Mapping the linguistic landscapes of the Marshall Islands

This paper examines code choices in the written linguistic landscape of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). Due to a history of language imposition, the Marshall Islanders have long been denied the opportunity to express their linguistic identity in the public domain. A recently proposed bilingual language policy, which requires all public signs to be Marshallese-English bilingual, aims to change this status quo. We map language choices in the linguistic landscape of the RMI at the cusp of this policy with an eye on the stakeholders, production processes, and audiences involved in the creation and reception of the linguistic landscape. State-of-the-art geographical and regression analyses model the factors that govern code choices in the linguistic landscape of the RMI. Our findings allow us to pinpoint niches - both geographical as well as social - where the Marshallese assert their linguistic identity in the public realm

Bombed Cities: Legacies of Post‐War Planning on the Contemporary Urban and Social Fabric

Post‐Second World War reconstruction is an important field of research around the world, with strands of enquiry investigating architecture, urban archaeology, heritage studies, urban design, city planning, critical cartography, and social geography. This thematic issue offers a critical statement on mid‐twentieth century urban planning, starting from the period of the Second World War. We approach post‐war reconstruction not only from the mainstream actualised perspective, but also considered by alternative visions and strategies, with an emphasis on empirically driven studies of post‐catastrophic damage and reconstruction, implementing a range of different methodologies. In this editorial we identify two research strands on post‐war planning of destroyed cities, one investigating the processes and practices of reconstruction and heritage conservation and the other assessing the legacies of planning decisions on the social and urban fabric of today’s cities. These two strands are interlinked; early planning visions and subsequent decisions were dominated by contemporary concerns and political values, yet they have been imprinted on today’s urban and social fabric of various bombed cities, affecting our urban lives. Thus, reconstruction strategies of destroyed cities should engage diverse voices in a broad dialogue through sensitive inclusion, as today’s planning decisions have the capacity to define the urban and social conditions for future generations

Diet, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and perceptions of the environment in young adults

Background Few studies have explored both food behaviour and physical activity in an environmental context. Most research in this area has focused on adults; the aim of the present study was to describe perceptions of the environment, diet, physical activity and sedentary behaviour patterns in 16–20 year olds in full-time education (Newcastle, UK). Methods Participants (n = 73) recruited from a college and sixth-form college completed a UK version of the Youth Neighbourhood Environment Walkability Survey, which included measures of sedentary behaviour. A validated food frequency questionnaire was completed and a factor applied to produce an estimated mean daily frequency of intake of each item, which was converted to nutrient intakes. A rank for Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) was assigned to their home postcode. Analysis explored associations between sedentary behaviours and nutrient intake. Results In this descriptive cross-sectional study, most participants reported being physically active for at least 1 h day−1 on 3–4 (n = 28) or 5–7 days (n = 31). There were no significant differences in nutrient intake according to sample quartile IMD position. Sedentary behaviours were significantly associated with less healthy eating patterns. Higher total energy (P = 0.02), higher fat (P = 0.005), percentage energy from fat (P = 0.035) and lower carbohydrate intakes (P = 0.004) were significantly associated with more time spent watching DVDs at the weekend. Conclusions This combination of sedentary behaviour and less healthy eating patterns has important implications for long-term health (e.g. the tracking of being overweight and obesity from adolescence into adulthood). Understanding behaviour relationships is an important step in developing interventions in this age group

Ensuring the ethical use of Big Data: lessons from secure data access

Big data holds great potential for research and for society, large volumes of varied data can be produced and made available to researchers much faster compared to ‘traditional’ data. Whilst this potential is recognized, there are ethical concerns which users of big data must consider. With the volume and variety of information in big data, comes a greater risk of disclosure. Researchers and data access services working with highly detailed and sensitive, secure data have grappled with this for many years. The sector has developed both ethical frameworks and statistical disclosure control techniques which could be utilized by those working with big data. We discuss the challenges, present some of the frameworks and techniques and conclude with recommendations for secure data access of big data

Maintaining Basic Command Unit and Crime and Disorder Partnership families for comparative purposes: 1 April 2003 results

