Point Of Arrival Research Articles

The Port of Los Angeles by Jane Sprague

165 BOOK NOTES The Port of Los Angeles, by Jane Sprague Chax Press, 2009 reviewed by Elizabeth Robinson The Port of Los Angeles, as its website informs us, is “the number one port by container volume and cargo value in the United States.” It is also a site of environmental, historical, and cultural significance, emptying into the second-most populous city in the United States. Not one to hesitate before challenge and complexity, in The Port of Los Angeles, Jane Sprague delivers a poetry that, much like Los Angeles itself, resists easy categorization , and richly rewards multiple readings. The Port of Los Angeles, like the best politically charged poetry, does not hammer its agenda home, but instead paces meditatively, sometimes even humorously, through its own dilemmas . Sprague has much to say about the state of the world she finds herself in, whether as cultural or natural environment. There’s an earnestness of attention in this book that presses gratifyingly against expectation and permits both poet and reader the freedom to encounter, and perhaps to self-indict, our bewildered complicity with a world beset by consumerism and perpetually tangled in the flux of the next arrival. The book begins with a portrayal of arrival (specifically but not exclusively in terms of the delivery of goods) and its eros— the intimacy of expectation—but comes around by the end of the second page to observe that “the goods” and their swift transport know the “same point of departure / as point of arrival .” Sprague further emphasizes the liminal nature of goods as she moves through a characteristic pattern of repetitions and variations to the conclusion of the third page, writing, “they waited // and waited // to arrive.” The endless circuit of consumption has been established. Sprague, a gifted craftsperson, modulates her verse to good effect: The aforementioned repetitions, for example, exercise an intriguing influence on the movement of the prosody. The many repetitions of “we [verb]” on pages 16 and 17 (e.g., “we arrive,” “we consider love and fucking,” “we pine,” “we follow,” “we colorado review 166 watch”) become incantatory. The “we”s morph into their own étude which Sprague then braids together with other significant words beginning with “w.” “Watch” is repeated four times. “Women” and “workers” appear and are presumably folded in as part of the antecedent “we” which further merges into a populace, striving for “ways of work // ways of sleep.” The recurrences create a sometimes soothing, sometimes enticing, and sometimes ominous suspension, for they seem static even as they move the poem forward via subtle changes. Thus at the end of page 17, “ways of work // ways of sleep” has lulled the reader into a sense of security disrupted by the page’s final startling word, “placeless.” The very concreteness of place and occupation slip abruptly away. Sprague is also expert at transposing repeated terms in ways that exploit the various meanings that freight the words. “Junk” is the cheap consumer detritus that clogs ports and bourgeois lives, and it is also heroin. In this conflation, Sprague circumvents cliché to demonstrate the ways that North Americans are addicted to their goods. The high of the narcotic is portrayed as erotic, and the poem moves on to depict a sexual encounter where “shared oily skin shared oily sheets” transposes in the next line to “shared lanes of oil lanes of derricks drilling unceasingly .” This swift, seamless prosody ensnares the reader in an inescapable cycle of commercialism resulting in the personal and natural erosion of our “extreme global village.” Approximately halfway through the book, Sprague shifts her attention from the human shape of the terrain to its marine life. “Aquarium of the Pacific,” which plays on the presence of an actual aquarium in Long Beach, is a poem of lyric witness. It begins with a register of dead creatures strewn about byways (Pacific Coast Highway, Alamitos Bay) and shows throughout the intricacies of urban life in conjunction with marine life: “fresh float canal side between two vertical rifts concrete rebar .” Sprague’s humorous irony is ever present in this poetry, but in this poem she also lets in a sense of wonder, chanting the names of species, absorbing the vividness of...

