Applied Geographic Studies最新文献

Geographic variation in educational attainment is often studied, but variation in access to higher education is much less well understood. Washington State is found to have unusually high access to community colleges, but rather low, and extremely uneven geographic access to four-year colleges and universities. The state, and especially the metropolitan core of Seattle, is highly dependent on migration of highly educated persons from the rest of the country and the world. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Emerging infectious diseases and resurgent older infectious diseases present major challenges to social welfare and health in developing and industrialized nations. New diseases such as HIV/AIDS, cryptosporidiosis, and Lyme disease have emerged through a number of mechanisms, including new human contact in zones which have been previously uninhabited or sparsely inhabitated, genetic mutation, spatial diffusion, and inadequate public health measures. Resurgent infectious diseases that were once close to elimination can also arise because of mutation, inadequate containment, antimicrobial resistance, and inadequate public health measures. Rapid detection and surveillance by the public health community are crucial in limiting the diffusion and spread of new and emergent diseases, and are prerequisites to the containment of these major threats to human health. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This article presents the epistemological foundations of regional medicometry and its five criteria: ethical, economic, social, spatial, and temporal. By its global approach medicometry studies the direct and indirect effects of medical infrastructures and employment on society and its quality of life. Two case studies, one dealing with an urban hospital in Geneva, Switzerland, the other with peripheral hospitals, give a step-by-step example of the multiplier effect approach. Detailed measures of economic and social impacts of hospitals are given to show that medical planning needs a careful and long-term analysis. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

There is a tradition of interaction between academic and practitioner, and the benefits of this tradition are well exemplified by the development of the body of knowledge of marketing geography. Marketing geography has existed as a subdiscipline longer than most other areas of applied geography; it then offers an example to the larger discipline. An historical overview reveals that the interaction has not always been appreciated or welcome, but has still generally brought benefits for both sides. The academic has benefited from the practitioner's sense of problem. The practitioner has benefited from the academic's advancement in methodology. But today the origin of the diffusion of the geographer's technology has shifted from the university to the larger commercial marketplace. Therefore, in the world of marketing geography, the gap between the academic and the practitioner shall become quite narrow. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Many of the contemporary environmental problems are geographic problems of spatial disparities between the distribution, impact, enforcement, costs, and remediation of a host of environmental ills. In order to link environmental process and human uses of the environment, a spatially accurate database of environmental hazards is required. This article examines the positional accuracy of some of the most important Environmental Protection Agency databases. It presents a methodology for identifying and correcting the errors found in the EPA databases, with South Carolina used as an example. Results show that more than 50% of the facilities in the state were initially located in the wrong census block group. The importance of this research for policy making is demonstrated with the use of an environmental equity analyses of a particular facility in South Carolina. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This paper reports on research measuring sustainability at the community-level scale. Working with planning and community development organizations in Charlotte, North Carolina, researchers from the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, developed and constructed a sustainable index for 73 inner city neighborhoods. This research embraces the broad definition of sustainable communities. It uses 28 indicator variables chosen to represent the multifaceted concept of local sustainability. Social, economic, and environmental factors are broadly represented. A sustainable index value was calculated for each neighborhood. In turn, this measure allows for comparison between neighborhoods as well as across communities. Moreover, the research methodology provides a framework for selecting, measuring, and analyzing the potential impact of public policy initiatives on neighborhood condition.

Historical enrollment data for the catchment areas of individual schools are rarely useful for projecting future enrollments because their boundaries are frequently adjusted to balance growth and decline in the enrollments of individual schools. The modifiable spatial-filter method (MSF) was developed to meet this problem (Rushton, Armstrong, and Lolonis, 1995). In this article, a modifiable catchment area method (MCA) is developed, and the performance of the two methods is compared in one school district. Both methods use individual, address-matched, student records, but are different in the way they spatially aggregate these data to estimate key model parameters. Results are clearly sensitive to these differences. We apply both methods retroactively to the address-matched student records, from 1989 through 1992, of 16 elementary schools in one school district in Iowa, and we project the 1993–1996 enrollments for 17 school catchment areas in the district. We show that the average of the results of the two methods produce projections that are more accurate than either method alone. We also show that it is the nonstationarity of model parameters that leads to different levels of performance by the two methods in certain parts of the study region. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.