Telecommunications and the Large City-Small City Divide: Evidence from Indiana Cities*

Urban systems are increasingly dominated by large cities that house a disproportionate share of telecommunications infrastructure. This paper investigates whether telecommunications is defining a technological divide between large and smaller cities. The paper provides a conceptual basis for large-city dominance and presents the results of surveys that investigate the use of telecommunications in medium and small Indiana cities. The survey data indicate that telecommunications is used by the set of Indiana cities, but is less prevalent among the set of smallest cities. Chi-square tests, however, suggest that city size does not adequately explain these variations in use.     

The significance of surface joints

This brief review demonstrates the significance, on a global scale, of joints as shearing surfaces in the neotectonic stress field. Thus, the principal directions of the neotectonic stress field can be determined by a statistical treatment of joint orientation data. These principal stress directions agree with those postulated from plate tectonic theory in every case, on five continents.     

Fossil mammoths from Santa Cruz Island, California

Mammoth remains on Santa Cruz Island, one of the four Northern Channel Islands of California, are very sparse, in marked contrast to those reported from Santa Rosa and San Miguel Islands of the same island group. A probable major reason for this scarcity is that Quaternary deposits are greatly restricted on Santa Cruz Island. It is proposed, contrary to popular opinion, that fossils found on Santa Cruz Island were derived from animals which died on the island, and were not transported there by humans. Reasons for this conclusion are that the size and geological context of the fossils are similar to those of the largest mammoth fossils of Santa Rosa Island, and that, in spite of extensive investigations by many persons, mammoth remains have not been found in middens, either on the islands or on the adjacent mainland.     

A device to examine the in situ response of intertidal cohesive sediment deposits to fluid shear

A self-contained, field-portable recirculating seawater flume was designed and constructed in order to measure in situ the erodibility of cohesive estuarine muds. The flume can be easily deployed by one person and is designed for subaerial use only. Bed shear stresses up to 0.6 Nm⁻² can be generated by the flume. Rates of sediment erosion are assessed in terms of the mass of particulate material eroded with time. Flow calibrations yield a drag coefficient (C_D) of 4.5 × 10⁻³ which enables single mid-depth velocity measurements to be related directly to the imposed bed stress. Water motions within the flume are complex, but secondary (radial) circulations are not considered sufficiently competent to dominate sediment erosion. Stratification effects due to high levels of suspended sediment ( 1.5 gl⁻¹) are negligible. However, the drag-reducing properties of the sediment suspension are uncertain.     

A comment on the continuity equation model of slope profile development and its boundary conditions

The constant base boundary condition used by Kirkby to derive characteristic form solutions to the continuity equation are unlikely in practice. Constant form solutions relying on constant basal erosion are however more probable.     

Stably stratified flows in meteorology

It is generally believed by those undertaking research in the fundamental aspects of geophysical fluid dynamics and meteorology that their results contribute to the improvements to numerical weather prediction and in practical weather forecasting. However, the techniques whereby the appropriate research results are selected and incorporated into the numerical models are not widely known, particularly the methods for representing the phenomena whose horizontal scale is less than that of the grid boxes.(say, 50 km). Some accounts of numerical weather prediction imply that the representation of subgrid-scale phenomena is formally similar to classical physics. In fact, atmospheric motions on these scales are not like molecular motions in an ideal gas, but show considerable structure, approximating to combinations of various idealized states. Great skill and experience in this specialized activity has been applied to deciding on these states, finding physical criteria for defining them and then modelling the relevant phenomena occurring on this scale. In this paper, we focus on a restricted range of phenomena associated with stably stratified flows, notably mountain waves, convection and clouds, and boundary layer phenomena. This category provides many examples of structures which need to be considered in detail to reconstruct the large-scale picture accurately, as well as in local forecasting.