Geographic Category Research Articles

Factors impacting hospitalisation and related health service costs in cancer survivors in Australia: Results from a population data linkage study in Queensland (COS-Q).

The global economic cost of cancer and the costs of ongoing care for survivors are increasing. Little is known about factors affecting hospitalisations and related costs for the growing number of cancer survivors. Our aim was to identify associated factors of cancer survivors admitted to hospital in the public system and their costs from a health services perspective. A population-based, retrospective, data linkage study was conducted in Queensland (COS-Q), Australia, including individuals diagnosed with a first primary cancer who incurred healthcare costs between 2013 and 2016. Generalised linear models were fitted to explore associations between socio-demographic (age, sex, country of birth, marital status, occupation, geographic remoteness category and socio-economic index) and clinical (cancer type, year of/time since diagnosis, vital status and care type) factors with mean annual hospital costs and mean episode costs. Of the cohort (N = 230,380) 48.5% (n = 111,820) incurred hospitalisations in the public system (n = 682,483 admissions). Hospital costs were highest for individuals who died during the costing period (cost ratio 'CR': 1.79, p < 0.001) or living in very remote or remote location (CR: 1.71 and CR: 1.36, p < 0.001) or aged 0-24 years (CR: 1.63, p < 0.001). Episode costs were highest for individuals in rehabilitation or palliative care (CR: 2.94 and CR: 2.34, p < 0.001), or very remote location (CR: 2.10, p < 0.001). Higher contributors to overall hospital costs were 'diseases and disorders of the digestive system' (AU$661 m, 21% of admissions) and 'neoplastic disorders' (AU$554 m, 20% of admissions). We identified a range of factors associated with hospitalisation and higher hospital costs for cancer survivors, and our results clearly demonstrate very high public health costs of hospitalisation. There is a lack of obvious means to reduce these costs in the short or medium term which emphasises an increasing economic imperative to improving cancer prevention and investments in home- or community-based patient support services.

In search of “Asian perspectives” in the field of adult education: From Asian perspectives to deimperialization

AbstractWhat constitutes an “Asian perspective” in the field of adult education? Through a literature review of journal articles from 1990 to 2023 on adult education in the geographical category of Asia, I analyzed how these discussions connect to an Asian perspective. I identified five approaches through which Asian voices have been articulated in the literature: (1) distinct and shared cultural traditions, (2) ambiguities in Asian diaspora transitions, (3) local and/or historical practices applying the lens of Western or external theories, (4) local and/or historical experiences with a focus on practice, and (5) Indigenous/independent theorizing. In addition to a need to de‐reify theory by contextualizing processes of theorizing, I argue for deimperialization in the field of adult education—a need to interrogate imperial imaginaries that persist in education theorizing and practices across Asian regions and making the category of “Asians” fluid by historicizing relations of power such as colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberal capitalism.

Presidential Discourses on Regionalism in Azerbaijan: Turkic Solidarity and the Silk Road

Abstract Drawing on theories of comparative regionalism, this article examines the construction of regionalist frames in Azerbaijan covering the period from 1993 to mid-2023. By examining more than 60 text passages from presidential speeches and statements, the study identifies two framings of regionalism that have dominated presidential discourses in Azerbaijan: the discourse of Turkic solidarity or unity (in the political-security domain) and the narrative of an East-West corridor or the revival of the Silk Road for transport of cargo and hydrocarbon resources (in the economic domain). By constructing these discursive frames, Azerbaijani state leaders crafted an alternative regional order reconstituting the geographic category of “South Caucasus” into a new, spatially broader area. In this formulation, “South Caucasus” is viewed as a central pillar of the Silk Road, and Azerbaijan as one of its focal points or nodes. While the study underscores a key role that actors and ideas play in the formation of regions and regional institutions, it also highlights how social construction of regional identities is embedded in and shaped by historical experiences and country-specific political-economic conditions such as historical memories, experiences of war, collective identities and cultural affinities, geographic location, domestic political economic structures, and international linkages.