In January 2000, the Home Office first published local-level crime statistics for the 318 Basic Command Units (BCUs) covering England and Wales. In July 2000, work was carried out to list the 376 Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership (CDRP) areas in England and Wales in groupings, or families (Leigh et al., 2000). These families were based on socio-economic and demographic factors that were shown to correlate geographically with the level of crime and disorder within a locality. These families were intended to be used: to provide a basis for the national publication of crime statistics at a local level; to help CDRPs identify which partnerships in their family have the lowest crime rates and, over time, are most successful at reducing crime, so that they can learn lessons from them; to help forces and police authorities undertake best value reviews by enabling them to compare local-level performance across a range of functions or processes; and to assist HMIC inspections at BCU level. In July 2000, the Home Office published crime statistics organised by CDRP family (Povey et al., 2000). A need for a similar grouping was identified for BCUs, so that publications of crime statistics at this level could also be organised by family. However, BCU boundaries are chosen according to operational policing needs, and do not necessarily coincide with the CDRP boundaries. Thus, in July 2001, Home Office Briefing Note 4/01, Family Ties: Developing Basic Command Unit Families For Comparative Purposes (Harper et al., 2001) was published, listing the families of the 318 Basic Command Units. A more detailed report is available on the Home Office RDS website www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds (Harper et al., 2002). A subsequent maintenance of family membership is documented at the Home Office RDS website http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/basiccommand.pdf (Sheldon et al., 2002). Whilst CDRP boundaries remain unchanged, the BCU boundaries have been changed a number of times since the initial publication of BCU-level crime data organised by family. Some BCU areas were entirely reorganised, usually resulting in a reduction in the number of BCUs, with several smaller areas being rearranged into a smaller number of larger BCUs. Such changes have occurred a number of times – the most recent taking effect from 1 April 2003, those prior to that taking place on 1 April 2002. The overall objective of this work, then, is to update boundaries, socio-economic data and family membership of the BCUs in the light of changed boundaries

Modelling the interdependence of spatial scales in urban systems

The multitude of interwoven spatial scales and their relevance for urban systems has been of interest to the complexity science of cities since its conception. Today, we are well aware that urban environments are being simultaneously shaped and organised through actions at all levels. However, the fundamental question of how to reveal and quantify the interdependence of processes in between various spatial and temporal scales is less often addressed. Deepening our theoretical understanding of the multiscale spatiotemporal complexity of urban systems demands a transdisciplinary framework and the deployment of novel and advanced mathematical models. This article performs a multiscale analysis of urban structures using a large dataset of rent price values in the Ruhr area, Germany. We argue that, due to their many interacting degrees of freedom, urban systems exhibit similar features as other strongly correlated systems, for example, turbulent flows, notably the occurrence of extreme small-scale fluctuations. This analogy between urban and turbulent systems, which we support by empirical evidence, allows for the modelling of spatial structures on the basis of concepts and methods from turbulence theory. We demonstrate how by identifying the main turbulence-borrowed characteristics of an arbitrary two-dimensional urban field, it can be fully reproduced with a small number of prescribed points. Our findings have theoretical implications in the way we quantify and analyse scales in urban systems, model small-scale urban structures as well as potential policy relevance on understanding the evolution and spatial organisation of cities

Towards a taxonomy of arguments for and against street renaming: Exploring the discursive embedding of street name changes in the Leipzig cityscape

In 2016, a special issue of the Linguistic Landscapes: An International Journal explored the nexus between LL and collective memory studies, calling for more research at the interface of these disciplines. Our analysis adds to recent studies by exploring the ways in which commemorative street renaming processes are discursively embedded. We build on research on memorialisation as well as critical toponymy to analyse media discourses that accompany, support or contest commemorative naming practices in the urban streetscape of a large East German city during the last century. Based on this dataset, we develop a typology of arguments against or in favour of street renaming. The longitudinal analysis of discourses in the local press vis-à-vis ongoing resemioticisation reveals a complex relationship between lived political history, freedom of the press, the type of argument and the stances encoded therein

Changes in the Commemorative Streetscape of Leipzig over the past 100 years

This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary project which explores street name changes in Leipzig, a city in Eastern Germany, over the past 100 years. Our analysis focuses on the ways in which semantic choices in the streetscape are recruited to canonise traces of the national past that are “supportive of the hegemonic socio-political order” (Azaryahu 1997:480). We triangulate results from variationist sociolinguistics, Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies and geographical analysis to visualise waves of street (re)naming during a century of political turmoil. Drawing on historical archival data allows us to interpret spatial and temporal patterns of odonymic choices as the public embodiment of subsequent political state ideologies. The analysis provides quantitative and longitudinal support to Scollon & Scollon’s (2003) claim that the indexing of officially sanctioned identity and ideology as well as the appropriation of human space are performed by and in turn index state-hegemonic politics of memory