Dispelling a myth? Second homes in rural Wales

Second homes have been a source of considerable controversy in Wales for more than three decades. In this article we argue that they have, in reality, become less important in recent times, with the market contracting during the 1990s and other more fundamental demographic changes and housing pressures coming to the fore. Second homes are a highly localized issue, affecting a minority of communities – though, at times, quite severely. Retirement and other housing pressures, however, bring more significant socio-economic changes and these pressures are all too frequently amplified by a planning system used to restrict housing supply rather than manage growth. This paper has three parts, beginning with a general review of the second home debate followed by an examination of the changing geography of second homes, showing how the distribution of these properties altered during the 1990s and how the market contracted. It ends with a review of secondary data, revealing that second homes are a relatively small component of wider processes affecting rural communities, though extremely significant in some areas.     

On Growth and Form in Geomorphology

Perhaps surprisingly, geomorphology's relative failure to deliver meaningful process-based accounts of landscape development has not stimulated much in the way of procedural debate. Although most geomorphologists seem to agree that a problem exists — how best to make explicit the links between process and form? — this tends to be seen as a substantive problem only, the solution to which lies within the existing framework of geomorphic research, located broadly within the tradition of positivist scientific method. Here I argue that we need to ask a new type of question in a new way: one which gives priority to organizational/compositional relationships rather than to detailed process studies, within the revived context of space–time dynamics. Such a framework draws loosely on complexity theory and realist philosophy, and, in the first instance at least, suggests a return to conceptual, qualitative methods of research. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CPOD successful in trial for detecting Māui dolphin outside harbours

Critically endangered Māui dolphin (Cephalorhynchus hectori maui) are found exclusively off the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. One important data gap troubling efforts to reduce the current unsustainable level of bycatch is the limited information on the offshore and alongshore limits of their range. Passive acoustic monitoring studies could address this data gap, but Māui dolphin habitat is dominated by a sandy substrate that can shift greatly in the strong local currents. In February 2016, a short pilot CPOD deployment was thus attempted as a first step to see if the equipment could be deployed and recovered in the area and if the data collected would be viable, with a second unit deployed inside a harbour for comparison with earlier TPOD data. The pilot was largely successful, and roughly 11% of all minutes in the core habitat location contained detections of clicks attributed to Māui dolphin. A visual inspection of the data suggests some trends with diel and tidal patterns. Further work of this type is thus recommended.     

Improving sub-salt imaging using 3D basin model derived velocities

The quality of depth imaging is directly related to the accuracy of the underlying velocity model. In most sub-salt settings, lack of angular illumination severely degrades the resolution and accuracy of velocity information derived from the seismic data itself. A standard approach for building a starting velocity model uses more reliable velocity information outboard of salt which is subsequently extrapolated to populate the sub-salt regions. The shortcoming of this method lies in the assumption that the effective stress observed outboard of salt can be extrapolated beneath salt solely as a function of depth below mudline.     

Calculation of magnetic anomalies caused by 2D bodies of arbitrary shape with consideration of demagnetization

Forward calculations of magnetic anomalies caused by two-dimensional bodies of any shape and magnetic properties may be performed either without considering demagnetization as in the equivalent source technique or taking demagnetization into account as in the volume integral equation (VIE) approach, in which, for this purpose, magnetized bodies are divided into a set of rectangular prismatic cells. Ignoring demagnetization may result in distortion of the shape and the amplitude of an anomaly, whereas rectangular cells may not be an optimal representation of the source. Moreover, an inaccurate form approximation in the VIE technique may lead to inconsistent results in the near-body region. In this paper, a method is proposed, based on the VIE approach but differing by applying triangular elementary cells. The method largely overcomes the above-mentioned limitations of the VIE technique. It allows us to delineate large and complex structures exactly and only requires the source to be divided into a few elementary cells to take demagnetization into account satisfactorily. These improvements have been attained through analytical calculation of the Green's function in the complex plane, using the theory of the Cauchy-type integral. Comparing numerical solutions with analytical solutions for homogeneous elliptic cylinders without remanence, the method is found to be consistent with the theory in the range of relative magnetic permeability of 2–20, not only far from but also at subcell distances from the body. The method is appropriate for modelling highly and inhomogeneously magnetized 2D bodies of any shape. It may be of value in interpreting underground measurements or topographic effects, as well as in modelling regional geomagnetic profiles, and it is also a convenient tool for testing questionable geological hypotheses. In the framework of the method, the gravitational anomaly for the same causative bodies can be easily calculated. However, at higher and geologically uncommon values of relative magnetic permeability, the algorithm may become unstable but may be stabilized with SVD regularization. The fact that discrepancies were found with the method employed is a basis for further research.     

