Differences in metal areal distribution displayed by trend-surface analysis.
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This paper includes many different epidemiological approaches to environmental health studies, and examples and discussion in terms of a limited number of exposures and diseases are provided. The methods described are not unfamiliar, but, by presenting a panorama in a linked context, it is intended to be constructive in developing ideas.
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Stevens and Coupe demonstrated that people tend to regularize their cognitive maps by distorting the position of relatively small features (e.g., cities) to make them conform with the position of larger features (e.g., state boundaries). The present studies replicated those of Stevens and Coupe by asking college students to study prototypical maps with three kinds of boundaries: none, straight, and curved. They extended Stevens and Coupe's work by asking students to (a) physically reproduce the maps rather than simply answer questions about them, (b) recall the information not only immediately after study, but also one hour later and again two days later, and (c) reproduce the state boundaries as well as the city locations. Students who studied the curved boundary maps made more distortion errors than those who studied the straight boundary and the no-boundary maps. In addition, students' distortion errors were greatest when recall was delayed, and distortion errors in the recall of state boundaries were correlated with their distortion errors in the recall of city locations. In general, the findings provide additional evidence for the notion that memory for map information is schematic.
The participants were 360 Canadian undergraduates. After receiving written scenarios involving a campus visitor seeking direction to a nearby destination (simple route) or a distant destination (complex route), they drew maps to that destination. The authors varied the visitor's gender, age, and familiarity with campus. They analyzed the content of the students' maps in terms of cardial indicators (compass grid, correct north-south orientation), landmarks, labeled buildings, directional arrows, and supplemental written directions. The men tended to provide more cartographically complete maps than the women, though there were no gender differences in use of landmarks or labeled buildings. The men were significantly more inclined than the women to take visitor characteristics into account, providing more complete maps to visitors navigating complex routes, to newcomers, and to older visitors who were unfamiliar with the campus. The men had more confidence that their maps would successfully lead visitors to their destinations. Route complexity led to greater use of landmarks, labeled buildings, and cardinal indicators. The participants' self-reported familiarity with campus had little effect on their direction giving, except for a greater use of labeled buildings in maps.
This study explored how differences in orienteering experience are related to differences in how visual attention is allocated to the map, the environment and to travel. Twenty more experienced and 20 less experienced individuals orienteered while wearing a head-mounted video camera with microphone. The participants verbalized what they were attending to (map, environment or travel) at any given time. Each recorded film was coded at each point in time in terms of what the participant was attending to and whether the participant was moving or stationary. More experienced orienteers attended to the map markedly more while moving and spent less time stationary than less experienced orienteers. The participants' performance was significantly related to the ability to attend to the map while moving. The strategic control of attention is proposed to explain this ability. It is proposed that attentional training might enhance performance in sports characterized by multiple and dynamically varying elements.
The distribution of surnames in 90 distinct regions in France during two successive periods, 1889-1915 and 1916-1940, is analysed from the civil birth registers of the 36,500 administrative units in France. A new approach, called 'Mobile Site Method' (MSM), is developed to allow representation of a surname distance matrix by a distorted geographical map. A surname distance matrix between the various regions in France is first calculated, then a distorted geographical map called the 'surname similarity map' is built up from the surname distances between regions. To interpret this map we draw (a) successive map contours obtained during the step-by-step distortion process, revealing zones of high surname dissimilarity, and (b) maps in grey levels representing the displacement magnitude, and allowing the segmentation of the geographical and surname maps into 'homogeneous surname zones'. By integrating geography and surname information in the same analysis, and by comparing results obtained for the two successive periods, the MSM approach produces convenient maps showing: (a) 'regionalism' of some peripheral populations such as Pays Basque, Alsace, Corsica and Brittany; (b) the presence of preferential axes of communications (Rhodanian corridor, Garonne valley); (c) barriers such as the Central Massif, Vosges; (d) the weak modifications of the distorted maps associated with the two periods studied suggest an extension (but limited) of the tendency of surname uniformity in France. These results are interpreted, in the nineteenth- and twentieth century context, as the consequences of a slow process of local migrations occurring over a long period of time.
Community-residing young and elderly persons were given six maps with routes indicated by lines connecting dots. The dots were arranged in a 3 x 3 matrix that corresponded to the placement of discs affixed to the testing room floor. Route lengths increased by one segment with each subsequent map. In one condition participants were instructed not to turn the map while walking the indicated route and thus the orientation of the map to the room varied as the person followed the path. In a second condition participants turned the map while following the route, keeping it aligned with the room. Elderly persons made fewer correct choices and took more time to make direction decisions than younger people as did females compared to males. When the map could not be turned, decision times were related to the amount of misalignment between the map and the room. Elderly persons, especially females were influenced more by map misalignment than were young people. The results indicate that mental realignment is an important aspect of route following and may explain some of the difficulty older people have with such tasks.
