Piece Of Space Research Articles

The sky is falling: how Skylab became an Australian icon

In 1979, the US orbital space station Skylab made a spectacular re-entry that, like the de-orbiting of Mir in 2001, was widely anticipated across the world. As it disintegrated, debris from the spacecraft fell around the towns of Esperance and Balladonia in Western Australia. The Shire of Esperance, tongue-in-cheek, fined the United States Government for littering. While in orbit, the space station was largely invisible. In its re-entry, however, the disembodied spacecraft became tangible, visible, and collectible, in the form of its widely scattered and charred remains. Anyone could own a piece of space if they wanted; the debris was both space junk and a precious artefact. Through these local and personal interventions after its decay, the social significance of Skylab came to outweigh its historic significance and it passed into popular consciousness as a rare Australian space icon. In this article I consider how the parts of Skylab became more than the sum of the whole.

DISTRIBUTIVE CONTINUOUS FRACTAL ANALYSIS FOR URBAN TRANSPORTATION NETWORK

A city has a very complex transportation network. It is very hard for city planners to evaluate it in both micro scale and macro scale and so far most of these works have been done empirically. In this study a new method named Distributive Continuous Fractal Analysis will be introduced to evaluate the road networks. Previous researches treat a city as a whole and did fractal analyses between cities. This study tries to treat a city as distributive continuous space and deploys the fractal analysis on every piece of space. With the power of high end computer and GIS platform this analysis can be done in few hours and shows the results to the planners visually. Comparing with the other subsystems will make the policy maker or planner see the detailed situations of a city more clearly and intuitively and they can easily make some decisions or predictions.

Jack London's Klondike speculation: capitalist critique and the sled as heterotopia in The call of the wild

AbstractIn 1903 Jack London (1876–1916) wrote The call of the wild. This deceptively complex adventure novel concealed the author's vision and critique of a ‘Southland’ society ensnared in a system of capitalism. To reveal the limits of capitalist constructions of knowledge and power, London took his readers from the civilised Southland of California to the frozen uncivilised ‘Northland’ of the Klondike. In this primitive Northland setting, the legacy of a Southland society that valued an individual according to economic mastery was to impede a successful response to London's exacting call of the wild. To investigate London's premise, this paper draws upon the insights of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault argued that knowledge and power can be analysed in terms of region, domain, territory, and field, and his work described how institutions ‘inscribe themselves both on a material soil and within forms of discourse.’ He reasoned that ‘one is able to capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power’ through the critical apparatus of the ‘heterotopia.’ Unlike the idealised space of the Utopia, the heterotopia is a ‘real’ social and cultural space that represents, contests, or inverts other sites found within a culture. Foucault recognised the ‘ship’ as the heterotopia par excellence: ‘a floating piece of space…that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself.’ This paper argues that in London's novel the central heterotopia is the Northland sled.

Accounting for Municipal Economic Development

Local economic development analysis typically emphasizes the metropolitan area, rather than municipalities, because it is the basic economic space, but it is not a strong unit of local government. Brief reference is made here to parallel research published elsewhere on a coordinated metropolitan development model and then focus shifts to a municipal model that evaluates the position, prospects, and potential of a given piece of space within the local economy. Three basic municipal economic roles—on occasion alternatives, complementary, or sequential—are itentified: (1) a site for export production contrasting goods and services), (2) a center for metropolitan trade and services (for business or households), and (3) as a preferred place of residence (for high or low income households). The central city of Cleveland is compared to its metropoltan area, using readily available Census data for the 32 largest metropolitan areas and their central cities. Other Census data on the age distribution of housing and residential relocation between central cities and suburbs (disaggregated by occupation, education, and income) are examined as additional examples of the kind of data that can and will be integrated into this three-path muncipal model. The ultimate objective is to link that metropolitan (economic) model and this municipal (policy) model into a broad decision-making framework for local economic development policy and planning.

Handbook of Pediatrics

How does one review a book that has been excellent and that has been kept excellent, except to summarize by saying that it continues to be an excellent shorthand version of the whole subject of pediatrics? It is practical, up-to-date, and, except for one of the dust covers, has utilized every conceivable piece of space to convey information to the reader. The three authors have made this handbook excellent and have kept it up to date. One can only appreciate the numerous topics covered by carefully searching through the book. Rather than as a point of criticism, I mention the following as a point for attention: the drug naloxone (Narcan) is new and as yet is an "orphaned" drug for infants and children. Should a drug that has not been sufficiently studied in newborn or older children be included? This book is highly recommended for all students of medicine, including