Situating local experience of risk: Peripherality, marginality and place identity in the UK foot and mouth disease crisis

Research into exposure to, and experience of, environmental risk that has an explicitly spatial focus can be broadly differentiated into two strands. The first strand focuses on the responses of communities of exposure (or the threat of exposure) to some form of environmental hazard and to the policies put in place by institutional actors to manage the hazard. The second strand addresses social inequalities in exposure to environmental hazards and seeks to correlate uneven spatial distributions of risk across different social groups. It is argued that both strands are limited by their respective understandings of space - and that the way in which vulnerable communities experience environmental risk and its management will be shaped significantly by the complex interactions of different spatialisations or constructions of space. We explore this process by examining accounts of local experience of the UK’s 2001 foot and mouth disease crisis and its management in terms of the interplay of two different spatialisations: socio-cultural marginality and political-economic peripherality. We trace the relationship between these cultural and political-economic spatialisations through an analysis of the discursive mobilisation of contrasting place rhetorics. We conclude that focusing on these rhetorics can enhance our understanding of the spatial processes which are constitutive of place identity and in turn mediate the experience of environmental risk and its management.     

The position and context of Middle Palaeolithic industries from the Ebbsfleet Valley,Kent, UK

The late Middle Pleistocene sites in the Ebbsfleet Valley, Kent, UK, have yielded archaeological assemblages critical to understanding the early Middle Palaeolithic of northwestern Europe. Despite a long history of research, the nature and context of these assemblages are still poorly understood. This paper clarifies the stratigraphic, environmental and archaeological records at Ebbsfleet. These reflect a cold–warm–cold sequence of climatic events, preserved within part of the Taplow/Mucking Formation of the Thames (Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 8/7/6). Levallois artefacts are shown to be restricted to the lower part of the Ebbsfleet Channel sequence (Phases I and II) and are assigned to late MIS 8/early MIS 7. This material is associated with fauna indicative of open environments during both cool and temperate conditions. Handaxe assemblages are recorded from higher up the sequence (Phases III–V), but have been redeposited from higher terrace units nearby. No primary context archaeology is apparent during these later phases of aggradation. This may indicate that humans abandoned the site once available raw material became inaccessible, and may also reflect a decline in human presence in Britain during the latter part of MIS 7. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Minimum geocoding match rates: an international study of the impact of data and areal unit sizes

ABSTRACT

The analysis of geographically referenced data, specifically point data, is predicated on the accurate geocoding of those data. Geocoding refers to the process in which geographically referenced data (addresses, for example) are placed on a map. This process may lead to issues with positional accuracy or the inability to geocode an address. In this paper, we conduct an international investigation into the impact of the (in)ability to geocode an address on the resulting spatial pattern. We use a variety of point data sets of crime events (varying numbers of events and types of crime), a variety of areal units of analysis (varying the number and size of areal units), from a variety of countries (varying underlying administrative systems), and a locally-based spatial point pattern test to find the levels of geocoding match rates to maintain the spatial patterns of the original data when addresses are missing at random. We find that the level of geocoding success depends on the number of points and the number of areal units under analysis, but generally show that the necessary levels of geocoding success are lower than found in previous research. This finding is consistent across different national contexts.     

Conflict in Common: Heritage-making in Cape York

The outstanding natural and cultural values of Cape York have been acknowledged for decades, but those decades have been characterised by deep conflict. Non-government organisation intervention in local politics has seen a forceful push for nominating some or all of the Cape York Peninsula as a World Heritage Site. We illuminate the authorised heritage discourse at work in heritage-making, and highlight contested issues of ownership, governance, authenticity, and value. These themes contribute to the possibility of marginalising the voices of local people who wish to contribute to heritage-making in Cape York. Politics infuses all aspects of heritage-making in Cape York, and the specific experiences on Cape York reflect larger political processes occurring in World Heritage discourse. The paper draws on interviews undertaken in May and June 2012.