Desert Town Research Articles

Early Earthquake Detection and Warning Alarm System in Iran by a Telegraph Operator: A 116-Year-Old Disaster Prevention Attempt

According to an article printed in 1909 in a local Iranian newspaper, the New Iran ( Irān‐e Nau ; Fig. 1), a telegraph operator at the remote desert town of Kermān in southeast Iran, using coils of a single wire with return circuit through the ground of his telegraph instrument, picked up the Earth’s movement as an unusual electromagnetic signal on the magnetic needle, which gave a few seconds warning of an earthquake. Apparently, the operator was using a Wheatstone/Cooke‐type needle magneto‐electric telegraph built in the late nineteenth century. Figure 1. Yusef the telegraph operator’s 1909 account of his observations of unusual electromagnetic signals detected just before earthquakes in 1897 and 1909. He first noticed this anomaly on his telegraph instrument during an earthquake in 1897. Two medium‐magnitude earthquakes during that year were strongly felt and documented in Kermān. These were (1) the 22 May 1897 MMI∼VII+ M S∼5.5, Kuhbanān earthquake with its epicenter about 145 km northwest of Kermān; and (2) the 27 May 1897, MMI∼VIII M S∼>5.5 Chatrud earthquake located about 25 km north‐northwest of Kermān (see fig. 3 in Berberian, 2005). The telegraph operator observed that the first earthquake took place during the evening, suggesting that he was referring to the 27 May 1897 event. His second observation of a seismically induced disturbance was during the 27 October 1909, ∼ M S>5.5, MMI>VII+, Jowshān earthquake, with its damage zone located about 58 km to the east‐southeast of Kermān (fig. 5 in Berberian, 2005). The article, translated below from Persian into English, is signed by “Yusef Telegerāfchi va Tahvildār‐e Telegerāf‐khāneh‐ye Kermān” (“Yusef /Joseph, the telegraph operator and cashier of the Kermān Telegraph Office”). The article was printed nine months after the occurrence of the …

Sound and Music in the Works of Randolph Stow

This article considers the many ways in which sound and music resonate through the works of Australian writer Randolph Stow (1935–2010), offering a broad, contextual perspective on the ways in which music and words, and often place as well, are intertwined. It is a rich subject for exploration, as much of Stow’s literary output uses music and sound to great effect. Named pieces of music are used as a means of locating fiction in time and place. Though born in Geraldton, Western Australia, Stow’s affiliation with his distant British ancestry has had a profound impact on his work, and images of Scottish pipers, hymns and drums reverberate through his words. In the works set in Australia the landscape evoked is a sonorous one. It thrums with the sounds of old mills, cockatoos, gurgling tanks and imported drawing-room pianos. His literary output shifts from aboriginal mission stations (To the Islands, 1958) to drought-ravaged Australian desert towns (Tourmaline, 1963). The article focuses primarily on Stow’s poetic novels, including the autobiographical The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965) as well as his later allegorical works set on the east coast of England (The Girl Green as Elderflower, 1980) and The Suburbs of Hell (1984), which last novel is structured as a Brittenesque chamber opera, in a series of short acts and interludes.

Landing in Las Vegas: commercial aviation and the making of a tourist city

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Las was a dusty, isolated desert town. By century s end, it was the country s fastest-growing city, a world-class travel destination with a lucrative tourist industry hosting millions of visitors a year. This transformation came about in large part because of a symbiotic relationship between airlines, the city, and the airport, facilitated by the economic democratization and deregulation of the airline industry, the development of faster and more comfortable aircraft, and the ambitious vision of Las city leaders and casino owners. Landing in Las Vegas is a compelling study of the role of fast, affordable transportation in overcoming the vast distances of the American West and binding western urban centers to the national and international tourism, business, and entertainment industries.

Quantity and quality of public open spaces in Israel

Neighbourhood public open spaces (POS) are generally considered to be essential for a good quality of urban life. Few studies attempt to examine the contribution of POS to the life of residents across different climate zones and settlement sizes. This research employed three different methods to evaluate POS in ordinary neighbourhoods in Israel: observation of activity, survey of residents’ attitudes towards them and mapping feelings while walking through them. The research shows that while neighbourhoods in Israel do not lack POS, their quality leaves much to be desired, particularly in desert cities and towns. The various methods of evaluating the quality of POS have resulted in mixed messages: while civic spaces were the most intensively used, people's feelings were better in green POS; residents ranked neighbourhood POS as least attractive for spending time outdoors, yet perceived them as important for their quality of life. In smaller and low-density neighbourhoods, little use of green POS was in evidence, and yet appreciation and satisfaction with them were highest. The results indicate that it is time to depart from the exclusive use of quantitative standards in assessing POS provision, and that the quality and success of POS must be measured using diverse methods.