Mestizaje and the Lyric Subject: Paratexts, Texts, and Contexts in the Poetry of Jaime Luis Huenún Villa

ON MESTIZAJE AND THE LYRIC SUBJECT About the notion of mestizaje, we eco, in first instances, the use that the poet gives to it. All in all, we are aware of the theoretic difficulties of this concept. For some critics, the notion of mestizaje is no longer a valid explicative concept, at least not in cultural and textual processes that imply heterogeneous crossing of references and the movement of sensibility matrices stemming from diverse cultural origins (cf. Sobrevilla, and Vich). Precisely, concepts like transculturalization (Angel Rama), literary and cultural heterogeneity (Cornejo Polar), hybridity (Garcia Canclini) have been extensively discussed in Latin American cultural and literary criticism with the intension of shedding some light on the multiplicity of literary registers and ways in which these registers circulate and generate conditions of sociocultural continuity. It is not the objective here to definitively shut down such long an illustrious polemic. It is of interest to examine in detail, that which the own poet calls mestizaje (better said, mestizo poetry), something that we intend to do from the process of construction (and analytic dismounting) of the category of the lyric subject. We suspect, however, that mestizo poetry, in this particular case, would allude to a kind of textual registry exhibiting a deliberate political intentionality of writing poetry that displays signifiers which recognize diverse origins, not only in terms of cultural difference, but also (and perhaps more importantly), in terms of social differences and differences of power. Such intentionality can be translated in textual footprints which impels us to read this poetry as a genealogic history of its own writing. As to the category of lyric subject, we closely follow the theoretical proposal of Janusz Slawinsky, who distinguishes between the concrete individual, the creator of the given work, an area in which the poet demonstrates how he is carrying all those other rolls that the individual has carried out in those heterogeneous situations of his life, and the author, the hypothetical subject of the creative action (Slawinsky, 2). This subject is hypothetical in the sense that the notion of authorship comes from considering the poet exclusively as someone who defines himself only in relation to that which he writes (but also of what he doesn't write--a concept we would add to that of Slawinsky). On a third level, the category of lyric subject would appear. At this level, the organization of the text, we shall say that all literary enunciation is perceived as someone's enunciation, that the perception of all people is accompanied by the sense that there exists a speaking subject, which does not have to be mentioned or presented in order for its presence to affect our perception (Slawinsky, 3-4). Following this line of thought, the uniqueness of poetry would rest on one of the principle characteristics of the lyric enunciation: its specific monocentricity, the concentration of all semantic material in relation to the singular individual, the transmitter (Slawinsky, 4). This assertion refers to the fact that poetry is a tale that displays a discursive construction from an ego-centric I which emerges as the point of departure and arrival of the lyric enunciation. The lyric message, then, in essence, is the record of the process of the formation of a singular I speaker, and this process incorporates, directly or indirectly, all the semantic potential of the work of art (Slawinsky, 7). JAIME LUIS HUENUN VILLA -- PARATEXTS AND TEXTS If the imaginary is, to a certain extent, according to Gilbert Durand (2004), a construction and resignification, in the present, of images, things, feelings and experiences of the past of an individual who builds and projects it in, for example, a literary text, that construction is not, for this, less representative and telling of what the author--in this case, Jaime Huenun Villa--wishes to transmit and, somehow, create as his own world, in the living and reliving of the imagined and the real. …

Foucault czyta Marksa. Marks czyta Foucaulta.

Important element which funds the base of Foucaultian social science is his thesis on the locality of power, on its material and corporeal characteristics. We are discussing here his very relationship with capitalism, and, indirectly, with Marx himself. Foucault claims, that power has no center and it is not commanded from any kind of headquarter. That has enormous epistemic, as well as political consequences. Foucault stays suspicious to systemic thinking, if we consider system following Hegel, that is, both a point of departure and a point of arrival of research. His controversy with Marxism has many levels, but one of the most important refers to the issue of power: system of power does not have its center, which according to Marxists lays in the political economy, and it has no dualistic character, that is structure and superstructure.

Observation of river front at Tone River with X band radar network

This study analyzed the movement of river front at Tone River by using the echo data observed with X band radar network from January to June of 2010. Relationships between intensities and the propagation speeds of the front, and water level of Tone River, tide level and wind velocity and direction measured at Fishing Port of Choshi were analyzed. Front intensity tends to strengthen when tide level is descending. The alongshore propagation speed and the arrival point of front increase when the alongshore component of wind increases.

