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By conceptualizing similarity among firms in terms of overlapping resources, research on location choice has found that similar firms tend to locate far from one another. Yet, a resource-overlap perspective may not always align with decision-makers' similarity classifications. In this article, we propose that new entrants also perceive firm similarities in terms of collective identities, and we examine how competition between collective identities influences entrants' choice of location. Our arguments center on the distinction between unaffiliated traditionalists, actors who are loyal to values and practices originally associated with a label and who emphasize autonomy, and affiliated modernists, actors who reinterpret a label using different values and practices and who seek consistency. Analyzing the entry of 177 artisan bakers within the city of Lyon from 1998 to 2017, we find that new entrants locate where prior actors with similar collective identities had located previously. To differentiate through competition, however, some new entrants also tend to prefer locations closer to actors who are encroaching on their collective identity, most evident among traditionalists choosing to locate near modernists. By integrating a collective-identity perspective with location choice, we show how the sociocognitive basis of similarity classification shapes new entrants' competitive behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses insights from the political perspective on corporate governance to investigate the influence of geographic concentration of institutional blockholders on workplace safety violations. When institutional investors who have a blockholding stake (i.e., institutional blockholders) are geographically concentrated, corporate managers are more likely to pursue efficiency at the expense of employee interests because these blockholders may find it easier to coordinate their actions, strengthening their power over corporate managers and ultimately giving rise to more workplace safety violations. We also contend that the influence of institutional blockholders' geographic concentration on workplace safety violations hinges upon the ownership of employees, socially responsible investment funds, and the CEO. Findings from a longitudinal sample of 1316 U.S. firms support our arguments. This study contributes to a nascent stream of research examining the influence of capital market participants on workplace safety by highlighting the role of institutional blockholders' geographic concentration as a new channel through which investors can shape employee outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diálogo com a Economia Criativa is the property of Dialogo com a Economia Criativa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The COVID-19 pandemic altered the local economic geographies of many U.S. cities, and it remains unclear how long these changes will persist. This study analyzed the sociospatial dynamics of business closures in Miami-Dade County, Florida, from August 2020 to August 2021 with an explicit focus on reconciling the pandemic's effects in the context of location theory. We found that traditional urban centers and transit-concentrated areas experienced disproportionately higher rates of business closures during the study period, suggesting a potential wave of commercial suburbanization in Miami. Middle-class and working-class Hispanic neighborhoods suffered the most business closures. The results of correlation analysis and spatial regression models suggested a positive association between the incidence of COVID-19 cases and business closures at both zip code and individual business levels. These results also beckon a revaluation of the role of certain urban externalities in traditional location theory. The importance of automobile accessibility and agglomeration effects are poised to persist beyond the pandemic, but the benefits of proximity to the public transport system might decline. The trends observed in Miami suggest that the pandemic could generate more automobile-reliant employment subcenters in U.S. cities and amplify problems of intraurban inequality and urban sprawl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gaceta de la Real Sociedad Matematica Espanola is the property of Real Sociedad Matematica Espanola and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we discuss the obnoxious and semi-obnoxious version of the backup 2-median problem on a tree. In the obnoxious case of the 2-median problem, all vertices have negative weights, whereas in the semi-obnoxious model the vertices may have either positive or negative weights. In these two problems, we should find the location of two facility servers on the tree so that the sum of minimum weighted distances from vertices in the tree to the set of functioning servers is minimized. In the backup model, each facility server may probably fail. If a facility server fails, the remaining server should serve the clients. Vertex optimality is an important property for the 2-median problem. This property indicates that the set of vertices involves an optimal solution of the 2-median problem. We verify that the vertex optimality holds for the semi-obnoxious backup 2-median problem on a tree network. In the obnoxious 2-median problem, the set of leaves contains an optimal solution, we show that this property does not hold for the obnoxious backup 2-median problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Christaller's central place theory famously conceptualizes local external urban relations (town-ness) while neglecting non-local connections characterized as central flow theory (city-ness). In this paper, we advance the study of central flow theory by revealing its existence within the foundation text of central place theory. We systematically separate town-ness and city-ness in Christaller's original data on 1920s' southern Germany to estimate the balance between the two processes for different urban places. We find that city-ness dominates town-ness in leading cities and show the severe limitations of focusing on just one urban external relation in urban and regional studies of settlement systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on recent and growing evidence that geographic