Desert town becomes gateway to space

Desert town becomes gateway to space

QUALITY OF FINANCIAL STATEMENTS MICRO SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES (SMEs) AND PROSPECTS OF IMPLEMENTATION OF FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING STANDARDS NO AKUNTANBILITAS PUBLIC ENTITIES (SAK ETAP)

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the influence of education courses last, the size of the business, long established businesses, and educational background related to the perception of the importance of entrepreneur financial accounting and reporting for business. Furthermore the influence of the quality of financial reporting of SMEs against the amount of bank credit received by SMEs and the provision of information and socialization influence SAK ETAP, educational background, business, education Last employers related to the understanding of the SME entrepreneurs SAK ETAP. The research data was taken by distributing questionnaires to SMEs in the desert town of 15 SMEs, as many as 10 SMEs Pariaman, Padang length of 10 SMEs, as many as 8 Solok SMEs, SME as much as 9 Bukit Tinggi, Pasaman of 10 SMEs, SMEs Payakumbuh as many as 8, the Stone cage of 10 SMEs, and SMEs as much as 10 Painan resulting in 90 respondents from the SMEs. in West Sumatra. The results showed that Model 1 hypothesis H1a levels of education had no effect on employers' perceptions related to the importance of accounting and financial reporting for business, old business (H1b), size of business (H1c) and educational background (H1d) affect the perception of the importance of book-keeping and related businesses financial reporting for the business. Model 2 H2 hypothesis suggests that the quality of financial reporting affect the growing number of bank credit received by SMEs. Model 3H3a hypothesis suggests that the provision of information and socialization SAK ETAP and educational background (H3b) affects the understanding of the SME entrepreneurs related to SAK ETAP, education level (H3c) had no effect on understanding of related GAAP :TAP SME entrepreneurs.

Mary Austin and the American West (review)

Reviewed by: Mary Austin and the American West Karen S. Langlois Mary Austin and the American West. By Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 344 pages, $29.95. This biography is a wonderful addition to scholarship on the writer Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934). The biographical details add to the information that is available in Austin's autobiography, Earth Horizon (1932), and in two previous biographies. Beautifully written and wonderfully researched, it will prove indispensable to those who are familiar with Austin's work while also appealing to a wider audience. Austin is best remembered for writing the California classic The Land of Little Rain (1903). She has a vast oeuvre—thirty books in a wide variety of genres, including nature writing and long and short fiction, as well as articles, plays, and poetry. Her subjects range from her beloved desert landscapes and the people who inhabited them to the important issues of her day. Many readers are familiar with the general contours of her early life—her birth and youth in Carlinville, Illinois; her graduation from Blackburn College; her trip west at age twenty; her marriage to Stafford Wallace Austin. These are detailed in the biography's first chapter titled "Desert Places." Her years in California, which were the inspiration for many of her finest works, were also the period of two of her greatest heartbreaks: the realization that her only child was mentally disabled and the understanding that her married life would fail. The biography covers Austin's life in the high desert towns of Lone Pine, Independence, and Bishop; her move to the literary colony of Carmel, California, after her separation from her husband; and her travels to England and Italy. Later chapters consider her life in New York City and her eventual relocation to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she lived until her death at age sixty-four. Goodman and Dawson examine her literary work and her association with important figures of her day, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lincoln Steffens, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Lou and Herbert Hoover. They also explore her activism in many of the important issues of her time, including the diversion of Owens Valley water to Los Angeles, women's rights, Native American rights, and the preservation of Native American and Spanish Colonial arts. In the last chapter, "The Accounting," they offer a summary of Austin's legacy. For all its merits, the biography does not displace Austin's engaging autobiography, which, though unwieldy, is poetic and insightful. It also does not negate the straightforward, no-nonsense insights of Austin's [End Page 104] first biographer, Augusta Fink, in I-Mary (1983). Furthermore, it does not attempt to ground Austin in American studies and feminist theory, the approach of Esther F. Lanigan in her critical biography, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (1989). Goodman and Dawson do offer more detailed information on Austin's life and times. Eventually, the book brings to mind a significant question. What genuine new insights are offered by this third biographical narrative of Austin's life? In that, the biography somewhat disappoints. In addition to her achievements, Austin is also distinctive for her theatrical, unconventional personality. For example, in Carmel, the thirty-eight-year-old Austin was noted for wearing flowing robes and writing in a tree house she called her "wickiup." In 1922, at a dinner in her honor at the New York City National Arts Club, she was escorted by a young Chickasaw artist, who was dressed in quill embroidered buckskin and wore a flamingo feather headdress and a necklace made out of alligator teeth. In addition to her eccentricities, Austin was known for being insufferably egotistical. She also had a well-earned reputation for exaggerating or disregarding facts. The challenge to biographers is to capture her complex persona. Scholars who are familiar with her correspondence know all too well that Austin could fly into a rage and hurl insults at her family, friends, and professional associates. Austin was, on various occasions, referred to as "the Priestess at Delphi" because of her know-it-all approach, "God's Mother-in-Law" because of her imperious attitude, and "Sitting Bull...

