Distant Places Research Articles

No inventor is an island: Social connectedness and the geography of knowledge flows in the US

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Facebook friendships. We use a well-established identification strategy that relies on matching inventor citations with citations from examiners. Moreover, we isolate the specific effect of informal connections, above and beyond formal professional ties (co-inventor networks) and geographic proximity. We identify a significant and robust effect of informal ties on patent citations. Further, we find that the effect of geographic proximity on knowledge flows is entirely explained by informal social ties and professional networks. We also show that the effect of informal social ties on knowledge flows is greater for new entrepreneurs or ‘garage inventors’, for older or ‘forgotten’ patents, and for flows across distant technology fields. It has also become increasingly important over the last two decades.

Long-distance travel in tension with everyday mobility of urbanites – A classification of leisure travellers

For understanding long-distance travel and its impact on the environment, the travel behaviour of people living in urban areas is of particular interest. Although urbanites tend to travel short distances in their everyday lives using environmentally friendly means of transport, studies indicate a different picture for their long-distance travel. Urbanites show a higher demand for long-distance as they travel more frequently and to more distant places, which in addition involves a higher demand for air travel. By using travel survey data from 893 people living in Berlin and Munich (Germany), we analyse the travel behaviour of urban people with a focus on leisure travel. The method is based on an integrated approach including everyday travel, norms and attitudes, sociodemographic characteristics as well as spatial aspects. By applying a latent class analysis, we identify four different leisure travel types among urbanites. The analysis of sociodemographic and psychographic characteristics as well as mode choice reveal distinct differences between the types. The leisure travel type ‘young travel-addicted urbanites’ is characterized by car-less people from highly dense urban areas. Even though these people behave environmentally friendly in everyday travel and show a higher ecological norm orientation than other types, they reported the highest frequency of touristic trips and the most air travels. This shows how long-distance travel can be in tension with everyday mobility of city dwellers.

Treatment of Ewingʼs sarcoma in children and adolescents: new vision

Introduction. Over the past decades, a significantly greater understanding of the morphology and molecular biological characteristics of tumors of the Ewing sarcoma family (ESFT) has been achieved. More than 70 % of relapses occur within 2 years from the date of diagnosis. In about 2/3 of cases, relapse occurs in distant places; this type of relapse is especially common in patients who initially have metastases. On the contrary, isolated local metastasis most often (in 1/5 of cases) occurs in patients with a localized form of the disease. In half of the patients, a relapse of the disease was detected during a routine examination, was asymptomatic and was a chance find.Purpose of the study – to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-relapse treatment in patients with ESFT, to develop an algorithm for a personalized approach, to improve the results of overall and relapse-free survival in children and adolescents with ESFT.Materials and methods. Our study included patients with a confirmed diagnosis of Ewing sarcoma (ES), who received treatment from 2008 to 2019. The analysis of follow-up data was closed on 19.02.2021. The study included 274 patients aged 6 months to 18 years, the average age was 11.6 years. Up to 1 year in our study there were 2 children. Twelve (4.3 %) patients went out of follow-up within 2 to 9 months from the start of treatment; we did not include them in the subsequent analysis. Analyzed were 262 patients with ES who received treatment according to the protocols at the Research Institute of Pediatric Oncology and Hematology of the N.N. Blokhin National Medical Research Center of Oncology. A relapse of the disease was revealed in 48 (18.3 %) children out of 262 – the study group; 58 (22.1 %) patients showed disease progression during treatment. In 70.8 % (34/48) patients had an isolated relapse, in 14 (29.2 %) cases – a combined one. The defeat of only the lung tissue with a relapse of the disease occurred in 19/48 (39.6 %) cases, local relapse without metastasis – 7/48 (14.5 %) cases. In general metastatic lung disease occurred in 66.6 % of cases. The defeat of the brain and lymph nodes occurred in 4 %. Most of the patients were in the group from 11 to 17 years, inclusive – 38/48 patients, which amounted to 79 %. All 48 patients from the study group received anti-relapse therapy depending on the duration of the disease relapse. For late relapses the primary treatment regimen was used: alternating courses of chemotherapy with vincristine/doxorubicin/cyclophosphamide and etoposide/ifosfamide. In early relapses two regimens were most used: vincristine/topotecan/cyclophosphamide and vincristine/irinotecan/temozolomide (VIT). The positive response rate with the antirelapse VIT regimen was 60 %, and the time to progression was 7.6 months. With the topotecan regimen the response rate was 45 % and the time to progression – 7 months.Results. The overall survival (OS) rate of patients when a relapse was detected was significantly (p £ 0.05) higher when compared with the group of patients who had progression of the disease, which is associated with the effect of anti-relapse chemotherapy. When analyzing OS of patients with ES it should be noted that the 5-year survival rate of all patients (n = 262) was 66.3 ± 3.3 %, compared with the group of patients with confirmed relapse (n = 48) – 53 ± 8.1 %. The median in the group of patients with relapse was 39.3 months. The follow-up time in the group with recurrent ES disease averaged 52.2 ± 32.3 months (from 12.6 to 142 months). OS of patients was analyzed depending on the interval of disease recurrence. The Interval No. 1 was from the beginning of the main treatment to the first relapse, with a median of 37.2 months. Interval No. 2 – from the date of the first relapse to the date of the second relapse with a follow-up time of 58.8 ± 29.1 months (from 28.6 to 108 months), the median was not reached. The second relapse occurred significantly less frequently than the first relapse (p = 0.000001).Conclusion. The outcome for patients with recurrent ES remains poor, and a standard approach to their treatment has not yet been established. Standard first and second lines chemotherapy can be effective in most patients in terms of reducing symptoms and increasing the time to further progression, but complete remission remains hard to reach. Further multidisciplinary study of prognostic factors, effects of various treatment regimens and protocols, study of the inclusion of targeted drugs in the therapy program is required.