location influences information diffusion, this paper examines the relation between firm's location and the predictability of stock returns. We hypothesize that returns on a portfolio composed of firms located in central areas are more likely to follow a random walk than returns on a portfolio composed of firms located in remote areas. Using a battery of variance ratio tests, we find strong and robust support for our prediction. In particular, we show that the returns on a portfolio composed of the 500 largest urban firms follow a random walk; however, all variance ratio tests reject the random walk hypothesis for a portfolio that includes the 500 largest rural firms. Our results are robust to alternative definitions of firm's location and portfolio formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conditions underlying the undertaking and developing of a business enterprise in a specific location are strictly connected to the state and any possible modifications of the spatial management in a given area, and the local government of every municipality is obliged to ensure spatial order and to manage the land resources so as to take into account their economic assets. The main purpose of this study was to identify the role of a variety of relevant factors as well as the activities performed by local governments in eastern Poland that arise from with the local policy of a municipality, the smallest unit in Poland's administrative division, in connection with the location of business enterprises. The research enabled us to determine what activities in the domain of spatial policy are implemented by local governments and what role they play in the enhancement of economic values of a municipality. The results also helped to indicate which spatial policy factors lose and which gain importance in the context of conducting a business activity. The most important factor in terms of the location a business investment in a given area is the active implementation of the municipality's spatial policy. The factor that gains the highest importance in the eyes of entrepreneurs is the condition of technical infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of modifying edge lengths of a cycle at minimum total costs so as to make a prespecified vertex an (absolute) 1-center of the cycle with respect to the new edge legths. We call this problem the inverse 1-center problem on a cycle. To solve this problem, we first construct the so-called optimality criterion for a vertex to be a 1-center. Based on the optimality criterion, it is shown that the problem can be separated into linearly many subproblems. For a predetermined subproblem, we apply a parameterization approach to formulate it as a minimization problem of a piecewise linear convex function with a connected feasible region. Hence, it is shown that the problem can be solved in O(n2logn) time, where n is the number of vertices in the cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large scale calamities caused by natural or human-created disasters are the challenging issues to protect the life and their surroundings. It is a complex task to develop the significant and universally accepted solution strategy for handling these issues. Appropriate facility locations and transportation facilities are essential components for the efficient evacuation planning flow models. Contraflow, the lane reversal strategy, is one of the widely accepted solution approach for evacuation planning as it maximizes the outbound capacities of roads by reversing the required road directions and makes the traffic smooth. This significantly increases the flow value and decreases the evacuation time. In this work, the network facility location and the contraflow approach are incorporated to the flow models and some efficient algorithms are presented to locate the facility with an objective of minimum flow loss on the evacuation network. Our facility location contraflow solutions obtain the optimal plans with respect to the given and arbitrary locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ordered median function is used in location theory to generalize a class of problems, including median and center problems. In this paper we consider the complexity of inverse ordered 1-median problems on the plane and on trees, where the multipliers are sorted nondecreasingly. Based on the convexity of the objective function, we prove that the problems with variable weights or variable coordinates on the line are NP-hard. Then we can directly get the NP-hardness result for the corresponding problem on the plane. We finally develop a cubic time algorithm that solves the inverse convex ordered 1-median problem on trees with relaxation on modification bounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first systematic research on Location Theory dates back to 1826. Quantitative approaches came much later. On the supply side extensive Input-Output Tables can be mentioned and on the demand side the optimization by Multi-Criteria Decision Making. The advantages of Input-Output Tables for location opportunities on a regional and urban basis have to be emphasized, whereas the link is made between Input-Output and Multi-Criteria Optimization. MOORA, Multi-Objective Optimization by Ratio Analysis, is composed of two methods: Ratio Analysis and Reference Point Theory and responds to the different conditions of robustness needed for optimization. This approach attempts to localize in an optimal way a certain project facing different indicators, criteria or objectives sometimes originating from different groups or individuals. Here however type and importance of objectives and alternatives were only simulated. The real stakeholders to be considered are rather the national and local authorities, the contributing firms and their personnel. In the production sphere consumer sovereignty was only indirectly involved. If consumers, via consumer organizations and trade unions, were directly involved, other claims could emerge. The simulation used was limited in its applications. Clearly if this simulation has no practical consequences, it still provides a learning experience with the use of the MOORA Method in its double composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I ask how the location of a protest affects how forcefully governments crack