South African geography and post-apartheid reconstruction

South African geography and post-apartheid reconstruction     

The geography of property in inner-city Johannesburg

Questions surrounding property investment and the geography of property have been little researched in African cities. In this paper an examination is undertaken of the changing geography of property in the Johannesburg inner-city. Six distinct property districts in the inner-city are defined and their major property developments discerned. Ownership of the inner-city is narrowly focussed in the hands of 20 core institutional investors. Overall the problems of Johannesburg's economically declining inner-city property market are reflected in patterns of office rentals, vacancies and occupation.     

Monitoring spatial maxima

When assessing maps consisting of comparable regional values, it is of interest to know whether the peak, or maximum value, is higher than it would likely be by chance alone. Peaks on maps of crime or disease might be attributable to random fluctuation, or they might be due to an important deviation from the baseline process that produces the regional values. This paper addresses the situation where a series of such maps are observed over time, and it is of interest to detect statistically significant deviations between the observed and expected peaks as quickly as possible. The Gumbel distribution is used as a model for the statistical distribution of extreme values; this distribution does not require the underlying distributions of regional values to be either normal, known, or identical. Cumulative sum surveillance methods are used to monitor these Gumbel variates, and these methods are also extended for use when monitoring smoothed regional values (where the quantity monitored is a weighted sum of values in the immediate geographical neighborhood). The new methods are illustrated by using data on breast cancer mortality for the 217 counties of the northeastern United States, and prostate cancer mortality for the entire United States, during the period 1968-1998.The research assistance of Ikuho Yamada is gratefully acknowledged. I also am grateful for the support of Grant 1R01 ES09816-01 from the National Institutes of Health, the support of National Cancer Institute Grant R01 CA92693-0, and the helpful comments made by the referees     

Re-balancing racial economic power in South Africa: The development of black small-scale enterprise

This paper examines the problems and prospects of developing black small-scale enterprise as part of the challenge to re-balance racial economic power in South Africa. The findings are presented of several studies identifying major blockages to black small business development. Policy issues of concern include finance, training and urban planning. Considerable importance is attached to the potential for expanding subcontracting linkages between large and small production enterprises.     

Pleistocene deposits at Stoke Goldington,in the valley of the Great Ouse,UK

At Stoke Goldington in the valley of the Great Ouse in Buckinghamshire a river terrace at a height of about 7 m above the floodplain is underlain by fluvial sediments representing climatic fluctuations in the late Middle Pleistocene. Near the base of the succession, at a level only 1 m above the modern floodplain, a fossil assemblage, including pollen, plant macrofossils, molluscs, insects and ostracods, provides evidence for the local development of herb-rich grassland under temperate climatic conditions. The fossil record, amino-acid racemisation ratios and uranium disequilibrium dating all suggest deposition of this material during Oxygen Isotope Stage 7. The deposits containing the temperate assemblage are immediately overlain by typical cold-climate gravels of the Great Ouse. These have been subjected to a later cut-and-fill episode, with the fill accumulating in cool climatic conditions. The cut-and-fill episode was succeeded by aggradation, forming the overlying terrace surface. Amino-acid racemisation ratios indicate that the fill was emplaced, and the terrace surface created, during or after Oxygen Isotope Stage 5. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

First account of apochlorotic diatoms from intertidal sand of a south Florida beach

During the period January to December 2004, monthly intertidal sand samples were collected from John U. Lloyd State Park beach, Florida. This study is the first to report on spatial and temporal distributions of heterotrophic (apochlorotic) diatoms in a sub-tropical beach, or indeed any sandy beach. Two non-pigmented, apochlorotic diatom morphotypes (strains III and IV) were consistently isolated from two intertidal beach sites and neither conformed to the morphologies of described species. Apochlorotic diatoms were found throughout the year and formed significant peaks in April, attaining total diatom counts of 71.1 and 94.9 cells g⁻¹ wet sand, for the upper tidal zone and lower tidal zone, respectively. Valve morphology is described in detail for the two diatom morphotypes isolated from the beach sites (strains III and IV). Growth responses to changes in salinity (reflecting those of the intertidal zone) were examined in the laboratory for these diatoms. Both morphotypes were euryhaline, tolerating salinities between 10 and 50, and maximum growth rates were achieved at salinities between 20 and 40. Diatoms grew equally well whether grown in the light or the dark and showed no evidence of pigments when viewed by epifluorescence microscopy. The ability of diatoms to burrow into agar and carrageenan at different concentrations was tested. Both morphotypes were observed to develop burrows through non-nutrient agar up to twice the standard concentration (30 g agar l⁻¹). The ease with which these heterotrophic diatoms formed burrows suggests that they were digesting these complex carbohydrates (i.e. phycocolloids) as a nutrient source. Strain IV, however, failed to burrow in a different phycocolloid, carrageenan. Similar degradative actions in the field might have implications for the breakdown of recalcitrant materials or allow diatoms to effectively compete with bacteria for carbon and nutrients.     

Morphometric variation in the cutlassfish Trichiurus lepturus on the Kenyan coast: implications for stock identification and management

Morphometric variation was used to study population structure of the cutlassfish Trichiurus lepturus on the Kenyan coast. In all, 16 morphometric measurements taken from 193 individuals from six sites were subjected to multivariate statistical analysis in order to determine possible stock differentiation. Multivariate analysis of variance indicated significant differences in the means of a combination of the morphometric characters among the sites, and discriminant function analysis by groups showed the presence of phenotypically distinct populations on the south and north coasts of Kenya. A classification tree analysis of morphometric characters validated the distinct groups and indicated certain characters to be useful for classifying specimens to source sites. The likely presence of distinct north and south stocks of T. lepturus on the Kenyan coast observed in our study will require validation by other methods, but indicates the potential need for spatially explicit models for managing fish populations on a large spatial scale.     

Improving 9-intersection model by replacing the complement with voronoi region

1 Overview of the original 9-inter-section modelThe spatial re1ations betWeen spatial entities areknown as important as the entities themselves. It istherefore very essential to know what poSSibIe spa-tial relationships are and how they can be deter-mined. The 9-intersection model is the most POpu-lar mathematical framework fOr formalizing spatialrelations and have been widely used in spatial querylanguages(EngenhOfer, l991; Clementinietal., l994;Mark et al., l995). Using this medel the t…