Regional accents modulate perspective in geographical space

In this study, participants listened to first-person statements that mentioned a character who was approaching a geographical location close to (Tenerife, Canary Islands) or distant from the participant (Madrid, Spanish peninsula), pronounced with either the participants' local or a distal regional accent. Participants more often judged approaching statements as coherent when they refer to a close place pronounced with local accent or refer to a distant place with distal accent, rather than when they refer to a close place with distal accent or to a distant place with local accent. These results strongly suggest that the local accent induces listeners to keep their own geographical perspective, whereas the distal accent determines shifting to another’s perspective. In sum, a subtle paralinguistic cue, the speaker’s regional accent, modulates the participants’ geographic perspective when they listen to identical first-person sentences with approaching deictic verbs.

The Role of Peritoneal Macrophages in Endometriosis.

Endometriosis is an estrogen-dependent gynecological disorder, defined as the growth of endometrial stromal cells and glands at extrauterine sites. Endometriotic lesions are more frequently located into the abdominal cavity, although they can also be implanted in distant places. Among its etiological factors, the presence of immune dysregulation occupies a prominent place, pointing out the beneficial and harmful outcomes of macrophages in the pathogenesis of this disease. Macrophages are tissue-resident cells that connect innate and adaptive immunity, playing a key role in maintaining local homeostasis in healthy conditions and being critical in the development and sustainment of many inflammatory diseases. Macrophages accumulate in the peritoneal cavity of women with endometriosis, but their ability to clear migrated endometrial fragments seems to be inefficient. Hence, the characteristics of the peritoneal immune system in endometriosis must be further studied to facilitate the search for new diagnostic and therapeutic tools. In this review, we summarize recent relevant advances obtained in both mouse, as the main animal model used to study endometriosis, and human, focusing on peritoneal macrophages obtained from endometriotic patients and healthy donors, under the perspective of its future clinical translation to the role that these cells play on this pathology.