A minimum traveltime ray tracing global algorithm on a triangular net for propagating plane waves

To address the problem of subdividing inflexible rectangular grid models and their poor definition of velocity interfaces, we propose a complex structure triangular net for a minimum traveltime ray tracing global algorithm. Our procedure is: (1) Subdivide a triangle grid based on the Delaunay triangular subdivision criterion and the relationships of the points, lines, and the surfaces in the subdividing area. (2) Define the topology relationships and related concepts of triangular unit ray tracing. (3) The source point and wave arrival points at any time compose the propagating plane wave and the minimum traveltime and secondary source positions are calculated during the plane wave propagation. We adopt the hyperbolic approximation global algorithm for secondary source retrieving. (4) By minimum traveltime ray tracing, collect the path from receiver to source points with the neighborhood point’s traveltime and the direction of the secondary source. Numerical simulation examples are given to test the algorithm. The results show that the triangular net ray tracing method demonstrates model subdivision flexibility, precise velocity discontinuity interfaces, and accurate computations.

Diversitas and biodiversity: the roots of a twenty-first century myth

The first mention on conceptualisation of what we now term “biodiversity” was given by Federico Cesi about 400 years ago. By the light of the first formulation of this concept, the historical changes in the human approach to “biodiversity” are discussed. The popularity of this term shifted from scientific to socio-political contexts and its significance became progressively blurred by eco-social implications. Biodiversity, today, is perceived by most as an ideal container of the remains of a vanishing traditional landscape, where man and nature lived together harmoniously. This is in contrast with the man’s desire for self-assertion, which has accompanied the civilisation process from its origins up to the birth of the ecology movements. While the present need to promote research on biodiversity arises from the desire to help organisms and ecosystems threatened by man, Federico Cesi and the first Linceans were inspired by the desire to “acquire knowledge and wisdom” in order to improve man’s condition. Between the Cesian view of diversitas and the modern perception of biodiversity, there is the same gap that marked the transition from a “traditional” world, longed for by modern man as an Edenic state, to a “modern” world, probably dreamt by the first Linceans as the point of arrival of a strongly innovative scientific ascent, which was taking its first steps during their time. The strong connecting element between diversitas and biodiversity is represented by a common epistemological approach, i.e. to delineate an exhaustive and shareable bulk of knowledge on living organisms, according to how they appear in the light of a collection of empirical data.

Forward Semi-Lagrangian Advection with Mass Conservation and Positive Definiteness for Falling Hydrometeors

Abstract A semi-Lagrangian advection scheme is developed for falling hydrometeors in hopes of replacing the conventional Eulerian scheme that has been widely used in the cloud microphysics scheme of numerical atmospheric models. This semi-Lagrangian scheme uses a forward advection method to determine the advection path with or without iteration, and advected mass in a two-time-level algorithm with mass conservation. Monotonicity is considered in mass-conserving interpolation between Lagrangian grids and model Eulerian grids, thus making it a positive definite advection scheme. For mass-conserving interpolation between the two grid systems, the piecewise constant method (PCM), piecewise linear method (PLM), and piecewise parabolic method (PPM) are proposed. The falling velocity at the bottom cell edge is modified to avoid unphysical deformation by scanning from the top layer to the bottom of the model, which enables the use of a large time step with reasonable accuracy. The scheme is implemented and tested in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Single-Moment 3-Class Microphysics Scheme (WSM3). In a theoretical test bed with constant terminal velocity, the proposed semi-Lagrangian algorithm shows that the higher-order interpolation scheme produces less diffusive features at maximal precipitation. Results from another idealized test bed with mass-weighted terminal velocity demonstrate that the accuracy of the proposed scheme is still satisfactory even with a time step of 120 s when the mean terminal velocity averaged at the departure and arrival points is employed. A two-dimensional (2D) squall-line test using the WSM3 scheme shows that the control run with the Eulerian advection scheme and the semi-Lagrangian run with the PCM method reveal similar results, whereas behaviors using the PLM and PPM are similar with higher-resolution features, such as mammatus-like clouds.

Fibrinolysis Versus Primary Percutaneous Intervention in ST‐elevation Myocardial Infarction With Long Interhospital Transfer Distances

