Spatial Modelling in Forest Ecology and Management: A Case Study. Edited by M. JANSEN,M. JUDAS and J. SABOROWSKI (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2002). [Pp. xiii+225]. ISBN 3-540-43357-0. Price €89.95. Hardback

Urban segregation has received increasing attention in the literature due to the negative impacts that it has on urban populations. Indices of urban segregation are useful instruments for understanding the problem as well as for setting up public policies. The usefulness of spatial segregation indices depends on their ability to account for the spatial arrangement of population and to show how segregation varies across the city. This paper proposes global spatial indices of segregation that capture interaction among population groups at different scales. We also decompose the global indices to obtain local spatial indices of segregation, which enable visualization and exploration of segregation patterns. We propose the use of statistical tests to determine the significance of the indices. The proposed indices are illustrated using an artificial dataset and a case study of socio‐economic segregation in São José dos Campos (SP, Brazil).     

GIS for Water Resources and Watershed Management. Edited by JOHN G. LYON (London: Taylor & Francis, 2002). [Pp. vii+266]. ISBN: 0-415-28607-7. Price £45. Hardback

Nowadays, a huge quantity of information is stored in digital format. A great portion of this information is constituted by textual and unstructured documents, where geographical references are usually given by means of place names. A common problem with textual information retrieval is represented by polysemous words, that is, words can have more than one sense. This problem is present also in the geographical domain: place names may refer to different locations in the world. In this paper we investigate the use of our word sense disambiguation technique in the geographical domain, with the aim of resolving ambiguous place names. Our technique is based on WordNet conceptual density. Due to the lack of a reference corpus tagged with WordNet senses, we carried out the experiments over a set of 1,210 place names extracted from the SemCor corpus that we named GeoSemCor and made publicly available. We compared our method with the most‐frequent baseline and the enhanced‐Lesk method, which previously has not been tested in large contexts. The results show that a better precision can be achieved by using a small context (phrase level), whereas a greater coverage can be obtained by using large contexts (document level). The proposed method should be tested with other corpora, due to the fact that our experiments evidenced the excessive bias towards the most‐frequent sense of the GeoSemCor.     

Bidrag til Norges Karthistorie. IV Olaus Magnus,et 400-års minne.

Olaus Magnus — et 400 års minne, så lyder titelen på det korte foredrag jeg har fått adgang til å. holde her i dag på. akademiets siste møte i inneværende kalenderår. Den 2. august i år var det nemlig 400 år siden denne merkelige, interessante og sympatiske personlighet døde i Rom. som Sveriges siste katolske erkebiskop etter 33 års land-flyktighet uten å ha fått tiltre den erkebiskopstolen i Uppsala, som pave Paulus III hadde utnevnt ham til etter hans to år eldre brors Johannes Magnus' død i 1544.