Use of Virtual Reality to Improve the Quality of the Hospital Stay for Patients in Neurosurgery

Background: Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have numerous beneficial applications for patients during hospitalization (through complete immersion in a virtual, distant place allowing to “escape” from the context of hospitalization). Their positive effects in pain and anxiety management, neurorehabilitation and psychotherapy have been demonstrated. Here, we evaluated the effects of VR on the quality of hospitalization and postoperative pain after neurosurgery.Methods: Patients hospitalized in our department between 2019 and 2020 were prospectively enrolled and divided into a group that received a personal, 30-minutes-long, VR session using an Oculus Go ™ VR headset (VR group) or not (non-VR group). Surgeries were classified in simple or complex spinal and simple or complex cranial. Patient‘s overall satisfaction was considered as primary outcome, with secondary outcomes encompassing duration of hospitalization, pain reduction and patients’ opinion regarding VR.Results: 161 patients were enrolled (77 in the VR group and 84 in the non-VR group). There was no statistical difference between the two groups regarding satisfaction. The VR group presented with a significantly longer duration of hospitalization and higher maximal pain. Interestingly, pain reduction during hospitalization was significantly higher in the VR group, particularly in simple surgeries and spine surgeries. A vast majority of the VR group patients appreciated their VR experience (89.2%) and advocated for its systematic use (83.8%).Conclusion: VR can improve pain reduction during hospitalization after neurosurgery, particularly for simple spine surgeries. Furthermore, patients experiencing VR appear to appreciate it and advocate for its systematic use in neurosurgery. Further research is warranted to identify patients for whom addition of VR during hospitalization might bring the most benefit.

Riding to Learn, Learning to Ride: Early School-busing in Connecticut, 1900–1945

Riding to Learn, Learning to Ride: Early School-busing in Connecticut, 1900–1945

“... And Their Mosques From Churches of God to Build in Distant Places”: to Qquestion of Formation of Interethnic and Interfaith Borders in Western Siberia in 18<sup>th</sup> Century

The process of building ethno-religious boundaries in the 18th century in the social space of Western Siberia is considered on the example of the provincial center — Tobolsk. The relevance of the study is due to the transformation of ethno-confessionalism from a cultural phenomenon into an instrument that can be used for political purposes in modern Russia. One of the methodological research tools is the method of analysis of the “new local history”, which allows you to create a holistic perception of the study of the social life of the past “at a local object”. The main stages of the state ethno-confessional policy in the 18th century are highlighted. The facts of the forced Christianization of Muslims are clarified. The authors draw attention to the role of the personal (subjective) factor in the processes under study. On the example of the activities of Metropolitan Sylvester Glovatsky and the governor F. I. Soimonov, the vector of the development of interfaith relations is considered, which often depends on the foresight and ideological attitudes of local authorities. Particular attention is paid to government decrees reflecting the position of the state in the ethno-religious sphere. The features are revealed and the main stages of the process of Christianization of Siberian Muslims during the 18th century are highlighted. The process of formation of interfaith boundaries in the multiethnic Siberian region is analyzed. The historiography of the topic under study is presented.

University prestige, cultural distance of the place of education, and wage differences between high-skilled U.S. immigrants with foreign and domestic credentials

We examine the reasons behind a wage penalty that is applied to foreign-educated immigrants—a phenomenon identified across countries and levels of educational attainment. The lower wages employers offer to high-skilled immigrants are usually attributed to the foreignness of their educational credentials. We argue instead that their disadvantaged economic outcomes are related to the educational prestige of their universities and the cultural distance of their places of education. Employers may interpret signals of ability from the educational prestige associated with credentials and may view immigrants as lacking relevant cultural competence if they perceive the place of education as culturally distant. Using data from the U.S. H-1B visa program, we show that employers do not discount wage offers to immigrants with foreign degrees per se. Instead, we find that they offer lower wages to immigrants with educational credentials from less prestigious universities and more culturally distant places of education.