Current guidelines recommend rapid initiation of reperfusion therapy for ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), with short-distance transfer for primary percutaneous coronary intervention (pPCI) preferred over fibrinolysis in non-pPCI-capable hospitals. Comparative outcomes in patients with longer transfer times are unclear. We designed this study to assess whether administering fibrinolytics prior to initiating longer-distance interhospital transfer in patients with STEMI leads to a delay in transfer or worse outcomes compared with transfer for pPCI. We analyzed 259 STEMI patients transferred to a receiving pPCI-capable center in eastern North Carolina. The patients were divided into 2 groups, with 43 (16.6%) transferred for pPCI and the remaining 216 (83.4%) transferred following fibrinolysis. The primary endpoint was door-to-door time. We also compared stroke, death, significant bleeding, and combined outcomes between the 2 groups. The median door-to-door time was similar for pPCI and fibrinolysis patients (135 vs 128 minutes; P = 0.71). Median door-to-balloon time among pPCI patients was 182 minutes from the point of arrival at the referral hospital and 49 minutes from arrival at the receiving pPCI center. Median door-to-needle time in the fibrinolysis patients was 30 minutes, with rescue PCI eventually performed in 81 (37.5%) patients. In-hospital mortality was higher in patients with pPCI (9.3%) compared with fibrinolysis patients (1.9%; P = 0.03). Combined incidence of stroke, significant bleeding, and death was 14% in pPCI patients compared with 7% in fibrinolysis patients (P = 0.13). In settings with longer transfer distances, administering fibrinolytics prior to transfer to a pPCI-capable center did not cause any significant delay in transfer or worse outcomes.

Treatment of vector equations in deep‐atmosphere, semi‐Lagrangian models. II: Kinematic equation

AbstractThe rotation matrix formalism described in Part I of this study is here applied to the deep‐atmosphere form of the vector kinematic equation and the determination of semi‐Lagrangian ‘departure points’ (locations at the current time of fluid particles that arrive at model gridpoints at the forecast time). Following a brief review of published methods for determining departure points in models that incorporate the restrictive shallow‐atmosphere approximation, a certain discrete form of the kinematic equation is used to illustrate application of the rotation matrix technique in spherical coordinates in the deep‐atmosphere case. This discrete form–referred to as ‘doubly implicit’ –involves velocities at arrival gridpoints as well as at departure points but has several advantages over alternatives that involve velocities at a point or points along the intervening trajectory. A local Cartesian transformation method for finding departure points emerges from the rotation matrix approach applied in spherical polar coordinates. In spheroidal coordinates, a local transformation method also emerges, but the relevant Cartesian origins lie along the axis of symmetry of the spheroids rather than at their common centre. Modifications for the spherical polar case under the shallow‐atmosphere approximation are obtained by a constraint method; apart from order‐unity multiplicative factors, the resulting departure‐point equations are of the form expected given the shallow‐atmosphere momentum component equations found in Part I. © Crown Copyright 2010. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Statistical analysis and modeling of Internet VoIP traffic for network engineering

Network engineering for quality-of-service (QoS) of Internet voice communication (VoIP) can benefit substantially from simulation study of the VoIP packet traffic on a network of routers. This requires accurate statistical models for the packet arrivals to the network from a gateway. The arrival point process is the superposition, or statistical multiplexing, of the arrival processes of packets of individual calls. The packets of each call form a transient point process with on-intervals of transmission and off-intervals of silence. This article presents the development and validation of models for the multiplexed process based on statistical analyses of VoIP traffic from the Global Crossing (GBLX) international network: 48 hr of VoIP arrival times and headers of 1.315 billion packets from 332018 calls. Statistical models and methods involve point processes and their superposition; time series autocorrelations and power spectra; long-range dependence; random effects and hierarchical modeling; bootstrapping; robust estimation; modeling independence and identical distribution; and visualization methods for model building. The result is two models validated by the analyses that can generate accurate synthetic multiplexed packet traffic. One is a semi-empirical model: empirical data are a part of the model. The second is a mathematical model: the components are parametric statistical models. This is the first comprehensive modeling of VoIP traffic based on data from a service provider carrying a full range of VoIP applications. The models can be used for simulation of any IP network architecture, wireline or wireless, because the modeling is for the IP-inbound traffic to an IP network. This is achieved because the GBLX data, collected on an IP link, are very close to their properties when they entered the GBLX network.

Going against the flow: finding the optimal path

We consider the problem of finding the optimum path of a boat traversing a straight in a current. The path of the shortest time is found using the calculus of variations with the constraint that the boat must land directly opposite to its starting point. We compare the optimal trajectory with that where the boat's local orientation is always directed to the arrival point. When analytical solutions cannot be found we use numerical methods. The level of the exposition is suitable for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students and general physicists.