down. This geography of repression provides insight into a larger strategic problem: under what conditions do leaders meet protests with violence? I argue that protests in rural areas pose a smaller threat and, thus, prompt less frequent intervention. However, when governments decide to repress rural protests, they are less concerned that lethal repression might incite a backlash, as there are fewer bystanders in more rural areas that can join the fray. I uncover two patterns consistent with this theory: (1) repression is 30 percent more frequent in response to social conflicts in urban areas; but (2), if the state does employ repression, it is 75 percent more likely to kill dissidents in rural areas. The empirical relationships I report cannot be explained by reporting bias, international sanctioning, proximity to past armed conflicts, or the presence of natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate a variant of the reverse obnoxious center location problem on a tree graph T=(V,E) in which a selective subset of the vertex set V is considered as locations of the existing customers. The aim is to augment or reduce the edge lengths within a given budget with respect to modification bounds until a predetermined undesirable facility location becomes as far as possible from the customer points under the new edge lengths. An O(|E|2) time combinatorial algorithm is developed for the problem with arbitrary modification costs. For the uniform-cost case, one obtains the improved O(|E|) time complexity. Moreover, optimal solution algorithms with O(|E|2) and O(|E|) time complexities are proposed for the integer version of the problem with arbitrary and uniform cost coefficients, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community Based Organizations (CBOs) are important health system stakeholders with the mission of addressing the social and economic needs of individuals and groups in a defined geographic area, usually no larger than a county. The access and success efforts of CBOs vary, depending on the integration between health care providers and CBOs but also in relation to the community participation level. To achieve widespread results, it is important to carefully design an efficient network which can serve as a bridge between the community and the health care system. This study addresses this challenge through a location-allocation model that deals with the hierarchical nature of the system explicitly. To reflect social welfare concerns of equity, local accessibility, and efficiency, we develop the model in a multi-objective framework, capturing the ambiguity in the decision makers' aspiration levels through a fuzzy goal programming approach. This study reports the findings for the real case of Shiraz city, Fars province, Iran, obtained by a thorough analysis of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By way of a background to this commentary, the recent history of central place theory is briefly reviewed. Drawing on the work of Christaller and Lösch, attention is initially focused on the particular characteristics of central place goods and on the spatial distribution of their supply. With the aid of export-base analysis, a distinction is made between central places and specialized function centers, leading to the contention that in contemporary urban systems the central place structure represents one component of a more extensive urban system. Further perspectives on central place theory are revealed by examining some of its deficiencies. In this connection, a distinction is made between limitations inherent to the theory and areas where the theory is deemed to be incomplete or otherwise inadequate. While central place theory is in need of elaboration and extension, it continues to represent a valuable framework within location theory and urban and regional analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in quality of life and place (QOL) has increased dramatically over the past few decades. Traditionally, QOL across geographic areas has been measured with two approaches: objective measures based on revealed preference theory via compensating differentials and subjective or stated preference approaches. While recent work has attempted to statistically link the two approaches, this paper presents a new alternative approach to measuring QOL across geographic areas founded on location theory from the multidisciplinary field of regional science using chain store data. While highly correlated with the other two approaches, the index developed here is also easily and quickly updated and able to provide insights that are not available with the two traditional means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to be successful in spatial orientation tasks, people need to recall locations and configurations of spatial objects from their memory. This understanding of geographic space often arises from experience with cartographic media representing topographic and topological information by graphic symbols. Learning spatial information from graphic media is influenced by different perception-based grouping effects distorting the accuracy of spatial object-positions and their relations. Such geometric inaccuracies can be softened by adding a grid layer, which regionalizes the map and can be used as an additional orientation pattern. This grid layer usually consists of solid lines and overlays semantic information. The present paper reports the results of two empirical studies on object-location memory (OLM) performance. In these studies, the amount of visual detail of the grid layer was reduced. By positioning the grid layer below specific urban topographic objects (study 1), the grid pattern was graphically interrupted. These interrupted grid lines were completed by cognitive completion mechanisms (illusory grid lines) described in the Gestalt principles of closure and continuation. The second experiment examined the maximum grid line gap that is closed by cognitive line completion and keeps an advantage for OLM (study 2). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Location recommendation is an important feature of social network applications and location-based services. Most existing studies focus on developing one single method or model for all users. By analyzing data from two real location-based social networks (Foursquare and Gowalla), in this paper we reveal that the decisions of users on place visits depend on multiple factors, and different users may be affected differently by these factors. We design a location recommendation framework that combines results from various recommenders that consider different factors. Our framework estimates, for each individual user, the underlying influence of each factor to her. Based on the estimation, we aggregate suggestions from different recommenders to derive personalized recommendations. Experiments on Foursquare and Gowalla show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on location recommendation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of LogForum is the property of LogForum and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) is a transformative platform that engages individuals in collecting and analyzing environmental, social, and other spatio-temporal information. SC outsources spatio-temporal tasks to a set of workers, i.e., individuals with mobile devices that perform the tasks by physically traveling to specified locations. However, current solutions require the workers to disclose their locations to untrusted parties. In this paper, we introduce a framework for protecting location privacy of workers participating in SC tasks. We propose a mechanism based on differential privacy and geocasting that achieves effective SC services while offering privacy guarantees to workers. We address scenarios with both static and dynamic (i.e., moving) datasets of workers. Experimental results on real-world data show that the proposed technique protects location privacy without incurring significant performance overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK café industry has experienced significant growth over the last decade. With over 18 800 outlets, and a turnover of £7.2 billion recorded in 2014, the industry represents an important component of the retail sector. Industry commentators forecast that the industry will continue to grow and that there will be 27 000 outlets by 2020. This article provides an overview of the UK café industry and highlights the key drivers of it's rapid growth. It explores the ways that a new economic geography is quietly made as the café industry refashions our high streets. The article culminates by presenting an illustrative typology of café types which comprise the café industry in the UK, highlighting the need for greater research into the landscape of the café industry as it develops, and the roles that café spaces play in different communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The creation and distribution of human capital, often termed talent, has been recognised in economic geography as an important factor in the locational decisions of firms (Florida, 2002), and at a more general level as a key driver of economic growth (Romer, 1990). The purpose of this paper is to consider how talent is created and distributed across the cities of the UK and the key factors which are driving this spatial distribution. They also consider what the economic outcomes of these disparities are for cities.Design/methodology/approach The multivariate models can estimate the dynamic inter-relationships between human capital (talent), innovative capacity, and economic value added. These can be estimated, using talent as an example, in the form: human capital measurei =α0i+α1i innovative capacity +α2i quality of life + α3i labour market indicators + α4i economic indicators + α5i HEI indicators + β6i population demographics + β7i population + υi.Findings The first finding is that talent is unequally distributed across cities, with some having three times more highly educated workers than others. Talent concentration at the city level is associated with entrepreneurial activity, culture, the presence of a university, and to a lesser degree the housing market. This feeds into more knowledge-based industry, which is associated with higher gross value added.Research limitations/implications The research is limited in a practical sense by the fact that UK data at this level have only become available quite recently. Thus, it is only possible to capture talent flows and city growth in a relatively small window. But the prospects going forward will allow more detailed analysis at the city level of the relationship between talent flows and local economic growth. And additional insights could be considered relating to the on-going changes in the UK university system.Practical implications The question of whether universities are simply producers of talent or play a much broader and deeper role in the socio-economic landscape and outcomes of cities is an open one. This research has identified what the key drivers of city level economic growth and knowledge creation are, and sought to explain why some cities are capable of attracting and harnessing three times more talent than other cities. This has significant implications for the future development of UK cities and for those seeking to address these imbalances.Social implications Universities are a major economic agent in their own right, but they are increasingly being asked to play a wider role in local economic development. The authors’ evidence suggests that universities do play a wider role in the growth and development of cities, but that there are large discrepancies in the subsequent spatial distribution of the talent they create. And this has significant implications for those seeking to address these imbalances and promote a broader and less unequal economic landscape.Originality/value The authors explore how cities create economic value via a process whereby talent is attracted and then this stimulates knowledge-based industry activity. The originality relates to several key aspects of the work. First, the authors look at the stock of talent, and then the authors explore how “new” talent from universities is attracted by looking at graduate flows around the cities of the UK, differentiating between top-level graduates and less talented graduates. The authors then allow a wide variety of economic, cultural, and population factors to influence the locational decision of talented people. The results highlight the complexity of this decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the subjective and