Aboriginal Music and Passion: Interculturality and Difference in Australian Desert Towns

Aboriginal country, rock and reggae music makers in Central Australian desert communities often portray performances in regional white towns as desirable and rewarding occasions for engagements with a non-indigenous ‘mainstream’. Aboriginal popular music is also often understood as a tool for a marginalised minority to ‘talk back’ to non-Aboriginal powers, or for ‘sharing culture’ to achieve greater cross-cultural understanding. This article investigates what actually takes place at local Aboriginal music events in the town of Alice Springs. It shows how they, in fact, become powerful occasions for enacting certain blackfella forms of sociability that reinforce relations of estrangement between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people and domains. Addressing the question how to account for the lived experience of racial and cultural formations without resorting to notions of bounded or pre-existing categories, the author proposes an approach to difference as relational at the outset that can accommodate multiple dimensions and inherent contradictions of intercultural lives.

Children's sense of place in desert towns: a phenomenographic enquiry

Set against the background of the call for sustainable development, a fostering of sense of place emerged as one of education for sustainability's chief goals. Heidegger's concept of dwelling thinking guided us, in this research, to look beyond the emotional and cognitive attachment to a place toward a state of mind which is not limited to a specific place but can also be taken with the dweller wherever he or she goes. A qualitative tool based on analysis of children's drawings was developed for characterizing dwelling thinking in desert towns’ children aged 9–10. The results clarified different forms of sense of place and pointed to practical methodologies for the enhancement of dwelling thinking in our quest for sustainability.

Wind Catchers: Remarkable Example of Iranian Sustainable Architecture

As scientists we tend to view technology as a scientific system but in fact the success of a particular technology at a particular time may rest less on its efficient performance and more on its 'social' relevance and impact. We now need to identify sustainable design investments for a very uncertain future of expanding populations, scarcer resources and climate change. Buildings in the Iranian desert regions are constructed according to the specific climatic conditions and differ with those built in other climates. Desert buildings are equipped with air traps, arched roofed, water reservoirs with arched domes and ice stores for the preservation of ice. The operation of modern coolers is similar to the old Iranian air traps which were built at the entrance of the house over underground water reservoirs or ponds built inside the house.Lofty walls, narrow and dry streets, highly elevated air traps, big water reservoirs and arched roofed chambers, are the outstanding features of desert towns in Iran. The ever shining scorching sun of the desert has rendered life very difficult for its hardy and warm-blooded inhabitants and has compelled them to resort to facilities that can moderate the unbearable heat. In the following paper, subjects relating to the building materials of desert towns and the method of operation of the traditional cooling systems in the cities with warm and arid climates are described. Herein the great wind catchers of Iran are a zero carbon cooling technology, but because the high towers of the region grew too large during a period of economic boom and soaring social hubris these structures may survive less well than if they had been more modest in their design.

Developing a Perception of a Place as Home among Children in an Isolated Desert Town

This study focuses on the perception of a “place” as “home” and on place attachment among children. The aim was to understand how these perceptions contribute to the development of environmental citizenship. The research was conducted in an isolated desert town, following an intervention program aimed at encouraging deeper attachment to a locale. The results led us to define categories of children's perceptions that each represents a different connection to the environment. A comparison of children's attachment to their locale before and after the intervention suggests a strengthening of “place attachment” and an increased sense of empowerment with regard to their ability to improve their surroundings.