Deep learning on compressed sensing measurements in pneumonia detection

AbstractPneumonia is one of the very common life‐threatening diseases and needs proper diagnosis at an early stage to be cured expeditiously. Medical practitioners use chest X‐ray as the best imaging modality to identify pneumonia. Due to the limited facilities available at the remote places and the need of maintaining the social distancing imposed by the recent outbreak of coronavirus disease, one may not have ease of access to a professional radiologist. This article proposes a deep learning (DL) framework that detects pneumonia from X‐ray images to assist the medical practitioners located at distant places. The X‐ray images are captured as compressed sensing (CS) measurements i.e. very few numbers of samples are observed in order to obtain an energy efficient and bandwidth preserving system to be utilized for far‐end pneumonia detection purpose. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed approach enables the detection of pneumonia with 96.48% accuracy when only 30% samples are transmitted.

Children’s documentaries: distance and ethics in European storytelling about the wider world

ABSTRACT The material challenges of funding, commissioning and distribution that are well known to inhibit production of children’s factual content about other countries and cultures operate in parallel with challenges arising from the moral responsibilities inherent in what Roger Silverstone called “the problem of proper distance”. By that he signified a “moral category” requiring filmmakers to provide “context as well as imagination” and be willing to “recognise the other in her sameness and difference”. “Distance” and “difference” have become at once more significant but also more ambiguous at a time of mass forced migration, in which traditions, religions and cultures from distant places are brought together in physical proximity. Based on input from cross-cultural dialogues, screenings and interviews involving European producers of children’s documentaries, this article explores dilemmas and experiences faced in representing the backgrounds and stories of children who arrived in Europe from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the mid-2010s. It shows the resonance of Silverstone’s thinking by revealing that many practitioners themselves apply notions of closeness and distance, both physically and metaphorically, in their choices about combining the familiar and unfamiliar and co-creating content with child participants. IMPACT SUMMARY a. Prior State of Knowledge: Existing power imbalances between filmmaker and subject/participant are accentuated when documentaries are made about vulnerable children. Studies have pinpointed competing pressures to tell a compelling story, respect privacy and provide background, while avoiding exoticism, didacticism and cultural preconceptions. b. Novel Contributions: Practitioners’ spontaneous references to “distance” when discussing their filming of refugee children demonstrate that Silverstone’s concept of “proper distance” as a “moral category” can be operationalised in co-creating content with documentary participants and evaluating the merits of such documentaries. c. Practical Implications: Creatives and commissioning editors responsible for children’s factual content about other cultures can use the findings to calibrate how they convey children’s “sameness” and “difference” with empathy and respect. Such content’s relevance for promoting social cohesion also matters to policymakers.

The Light Beyond the Clouds

A similar sentiment may be seen in the motto of the Royal Air Force, per ardua ad astra (through adversity to the stars). Since the 1950s, millions of flights carrying billions of passengers have burst into bright sunlight when taking off from a grey-weather airport to fly above the clouds;similarly, millions of tourists have left cloud-bound climates to enjoy the sunshine in distant places;places that would have been inaccessible to the majority in the absence of massive investments and the efforts of thousands of engineers in the technology for advanced, reliable and very safe propulsion systems. To balance the protection of affordable air travel and protection of the environment, there are two fundamental tasks our community needs to undertake: 1) to communicate widely and robustly the socio-economic benefits of aviation. The success of our noble enterprise is dependent on attracting large new cohorts of young, talented and well-educated individuals to deliver the analysis, research, development and products that will underpin the transition to ‘green’ aviation.

American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865

American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865

Emission of respirable dust from stone quarrying, potential health effects, and its management.

