strategies carried out in Barcelona, in relation to other European cities, capitals and non-capitals.     

Recasting diaspora strategies through feminist care ethics

The diaspora-centred development agenda holds that migrants lead transnational lives and contribute to the material well being of their homelands both from afar and via circular migration. Concomitant with the ascendance of this agenda there has arisen a new field of public policy bearing the title ‘diaspora strategies’. Diaspora strategies refer to proactive efforts by migrant-sending states to incubate, fortify, and harness transfers of resources from diaspora populations to homelands. This paper argues that diaspora strategies are problematic where they construe the diaspora–homeland relationship as an essentially pragmatic, instrumental, and utilitarian one. We suggest that a new generation of more progressive diaspora strategies might be built if these strategies are recast through feminist care ethics and calibrated so that they fortify and nurture caring relationships that serve the public good. Our call is for an approach towards state–diaspora relationships that sees diaspora-centred development as an important but corollary outcome that arises from prioritising caring relationships. To this end we introduce the term ‘diaspora economies of care’ to capture the derivative flow of resources between diasporas and homelands that happens when their relationship is premised on feminist care ethics. We introduce three types of diaspora economies of care, focusing on the emotional, moral, and service aspects of the diaspora–homeland relationship, and reflect upon the characteristics of each and how they might be strengthened later by foregrounding care now.     

大坝渗流基流的分析模型研究

深入研究了库水位等变化对渗流变化滞后效应,探讨了渗流的滞后模型,利用该模型进行优化分析,确定了渗流滞后天数和影响天数以及上游有效水深等参数;并借助于上游有效水深,将非稳定渗流计算问题转化为稳定渗流的求解问题,简化了计算;在此基础上,结合实测资料及渗流分析,建立了大坝渗流基流的分析模型。算例表明：建立的模型能较好地反映基流的变化性态。     

Working towards conceptual consistency in discussing “diaspora” and “diaspora strategies”: Ethnicity and affinity in the case of Japan

The terms “diaspora” and “diaspora strategies” are both used in inconsistent, and often, conflicting ways. Who encompasses “the diaspora” and what are “diaspora strategies”? What roles do ethnicity and affinity play in conceptualizing relationships between diasporas and homeland governments? This paper extrapolates from programs and organizations that link overseas coethnic and former resident non-coethnic populations to Japan to offer clarity and consistency in usage by bringing together concepts not typically put in conversation with each other and introducing new terms that conceptualize more specific aspects of who we are referring to as “diaspora” and what we are referring to as “diaspora strategies”. Conceptualizations of diaspora often gloss over internal differences, including whether or not people deemed members of a diaspora actually demonstrate a homeland orientation. Focusing on the difference between ethnicity-based and affinity-based definitions of diaspora, I distinguish between three types of diaspora strategies: “diaspora-connecting”, “diaspora-cultivating”, and “diaspora-creating strategies”. Finally, as a way to discuss the potential contributions of both overseas coethnic and non-coethnic populations to a given nation, I conclude by considering Joseph Nye’s notion of “soft power” in relation to diaspora strategies. By engaging these concepts together, the paper highlights the tensions between considering ethnicity and affinity as factors for deciding who to target for diaspora strategies, and demonstrates how diaspora strategies can also target non-coethnics.     

Financialization,totality and planetary urbanization in the Chilean Andes

In a context of planetary urbanization, where vast swathes of the countryside are being enclosed on an ongoing basis in order to support a sprawling urban system, the relationship between finance and land-use change needs to be brought to the forefront. By engaging with Henri Lefebvre’s ideas of levels and totality, this paper draws analytical connections between the financialization of the transnational mining industry and the production of the financialized urban everyday in geographies of extraction. The paper does this by looking at the case of Pascua Lama, a multibillion open-cast mine to be developed in Chile by a major mining company in the context of the current global gold rush. Through this case, I show how a set of strategies pursued by financiers and corporate managers thousands of kilometers away from the extraction site, resulted in fractured spaces of urbanization shaped by socioecological plunder, dispossession and geographically uneven financial landscapes.     