Showdown on the Subcontinent

Research Article| September 01 2009 Showdown on the Subcontinent Megha Bahree Megha Bahree 1Megha Bahree is a staff writer at Forbes, specializing in Asia and the India-Pakistan region. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google World Policy Journal (2009) 26 (3): 41–49. https://doi.org/10.1162/wopj.2009.26.3.41 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Megha Bahree; Showdown on the Subcontinent. World Policy Journal 1 September 2009; 26 (3): 41–49. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/wopj.2009.26.3.41 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsWorld Policy Journal Search Advanced Search Issue Section: ARTICLE You do not currently have access to this content.

Busting Cancer Clusters: Realities Often Differ From Perceptions

C ancer clusters often have all the necessary ingredients for great detective stories and human drama, and that fact has not been lost on either Hollywood or the news media. Woburn, Mass., Hinkley, Calif., and Toms River, N.J., are all examples of small towns thrust into the public spotlight because of a reported cluster of cancer cases (and potentially related environmental conditions) that drew both local and national headlines. The Woburn story spawned a bestselling novel and a movie , A Civil Action . The movie Erin Brockovich tackled the story of a cluster of childhood cancers in a small desert town in California. Cancer clusters come in two basic types: occupational and environmental, with variations on both themes. Occupational clusters are easier to spot because they are confi ned to one population with similar exposures to potential contaminants. Examples include asbestos and mesothelioma, vinyl chloride monomer and liver cancer. Community — and potentially environmentally caused — clusters are harder to unravel because of the diffi culty in determining and measuring the myriad variables involved, such as age, potential exposure, and length of time living in an area. They are incredibly diffi cult to prove and even harder to trace to specifi c causes. Epidemiologists like to distinguish between perceived and observed clusters. It is one thing for some residents to think that their community has had an abnormally high number of cancers over a given period and another to actually meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) defi nition of “a greater than expected number of cancer cases that occurs within a group of people, in a geographic area or over a period of time.” But clusters mean different things to different people. When residents begin to see several cancers in a small community, or even in their families, they tend to want to fi nd a common cause. Sometimes they forget how common cancer can be. Or they fail to take into account that cancer is a hundred different diseases with different causes. And of course, few think about random chance. According to veteran “cluster buster” Tim Aldrich, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, the cancers that are involved in a cluster have to be rare diseases to be detected. “Common cancers such as breast, lung, colon, and prostate have too much background noise to tell if an environmental exposure is the culprit,” he said. “If, as some say, 3% – 5% of cancers are environmental, and 1% – 2% of perceived clusters really are clusters, then you’re dealing with a very uncommon event. You have to have a rarefi ed distribution to see these things jump up.” “There have only been a few reported cancer clusters that have proven to be real clusters,” said Melissa Bondy , Ph.D., professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “People get alarmed when they hear about cancers at various sites in an area. There have been some that epidemiologists have been able to untangle, but most cancer clusters have not been well documented. They usually don’t pan out to be anything.”

The Higher Power of Lucky (review)

Reviewed by: The Higher Power of Lucky Deborah Stevenson Patron, Susan The Higher Power of Lucky; illus. by Matt Phelan. Jackson/Ath-eneum, 2006134p ISBN 1-4169-0194-9$16.95 R Gr. 4-6 It's been two years since Lucky's mother died; since then her guardian has been Brigitte, her father's first wife, who's a long way from her native France in Lucky's trailer home in the little desert town of Hard Pan, California (pop. 43). Ten-year-old Lucky is mostly happy in Hard Pan, hanging out with her knot-tying friend Lincoln (whose mother is determined her son will be president) and her dog, HMS Beagle, and eavesdropping on the various twelve-step groups that meet at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center; at heart, though, she's afraid that Brigitte's stay is really only a temporary one. The book resorts to a threadbare convention, the misunderstanding of chance information, to drive Lucky to her climactic run from home, but the merits here lie not in original plotting but in the quirky and eccentric characters and setting. Hard Pan is vividly conceived, from the monthly deliveries of government surplus commodities ("It must be some kind of secret weapon," says a local darkly of a delivery of inedible cheese) to the tightly connected knot of colorful inhabitants (Lucky is particularly plagued by five-year-old Miles, who wanders around mooching food and insisting that he be read to from Are You My Mother?). Lucky herself is intense yet vulnerable, understandably longing to be certain that Brigitte considers her worth staying for. Fans of more traditional stories of youngsters finally finding the home they deserve will enjoy this offbeat treatment of the classic theme. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Rediscovery of Contractors General Hospital –Birthplace of Kaiser Permanente

Stanley Ragsdale remembered Sidney Garfield, MD, from the days when the young doctor from Los Angeles first arrived in the Mojave Desert town of Desert Center in the early 1930s. Dr Garfield had come there to set up a hospital to treat workers building the nearby Colorado River Aqueduct. The 242-mile aqueduct was the largest public works project of its day.

