Extracting and analyzing semantic relatedness between cities using news articles

News articles capture a variety of topics about our society. They reflect not only the socioeconomic activities that happened in our physical world, but also some of the cultures, human interests, and public concerns that exist only in the perceptions of people. Cities are frequently mentioned in news articles, and two or more cities may co-occur in the same article. Such co-occurrence often suggests certain relatedness between the mentioned cities, and the relatedness may be under different topics depending on the contents of the news articles. We consider the relatedness under different topics as semantic relatedness. By reading news articles, one can grasp the general semantic relatedness between cities; yet, given hundreds of thousands of news articles, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to manually read them. This paper proposes a computational framework which can ‘read’ a large number of news articles and extract the semantic relatedness between cities. This framework is based on a natural language processing model and employs a machine learning process to identify the main topics of news articles. We describe the overall structure of this framework and its individual modules, and then apply it to an experimental dataset with more than 500,000 news articles covering the top 100 US cities spanning a 10-year period. We perform exploratory visualizations of the extracted semantic relatedness under different topics and over multiple years. We also analyze the impact of geographic distance on semantic relatedness and find varied distance decay effects. The proposed framework can be used to support large-scale content analysis in city network research.     

A low resolution map of Europa from four occultations by Io

Analysis of three occultations of JII (Europa) by JI (Io) has resulted in a preliminary reflectivity map of JII for the hemisphere centered on longitude 324°, a measurement of 1483±20 km for the radius of JII, estimates of the event impact parameters, determination of the mid event times, and a visual geometric albedo, p_ν = 0.74, for JII. A fourth occultation light curve was used after derivation of the results to confirm their validity.     

Climate change action as a project of identity: Eight meta-analyses

Identity can improve our understanding of personal climate action, particularly when climate action becomes an expression of a person’s self. However, it is unclear which kind of self or identity is most relevant. Building on a comprehensive series of eight meta-analyses (using data from 188 published articles, N = 414,282 participants) this research systematically compares how strongly climate-friendly intentions and behaviors are associated with place identity, personal connectedness to nature, environmental self-identity (i.e., personal self-definition as a pro-environmentally acting person), and social identity (i.e., identification with social groups). Results suggest robust, medium-sized to strong links of both pro-environmental intentions and behaviors to people’s nature connectedness (r = 0.44/0.52), environmental self-identity (r = 0.62/0.56), and identification with groups considered to support climate-friendly behavior (r = 0.48/0.51), but markedly weaker effects for identification with groups which are unrelated to environmental topics (r = 0.30/0.15) and for place identity (r = 0.18/0.32). Implications for policy interventions and psychological theory are discussed.     

SOME EMPIRICAL EXAMPLES OF CENTRAL PLACE MODEL IN CHINA''S RURAL AND URBAN STUDIES

Sincethe195Os,theCentralPlaceTheory(Cpp)hasbeenprevailingallovertheWest.Nevertheless,theaPplicationofthismodelinChinasplanningworkusedtobeanargUableproblem.Negativeviewswerefl.thehyPothesisabouttl1enatUralandhumanhomogeneityisdevoicedfromthereality;2.thetheorytvasge11eratedfrol11caPitalistsociety,wherethehistorical,socialandeconomicconditionsaredifferentfromChina's.Inrecentyears,theauthorshavetriedtoapplyCppmode1toChina'Surbanal1dregionalplanning,thesatisfactoryresu1tsprovedthegenera1ada…     

Irrigated agriculture and place‐making in the East Kimberley

This paper explores the way in which lived experiences of farmers in the Ord Valley have intersected with representations of the Ord Valley over time. I contrast the development of Stage 1 of the Ord River Irrigation Scheme in the 1960s with a proposal put forward in the late 1990s for greatly expanding the area of irrigated agriculture as Stage 2 of the scheme. I examine the rhetoric employed in planning documents and public media coverage of the first and proposed second stages of the Ord Irrigation Scheme and explore its connections with social identifications of farmers in the Ord Valley since the 1960s. I then argue the value of this approach for understanding the dynamic relationship between the spatial practices and social identifications of farmers and representations of place and land use in public media and planning processes.     

Who owns the name? Fandom,social inequalities and the contested renaming of a football club in Timişoara,Romania

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship in critical toponymy has raised questions about the impacts on urban residents of selling naming rights and the possibility of contesting the commodification of urban place names. This article examines these issues using Poli Timi?oara, the major football team of Timi?oara, Romania, as a case study. The cash-strapped local authority sold the naming rights for the team to raise revenue. However, when the club’s private owner was unable to finance the team, the local authority reacquired the naming rights of Poli, now under the name Asocia?ia Club Sportiv Poli (a new team with a small fan base). Drawing on the everyday narratives of fans, this article explores how the commodification of a local club name can cause social tensions. This is important for understanding urban residents’ access, or lack thereof, to social capital resources and how this leads to the manifestation of social inequalities which co-determine fans’ reactions and responses to the change in the name of a sports team. The findings suggest that commodifying names can mobilize serious contestations among partisan groups about who owns the name, although such contestations appear to be on uncertain ground because of post-communist urban practices of delayed economic restructuring.     

A fuzzy formal concept analysis-based approach to uncovering spatial hierarchies among vague places extracted from user-generated data

The spatial hierarchy of part-whole relationships is an essential characteristic of the platial world. Constructing spatial hierarchies of places is valuable in association analysis and qualitative spatial reasoning. The emergence of large amounts of geotagged user-generated content provides strong support for modelling places. However, the vague nature of places and the complex spatial relationships among places make it intractable to understand and represent the hierarchies among places. In this paper, we introduce a fuzzy formal concept analysis-based approach to uncovering the spatial hierarchies among vague places. Each place is represented as a concept that consists of its extent and its intent. Based on the place concepts, the spatial hierarchies are generated and expressed as a graph that is easy to comprehend and contains abundant information on spatial relations. We also demonstrate the rationality of our result by comparing it with the result of a questionnaire survey.     

Sheinkin as a place in the globalizing city of Tel Aviv

Sheinkin is an example of a place constituted by global forces. Yet Sheinkin creatively responds to scalar jumps of global forces, drawing from the capitals of the global system like Soho and Greenwich village. These models are embedded in the Israeli reality with Sheinkin becoming an incubator of post-Zionist identity. Young people from all over Israel concentrate in the place on Fridays to participate in choreography of strolling along the street with its’ designers’ shops, mingling with celebrities and others who belong to the cult and around the ‘Hyde Park’ corner in which environmental, spiritual and other worldviews are promoted. The article suggests a model to investigate such places as the organic integration of a community whose participants do not live in the place but pilgrimage to the place, a landscape that appraises creativity, originality and individualism, a choreography of strollers who search for stimulations and a set of norms and values promote in the place.     

Flexibility, technology, and the daily life practices of distance students living beyond the digital mainstream

In this paper it is argued that even though communication technologies release distance students considerably from their dependency on a campus, students are still very much connected to places in their daily lives. These connections are constituted through the “placing” of technology, the students’ relations to people in their daily lives and the students’ relations to the education institution. Communication technology not only releases students from the spatial dimensions; it also attaches them to specific places. It is argued that the use of technology in distance education can reduce the students’ flexibility even if they do not have to attend campus regularly. The empirical analysis presented in this paper is based on a case study of a Master’s degree programme in Public Management offered by Open University Indonesia (Universitas Terbuka).     

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.