Pudrición del Cogollo and the (post-)neoliberal ecological fix in Ecuador's palm oil industry

This paper examines the variegated natures of (post-)neoliberal environmental governance in Latin America using environmental crisis as an entry point. It examines the institutional measures put forth by Ecuador’s government, in concert with other actors, to contain and manage the damaging effects of an insidious palm oil plant disease known as Pudrición del Cogollo (PC). Using empirical data collected through qualitative means, my analysis demonstrates that nature’s biophysical processes – in particular, disease ecologies – can play a crucial role in the pursuit and achievement of national accumulation goals. Specifically, I argue that the ecologies of the PC crisis have been rendered functional to the Ecuadorian government’s current political and economic strategies of intensified accumulation and market competitiveness. By making environmental crisis the basis of key accumulation strategies, the state is able to convert negative environmental outcomes into opportunities for profit-generation. Utilizing the notion of the ‘ecological fix’, this paper reveals two major conclusions: (1) plant health emergencies and the actions used to mitigate environmental crises are not only challenges but opportunities that can be mobilized to support further accumulation strategies and (2) the study of PC and Ecuador’s palm oil industry provides new fruitful terrain to examine the connections between the deepening variegated effects of neoliberalism through nature and environmental crisis solutions in Latin America.     

Contributions and unrealized potential contributions of cosmogenic-nuclide exposure dating to glacier chronology, 1990–2010

This paper reviews the application of cosmogenic-nuclide exposure dating to glacier chronology. Exposure dating of glacial landforms has made an outsize impact on this field because the technique filled an obvious need that had already been recognized by glacial geologists. By now, hundreds of studies have used cosmogenic-nuclide exposure dating to date glacial deposits, and in fact it is rare to find a study of glacial geology or glacier chronology, or any paleoclimate synthesis that makes use of such studies, that does not involve exposure dating. These developments have resulted in major contributions to glacier chronology and paleoclimate, in particular i) reconstructing Antarctic ice sheet change, ii) establishing the chronology of late Pleistocene and Holocene glacier change in mountain regions where it was previously unknown; iii) establishing the broad chronological outlines of mountain glaciations prior to the Last Glacial Maximum; and iv) gaining insight into subglacial erosional processes through the observation that many glaciated surfaces preserve cosmogenic-nuclide inventories from long past ice-free periods as well as the present one. An important potential future contribution will be the application of the large data set of exposure-dated glacier chronologies to better understand global and regional climate dynamics during Lateglacial and Holocene millennial-scale climate changes. However, this contribution cannot be realized without significant progress in two areas: i) understanding and accounting for geologic processes that cause apparent exposure ages on glacial landforms to differ from the true age of the landform, and ii) minimizing systematic uncertainties in exposure ages that stem from cosmogenic-nuclide production-rate estimates and scaling schemes. At present there exists an enormous data set of exposure ages on glacial deposits, but these data cannot be used to their full potential in paleoclimate syntheses due to an inadequate understanding of geologic scatter and production-rate uncertainties. The intent of this paper is to highlight this situation and suggest some strategies for realizing this potential.     

Hyperspectral cathodoluminescence

Hyperspectral cathodoluminescence (CL) is an important emerging tool in microanalysis and complements other traditional x-ray analysis techniques often associated with electron microscopes. By collecting whole CL spectra in a short acquisition time it is possible to minimise beam induced damage artefacts in the spectrum offering the opportunity, in particular cases, to quantify the emission centres associated with the peaks. In this paper we review the literature associated with CL collection optics, spectrometers, gratings, methods and strategies, and sample preparation. In addition we cover hyperspectral data collection and analysis including peak fitting techniques and calibration for quantitative CL analysis. To illustrate the application of hyperspectral CL we give examples of the quantification of trace Ti in quartz, and the identification of radiation damage in a sandstone-hosted uranium deposit.     

On classical iterative subdomain methods for the Stokes–Darcy problem

Within classical iterative subdomain methods, the problems in the subdomains are solved alternately by only using data on the interface provided from the other subdomains. Methods of this type for the Stokes–Darcy problem that use Robin boundary conditions on the interface are reviewed. Their common underlying structure and their main differences are identified. In particular, it is clarified that there are different updating strategies for the interface conditions. For small values of fluid viscosity and hydraulic permeability, which are relevant in applications from geosciences, it is shown in numerical studies that only one of these updating strategies leads to an efficient numerical method, if it is used with appropriate parameters in the Robin conditions.     