An analysis of the spatial structure of a new desert town: Al Ain, United Arab Emirates

This paper presents a study of the current spatial structure of Al Ain, a town-oasis in the United Arab Emirates, by examining the relationship between spatial design and circulation patterns within the town. An analysis of vehicular and pedestrian flows was carried out to establish the relationship between attractors, accessibility and configuration of road network. The main objective was to test Space Syntax methodology in order to explore design guidelines as well as re-design proposals if some areas are found to be very deficient in terms of spatial layout and ease of movement and connectivity. URBAN DESIGN International (2006) 11, 3–19. doi:10.1057/palgrave.udi.9000155

The effect of voluntary dehydration on cognitive functions of elementary school children

(1) To describe the occurrence of voluntary dehydration in two classes of elementary school students as expressed by their morning and noon-time urine osmolality; and (2) to determine the relationship between the children's scores on cognitive tests and their state of hydration. Group comparison among fifty-eight sixth-grade students (age range 10.1-12.4 y old) during mid-June at two schools in a desert town. Morning and noon-time urine samples were collected in school, and five cognitive tests were scored in the morning and at noon-time. (1) morning and noon-time urine osmolality; (2) scores of five cognitive tests (hidden figures, auditory number span, making groups, verbal analogies, and number addition) that were applied in the morning and at noon-time. Thirty-two students were dehydrated (urine osmolality above 800 mosm/kg H(2)O) in the morning. An individual's noon-time urine osmolality was highly related to morning osmolality (r=0.67, p=0.000). The morning cognitive scores were similar in the hydrated and dehydrated students (p=0.443). The adjusted mean scores of the noon-time tests, with the morning test scores as covariates, demonstrated an overall positive trend in four of the five tests in favor of the hydrated group (p=0.025). The effect was mainly due to the auditory number span test (p=0.024). Voluntary dehydration is a common phenomenon in school-aged children that adversely affects cognitive functions.

Between East and West: immigrants, critical regionalism and public housing

The architecture of an immigrant society is characterised by problems of identity. The lack of a long continuous connection between the builders and the land where the construction takes place severs the natural identity between the planning and construction tradition and the builders. Concepts such as ‘local planning and construction tradition’ or ‘adapting construction to the conditions and natural qualities of the land’ are not defined where immigrant architecture is concerned. The State of Israel was built by Jews who immigrated to it from all over the world. The problem of the lack of a local constructing tradition, common to the entire immigrant population, was magnified many times over in Jewish construction in Israel. Israel being an immigrant country, the European origin of most of the early Jewish immigrants, and the conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians – all contributed to intensifying the problem of creating the ‘place’. This paper examines public housing construction in Israel and its relationship to the ‘place’. Following the Introduction, which reviews the question of the essence of the place in an immigrant society, the paper covers pre-State construction and Jewish-ideological planning, focusing on urban and neighbourhood planning during the first decade of the State of Israel (1948–1958). Planning was first evidenced in the town of Be’er Sheva – a desert town referred to in the bible as the City of Abraham. The town was rebuilt during the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century and later by the Israeli authorities. In examining Be’er Sheva’s urban and neighbourhood planning, the following questions may be studied: What is the relationship between ‘ideological’ planning and the population that ‘lives’ with the planning? What is the relationship between the planning and the physical conditions of the place? In effect, the issue of critical regionalism is examined.

Some recharged aquifers susceptible to contaminants, study finds

Injecting treated water into wells to recharge some aquifers could introduce a long‐lasting contaminant that affects future usability of the water, according to a 13 May report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).A test of the quality of water injected into wells in a desert town 130 kilometers northeast of Los Angeles, California, found that certain carcinogenic compounds mixed and lingered in the aquifer, even after extensive pumping to try to remove them.

Familial occurrence of congenital incomplete prepyloric mucosal diaphragm.

Incomplete prepyloric mucosal diaphragm (IPMD) is an uncommon congenital anomaly that leads to gastric outlet obstruction in infancy and childhood. This report describes the occurrence of IPMD in six children...