Gunther Maier (p)

Carlos Mendez

In recent years, substantial improvements have been made in the open science/open source community toward integrated analysis and publishing tools. These developments are particularly important for academic publishing of all types. This includes the writing and publishing of articles, books, research reports, web-sites, presentation slides,etc. Key elements of this environment of software and IT-infrastructure are Quarto, R, and GitHub.
In this paper, I want to review these tools and how they can contribute to the production of academic output. The full benefit of these tools, however, will only be achieved, when the publishers adapt their requirements and procedures to them as well. Therefore, I want to put the main focus of this presentation on the publishers' role in this transition. I will discuss how publishers can streamline their workflow with these tools, and show what they will have to develop and provide to authors. I will discuss the proper integration of these tools into the open source publishing software "Open Journals System".

Petros Milionis (p)

Gunther Maier

We empirically investigate how historical patterns of agriculture have shaped contemporary diversity in cultural values in different parts of the world. We provide systematic evidence that regions of the world characterized by greater spatial variation in suitability of land for agriculture exhibit greater diversity in cultural values. We document this pattern for a broad range of cultural values both across countries and across regions within countries. This pattern is visible even when we control for ethnolinguistic and other dimensions of societal diversity, and is robust to the potential endogeneity of agricultural conditions to economic development. We also demonstrate the relevance of the hypothesized mechanism, that relates to variation in cultivation patterns of different crops, relative to other mechanisms that relate variation in cultural values with geographic conditions. Our findings provide broader support for the agricultural origins of contemporary variation in cultural values. Unlike previous contributions to this literature, though, we focus not on the prevalence of particular cultural values, such as individualism, long-term orientation or egalitarian gender norms, but on interpersonal diversity in such values within a given geographic entity. Our findings, thus, suggest that the link between geography and culture may be more general than previously understood.

Kazunari Tanaka (p)

Petros Milionis

In many urban areas today, evacuation plans have been formulated to cope with disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and the resulting fires. In addition, temporary evacuation sites and long-term evacuation sites have been established. In the evacuation plans, citizens are encouraged to conduct evacuation exercises in each area. Citizens can cope with disasters by conducting such exercises on a continuous basis. However, there are many people who do not participate in evacuation drills, such as the elderly. Many citizens understand the plan but do not actually simulate it. When a disaster occurs, many citizens may be hesitant to evacuate to the evacuation sites set in the plan. They may be more willing to evacuate to an evacuation site along a path that they often walk, even if it is a bit far away, than to an evacuation site that is closer but unfamiliar to them. The same is true for neighborhood community groups. For them, a distant but well-known town is more likely to be an evacuation site than a nearby neighborhood. In fact, evacuation plans need to be developed based on an understanding of the cognitive structure of such cities.
The purpose of this study is to find appropriate evacuation sites based on the cognitive maps of citizens. In this study, data will be collected from children between the ages of 10 and 12, the age group from which cognitive maps can be extracted the best.
As a result, we found the importance of establishing evacuation routes in well-known areas. In the children's cognitive maps, places where directional changes are made, such as curves and intersections, are drawn larger than they are in, while busy areas with stores, such as shopping streets, are drawn wider and shorter in distance.

Carlos Mendez (p), Ayush Patnaik

Kazunari Tanaka

Nighttime lights (NTL) data are widely recognized as a useful proxy for monitoring national, subnational, and supranational economic activity. These data offer advantages over traditional economic indicators such as GDP, including greater spatial granularity, timeliness, lower cost, and comparability between regions regardless of statistical capacity or political interference. However, despite these benefits, the use of NTL data in regional science has been limited. This is in part due to the lack of accessible methods for processing and analyzing satellite images. To address this issue, this paper presents a user-friendly geocomputational notebook that illustrates how to process and analyze satellite NTL images. The evolution of regional disparities in India is presented as an illustrative example. The notebook first introduces a cloud-based Python environment for visualizing, analyzing, and transforming raster satellite images into tabular data. Next, it presents interactive tools to explore the space-time patterns of the tabulated data. Finally, it describes methods for evaluating the usefulness of NTL data in terms of their cross-sectional predictions, time-series predictions, and regional inequality dynamics.