Beyond Revisionism: The Bicentennial of Independence, the Early Republican Experience, and Intellectual History in Latin America

Beyond Revisionism:The Bicentennial of Independence, the Early Republican Experience, and Intellectual History in Latin America Elías José Palti Latin America's Revolution of Independence was an event of world-historical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously created new nation states and established republican systems of government. This occurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of "nation" and "republic" remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of debates naturally emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind of dilemmas and problems contained therein. Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has been precluded by the teleological assumptions which have informed traditional approaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historians to interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that prevented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberal concept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, the concerns of Latin American commentators were seen as "deviations" from the rational path of conceptual development and understanding. It was necessary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the debates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century could reveal their historical significance and become matters for systematic analysis. The rise of a "new intellectual history," insofar as it has [End Page 593] questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putative models and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, has opened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues for scholarly research in the field of Latin American politico-intellectual history. The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by the approach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly influenced by this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in Latin America have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to revise established perspectives in the field. This has made room for the development of a self-defined "revisionist" position. However, what is to be revised has not always been clear. The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence as the epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover their rights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalistic biases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already present at the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could be perceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however, the revisionists' contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the 1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America of Marxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence of American and European historians in the field, had already destabilized Manichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a struggle between liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nuances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged from the rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new states were the result of the contingent process of formation rather than its premise. [End Page 594] Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of nationalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises on which these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the sets of antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded: enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; "liberty of the Modern" / "liberty of Ancient;" modernity / tradition; individualism / organicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism in Latin American, its contributions to the field of politico-intellectual history, and the kind of problems that it raises in turn. The Tradition of History of "Ideas" in Latin America Many scholars consider Charles Hale to be the key figure in the emergence of the revisionist critique. As Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo remarks, for the case of Mexico (which has served as the exemplary case for the entire region): "Up to the moment Charles Hale came to intervene, we could recount to ourselves a delicious...

‘Homelessness & Hope’ - Johannesburg's Ponte City

This paper focuses on Ponte City, a high rise residential tower within the inner city of Johannesburg, South Africa - the highest of its kind in the southern hemisphere. This equally visually and socially notorious cylindrical building has since its erection in the 1970's become an icon and simulacrum of Johannesburg city life. It is located on the border of the suburb of Hillbrow, a restless transcendental suburb, known for its well mixed population of locals and migrant non South Africans, especially from other African countries. The inner city suburbs of Hillbrow and surround is furthermore notorious for being overcrowded and dangerous, with crime and xenophobia reaching peak statistics within the country. Famous for its peculiar shape and size, and somehow the epitome of what has and is happening in these areas, are Ponte City. It has become the first point of arrival for thousands of migrants from the rest of Africa and functions as a beehive of tangible and non-tangible systems and myths. Although it primarily provides a big concentration of homes for many, its purpose and influence has always been about something bigger - a reference to visual and structural feat, to social elitism, to African migration, and to urban legend of both horror and delight. The paper investigates the significance of Ponte as built form within this milieu of fear and transition. The building is seen as an urban body that has moved beyond the borders of its physical existence. It is described how it functions and exercises influence in the collective imaginations of its users and spectators. It also looks into how it asserts traditional definition and the significance of volatility in such inner-city environments. Experimental theories of homelessness, concept cities and cities with people as infrastructure are investigated and utilized in order to grasp a new understanding of the building within this unique milieu.

Migration and interpretation of first arrival inflection points due to lateral variations

ABSTRACTThe majority of shallow refraction seismic algorithms work well only in cases of a horizontal plane or inclined refractors. In case of piecewise lateral variation either in dip angle and/or in velocity along the refracting interfaces, the applications of these conventional methods are usually problematic. This is because of the existence of two different inflection points along the first arrival travel‐time curve. The first inflection point corresponds to the crossover point while the later inflection points are due to these lateral variations. The terms true and apparent inflection points will be used in this study to refer to inflection points corresponding to crossover points and those due to lateral variations, respectively. The intersection of the backward extrapolation from inflection points with the time axes will give true intercept times from true inflection points and apparent intercept times from apparent inflection points.Migration of apparent inflection points aims to remove the distortion due to lateral variations of refracted rays from the first arrival traveltime curves by moving them to their proper locations. After the migration of the apparent inflection points, the intercept time technique can be applied in a conventional way to map shallow subsurface refracting interfaces with piecewise lateral variations. The common traveltime elements recorded from the same refracting interfaces and the layer reciprocal time are required for this migration process.This algorithm will be generalized after the removal of the effects due to the apparent inflection points and calculation of the corresponding migrated traveltime elements. Each pair of the common migrated traveltime elements from forward and reverse directions will represent a simple traveltime curve of two planes. Therefore, most shallow refraction algorithms can be applied to this simple traveltime curve using their own equations to map refracting interfaces recorded from media with piecewise lateral variations.

