Technology and the architecture of markets: re-configuring the Canadian equity market

This paper examines the relation between technical possibilities, liberal logics, and the concrete reconfiguration of markets. It focuses on the enrolling of innovations in communication and information technologies into the markets traditionally dominated by stock exchanges. With the development of capacities to trade on-screen, the power of incumbent market makers has been challenged as a less stable array of competing quasi-public and private marketplaces emerges. Developing a case study of the Toronto Stock Exchange, I argue that narrative emphasis on the performative power of sociotechnical innovations, the deterritorialisation of financial relations, and the erosion of state capacities needs qualification. A case is made for the importance of developing an understanding of: the spaces of encounter between emerging social technologies and property rights, rules of exchange, and structures of governance; and the interplay of orderings of different institutional composition and spatial reach in the reconfiguration of market architectures. Only then can a better grasp be gained of the evolving dynamics between making markets, the regulatory powers of the state, and their delimitations.

Water quality impacts and palaeohydrogeology in the East Yorkshire Chalk Aquifer, UK

A large hydrochemical data-set for the East Yorkshire Chalk has been assessed. Controls on the distribution of water qualities within this aquifer reflect: water-rock interactions (affecting especially the carbonate system and associated geochemistry); effects of land-use change (especially where the aquifer is unconfined); saline intrusion and aquifer refreshening (including ion exchange effects); and aquifer overexploitation (in the semi-confined and confined zones of the aquifer). Both Sr and I prove useful indicators of groundwater ages, with I/Cl ratios characterising two sources of saline waters. The hydrochemical evidence clearly reveals the importance of both recent management decisions and palaeohydrogeology in determining the evolution and distribution of groundwater salinity within the artesian and confined zones of the aquifer. Waters currently encountered in the aquifer are identified as complex (and potentially dynamic) mixtures between modern recharge waters, modern seawater, and old seawaters which entered the aquifer many millennia ago.

Impacts of climate change on species, populations and communities: palaeobiogeographical insights and frontiers

Understanding climate change and its potential impact on species, populations and communities is one of the most pressing questions of twenty-fi rst-century conservation planning. Palaeobiogeographers working on Cenozoic fossil records and other lines of evidence are producing important insights into the dynamic nature of climate and the equally dynamic response of species, populations and communities. Climatic variations ranging in length from multimillennia to decades run throughout the palaeo-records of the Quaternary and earlier Cenozoic and have been shown to have had impacts ranging from changes in the genetic structure and morphology of individual species, population sizes and distributions, community composition to large-scale bio-diversity gradients. The biogeographical impacts of climate change may be due directly to the effects of alterations in temperature and moisture on species, or they may arise due to changes in factors such as disturbance regimes. Much of the recent progress in the application of palaeobiogegraphy to issues of climate change and its impacts can be attributed to developments along a number of still advancing methodological frontiers. These include increasingly finely resolved chronological resolution, more refi ned atmosphere-biosphere modelling, new biological and chemical techniques in reconstructing past species distributions and past climates, the development of large and readily accessible geo-referenced databases of biogeographical and climatic information, and new approaches in fossil morphological analysis and new molecular DNA techniques.