Unveiling Urban Evolution: Assessing Patterns of Transformation in Guangzhou's Net Production

Urban evolution refers to the continuous changes and adaptation of urban environments to social, economic, technical, and environmental changes, acknowledging that cities are dynamic systems. Urbanization and land use/cover change (LULCC), which are mostly caused by human activity, which have a big impact on the environment. These two variables also affect urban vegetation when combined with climate change. We choose Guangzhou City to examine how urban growth processes and spatial changes in urban areas affect net production (NP). A Machine learning [ML] approach such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) was utilized to examine the relationship between NP and urbanization intensity. This study examined to analyze urban evolution, focusing on the patterns of change in the NP in Guangzhou City, China. The findings demonstrated between 2011 and 2023, the NP in the studied region decreased overall and had distinct geographic variation. The mean Urban Development Index (UDI) in Guangzhou increased significantly between 2011 and 2023. In both years, metropolitan exurbs constituted the majority of the urban geographic category, but the most notable increase in urban fringe areas, which accounted for about 2,320.24 km2 of the urban exurbs. Regarding UDI and NP, there was an opposite relationship, suggesting that the growing intensity of the growth of urban expansion negatively affected NP. Urban development intensity negatively influenced NP, with urban fringes experiencing the most significant losses due to an increase in urbanization and a decrease in agriculture.

Students' Geographic Literacy Abilities

One of the abilities that students must master in the 21st century is literacy skills, one of which is geographic literacy. Based on previous research, students' geographic literacy, in general, still needs to improve. This research aims to determine and analyze the geographic literacy abilities of State High School (SMA) students in Jambi City. This research uses a survey method. The data processing results show that the geographic literacy skills of 190 State High School students in Jambi City are in the medium category with a percentage of 51% or 97 students. This means the students can understand the essence of interaction, interconnection, and the contextual implications of spatial interaction phenomena in life. Daily for some instances only. Meanwhile, the number of students in the high geographical literacy category is 43 or 23%, so it can be interpreted that students can understand the essence of interaction, interconnection and the implications of spatial interaction phenomena contextually in everyday life. Geographic literacy skills in the low category are 50 students or 26%, which means that students still need to understand the essence of interaction, interconnection and the implications of spatial interaction phenomena contextually in everyday life.

Tea authentication and determination of chemical constituents using digital image-based fingerprint signatures and chemometrics.

Tea (Camellia sinensis) fraud has been frequently identified and involves tampering with the labelling of inferior products or without geographical origin certification and even mixing them with superior quality teas to mask an adulteration. Consequently, economic losses and health damage to consumers are observed. Thus, a Chemometrics-assisted Color Histogram-based Analytical System (CACHAS) was employed a simple, cost-effective, reliable, and green analytical tool to screen the quality of teas. Data-Driven Soft Independent Modeling of Class Analogy was used to authenticate their geographical origin and category simultaneously, recognizing correctly all Argentinean and Sri Lankan black teas and Argentinean green teas. For the determination of moisture, total polyphenols, and caffeine, Partial Least Squares obtained satisfactory predictive abilities, with values of root mean squared error of prediction (RMSEP) of 0.50, 0.788, and 0.25mgkg-1, rpred of 0.81, 0.902, and 0.81, and relative error of prediction (REP) of 6.38, 9.031, and 14.58%., respectively. CACHAS proved to be a good alternative tool for environmentally-friendly non-destructive chemical analysis.

POI Recommendation Model Using Multi-Head Attention in Location-Based Social Network Big Data

A point of interest (POI) recommendation model using deep learning in location-based social network big data is proposed. Firstly, the features of POI are divided into inherent features composed of attributes such as geographical location and category, and semantic features of relevance composed of spontaneous access by users. Secondly, the inherent attribute features and semantic features of POI are extracted by constraint matrix decomposition and word vector model respectively, and the two hidden vectors are spliced into the feature vectors of POI to solve the problems of data sparsity and cold start. Finally, the multi-head attention is used to obtain the key information of user preferences, and a deep learning recommendation framework is constructed to model the nonlinear interaction between features. Experiments show that when the recommendation list is 10, the precision and recall of the proposed method are 0.118 and 0.135 respectively, which are better than the comparative recommendation method.

Frontieriphery: An Anti-positivist Ontological Approach to Intersectional Investigation

Grouping people into a geographical category of ‘peripherality’, based on positivist ontologies, conceals histories and policies of humiliation, marginalisation, and discrimination that forced communities away from access to material and cultural benefits. For this reason, we call for an anti-positivist ontological approach based on intersectional investigation, juxtaposing multi-variants of marginalised identities with multi-dimensional histories of discrimination. We also seek reconsideration of the universal validity of ‘periphery’, ‘peripherality’, and ‘center’, and propose instead to develop more accurate concepts that reflect particular localism, histories, and social conditions. Following the anti-positivist ontology, we meld two concepts of relevance in the Israeli context, periphery and frontier, into a portmanteau—frontieriphery—and add it as a socio-spatial and ethnical frame for intersectionality. Our urgings are the outcomes of research on Israel’s ‘development towns’ and its periphery.