Source locations of narrowband radio emissions detected at Saturn

Since Cassini's arrival at Saturn in 2004, the Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrument has detected numerous narrowband (NB) radio emission events. These emissions, mostly detected around 5 and 20 kHz, usually occur periodically for several days after intensifications of Saturn kilometric radiation. We present calculations based on an electron density profile of Saturn's plasma torus and a dipole magnetic field model showing that the NB emissions originate from the northern and southern edges of Saturn's plasma torus at L shells ∼ 8 to 10 for 5‐kHz NB and L ∼ 4 to 7 for 20‐kHz NB. In many cases, Cassini passes through the source region of the 20‐kHz NB, as indicated by intense electrostatic upper hybrid (ESUH) waves in close proximity to electromagnetic emissions on spectrograms. The positions of the spacecraft when intense ESUH waves are observed agree with the model predictions of the NB source locations. Source locations determined by goniopolarimetric (also known as direction‐finding) analysis of the NB emissions also support the above results, although sometimes the directions of arrival point toward the region interior to Saturn's plasma torus. A polarization reversal technique is applied to localize the NB emissions observed during spacecraft rotation, on the basis of the fact that the source is within the antenna plane when the apparent circular polarization degree switches sign. The NB emissions are found to be L‐O mode polarized, which is consistent with the prediction of linear/nonlinear mode conversion theory. It is also found that sometimes right‐hand polarized NB emissions are generated at second harmonic frequencies of the 20‐kHz NB; in which case, wave‐wave interactions between oppositely propagating ESUH waves may play an important role in the mode conversion process.

Hepatitis C Virus in Blood Donors, Brazil

Hepatitis C Virus in Blood Donors, Brazil

The invertebrate fauna of High Arctic seabird nests: the microarthropod community inhabiting nests on Spitsbergen, Svalbard

The invertebrate fauna of the nests of three seabird species, black-legged kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla), common eider (Somateria mollissima) and glaucous gull (Larus hyperboreus), were sampled in Kongsfjorden, Spitsbergen, Svalbard. The invertebrate community was species poor, consisting predominantly of the flea, Mioctenopsylla arctica arctica (Insecta: Siphonaptera), but with six species of oribatid mite (Acari: Oribatida), Diapterobates notatus, Oribatula tibialis, Ameronothrus lineatus, Hermannia reticulata, Trichoribates trimaculatus and Ceratoppia bipilis, plus an occasional mesostigmatid mite. No Collembola or ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) were observed. With the exception of M. arctica arctica, the fauna of seabird nests consisted of opportunistic microarthropod species rather than specialised nest-dwelling or bird parasitic species. Species diversity of soil oribatid mites was greater in nests of the common eider than compared to nests of the black-legged kittiwake, which may be related to the ground nesting behaviour of the common eiders. No rare or unusual microarthropod species for Svalbard were found in the seabird nests. The contentions that nests may facilitate microarthropod colonisation of High Arctic regions via bird phoresy by providing a high-quality habitat at the point of arrival, or that there might be a specialised microarthropod fauna exploiting this habitat, were not supported in this study. These are amongst the first data on the microarthropod community of seabird nests in the High Arctic.

