The ethnocultural component of tourism development in the Altai Republic

A characterization is provided for the recreation resources of the Altai Republic. The diversity of the national-ethnical composition of the population of the Altai Republic is determined as well as analyzing the spatial distribution of the ethnoses on its territory. The coefficients of ethnical diversity are calculated for all administrative districts. The territories with a different level of ethnical diversity and a different combination of ethnical groups are determined. The study revealed a connection of ethnical diversity and natural conditions of the territory and the concentration of separate ethnoses in definite landscapes. A characterization is provided for the ethnocultural tourism and recreation resources of the Altai Republic within the context of administrative districts. Information is provided concerning the territorial distribution of separate ethnical groups, traditional kinds of their nature management, religion, main national dishes, elements of national costume, national festivities and rites, etc. An analysis of the spatial distribution of the ethnocultural recreation resources identified promising clusters (nodes) or destinations for the arrangement of special ethnocultural tourist routes. Schematic maps are provided, which display the ethnical diversity in the districts of the region, and promising districts for the organization of ethnocultural tourist routes.     

Accommodation of ecological and economic interests in placer gold mining

An attempt is made to find the answer to the question as to why the measures of the environmental institutions of Russia are ineffective for the avoidance and prevention of the degradation of aquatic ecosystems in placer gold mining. It is established that the size of payments to be made by companies engaged in placer gold mining are such that they almost cannot stimulate any nature conservation initiatives. Moreover, they even cannot be the argument for observance of environmental legislation. It is shown that the high transaction costs borne by the State, with minor expenditures of nature resource users connected with the protection of environmental natural systems fail to achieve the objectives imposed upon the supervising institutions. It is established that local authorities are directly interested in increasing placer gold mining as well as in gaining the loyalty of artels implying registration of the enterprise in this region, because these tax proceeds are exceptionally important for municipal formations facing a chronic financial deficit, a budgetary uncertainty and a dependence on regional and federal subsidies and transfers. Finance flows were calculated and analyzed to show that a very important problem for Russia’s eastern regions that involves reconciling the economic and ecological interests in placer gold mining is not resolved through “cosmetic changes” in organs of state supervision. It is concluded that there is a need for new institutional solutions in order to create and increase incentives for users of mineral resources and local authorities for observance of environmental regulations, the preservation and restoration of disturbed ecosystems, and for the ecologization of production processes.     

Rangeland production: use of models incorporating aggregated knowledge and fuzzy construction

This work reports on a method using fuzzy membership functions to construct an aggregated interaction matrix in which the summation of variables is scaled according to the way rainfall and soil variables affect water availability to plants and hence influence rangeland productivity. Aggregation of the variables gives a comprehensive value which can be used to predict production. The model increases the predicability of production to 81% compared to models using rainfall alone and a multiplicative parametric one which give predictibilities of 61 and 76% respectively. The results showed that (1) the importance of rainfall in determining production was most important at lower rainfalls i.e. <350 mm; (2) soil texture and particularly slope were important through out the rainfall range (149–700 mm) investigated; and (3) soil depth was only important at the higher >350 mm rainfalls. The aggregated interaction matrix gives a measure of land productive capability.     

Tibetan immigrants in India

"This paper documents the current evidence of the state of the Tibetan society in India with special reference to the trends in social transformation, livelihood patterns and cultural adaptation to a geographically alien environment....Three-and-a-half decades of living in India [have] demonstrated how a culture group can survive by carving out ecological niches in ethnically segregated social space and yet adapt to a new cultural environment without losing its identity."     

Modes to replace transitional asymptotic ray fields in a vertically inhomogeneous earth model

Summary. Asymptotic ray theory (ART) fails in transition regions near critically reflected, bottom glancing or caustic-forming rays in a vertically inhomogeneous layered earth. These deficiencies are repaired here by replacing the transitional ray fields with guided modes plus truncation remainders. Exact ray-mode equivalences and their high-frequency asymptotic approximations are formulated, and their validity and efficiency are verified by numerical comparisons for SH motion in a two-layer earth model comprised of an inhomogeneous sediment above an homogeneous semi-infinite bedrock.     

Slowness—time mapping of near offset seismic reflection data

Summary. The transformation of a set of seismograms to the delay time-slowness, τ—p, domain is presented as a sequence of Fourier and Bessel transforms, For a horizontally layered medium, this sequence gives an exact cylindrical wave decomposition of the response to a point source; correctly compensating for the phase shifting and geometrical spreading associated with transmission through the Earth. The resultant τ—p map or 'slant stack' contains true amplitude and phase information. The spatial aliasing properties of the transformation, when applied to a dataset, are greatly improved by the use of only outgoing waves in the Bessel transform. This is equivalent to using Hankel functions rather than Bessel functions, and is justified by the absence of incoming waves from most datasets. The WKBJ approximation to the medium response enables predictions to be made about the shape and amplitude variation with slowness of truncation effects. Theoretically the τ—p transformation is reversible, thus the τ—p domain is a suitable one in which to perform filtering operations before seismogram reconstruction.