Beyond environmental frames: The social representation and cultural resonance of nature in conflicts over a Dutch woodland

Frame analysis has been widely employed to understand environmental conflicts. Such studies emphasize the internal dynamics of conflict and focus on how actors discursively struggle with each other in order to gain hegemony over the dominant discourse on the issue. In this paper, we argue that the explanatory power of framing theory could be enhanced by relating issue specific frames to the broader cultural context in which framing efforts are situated. In order to investigate the link between the success of framing strategies and the cultural background of such strategies, we suggest rethinking the concept of cultural resonance. We propose social representations theory as a novel way of understanding this cultural resonance of spatial and environmental frames. Based on a dispute over the management of a national park in the Netherlands, we empirically illustrate how contending stakeholders refer to different social representations of nature in the framing of local conflicts. A local protest group proves to be much more in touch with the views of the local community and is thus more successful in its framing of the dispute than the nature conservation agency involved. While the protest group uses a wide range of locally embedded representations of nature to enhance the currency of its framing efforts, the nature conservation agency responsible for the management of the forest refers to a much more limited range of representations. By making references only to the wilderness representation of nature, the cultural resonance of the agency’s framing efforts remains limited to those residents who adhere to this specific representation of nature. Consequently, this framing is not very successful among groups that adhere to other representations of nature, such as aesthetic or inclusive representations. Our analysis shows that combining framing theory with social representations theory enables one to disentangle the framing of environmental disputes from the more constant cultural values and opinions on which this framing is based.     

Activity-specificity in organizational learning: implications for analysing the role of proximity

By the late 1990s, learning became a key notion in explaining successful regional economic development outcomes. One of the key (implicit or explicit) assumptions in these explanations tends to be that regional – i.e., proximate – relations are most conducive for collective interactive learning. In consequence, accounting for the significance of spatial proximity appears to be at the heart of explaining learning and the creation of competitiveness at the level of regions as well as the firms that they host. A general claim about the role of proximity in learning seems too vague, however. This paper suggests that the significance of proximate relations for learning needs to be unveiled in the case of the various activities carried out in firms. Firms are depicted as utilising activity-specific resources in carrying out their various functions. While other factors obviously also influence processes of learning – such as sector, product and market strategies, type of organization, etc. – this paper puts its main focus on elaborating on the significance of understanding various organizational activities. It aims at pointing out that learning is likely to take place in all of them, regardless of whether proximate or more distant relations are involved. This is believed to provide one step further in an attempt to understand the difference that space makes in organizational learning.     

滑坡灾害防治的新技术路线及分析

论文指出了滑坡灾害防治中面临的工程问题和科学问题。提出了“监测为首、排水为主、结构为辅、预测预警、科学决策”新的滑坡防治技术路线,介绍了其涵盖的基本内容。监测的首要性在于山体地质结构的复杂性和具体滑坡的个体行为。通过监测有可能获得地质体当前的状态、提高排水工程的可靠性、确定工程治理适用范围、创造滑坡灾害预测预报的条件、为科学决策提供依据;排水不仅可以预防滑坡灾害的发生,还应作为工程治理的主要措施。它以较低的成本维持山体的整体强度;与排水技术相比,借助于工程结构治理大型滑坡,是以较高的代价换取山体局部区域的强度提高;滑坡灾害的预测预警和科学决策,依赖于科学监测数据和可靠的分析方法。新技术路线的可靠性、合理性和实用性还需更为全面深入的论证,对相关问题开展讨论,有助于提高我国滑坡灾害防治水平。     

Modeling of an MTBE plume at Pascoag, Rhode Island

A numerical groundwater flow and mass transport model was developed to predict the extent of impact from methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) release on a down-gradient drinking water well field. An MTBE incident in Pascoag, Rhode Island, was used as a case study and the plume’s past and future development was simulated using scenario analysis. The numerical code used was GeoSys/Rockflow, which permits a coupled flow and transport simulation as one object, thus alleviating the need for simulating the MTBE fate with separate flow and transport codes. The numerical model was built on available hydrogeological and chemical data as well as on GIS information of the site. By comparing the simulated results with observed field data, it was found that the model could provide reliable results even when the simulated aquifer was simplified to a two-dimensional flow and transport domain. Finally, the calibrated model was used for exploring a location that may be suitable for a new well field. Despite the model limitations associated with uncertainties of data and simplifying assumptions, numerical modeling of this MTBE contaminated site proved a useful tool and provided guidance for future municipal well field operation strategies and aquifer remediation alternatives.