Background In a previous study, we described the distribution of coronal alignment in a normal asymptomatic population and recognized the occurrence of constitutional varus in one of four individuals. It is important to further investigate the influence of this condition on the joint line orientation and how the latter is affected by the onset and progression of arthritis.

This is an empirical paper that measures and interprets changes in intercity relations at the global scale in the period [2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008]. We draw on the network model devised by the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research group to measure global connectivities for 307 cities across the world in 2000 and 2008. The measurements for both years are adjusted so that a coherent set of services/cities is used. A range of statistical techniques is used to explore these changes at the city level and the regional scale. The most notable changes are (i) the general rise of connectivity in the world city network, (ii) the loss of global connectivity of US and Sub-Saharan African cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami in particular), and (iii) the gain in global connectivity of South Asian, Chinese and Eastern European cities (Shanghai, Beijing and Moscow in particular).

This paper presents an analysis of the geography of the booming 'Islamic financial services' (IFS) sector, which provides a host of financial services based on Islamic religious grounds. The relevance of such an analysis is discussed against the conceptual backdrop of the world city network literature. It is argued that a focus on the globalization of the IFS sector may provide an alternative to hegemonic geographical imaginations of world city-formation through its focus on other forms of globalizing economic processes and regions that do not commonly feature in this literature (the Middle East and North Africa in particular). Based on information on the location strategies of 28 leading IFS firms in 64 cities across the world, we analyze different features of this decentred global urban geography. Manama is hereby identified as the Mecca of the IFS sector. Other major MENA cities such as Tehran and Dubai follow suit, but also more traditional financial centres such as London and Paris are well-connected.

This paper interrogates the enduring, yet changing role of world cities as centers of capitalist command and control amidst deepening uneven development. By incorporating financialization processes in Friedmann's (1986) world city hypothesis, we hypothesize that the world city archipelago remains an obligatory passage point for the relatively assured realization of capital. The advanced producer services complex appropriates superprofits as producers of coconstitutive knowledge on operational and financial firm restructuring, the creation of new circuits of value, and capital switching. Geographically, beyond the International Financial Center shortlist, the wider world city archipelago inserts finance capital (logics) in contemporary economies and societies.

This article critically evaluates the network-centrism of much of contemporary world cities research and queries its capacity to unveil key accumulation processes under financialized globalization. Our object of inquiry is the world city archipelago (WCA), a material yet non-contiguous space of world city 'islands', which is (re)produced through the socio-spatial practices of advanced producer services (APS) firms as they assist in constructing ( financial) accumulation strategies for their clients. Scrutinizing the WCA with a singular focus on networks can veil dynamics that lead to internal stratification and hierarchy between world cities and their constitutive outside. Alternatively, these veiled dimensions are better grasped by territorial, scalar and place-based abstractions. As an example, we unveil WCA space by studying the space of APS practices in three recent cases of Eurobond issuance. By comparing these three instances through an encompassing approach, a bounded geography of a financialized accumulation space is identified, which contains London and other world cities as a necessary space of dependence but also stretches out to various contingent spaces of engagement at the fringes of the WCA network: offshore jurisdictions and places of debt origination. We conclude by making the case for a heightened sensitivity in respect of core-periphery structures that exist between the WCA and its outside, but also within the WCA itself.