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This paper explores the political and historical roots of collective action problems around community policing in Hout Bay, South Africa. Utilizing a social capital approach, it argues that party politics has exacerbated a racialized politics of public goods provision in the community, with implications for the local governance of security. Using original data from semi-structured interviews and secondary sources, the paper analyzes the community's environment of social capital, the influence of local and provincial party agendas on inter-group relations there, and its ultimate impact on community policing in Hout Bay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geoinformatic Tupu, or Geoinformatic graph spectrum, is a theoretical as well as a technical framework for generalizing geographic knowledge and solving real world problems. Geoinformatic Tupu is a promising platform for capitalizing on the technical advances of Geographic Information Systems, and to integrate the Chinese traditional way of thinking with modern information technology. It has been one of the major research topics in the Chinese GIScience community in recent decades, with an evolving epistemological development. A core objective of Geoinformatic Tupu is to recover and represent geographic principles with the Tupu approach, which is adopted in this paper to formulate the First Law of Geography (FLG) [i.e. the law of spatial autocorrelation] as the Moran Spectrum – a combination of sequential diagrams, graphs, and numeric components. Using the Moran Spectrum as a conduit, we present the theory of Moran Eigenvector Spatial Filtering (MESF), a distinct branch of spatial statistics that has demonstrable advantages in statistical modelling and machine learning, but has yet to be widely disseminated due to its conceptual and computational complexity. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the Tupu approach in enriching the representation of the FLG as well as deepening its applications. It also suggests inclusion of the Moran Spectrum as a core component in Geoinformatic Tupu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The images captured from SAR sensors are inherently weakened by speckle noise. The SAR image processing community targeted this problem with many feature-based filters. Since SAR images are low-contrast images, edge retention is the most crucial aspect to consider. This helps in the efficient retrieval of information. This paper provides a two-step edge-preserving homomorphic SAR image despeckling technique that implements a guided filter as the first step, and a modified method of noise thresholding using the bivariate shrinkage rule and canny edge operator in the Discrete Orthonormal Stockwell Transform (DOST) domain as the second step. The use of a canny edge operator improves overall edge preservation after despeckling. The use of noise thresholding delivers the highest level of speckle reduction in the DOST domain. The detected edges are added to the residual part obtained after removing the noise to produce more informative content. According to several qualitative and quantitative criteria, the suggested approach is compared to some of the newest despeckling methods. The execution time of the proposed method is around 7.2679 seconds. Upon conducting qualitative and quantitative analysis, it has been determined that the proposed method surpasses all other despeckling methods that were compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, agrarian reform areas have transformed urban and rural spaces across Brazil. Although these areas' creation reduced inequalities and environmental problems, their residents still experience several constraints and vulnerabilities associated with water, energy, and food provision. Drawing on the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus' critical and territorial perspectives, this paper aims to better understand the agrarian reform areas' challenges in peri-urban interfaces towards social justice. We analyse a territory in the Northeast portion of the São Paulo State, where it is located the Sepé Tiaraju agrarian reform settlement in interface with two municipalities. We suggest that agrarian reform areas can activate a progressive and concrete environmental change at the local level where food is the key element to redefining the area's nexus. However, socio-political and spatial dynamics involving water and energy for the sugarcane sector, the municipal government, and tense relationships among residents around food also reproduce unequal access to resources. This paper contributes to the emerging critical literature and its efforts to politicize the nexus debate, giving more nuanced views to the complex and contradictory dynamics involving environmental problems and social justice struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the application of information theory and game theory to questions arising in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx's critical reformulation of Smith's analysis in Capital. After introducing the key theoretical concepts of entropy-constrained behavior and the social interaction model, the paper applies them to some central issues in Marxian and classical political economy: the long-period method analysis of commodity production, the social division of labor, commodity production and money, alienation, and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the role of sociology in climate change research and policies. Climate change can be regarded as one of the greatest challenges facing the world today. It has attracted attention from several disciplines, with the physical sciences regarded as dominating climate change research. Apparently, despite that climate change is inherently a social problem, sociologists have been slow in tackling it, at both theoretical and policy levels. Even so, available literature contains assorted and interesting sociological contributions and insights. As such, this paper posits that sociologists are interested in climate change issues, have a lot to offer and they can draw from a number of sub-fields. For instance, using sociology of sustainable consumption sociologists can tackle how societies can re-organise consumption patterns and habits, sociology of education provokes more intriguing research into the construction of climate change science, knowledge and solutions and feminist sociology can extend robust research into how the material and discursive dimensions of climate change are profoundly gendered. Importantly, critical sociology provides a repertoire of concepts and novel methods that can be deployed in climate change research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the type of work migrant women from the former Eastern European countries perform in nightclubs in Amman, Jordan. The fieldwork for this qualitative study was conducted in 2010 and is based on in-depth interviews with 13 women. The topic is approached from the perspective of describing women’s choices and journeys to this work. It juxtaposes the sexualised nature of their work with their yearning for a “normal” family life, which they imagine, yet know, is impossible to achieve with the men they meet in their workplaces. Layered on top of these private desires among both women and their clients is the business strategy of the clubs, which operate in the lucrative but marginal space of selling exotic but respectable seduction. I draw on the literature about female migration to the Middle East in order to argue that hostesses in these bars perform affective labour akin to care work, within the neoliberal global economy that individualises risk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]