objective factors that influence corporate behaviours, political region and firm location are of great importance to environmental information disclosure (EID). With spatial and political geography as a research perspective, this article makes a study by using the samples of manufacturing listed companies from 2009 to 2011. As a result, we determine that regulatory distance and political geography had negative effects onEID, while political geography weakens regulatory distance’s function. After considering an enterprise’s administrative rank, we determined that when the rank is higher, regulatory distance has negative effects onEID; when the rank is lower, the effects are the opposite. Regarding political geography, it always weakened the regulatory distance’s function. Moreover, the effects are significant only when the enterprises had low governmental regulation. The study shows the effects that firm location and political geography have made onEID. At the same time, this study also gives theoretical and empirical evidence to the necessity of raising governmental regulatory effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Automated high-frequency trading has grown tremendously in the past 20 years and is responsible for about half of all trading activities at stock exchanges worldwide. Geography is central to the rise of high-frequency trading due to a market design of “continuous trading” that allows traders to engage in arbitrage based upon informational advantages built into the socio-technical assemblages that make up current capital markets. Enormous investments have been made in creating transmission technologies and optimizing computer architectures, all in an effort to shave milliseconds of order travel time (or latency) within and between markets. We show that as a result of the built spatial configuration of capital markets, “public” is no longer synonymous with “equal” information. High-frequency trading increases information inequalities between market participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to turn Taipei into a sustainable, green metropolis, in 2009, the Department of Transportation of Taipei City Government launched a public bike rental system (YouBike) to meet people’s daily commute and/or leisure needs. Given that users may return bikes to sites differing from their starting locations, rental stations frequently lack bikes or bike racks. This study sought to identify lacking-bike and/or lacking-bike rack hot spots utilizing spatial-temporal analysis. In addition, it applied retail location theory to determine site selection of further rental stations. Historical data indicated that shortage of bikes was much more severe than shortage of bike racks in the YouBike public bike system and lacking-bike and lacking-bike rack hot spots were clustered significantly. The study demonstrated that spatial-temporal analysis can be used to effectively identify rental stations’ spatial patterns, determine the most suitable locations for further installation of rental stations, help to provide public bike users with a more effective rental system, and greatly assist public bikes’ operational management and decision-making in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“What is this” and “where am I” are two common questions that arise when people travel abroad. Recently, landmark image identification has shown great promise for the addressed problems, where most previous approaches are either visual-based or location-based. However, regarding city-view image location identification, there could be a number of buildings in a close proximity. Moreover, it is common that photos were taken indoors. The conditions may degrade the performance of previous approaches. To remedy the deficiencies, this paper unifies visual features, geo-tags, and check-in data, based on cross-domain social media, for city-view image location identification. Besides, this paper shows an effective and memory-efficient implementation based on sparse coding, where a new dictionary selection approach is presented. Further, this paper proposes a location-aware graph-based regrouping approach, leveraging spanning graph construction, on clusters of photos to refine clustering results. Experimental results show the improvement over the baselines (location-based, visual-based, etc.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that location, as both geography and epistemology, can be a place of innovation in the discipline of international relations (IR). Specifically, it suggests that a re-appropriation of IR as a product of a global history in which the Global South, in general, and Africa, in particular, played an important role can help displace the moral and historical centrality of Western theory where it has failed to give credence to ‘peripheral’ experience and social thought. This belief coincides with a commonsense according to which the production of knowledge is by necessity inseparable from the intellectual conventions, traditions and lineages of the place of production. This means that African universities in particular have the opportunity to generate new perspectives in IR based on the analyses of the historical events that marked the life of the continent. In this manner, thinking and teaching IR in Africa would consist of revisiting the received truths about the evolution of the international order and society by revising their historical underpinnings, where necessary, and by interrogating the ‘unit-ideas’ that structure disciplinary impulses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how the location behavior of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is shaped by the economic institutions of the host countries. The analysis covers a wide set of geographically proximate economies with different degrees of integration with theoldfifteen European Union members: new member states, accession and candidate countries, as well as European Neighborhood Policy countries and the Russian Federation. The article aims to shed new light on the heterogeneity of MNE preferences for the host countries’ regulatory settings (including labor market and business regulation), legal aspects (i.e., protection of property rights and contract enforcement), and the weight of the government in the economy. By employing data on 6888 greenfield