Intelligent Sensors for POI Recommendation Model Using Deep Learning in Location-Based Social Network Big Data

Aiming at the problem that the existing Point of Interest (POI) recommendation model in social network big data is difficult to extract deep feature information, a POI recommendation model based on deep learning in social networks and big data is proposed in this article. The input data are all gathered through intelligent sensors to apply some raw data pre-processing tasks and thus reduce the computational burden on the model. First, a POI static feature extraction method based on symmetric matrix decomposition is designed to capture the geographical location and POI category features in Location-Based Social Networking (LBSN). Second, the improved Continuous Bags-of-Words (CBOW) model is used to extract the semantic features in the user comment information, and realize the implicit vector representation of POI in geographic, category, semantic and temporal feature space. Finally, by adaptively selecting relevant check-in activities from the check-in history to learn and change user preferences, the Geographical-Spatiotemporal Gated Recurrent Unit Network (GSGRUN) can distinguish the user preferences of different check-in. Experiments show that when the length of the recommendation list is 15, the precision of the proposed algorithm on the loc-Gowalla data set is 0.0686, the recall is 0.0769, and the precision on the loc-Brightkite data set is 0.0659, the recall is 0.0835, both of which are better than the comparative recommendation methods. Therefore, compared with the comparison methods, the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of the POI recommendation system.

Наслідки повномасштабної російсько-української війни для позиціонування Тримор’я в глобальній політиці

The article discusses the term “Three Seas Initiative” – a product of the adaptation of the philosophical and geographical category “Intermarium” to the description of Central-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The thesis is substantiated that the application of the category “Intermarium” to Central-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe is due not only to the “mental geography” of Polish political thought and the practical needs of Polish geopolitics of the 20th and 21st centuries but also to the objectively existing general characteristics of the region (its buffer status between geopolitical powers of Germany and Russia, the lower level of prosperity of this region compared to Western Europe, its predominantly Slavic character, which repeatedly pushes the implementation of pan-Slavist projects in the Central-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the trends in social, in particular, cultural, economic and political, which are observed at least since the late 1980s). It is argued that the project “Three Seas Initiative” by A. Duda is a modern reincarnation of the idea of the Prometheists – “Intermarium”, created between the two world wars on the basis of the Jagiellonian idea of the Early Modern Age. This project arose as an opposition of rightwing conservative, poorer EU members to its left-liberal, rich participants with external support from the Eurosceptic, right-wing populist government of D. Trump in the USA. However, the evolution of the Three Seas Initiative finally led it to institutionalization as one of the cores of integration in the modern European Union at different speeds, with an emphasis on the development of cross-border communication and infrastructure projects in the region with the cooperation of the EU and the USA. It is emphasized that after the start of the Russian- Ukrainian war, the threat of its spread to the territory of the “Three Seas Initiative”, which the EU cannot overcome, forces the members of the initiative to seek direct military support from the United States in exchange for Washington’s support in its opposition to Beijing, an ally of Moscow. “Three Seas Initiative” could be perceived as an activation of the role of the region as one of the outposts of opposition to Chinese influence on the planet. In addition, the Russian- Ukrainian war involuntarily led to the achievement of one of the goals of the Three Seas Initiative - the development of the logistics infrastructure of its participants, due to the need to serve large-scale land and air movements of troops and the functioning of “grain” and humanitarian corridors from the European Union to Ukraine. Also, a full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war caused the resuscitation and development of the military-industrial complex of the Three Seas Initiative countries, its integration within the region and the rest of the EU, as well as with Ukraine, the USA, and South Korea, which gives a chance for high-tech economic growth of the participants of the project.

