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The article presents abstracts of the papers presented at the 63rd annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Saint. Louis, Missouri. The meeting took place in April 1967. The paper "Defense and the Morphology of Certain Settlements in the Western Mediterranean," discusses economic growth. Another paper "Approach to a Generating Model for Climatic Statistics," discusses a set of probability models for generating climatic statistics. After a brief review of previous work on this subject, a model based on moving waves superimposed, on standing waves in the zonal winds is outlined.

Economic development has long been a dominant topic in sociology. Since Marx' and Weber's initial insights, sociologists have been unraveling the complex relationships in this ubiquitous process. Recent conceptual work (Smelser, 1959, 1963; Parsons, 1966; More, 1964; Eisenstadt, 1964, 1965; Rostow, 1963) has attempted to isolate critical variables and relationships among them in the process of economic development. One of the consistent attempts of this literature is predicting when, where, and how fast economic development will occur in modernizing Third World nations. Drawing upon this growing body of literature, this paper will outline an analytical model of economic development. This model is especially relevant to developing Third World nations, although it is sufficiently abstract to encompass economic development in other types of historical and contemporary societies. The term model has an ambiguous meaning. In this paper, a model is a map or grid of relationships among analytically important units. The model presented here is cybernetic, denoting key feedback processes, both negative (Weiner, 1954; Nadel, 1953) and positive (Maruyama, 1963). Ideally, a model should assign differential weights to various relationships, but in the model to be presented, only general weights will be assigned to some relationships. As will be emphasized, feedback relationships among units will be considered to carry more weight than other relationships in determining rates of economic development. Beyond this, existing data do not warrant further weighting. But an attempt will be made to delineate those variables within and outside the economy affecting the weights of any particular relationship in the model. In doing so, elements in the model can begin to approximate a set of propositions in a more general theory of economic development. For the purposes of analysis, the economy can be divided into two general sectors (Moore, 1967): (1) the productive; and (2) the distributive. Production concerns those structures and processes involved in gathering resources from the environment and converting them into goods and commodities, while distribution refers to those structures and processes dealing with the dissemination of commodities throughout a social system. The model presented in this paper will focus on relationships between and within these two general economic sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study emphasizes the dynamism of the enterprise approach in manufacturing geography and the elusive quality of the milieu concept. It identifies the facilitating and restraining conditioning elements of the changing milieu of a large shipbuilding firm which, form 1950 to 1964, the period analyzed, comprised a major though rapidly declining part of the export base of Northern Ireland. The paper suggests that the local region provided a relatively permissive milieu for the firm, though it offered few opportunities for diversification. Competitive difficulties that arose during the period came mainly from the changing international milieu, especially movements in the composition of world demand and the appearance of Japanese suppliers. These difficulties were suggested in part to reflect the condition of the firm's internal resources, but they were increasingly assigned to the state of its national milieu. Also outlined are some of the firm's adoptive and adaptive features and the form of its adverse impact, including through multiplier effects, on the development of the local region.

Between 1857 and 1860 William Gilpin promoted a new regional concept of the Cis-Rocky Mountain West. After reviewing the earlier ideas about the area this paper traces the stages in Gilpin's formulation of his Great Plains concept. The final statement of 1857 is analyzed and appraised from several points of view: as a geographical concept. as a factor influencing settlement, and as a basis for predicting economic developments. As a geographical concept it was much more valid than its precursors. As a factor influencing settlement it provided a powerful motivating image However, as a basis for prediction it was too generalized and grossly incomplete. Nevertheless, for twenty-one years it remained the most significant statement on the region. until eventually superseded in 1878 by the more mature concepts of John Wesley Powell.

This paper is in two parts. The first section describes the relationship of a number of variables to political status and their relationship to each other. The second section deals with the kind of predictions that might have been made with these data and the relative efficiency of one type of prediction compared to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents three methods for mapping levels of economic development and applies each to the case of India. First, to provide a substantive addition to knowledge about the economic geography of India; second, to demonstrate that even within nations generally recognized simply as "underdeveloped" one can meaningfully map differential sub-levels of development; and third, to stimulate critical discussion of the various methods by which maps of economic development can be made. The chief statistical problem is how best to combine the several series of individual indices into a single set of areal ratings.