investment projects, the random-coefficient mixed logit analysis shows that, although the quality of the national institutional framework is generally beneficial for the attraction of foreign investment, MNEs’ preferences over economic institutions are highly heterogeneous across sectors and business functions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The p-center problem is one of the most important models in location theory. Its objective is to place a fixed number of facilities so that the maximum service distance for all customers is as small as possible. This article develops a reliable p-center problem that can account for system vulnerability and facility failure. A basic assumption is that located centers can fail with a given probability and a customer will fall back to the closest nonfailing center for service. The proposed model seeks to minimize the expected value of the maximum service distance for a service system. In addition, the proposed model is general and can be used to solve other fault-tolerant center location problems such as the (p, q)-center problem using appropriate assignment vectors. I present an integer programming formulation of the model and computational experiments, and then conclude with a summary of findings and point out possible future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with constrained multi-objective optimization problems. The main purpose of the article is to investigate relationships between constrained and unconstrained multi-objective optimization problems. Under suitable assumptions (e.g., generalized convexity assumptions) we derive a characterization of the set of (strictly, weakly) efficient solutions of a constrained multi-objective optimization problem using characterizations of the sets of (strictly, weakly) efficient solutions of unconstrained multi-objective optimization problems. We demonstrate the usefulness of the results by applying it on constrained multi-objective location problems. Using our new results we show that special classes of constrained multi-objective location problems (e.g., point-objective location problems, Weber location problems, center location problems) can be completely solved with the help of algorithms for the unconstrained case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study assesses the overall impact of place of residence (urban and Southern) on gender-role attitudes. Past research has often implicated timing of socialization, posing that attitudinal formation occurs either during childhood or adulthood. We propose an additional and more nuanced model that points to place by arguing that social relations in urban and Southern locations have long-lasting and powerful effects on attitudes. Using nationally representative data, we test this theoretical model by assessing whether the attitudes of urban and Southern in- and out-migrants differ from those of lifelong residents. Looking at lifelong residents and migrants, we further assess whether the impact of place will eventually diminish over time. Overall, results show that, particularly for lifelong urban residents, early socialization may be more important in impacting gender-role attitudes. With respect to region, the place based model appears more appropriate. However, it is the non-South location that seems more potent in maintaining and changing gender-role attitudes. Findings also suggest the importance of place on gender role attitudes has declined over the last 30 years. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Ekonomske Ideje i Praksa is the property of Centar za Izdavacku Delatnost Ekonomskog Fakulteta u Beogradu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sensor node (SN) is a crucial part in any remote monitoring system. It is a device designed to monitor the particular changes taking place in its environs. Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a system formed by the set of wirelessly connected SNs placed at different geographical locations within a target region. Precise placement of SNs is appreciated, as it affects the efficiency and effectiveness of any WSN. The manual placement of SNs is only feasible for small scale regions. The task of SN placement becomes tedious, when the size of a target region is extremely large and manually unreachable. In this research article, an automated mechanism for fast and precise deployment of SNs in a large scale target region has been proposed. It uses an assembly of rotating cannons to launch the SNs from a moving carrier helicopter. The entire system is synchronized such that the launched SNs accurately land on the pre-computed desired locations (DLs). Simulation results show that the proposed model offers a simple, time efficient and effective technique to place SNs in a large scale target region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taxi trajectories reflect human mobility over a road network. Pick-up and drop-off locations in different time periods represent origins and destinations of trips, respectively, demonstrating the spatiotemporal characteristics of human behavior. Each trip can be viewed as a displacement in the random walk model, and the distribution of extracted trips shows a distance decay effect. To identify the spatial similarity of trips at a finer scale, this paper investigates the distribution of trips through topic modeling techniques. Firstly, trip origins and trip destinations were identified from raw GPS data. Then, different trips were given semantic information, i.e., link identification numbers with a semantic enrichment process. Each taxi trajectory was composed of a series of trip destinations corresponding to the same taxi. Subsequently, each taxi trajectory was analogous to a document consisting of different words, and all taxi's trajectories could be regarded as document corpora, enabling a semantic analysis of massive trip destinations. Finally, we obtained different trip destination topics reflecting the spatial similarity and regional property of human mobility through LDA topic model training. The effectiveness of this approach was illustrated by a case study using a large dataset of taxi trajectories collected from 2 to 8 June 2014 inWuhan, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hub location problem is one of the new emerging and prosperous areas