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging and Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's <i>The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging</i> and Claudia Rankine's <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>

MAPNEWS: A Framework for Aggregating and Organizing Online News Articles

In recent years, digital news has become increasingly prevalent, with many people getting their news and information from online sources rather than traditional print or broadcast media. This shift has been driven, in part, by the convenience and accessibility of digital platforms, as well as the ability to personalize and customize news feeds. Digital news also allows for greater interactivity and engagement with readers and can reach a global audience almost instantly. News articles contain a plethora of hidden spatial information that, when shared with readers, increases comprehension of current events. Only a few news aggregation systems make this information available to users. Many stories, on the other hand, are not clearly geotagged with their spatial information. In this work, we propose the MapNews framework, a novel system that gathers, analyzes, and presents news articles on a map interface, allowing users to take advantage of their underlying spatial information. MapNews pulls content from several different internet news sources and, using a custom-built geotagger, it extracts geographic content from articles. A rapid online clustering method is used to organize articles into story clusters. Panning and zooming MapNews' map interface allows readers to receive news based on geographic location and category importance, and they will view distinct articles depending on their location. MapNews achieved an ARI score of 0.89 for clustering and an accuracy of 95% in usability testing

乾隆帝의 ‘景觀經營’에 대한 고찰

The purpose of this paper was to understand how Emperor Qianlong perceived the landscape. The imperial Qianlong tour created numerous landscapes and gave meaning. The perception of such a landscape was sufficient to change the conquistador image of Qianlong. Therefore, the attitude toward the landscape of Emperor Qianlong was called ''Landscape Management''. Emperor Qianlong changed the characteristics of the eight scenic spots. ‘Eight Scenic Views of the landscape’, which contained the unworldly view of the literary godfathers of the Song Dynasty, and ‘Eight Scenic Views of the landscape’, which was an ideology for national domination after the Jin Dynasty, changed during the emperor Qianlong. Eight Scenic Views of the Beauty Spot means that a landscape forms a beauty spot. This is because the geographical category of the landscape is narrowed and the number of sceneries is expanded to highlight the characteristics of each landscape, while strengthening the placeness and adding consolation and comfort functions. This strengthened the psychological effect by making the distance between the landscape and the viewer close. Through historical evidence of the existing landscape, poetry and paintings, the emperor Qianlong reconstructed the landscape, and built monuments and buildings in each landscape to take coordinates and promote the localization of the landscape. The emperor Qianlong pursued a "small landscape" nearby. The small landscape was thought to be sufficient to resemble the great universe. The inclusion of "the world" in the small landscape of the emperor Qianlong is in line with the strategy of "seeing the big through the small" as a national ruler. This political strategy is a governing logic and concept that runs from the "house" to the "state" of Confucianism, and it was believed that the individual''s capabilities could be in charge of a huge "world." In addition, the idea that the "beautiful scenery" in the small mind of humans is endless and infinite out of the world is due to the influence of Buddhist logic. In conclusion, it can be said that the emperor Qianlong contributed to the redefinition and expansion of China''s landscape culture.

Home Smoke-Free Policies as Children Age: Urban, Rural, and Suburban Differences.

Parents/guardians can effectively reduce tobacco smoking and secondhand smoke exposure among youth by adopting and enforcing rules against indoor tobacco smoking (ie, home smoke-free policies). We investigate home smoke-free policies from childhood to adolescence in the United States and across rural, suburban, and urban households. We analyzed 2019-2020 National Survey of Children's Health data from n = 5,955 parents of youth aged 0-17, living at home with a tobacco smoker in the United States (U.S). Geographical categories were: rural, suburban, and urban. Home smoke-free policy reflected prohibiting tobacco smoking inside the home. Weighted logistic regressions examined the (1) association between youth age and home smoke-free policies, (2) interaction between geographic category and youth age, and (3) differing associations between youth age and home smoke-free policies by geography. Models controlled for youth race, ethnicity, sex, parental education, household annual income, and home structure. Approximately 13.2% of U.S. households with a smoker did not have a home smoke-free policy. Stratified analyses found one-year increase in youth age was associated with lower odds of having a home smoke-free policy in rural (aOR:0.91; 95%CI: 0.87-0.95) and urban (aOR: 0.96; 95%CI: 0.92-1.00; p = .039), but not suburban (aOR:1.00; 95%CI: 0.95-1.05) households, controlling for covariates. Odds of having a smoke-free home in the U.S. declined significantly in rural (9% per year) and urban (4%) but not suburban (0%) households. We quantify declines in home smoke-free policies as children age and identify geographic disparities for this environmental determinant of health. Health promotion efforts targeting secondhand smoke prevention is needed, particularly for parents of older youth. Furthermore, there is a clear geographic bias in secondhand smoke exposure among all youth particularly older youth. Tailored interventions are needed to address geographic disparities in secondhand smoke exposure among rural and urban youth.