Mining of minerals exerts adverse pressure on different compartments of environment directly or indirectly. Air is the worst affected environmental matrix, and it can carry the harmful effect of pollutants generated from mining activity even to distant places. The present study was undertaken to estimate the emission of particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) from different activities undertaken in stone quarrying in Mahendragarh, Haryana. The results obtained from the present study indicated that drilling, blasting, crushing, and transport of mined material are chiefly responsible for the generation of dust. Whereas drilling, blasting, and loading were responsible for emission of higher fraction of PM10, crushing and re-suspension of roadside dust from movement of vehicles resulted in generation of relatively higher fraction of finer dust (PM2.5). Modelling the transport of dust over the Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory model revealed that the emitted particle may move up to the distance of about 40 km within 4 h of emission under average meteorological conditions. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy analysis of dust confirmed the presence of calcite and gypsum, thus confirming the source as mining. The study concluded that generation of PM2.5-sized particles may impose serious respiratory health effects over the workers engaged in mining, crushing, and transportation of sandstone. Apart from it, population residing downwind of the mining area is particularly vulnerable to the pulmonary effects due to inhalation of dust.

A novel integrated structure of hydrogen purification and liquefaction using natural gas steam reforming, organic Rankine cycle and photovoltaic panels

Nowadays, with the depletion of underground resources and the increase in carbon dioxide, humans are obliged to use renewable energy. Liquid hydrogen production as one of the clean energy carriers with proper storage capability and transport to distant places has attracted a lot of attention. One of the main problems of hydrogen liquefaction cycles is the high power consumption for purification and liquefaction. In this paper, a novel integrated structure of hydrogen purification and liquefaction is developed using natural gas steam reforming, organic Rankine cycle, and photovoltaic panels. This integrated structure produces 1020 kmol/h liquid hydrogen and 3321 kmol/h fuel gas. The energy and exergy efficiencies of the integrated structure are 74.15% and 72.41%, respectively. The specific power consumption of the pre-cooling and purification, liquefaction, and total hydrogen purification-liquefaction cycles are 5.909, 2.725, and 8.592 kWh/ kgLH₂, respectively. The exergy analysis of the integrated structure exhibits that the highest exergy destruction occurs in heat exchangers (44.51%) and reactors (17.59%). The impact of different parameters on the performance of the integrated structure is studied. The sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the power energy consumption decreases up to 7.881 kWh/ kgLH2 and exergy efficiency increases up to 0.801 when the methane content in inlet natural gas flow increases from 82 to 92 mol%. The thermal efficiency and productivity of the liquid hydrogen increase up to 0.7851 and 1084 kmol/h, respectively with the increase of reformer temperature from 550 °C to 650 °C.

Numerical simulation of magma intrusion on the thermal evolution of low-rank coal

To study the effect of magma intrusion on the thermal evolution of low-rank coal with high moisture content, the relationship between moisture content variation and thermal conductivity of low-rank coal was analyzed by COMSOL Multiphysics numerical simulation and field validation. Taking Daxing Mine in Tiefa coalfield as the research background, the effects of magma finite time intrusion mechanism and moisture volatilization in coal on thermal evolution and organic maturity of coal seam are investigated in this paper. The results show that as the sill thickness increases, the thermal evolution temperature of the coal seam increases, the required thermal evolution time increases and the final retention temperature increases after the coal seam is cooled down. The closer coal seam is to magma, the higher maximum temperature it can reach and the longer duration of the maximum temperature. The increase of moisture content of coal makes the thermal conductivity increase, and the rate of heat transfer from coal seam is accelerated, and more heat is transferred to distant places in the same time. At the same time, the heat lost by the magma in the same time increases, the time required for the cooling of the magma decreases, and the maximum temperature reached by the underlying coal seam is significantly lower. The presence of coal moisture weakens the thermal evolution of magma to coal seam and reduces the expected maturity of the coal. The results of average random vitrinite reflectance (Ro) and moisture examination of coal samples collected at the Daxing Mine site verified the numerical simulation results of magma thermal evolution.