in the classical facility location theory. As a part of the decision-making process, supply chain managers of organizations and companies must pay special attention to these issues. In strategic planning, decisions have long-term effects and program implementation will take a long time. Hence, in the decisions taken, uncertainty should be considered. Uncertainty can be regarded as a property of the system that describes the flaws of human knowledge about a system and its progress included. This paper considers single allocation and multiple allocation hub location problems (SAHLP and MAHLP). First, general models of capacitated single and multiple allocation hub location problems (CSAHLP and CMAHLP) are introduced, then a robust optimization approach is used for dealing with uncertain parameters. Finally, the uncertainty of parameters such as fixed setup cost and capacity of each hub on Iranian Aviation Dataset Karimi and Bashiri (Scientia Iranica 18:1571-1578, ) are studied and the results are presented. The results suggest that ignoring uncertainty in the supply chain network design sometimes causes large losses and expenses. In turn, these inflicted losses cause delay in the implementation phase in long-term expected plans and suspicion in all organizational activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central Place Theory has been proposed for a long time, but it is rarely applied in empirical research or planning practices on retail center systems in the real world primarily attributable to the complexities that are too difficult for the theory to capture and replicate in efficient ways. This paper proposes an agent-based simulation system which can derive spatial distributions of multilevel retail centers by simulating the interactions between retail centers and consumers. In the simulation, the retail centers can grow, recess, and adjust locations according to the revenues; the consumers generate different levels of shopping demands and choose retail centers according to spatial distance. By recursively simulating the interactions, equilibrium is reached with the distribution of emerging retail centers. The system is validated by examining the simulated retail center systems under five hypothetical but typical scenarios of consumer spatial distribution. It is also applied in modeling the retail center system of Shanghai in the 2000s. The results show a face validity of the simulation system as a potential tool for real-world planning practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In human dominated landscapes many diverse, and often antagonistic, human activities are intentionally and inadvertently determining the supply of various ecosystem services. Understanding how different social and ecological factors shape the availability of ecosystem services is essential for fair and effective policy and management. In this paper, we evaluate how well alternative social-ecological models of human impact on ecosystems explain patterns of 16 ecosystem services (ES) across the 62 municipalities of the Norrström drainage basin in Sweden. We test four models of human impact on ecosystems, land use, ecological modernization, ecological footprint, and location theory, and test their ability to predict both individual ES and bundles of ES. We find that different models do best to predict different types of individual ES. Land use is the best model for predicting provisioning services, standing water quality, biodiversity appreciation, and cross-country skiing, while other models work better for the remaining services. However, this range of models is not able to predict some of the cultural ES. ES bundles are predicted worse than individual ES by these models, but provide a clear picture of variation in multiple ecosystem services based on limited information. Based on our results, we offer suggestions on how social-ecological modeling and assessments of ecosystems can be further developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been suggested that a paradigm shift has occurred in the study of urban systems, central places being displaced by networks because the latter are better suited to currently observable processes. Cities are understood as harbouring local networks (milieu, clusters, buzz), as well as being themselves functionally specialised nodes in wider nonhierarchical networks. We test the empirical validity of this contention by analysing the geography of service use by innovators in Canada. Consistent with the results of Christaller, we find that use of local services diminishes as one moves down the urban hierarchy, and services most strongly connected with innovation—which we deem to be high-order—have the highest probability of being sourced at its summit. Our conclusions interrogate some of the assumptions that underpin local innovation networks, question whether the network approach can apprehend all aspects of urban systems, and discuss in what respect contention that there has been a paradigm shift is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study tested the hypothesis that separating stairway from escalator between pairs of origin and destination floors in a shopping center would increase the rate at which the stairway was used. The study site included 13 stairways and 12 pairs of escalators in seven connected shopping centers. A total of 33,793 pedestrians were counted ascending or descending over 35 days. Simultaneous flow rates up and down among centers correlated at r = .89. Distance between stairway and escalator accounted for 71% of variance in the ascending model and 21% in the descending model, with height between floors resulting in slightly diminished pedestrian volumes, and overall pedestrian volume accounting for less than proportional increases in stair climbing and descending. A 100% increase in distance between stair and nearest escalator yielded a 95% increase in stair climbing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The robust p-median problem in changing networks is a version of known discrete p-median problem in network with uncertain edge lengths where uncertainty is characterised by given interval. The uncertainty in edge lengths may appear in travel time along the edges in any network location problem. Several possible future scenarios with respect to the lengths of