Personal recollections of Juan Cuerda: friend, colleague and mentor / Vivències personals d'en Joan Cuerda: amic, col·lega i mentor

Abstract not availabl

Anthropeaulogie des Lom Lom

Présentation Le plaisir de la lecture du texte que publie aujourd’hui le Journal des anthropologues ne pourrait que pâtir d’un commentaire de type exégétique qu’il se veuille scientifique ou humoristique. Je me borne donc à rappeler que dans l’univers des ethnologues il est paradoxalement une des rares productions se rattachant à la filiation de Jonathan Swift et de Voltaire, et qui nous présente une société imaginaire structurée à l’aide de règles gauchies ou exacerbées de notre métier. Rédi..

Anthropeaulogie des Lom Lom

1 – Jographie Les Lom Lom, qui vivent au Fond du Bwa, sont patagames, fragmentaires, fistoulocaux et rétrolinéaires. Des greniers pointés vers le ciel (et prêts à la conquête de l’espace ?) parsèment les champs de digôl (bledinus vulgaris) nourriture de base des Lom Lom (ainsi appelés parce qu’ils sont les vrais hommes) et s’étendent entre les parcelles de forêts composées en majeure partie d’ombilis propicius, (L.) à cosses mauves et coniques. Le pays tout entier est soumis à un régime météo..

Levi-Civita cylinders with fractional angular deficit

The angular deficit factor in the Levi-Civita vacuum metric has been parametrized using a Riemann-Liouville fractional integral. This introduces a new parameter into the general relativistic cylinder description, the fractional index {\alpha}. When the fractional index is continued into the negative {\alpha} region, new behavior is found in the Gott-Hiscock cylinder and in an Israel shell.Comment: 5 figure

Extending the aridity record of the Southwest Kalahari: current problems and future perspectives

An extensive luminescence-based chronological framework has allowed the reconstruction of expansions and contractions of the Kalahari Desert over the last 50 ka. However, this chronology is largely based on near-surface pits and sediment exposures. These are the points on the landscape most prone to reactivation and resetting of the luminescence dating ‘clock’. This is proving to be a limiting feature for extending palaeoenvironmental reconstructions further back in time. One way to obviate this is to sample desert marginal areas that only become active during significant arid phases. An alternative is to find and sample deep stratigraphic exposures. The Mamatwan manganese mine at Hotazel in the SW Kalahari meets both these criteria. Luminescence dating of this site shows the upper sedimentary unit to span at least the last 60 ka with tentative age estimates from underlying cemented aeolian units dating back to the last interglacial and beyond. Results from Mamatwan are comparable to new and previously published data from linear dunes in the SW Kalahari but extend back much further. Analysis of the entire data set of luminescence ages for the SW Kalahari brings out important inferences that suggest that different aeolian forms (1) have been active over different time scales in the past, (2) have different sensitivities to environmental changes and (3) have different time scales over which they record and preserve the palaeoenvironmental record. This implies that future optically stimulated luminescence work and palaeoenvironmental reconstructions must consider both site location and its relationship to desert margins and sediment depositional styles, so that the resolution and duration of the aridity record can be optimally understood

A note on maximal estimates for stochastic convolutions

In stochastic partial differential equations it is important to have pathwise regularity properties of stochastic convolutions. In this note we present a new sufficient condition for the pathwise continuity of stochastic convolutions in Banach spaces.Comment: Minor correction

Landscape science: a Russian geographical tradition

The Russian geographical tradition of landscape science (landshaftovedenie) is analyzed with particular reference to its initiator, Lev Semenovich Berg (1876-1950). The differences between prevailing Russian and Western concepts of landscape in geography are discussed, and their common origins in German geographical thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are delineated. It is argued that the principal differences are accounted for by a number of factors, of which Russia's own distinctive tradition in environmental science deriving from the work of V. V. Dokuchaev (1846-1903), the activities of certain key individuals (such as Berg and C. O. Sauer), and the very different social and political circumstances in different parts of the world appear to be the most significant. At the same time it is noted that neither in Russia nor in the West have geographers succeeded in specifying an agreed and unproblematic understanding of landscape, or more broadly in promoting a common geographical conception of human-environment relationships. In light of such uncertainties, the latter part of the article argues for closer international links between the variant landscape traditions in geography as an important contribution to the quest for sustainability