Example-based spatial pattern matching

The prevalence of GPS-enabled mobile devices and location-based services yield massive volume of spatial objects where each object contains information including geographical location, name, address, category and other attributes. This paper introduces a novel type of query termed example-based spatial pattern matching (EPM) query. It takes as input a set of spatial objects, each of which is associated with one or more keywords and a location. These objects serve as an example that depicts the spatial pattern that users want to retrieve. The EPM query returns all sets of objects that match the spatial pattern. The EPM query can be used for applications like urban planning, scene recognition and similar region search. We propose an efficient algorithm and three pruning techniques to answer EPM queries. Furthermore, we provide an approximation guarantee for intermediate results of the algorithm. Our experimental evaluations on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm and techniques.

From the President and IFST News

From the President and <scp>IFST</scp> News

Rizoma: a new comprehensive database on traditional uses of Chilean native plants.

BackgroundWe describe Rizoma, a new comprehensive online database on traditional uses of Chilean flora. The Rizoma database was built by reviewing multiple data sources on the uses of native plants and integrating phytogeographic and ecological aspects of plant species. This database attempts to safeguard traditional knowledge by making it available and visible to society, providing 1380 use records from 736 vascular plant species native to Chile. In addition, it contributes to a better understanding of the use patterns of Chilean native plants.New informationThe Rizoma database includes 1380 use records from 736 vascular plant species native to Chile, representing 399 genera and 128 families. Each species record provides information on geographic distribution, phytogeographic origin, life form, life span and use category. In addition, the online version includes information on the mode of use of each species, as well as common names and photographs. The database serves as a traditional knowledge repository that contributes to preserving local biological and cultural diversity for future generations.

Pedro and Pita Built Peter Priesthood's Mansion and Now They Work the Grounds: Whose Masc Does “the Lamanite” Wear?

Pedro and Pita Built Peter Priesthood's Mansion and Now They Work the Grounds: Whose <i>Masc</i> Does “the Lamanite” Wear?

Hinterland: The political history of a geographic category from the scramble for Africa to Afro-Asian solidarity

AbstractThis article traces the history of one geographical concept, hinterland, through changing political contexts from the 1880s through the 1970s. Hinterland proved a valuable tool for states attempting to challenge the global territorial order in both the Scramble for Africa and the postwar world of nation-states. In the context of German territorial demands in East Africa, colonial propagandists used hinterland to knit together the first longue-durée histories of the Indian Ocean to cast Zanzibar as a failed colonial power and win control of the coast. In the 1940s, Indian nationalists revived hinterland as a concept for writing about the Indian Ocean, utilizing the concept to link areas far from the ocean to an informal Indian empire that could be rebuilt to its premodern glory through naval expansion. In both contexts, hinterland provided a geographical framework to challenge British dominance on the Indian Ocean. The shifting meaning and usage of the term indicates continuities in territoriality between the Scramble for Africa and postwar internationalism.

Worldwide prevalence, genotype distribution and management of hepatitis C.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is one of the leading causes of chronic liver disease, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma, resulting in major global public health concerns. The HCV infection is unevenly distributed worldwide, with variations in prevalence across and within countries. The studies on molecular epidemiology conducted in several countries provide an essential supplement for a comprehensive knowledge of HCV epidemiology, genotypes, and subtypes, along with providing information on the impact of current and earlier migratory flows. HCV is phylogenetically classified into 8 major genotypes and 57 subtypes. HCV genotype and subtype distribution differ according to geographic origin and transmission risk category. Unless people with HCV infection are detected and treated appropriately, the number of deaths due to the disease will continue to increase. In 2015, 1.75 million new viral infections were mostly due to unsafe healthcare procedures and drug use injections. In the same year, access to direct-acting antivirals was challenging and varied in developing and developed countries, affecting HCV cure rates based on their availability. The World Health Assembly, in 2016, approved a global strategy to achieve the elimination of the HCV public health threat by 2030 (by reducing new infections by 90% and deaths by 65%). Globally, countries are implementing policies and measures to eliminate HCV risk based on their distribution of genotypes and prevalence.