edges are presented. The planner will want a strategy of positioning p medians that will be working “as well as possible" over the future scenarios. We present MILP formulation of the problem and the solution method based on exchange MILP heuristic. The cluster of each median is presented by rooted tree with the median as root. The performance of the proposed heuristic is compared to the optimal solution found via Gurobi solver for MILP models through some illustrative instances of Slovak road network in Žilina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses spatial and locational aspects of cultural and creative industries (CCI) taking into consideration the internal heterogeneity of this group of activities. Emphasis is put on similarities and differences in those aspects found for the sector as a whole and for its individual branches. On the basis of the proposed criteria the paper tries to exemplify a set of CCI characteristics, on the one hand to highlight their diversity, and on the other, to select the best criteria for analysing spatial and locational aspects of CCIs. A detailed analysis of CCI location patterns and location factors is also carried out, and on this basis two groups of models of the spatial aspects of CCIs are proposed: those of CCI location and those of the range of CCI markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We reformulate the maximum availability location problem (MALP) with fewer variables and constraints. Our computational experiments demonstrate that the reformulated MALP solves much faster and provides improved solutions under certain conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many systems have been developed to assist wayfinding for people with sight problems. There is a need for user requirements for such systems to be defined. This paper presents a study which aimed to determine such user requirements. An experiment was also conducted to establish the best way of guiding users between locations. The focus group results indicated that users require systems to provide them with information about their surroundings, to guide them along their route and to provide progress information. They also showed that users with sight conditions interact with systems differently to sighted users, thereby highlighting the importance of designing systems for the needs of these users. Results of the experiment found that the preferred method of guiding users was a notification when they were both on and off track. However, performance was best when only provided with the off track notification, implying that this cue is particularly important. Technology has the potential to support navigation for people with sight problems. Users should have control over cues provided and for these cues should supplement environmental cues rather than replacing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geo-location data from social media offers us information, in new ways, to understand people's attitudes and interests through their activity choices. In this paper, we explore the idea of inferring individual life-style patterns from activity-location choices revealed in social media. We present a model to understand life-style patterns using the contextual information (e. g. location categories) of user check-ins. Probabilistic topic models are developed to infer individual geo life-style patterns from two perspectives: i) to characterize the patterns of user interests to different types of places and ii) to characterize the patterns of user visits to different neighborhoods. The method is applied to a dataset of Foursquare check-ins of the users from New York City. The co-existence of several location contexts and the corresponding probabilities in a given pattern provide useful information about user interests and choices. It is found that geo life-style patterns have similar items—either nearby neighborhoods or similar location categories. The semantic and geographic proximity of the items in a pattern reflects the hidden regularity in user preferences and location choice behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid rise in supermarkets in developing countries over the last several decades resulted in radical transformations of food retail systems. In Cape Town, supermarket expansion has coincided with rapid urbanization and food insecurity. In this context, retail modernization has become a powerful market-driven process impacting food access for the poor. The introduction of formal food retail formats is viewed simultaneously as a driver of food accessibility and as a detriment to informal food economies established in lower income neighborhoods. Through a mixed-methods approach, this article assesses the spatial distribution of supermarkets within Cape Town and whether this geography of food retail combats or perpetuates food insecurity, particularly in lower income neighborhoods. Spatial analysis using geographic information systems at a city-wide scale is combined with a qualitative case study utilizing semi-structured interviews and observational analysis in the Philippi township in order to illuminate the limitations of supermarket expansion as a market-oriented alleviation strategy for food insecurity. While supermarkets have been successful in penetrating some low-income communities, they are often incompatible with the consumption strategies of the poorest households, revealing the significance of the informal economy in Cape Town and the limitations of a food desert approach toward understanding urban food security. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information on the efforts by Kenya to fight poverty after the implementing of new constitution in the country. It discusses the measures taken aimed at improvement in livelihood, education and agricultural activities. The authors mention the efforts taken by World Bank to reduce inequality in the country as part of its efforts to decrease poverty. Inequality in Kenya is mentioned to depend largely on geography and inequality in the educational sector also has a dependency on locality of domicile. Health also depends largely on place of domicile. Authors optimistically opine that the new constitution would improve the standards of living there by tackling the geographic inequality of the country by decentralization of power.