‘It is Krajina all over again’: geopolitics of spite and geographical analogy in a Serbian newspaper audience

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the negotiation of geopolitical knowledge by internet audiences in the comment section of the website of the Serbian newspaper Politika. It maps changes in the commenters’ attitudes towards Russia’s declarative role as the international protector of Serbia’s territorial sovereignty through an examination of online comments on the Russo-Georgian war in 2008 and Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Starting with Serbia’s international humiliation during the Yugoslav wars, exemplified by the exodus from the Republic of Serbian Krajina in 1995 and the Kosovo crisis of 1999, it analyses the strategies that users deploy to draw geographical analogies between distant and local places and across time. The example of this Serbian newspaper comment board is used to discuss the benefits of deeper engagement with online comments in geopolitical narrative and argue for the value of treating geographical analogies as expressions of emotion. The sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) is shown to be useful in popular geopolitical analysis, especially of the knowledge/emotion nexus. SKAD is used to propose a context-specific way of accessing emotions in geopolitical narratives, taking the case of what is traditionally regarded as a national character trait in Serbia – inat, or ‘spite, defiance’.

Integrating multiple influencing factors in evaluating the socioeconomic effects of payments for ecosystem services

Integrating multiple external and internal processes into the evaluation of how payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs can affect socioeconomic outcomes allows us to distinguish the relative importance of each factor and identify specific strategies to enhance the desired outcomes of PES programs; yet, the methods available are limited. Based on the framework of metacoupling (human-nature interactions within and across adjacent and distant places), we developed an approach to distinguish the contributions and pathways of multiple influencing factors to socioeconomic outcomes by integrating linkages between influencing factors, livelihood activities, and socioeconomic outcomes. Here, the approach’s operationalization is empirically demonstrated by identifying the impact of the Grain for Green Program (GFGP) and other external and internal factors influencing rural household income in China’s Loess Plateau. We find that the local economy and investment rather than the GFGP were the dominant factors affecting income. With improved understanding of the pathways, several suggestions are proposed for the design and implementation of GFGP and other PES programs around the world. Our study highlights the necessity of applying integrated factors in evaluating socioeconomic effects of PES — a crucial input for guiding practice of PES programs to support sustainable development.

Variation of carbon monoxide at a suburban site in the Indo-Gangetic Plain: Influence of long-range transport from crop residue burning region

In the present study the diurnal, seasonal variability along with the comparison of ground-based and satellite retrieved carbon monoxide (CO) observations are reported at Agra. In addition, the impact of long-range transport of emissions from crop residue burning region (Punjab and Haryana) on CO concentrations at a downwind site was determined. Previous studies reported so far in India have mainly focused on the impact of crop residue burning activities on CO concentrations in the nearby regions while the present study is an attempt to identify the impact of these activities on a downwind site situated several kilometers away. The average concentration of in-situ measured CO at Agra was 518.7 ± 487.9 ppb during 2015–2019. A good correlation between ground-based and satellite CO observations was found (y = 0.1 x + 129.4, R = 0.8). The highest seasonal average CO concentrations were observed during Oct–Nov, which corresponds with paddy residue burning in the north-west IGP (NW-IGP). These activities result in the emission of CO which can be transported to distant places due to its long lifetime (2 months) and can influence the air quality. It was observed that during the crop residue burning period the average concentrations of CO were higher by 19.8, 78.7 and 65.1 %, respectively in 2015, 2017 and 2019. Backward air mass trajectories and potential source contribution function (PSCF) suggested crop residue burning activities can be the potential source of CO at the study site during the crop residue burning period.

Critical infrastructure literacies and/as ways of relating in big data ecologies

In response to the numerous ethical issues involving big data, this article positions the infrastructural dynamics of big data storage and circulation as a concern for social and environmental justice. After identifying how big data accumulate in place-based ecologies that are made vulnerable to sustain ever-increasing quantities of data, the author explains how most, if not all, digital writing practices are relationally tethered to often distant places. In response, the author argues for developing and sustaining critical infrastructure literacies where big data infrastructures are not perceived as ethereal, cloud-like entities, but as materialities with relations to place, land, water, history, climate, culture, nation, and much else. Attending to infrastructure with a cultural rhetorics orientation attentive to relationality, accountability, and story, the article details four critical practices that place digital citizens within relational matrices where they are asked to account for how data practices affect a constellation of people, places, and environments.