Two Dynamical Core Formulation Flaws Exposed by a Baroclinic Instability Test Case

Abstract Two flaws in the semi-Lagrangian algorithm originally implemented as an optional dynamical core in the NCAR Community Atmosphere Model (CAM3.1) are exposed by steady-state and baroclinic instability test cases. Remedies are demonstrated and have been incorporated in the dynamical core. One consequence of the first flaw is an erroneous damping of the speed of a zonally uniform zonal wind undergoing advection by a zonally uniform zonal flow field. It results from projecting the transported vector wind expressed in unit vectors at the arrival point to the surface of the sphere and is eliminated by rotating the vector to be parallel to the surface. The second flaw is the formulation of an a posteriori energy fixer that, although small, systematically affects the temperature field and leads to an incorrect evolution of the growing baroclinic wave. That fixer restores the total energy at each time step by changing the provisional forecast temperature proportionally to the magnitude of the temperature change at that time step. Two other fixers are introduced that do not exhibit the flaw. One changes the provisional temperature everywhere by an additive constant, and the other changes it proportionally by a multiplicative constant.

From natural semantics to C: A formal derivation of two STG machines

AbstractThe Spineless Tag-less G-machine (STG machine) was defined as the target abstract machine for compiling the lazy functional language Haskell. It is at the heart of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) which is claimed to be the Haskell compiler that generates the most efficient code. A high-level description of the STG machine can be found in Peyton Jones (In Journal of Functional programming, 2(2), 127–202, 1992), Marlow & Peyton Jones (In Sigplan Not., 39(9), 4–5, 2004), and Marlow & Peyton Jones (In Journal of Functional Programming, 16(4–5), 415–449, 2006). Should the reader be interested in a more detailed view, then the only additional information available is the Haskell code of GHC and the C code of its runtime system.It is hard to prove that this machine correctly implements the lazy semantics of Haskell. Part of the problem lies in the fact that the STG machine executes a bare-bones functional language, called STGL, much lower level than Haskell. Therefore, part of the correctness should be—and it is—established by showing that the translation from Haskell to STGL preserves Haskell's semantics.The other part involves showing that the STG machine correctly implements the lazy semantics of STGL. In this paper we provide a step-by-step formal derivation of the STG machine and of its compilation to C, starting from a natural semantics of STGL. Thus, our starting point is higher level than the descriptions found Peyton Jones (In Journal of Functional programming, 2(2), 127–202, 1992) and Marlow & Peyton Jones (In Sigplan Not., 39(9), 4–5, 2004), and our arrival point is lower level than those works. Additionally, there has been substantial changes between the so-called push/enter model of the STG machine described in Peyton Jones (In Journal of Functional programming, 2(2), 127–202, 1992), and the eval/apply model of the STG machine described in Marlow & Peyton Jones (In Sigplan Not., 39(9), 4–5, 2004). So, in fact, we derive two machines instead of one, starting from the same initial semantics.At each step we provide enough intuitions and explanations in order to understand the refinement, and then the formal definitions and statements proving that the derivation step is sound and complete. The main contribution of the paper is to show that an efficient machine such as the STG can be presented, understood, and formally reasoned about at different levels of abstraction.

Blood Transfusion: a new, international scientific journal for Transfusion Medicine.

From the announcement on the second page of this issue of the journal, our readers can see that Blood Transfusion has been selected and included by the National Library of Medicine in the PubMed-MEDLINE database: one of the most important and prestigious goals that the editorial staff had set has now been reached. The journal is also indexed in the Embase and Scopus databases, in PubMed Central and in Google Scholar. Another very important event is that the journal’s existing affiliates, AICE (Italian Association of Haemophilia Centres) and HSBT (Hellenic Society of Blood Transfusion), have been joined by SETS (Spanish Society of Blood Transfusion and Cell Therapy), whose President, Isidro Prat Arrojo, has become an Affiliated Society Editor. Undoubtedly, 2008 will be remembered by all our readers as a year of great changes to the journal which, thanks to the two facts described above, has evolved from being a vehicle conveying predominantly national experiences, to a new instrument for scientific communication and exchange in the international sphere of Transfusion Medicine. These excellent results must not, however, be considered as a definitive point of arrival. Indeed, only to maintain such results, the commitment and dedication that the entire editorial staff has shown up to now (perhaps hoping in an only temporary tour de force) must remain constant. For an international, scientific journal it is correct to ask that an exceptional commitment becomes the rule. Furthermore, any process of improvement must always set itself new aims. In the field of scientific publishing, the next objective sign of recognition is to be awarded an ‘impact factor’. The journey is still long and tasking, but I know that I can count on strong support from our Scientific Societies and on the dedication and enthusiasm of the editorial staff. With these two fundamental bases I can be nothing other than optimistic.