Cultural geography: a survey of perceptions held by Cultural Geography Specialty Group members

As of the year 2000, the Cultural Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers had 465 members and ranked fourth overall in total membership within the association. Furthermore, cultural geographers had the second fastest growing specialty group between 1993 and 1998, after the Geographic Perspectives on Women specialty group. In spite of this demonstrated overwhelming appeal among geographers, to date, no one has systematically analyzed the subdiscipline of cultural geography to determine such things as its links to other aspects of the discipline, its major scholarly contributions, its most highly regarded publication outlets, its notable practitioners, and its most recognized departments. As the ranks of cultural geographers have swelled, the subdiscipline has become multifaceted. This article contextualizes and interprets the results of a survey sent to members of the 1998–1999 Cultural Geography Specialty Group. Outcomes include Louisiana State University and the University of Texas at Austin listed as offering the strongest cultural geography departments, Wilbur Zelinsky being deemed the subfield's most outstanding living practitioner, and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers named the journal that best meets cultural geographers’ needs

Restriction Bounds for the Free Resolvent and Resonances in Lossy Scattering

We establish high energy $L^2$ estimates for the restriction of the free Green's function to hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{R}^d$. As an application, we estimate the size of a logarithmic resonance free region for scattering by potentials of the form $V\otimes \delta_{\Gamma}$, where $\Gamma \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ is a finite union of compact subsets of embedded hypersurfaces. In odd dimensions we prove a resonance expansion for solutions to the wave equation with such a potential.Comment: 24 page

The Feelings Group: A Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation of the Outcomes of a Smaller Anger Management Group for Clients who have a Learning Disability

Referrals concerning problems with anger for people with learning disability (LD) are relatively common as they are thought to be prone to difficulty in managing their anger (Willner, et al., 2002), a problem associated with aggressive behaviour (Novaco, 1994). Aggression is also prevalent in this population, with obvious inherent risks to themselves and others (Harris, 1993; Kiely & Pankhurst, 1998). Research on direct therapy in people with a learning disability (LD) indicates that there was a period of disdain for these types of approaches (Sinason, 1992). This was followed by a period marked by doubt around the value of using cognitive principles in particular (Willner, 2006), which was eventually overcome by a more positive and less discriminatory approach (Willner, 2005). This hesitancy has delayed the generation of robust empirical evaluation, which has yet to catch up (Willner, Jones, Tams & Green, 2002). The guidelines from the NHS are then activated whereby “in the absence of well designed randomised trials, clinicians may legitimately draw upon analysis of expert opinion and past experience” (Department of Health, 1996; p26). In some ways this offers freedom to adopt novel approaches or ones adapted from principle applied in other areas of clinical work, however, it also represents a difficulty in operating using evidence-based practice (Willner, 2005), which to some may represent a ‘professional minefield’ (Mead, 2000). In the emergent evidence-base for interventions for anger in this group, one important distinction has been made between ‘anger management’ and ‘anger treatment’ (Novaco et al., 2000), where the former is seen as a psycho educational approach whilst the latter explicitly combines assessment with treatment. Anger treatment also “centrally involves substantial cognitive restructuring and the acquisition of arousal reduction and behavioural coping skills” (Rose, et al., 2000, p172) This article presents the results from a small anger-management group for clients with a learning disability that was to be called “The Feelings Group”, which was based on the “Self awareness group” resource pack from Willner & Tomlinson (Psychology Department, Learning Disabilities Directorate, Bro Morgannwg NHS trust). This intervention boasted effectiveness in an RCT evaluation published in an article by Willner and colleagues (2002). The data was taken as part of service evaluation for the group. Informed consent was given by the clients involved to write about the group in an article

The Coherence Problem: Mapping the Theory and Delivery of Infrastructure Resilience Across Concept, Form, Function, and Experienced Value

In this contribution we explore the interface between the functional characteristics of infrastructures as artefacts and social need supplier. Specifically we are concerned with the ways in which infrastructure performance measures are articulated and assessed and whether there are incongruities between the technical and broader, social goals which infrastructure systems are intended to aspire to. Our analysis involves comparing and contrasting system design and performance metrics across the technical — social boundary, generating new insights for those tasked with the design and operation of networked infrastructures. The assessment delivered in the following sections is inherently interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral in nature, bringing thinking from the social and environmental sciences together with contributions from mathematics and engineering to offer a commentary which is relevant to all types of physical infrastructure

A snake of a different color: physiological color change in Arizona black rattlesnakes

Coloration may serve a variety of behavioral (e.g., crypsis, communication) and physiological (e.g., thermoregulation, protection) functions for terrestrial ectotherms. However, optimal coloration for a given function may vary over environments (spatial or temporal) or conflict with other functions. Physiological color change (rapid change due to movement of pigment granules within chromatophores) may be an adaptation to resolve conflicting selective pressures on coloration. The proximate factors related to physiological color change are well known in many animals, but few studies have investigated the ecological or evolutionary implications of this behavior. Here, we present alternative hypotheses for physiological color change and discuss biotic and abiotic factors that may have led to the maintenance and/or loss of this behavior among populations of Arizona black rattlesnakes (_Crotalus cerberus_). We discuss what is known about this behavior and propose to investigate the function and evolution of coloration and color change in _C. cerberus_

Social choice theory, game theory, and positive political theory

We consider the relationships between the collective preference and non-cooperative game theory approaches to positive political theory. In particular, we show that an apparently decisive difference between the two approachesthat in sufficiently complex environments (e.g. high-dimensional choice spaces) direct preference aggregation models are incapable of generating any prediction at all, whereas non-cooperative game-theoretic models almost always generate predictionis indeed only an apparent difference. More generally, we argue that when modeling collective decisions there is a fundamental tension between insuring existence of well-defined predictions, a criterion of minimal democracy, and general applicability to complex environments; while any two of the three are compatible under either approach, neither collective preference nor non-cooperative game theory can support models that simultaneously satisfy all three desiderata

Undecidability and Finite Automata

Using a novel rewriting problem, we show that several natural decision problems about finite automata are undecidable (i.e., recursively unsolvable). In contrast, we also prove three related problems are decidable. We apply one result to prove the undecidability of a related problem about k-automatic sets of rational numbers