Small-scale health-related indicator acquisition using secondary data spatial interpolation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Due to the lack of small-scale neighbourhood-level health related indicators, the analysis of social and spatial determinants of health often encounter difficulties in assessing the interrelations of neighbourhood and health. Although secondary data sources are now becoming increasingly available, they usually cannot be directly utilized for analysis in other than the designed study due to sampling issues. This paper aims to develop data handling and spatial interpolation procedures to obtain small area level variables using the Canadian Community Health Surveys (CCHS) data so that meaningful small-scale neighbourhood level health-related indicators can be obtained for community health research and health geographical analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Through the analysis of spatial autocorrelation, cross validation comparison, and modeled effect comparison with census data, kriging is identified as the most appropriate spatial interpolation method for obtaining predicted values of CCHS variables at unknown locations. Based on the spatial structures of CCHS data, kriging parameters are suggested and potential small-area-level health-related indicators are derived. An empirical study is conducted to demonstrate the effective use of derived neighbourhood variables in spatial statistical modeling. Suggestions are also given on the accuracy, reliability and usage of the obtained small area level indicators, as well as further improvements of the interpolation procedures.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>CCHS variables are moderately spatially autocorrelated, making kriging a valid method for predicting values at unsampled locations. The derived variables are reliable but somewhat smoother, with smaller variations than the real values. As potential neighbourhood exposures in spatial statistical modeling, these variables are more suitable to be used for exploring potential associations than for testing the significance of these associations, especially for associations that are barely significant. Given the spatial dependency of current health-related risks, the developed procedures are expected to be useful for other similar health surveys to obtain small area level indicators.</p

Exploring the Socioeconomic Composition of Wind Farm Communities in Ontario: Implications for Wind Farm Planning and Policy

This research explores the socioeconomic composition of sixteen wind farm communities in Ontario, Canada, for wind farms commissioned between 2006 and 2012. Past research has shown that wind farms are disproportionately developed in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas and that socioeconomic factors influence wind farm support, an important factor in wind farm planning. This research finds that wind farm communities do not exhibit characteristics of disadvantage compared to host counties. Investigating the association between when wind farms were commissioned and community-scale characteristics, this research observes that communities with wind farms operational before 2009 had significantly lower median income compared to communities with wind farms operational after 2009. This provides one perspective on how community-scale characteristics may shape wind farm planning, specifically the influence of local opposition and financial incentives on the location of wind farm developments

Remembering Sugihara, Re-framing Japan in Europe: Holocaust Era Altruism and the Politics of Cultural Memory

Cornell University This paper is a comparison of two museums dedicated to the Japanese diplomat to&nbsp;Lithuania during World War II, Sugihara Chiune. Credited with having written over&nbsp;6,000 visas to save the lives of Jews fleeing German occupied Poland into Lithuania,&nbsp;Sugihara is regarded in Europe, in Japan, and within the Jewish community as a&nbsp;whole as an altruistic person.&nbsp;This study is not an inquiry into the merits of Sugihara’s action, but rather astudy of how the process of memorializing, narrativizing and celebrating the life of&nbsp;Sugihara in two vastly different museums is part of a larger project of selective&nbsp;cultural memory on the part of various Japanese organizations and institutions. This&nbsp;paper situates the themes of altruism and heroism in the larger process of cultural&nbsp;memory, to see how such themes operate to advance other projects of collective&nbsp;memory. The case of Sugihara is fascinating precisely because the vastly differing&nbsp;processes of cultural memory of the Holocaust―in Lithuania, in Japan, and in a&nbsp;wider post-World War II, post Holocaust Jewish Diaspora each have different ways&nbsp;of constructing, disseminating and consuming narratives of altruism. This paper is&nbsp;based on fieldwork in Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2003, 2004 and again in&nbsp;2005 and in Japan in 2005

Introduction: Cultural Memory, the Past and the Static of the Present

Ithaca, New York, September 2007 “The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past.”WILLIAM FAULKNER The burgeoning field of study loosely known as “cultural memory studies” fills a&nbsp;strange gap between more traditional historiography and the anthropology of memory.&nbsp;Historiography in the more traditional sense embraces the stance that the past is&nbsp;knowable, verifiable to the extent that we have reliable evidence, and retrievable to&nbsp;some extent. It concerns itself with what happened in the past (and the many&nbsp;complications of knowing that). Cultural memory studies, on the other hand, address&nbsp;what Paul Ricoeur so aptly labeled “the mnemonic phenomenon,” the dialogical&nbsp;process through which collectivities recall the past in light of present concerns that arein part shaped by this very past that is being recalled and refashioned in the present. For&nbsp;the scholar of cultural memory, the object of study is not the past, but the many projects&nbsp;memory undertakes: healing, denial, revision, invention, recreation and re-creation,&nbsp;forgetting. What is the relationship between history and memory? What should it be? ..