Efforts have been made to identify, reduce and ultimately eliminate health disparities, yet variation in access to health services continues to be an important concern. As with large American cities, Toronto has been particularly hard hit by the AIDS epidemic, representing 68% of Ontario's HIV diagnoses (Health Canada, 2000). The accessibility of healthcare in terms of the geographic location and spatial distribution of health services are important factors in healthcare utilization. In this descriptive paper we map the location of HIV-related services and use exploratory spatial data analysis to visualize and examine the distribution of HIV service providers. In examining the location of HIV service providers we map the minimum distance to the nearest service provider. Our analyses also map and analyze five separate categories of HIV-related services. These include: (1) Diagnostic and preventive services; (2) Health and social services for initial HIV diagnosis; (3) Emotional and social support; (4) Emergency services; and (5) Medical and end-of-life services. While our findings point to significant clustering of some types of HIV-related services (such as emergency and preventive services), other services are more evenly distributed across Toronto (this includes medical and end-of-life services). Our findings point to the need for policy makers and researchers to integrate mapping, GIS and spatial analytic techniques into their analyses of the neighborhoods and subsequently the populations in those neighborhoods that are underserved in terms of accessibility of some categories of HIV-related services.
How do people use spatial information stored in maps? This question has been explored in a number of domains, such as memory and language comprehension, with differing results. Some studies of how experimentally learned maps are organised in memory, using primed recognition, have found temporal information to influence mental map organisation. In contrast, studies of narrative comprehension, using probe identification and anaphoric reading times, have observed spatial effects. This study combines these two research traditions and shows that the organisation observed in long-term memory differs from the organisation in narrative comprehension, even when both tasks refer to the same map.
We describe two patients with selectively preserved knowledge of the category of countries. Following a series of cerebral infarcts, patient DB presented with severe perceptual impairment, including dense apperceptive agnosia,prosopagnosia, and topographical agnosia. Despite these deficits, he could effortlessly name countries from their outline maps. Patient WH, who suffered from semantic dementia, had severe naming and comprehension difficulties, with extremely sparse residual semantic knowledge. Remarkably, the category of countries was preserved. First, we argue that, for both patients, this category preservation occurs at a semantic level. Second, we discuss our findings in the context of three current models of category-specific effects (perceptual, ontogenetic, and evolutionary models). We argue that the perceptual model (Humphreys and colleagues) cannot easily accommodate our findings. By contrast, the ontogenetic (Warrington and colleagues) and evolutionary models (Caramazza and colleagues) can explain our findings. However, some modifications to both models are required. The ontogenetic model needs to envisage a spatial channel for the development of map knowledge, which is anatomically separate from channels of other categories of knowledge. The evolutionary model needs to envisage the possibility that some categories of knowledge, such as countries, may not be prewired, but learned during ontogenetic development.
Over two decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century, astronomers' claims about the landscape and climate of Mars spurred widespread scientific and popular interest in the possibility that the red planet might be inhabited. This essay offers a new explanation for the power with which the notion of an inhabited Mars gripped noted scholars and everyday citizens on both sides of the Atlantic. Rather than pointing to a rekindling of age-old philosophical interest in the plurality of worlds, it argues that turn-of-the-century scientific narratives about Mars derived much of their power and popularity from ties with the newly established discipline of geography. From mapmaking to travelogue-style writing, astronomers borrowed powerful representational strategies from the discipline of geography to legitimize their claims about the red planet. In making the link between geographical and astronomical science more explicit, the essay further suggests that turn-of-the-century representations of Mars could be productively recontextualized alongside geographical works produced in the same period.
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A method using remotely sensed data was developed to map the incidence of Q fever in the vicinity of Cayenne, French Guiana. A satellite image was processed to map land cover and generate a population density index, which was used to determine areas of high disease incidence during the 1996-2000 period. A comparison with results obtained using population census data showed strong concordance between the two incidence maps. All high-incidence areas identified using population census data were also detected using remotely sensed data. This demonstrates the potential of remote sensing as a new tool for rapid mapping of disease incidence in epidemiologic surveys.
Spatially distributed data are often encountered in the biological sciences. Representation and analysis of such data requires specific tools. A simple geographical information system is presented, which allows representation and elementary analysis of geographically coded information. The system handles two kinds of data: maps and facts, where map data describe the basis on which the fact data are located. Maps consist of objects described through a set of coordinates, while for facts a coordinate pair is associated with an unlimited number of data records containing five fields: a date, an element from a list, a two-character code, an integer number and a real number. The input data can be displayed interactively on screen by logically combining selection criteria for each field. The facts corresponding to the selected criteria are either displayed as such, or are clustered and displayed as polygons or pies. A short example showing a possible application of the program is presented and advantages as well as limitations are discussed.
MOTIVATION: UniProtKB/SwissProt is the main resource for detailed annotations of protein sequences. This database provides a jumping-off point to many other resources through the links it provides. Among others, these include other primary databases, secondary databases, the Gene Ontology and OMIM. While a large number of links are provided to Protein Data Bank (PDB) files, obtaining a regularly updated mapping between UniProtKB entries and PDB entries at the chain or residue level is not straightforward. In particular, there is no regularly updated resource which allows a UniProtKB/SwissProt entry to be identified for a given residue of a PDB file. RESULTS: We have created a completely automatically maintained database which maps PDB residues to residues in UniProtKB/SwissProt and UniProtKB/trEMBL entries. The protocol uses links from PDB to UniProtKB, from UniProtKB to PDB and a brute-force sequence scan to resolve PDB chains for which no annotated link is available. Finally the sequences from PDB and UniProtKB are aligned to obtain a residue-level mapping. AVAILABILITY: The resource may be queried interactively or downloaded from http://www.bioinf.org.uk/pdbsws/.