Extraordinary Position Research Articles

Robert Millikan, Japanese internment, and eugenics

Robert A. Millikan (1868–1953) was the second American to win the Nobel Prize in physics. At the peak of his influence, no scientist save Einstein was more admired by the American public. Millikan, the head of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) during its first 24 years, oversaw its rapid growth into one of the leading scientific institutions of the world. However, in response to demands for social justice following the murder of George Floyd, Caltech launched an investigation into Millikan. Caltech reached a decision to strip Millikan of honors (such as the library named after him), following accusations from various sources that he was a sexist, racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, pro-eugenic Nazi sympathizer. In short, Caltech threw the book at him. This article analyzes two accusations against Millikan. The first of these accusations was published in Nature: that he collaborated to deprive Japanese Americans of their rights during their forced relocation to internment camps during the Second World War. An examination of original historical sources will show that this accusation is false. On the contrary, Millikan actively campaigned during the war to promote the rights of Japanese Americans. This article traces the stages of misrepresentation that led to current false beliefs about Millikan. In view of Millikan’s extraordinary position in American science, this misrepresentation is a cautionary tale. The article also treats Caltech’s central accusation against Millikan: he lent his name to “a morally reprehensible eugenics movement” that had been scientifically discredited in his time. The article considers the statements purporting to show that eugenics movement had been denounced by the scientific community by 1938. In a reversal of Caltech’s claims, all three of Caltech’s scientific witnesses against eugenics—including two Nobel laureates—were actually pro-eugenic to varying degrees. This article concludes that Millikan’s beliefs fell within acceptable scientific norms of his day.

Inventarul armamentului cetatii Deva in anul 1640

An inventory from 1640, published in this study, describes in detail the number of war instruments in the fortress of Deva. The inventory was made at the sale of the Deva estate by Lady Maria Széchy to Prince George I Rákóczy. So far only one such document was known, completed on 30 November 1640 and published by historian Endre Veress. However, the present inventory precedes it by one month, having been made by the archivists of the Alba Iulia Chapter house. The three men of the Transylvanian prince identified numerous pieces of artillery and other tools necessary for the defence of the fortification, but most of them were obsolete, sometimes a century old. Even if the weaponry was neither too modern nor too numerous, combined with the extraordinary position of the fortress it could still be an asset. The inventory of weapons of Deva offers us the possibility of investigating the military aspects of a Transylvanian fortress in the middle of the 17th century. Knowledge of military resources in that period is essential in understanding how the principality of Transylvania adapted to changes in tactics and weaponry in the early modern era.

Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition by David Richardson

For forty years, Richardson has worked on the British slave trade, producing pioneering documentation of the Bristol slave traders, playing a key role in the collaborative wonder that is the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, and co-founding the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (wise) in Hull. He began analyzing and demonstrating the economic significance of the British slave trade in an era when the received wisdom was that slavery had no role in Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and the focus of British historians and of the British popular imagination was on abolition, not on the slave trade or slavery per se.Richardson is therefore perfectly placed to provide what British history has long required, a synthesis between two competing explanations for Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807—broadly characterized as a “humanitarian” tradition, as represented by Clarkson, Lecky, Coupland, and Drescher, and as a “materialist” tradition, as initiated by Williams.1 The humanitarian version argued that the abolition in 1807 was the product of a sea change in mentalities, both elite and popular, that reached critical mass in the late 1780s; the materialist version argued that that abolition occurred largely because the old colonial system had become an obstacle to a newly industrializing Britain, which was developing a strong commitment to free trade by necessity. These debates unfolded between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, before getting bogged down in sterile binaries of economics versus morality and of self-interest versus altruism. The 2007 bicentenary of the slave trade’s abolition, when Richardson was Director of wise in Hull, re-ignited earlier debates about the fundamental nature of abolition, stimulating work by a new generation of scholars—notably Brown and Ryden—that raised fresh possibilities and pointed the way toward a potential synthesis, without themselves establishing it.2 Hence the opening for Richardson.The new volume, however, does not deliver fully on its potential. Organized in three sections—”Trade,” “Opinions,” and “Politics”—it proceeds from a brilliant summary of the slave trade to a survey of antislavery ideas in the eighteenth century and then to an account of the Parliamentary and extra-Parliamentary campaigns from 1788 to 1807. It thus spans economic, intellectual, cultural, and political history in an unusual way that balances accounts of the slave trade with accounts of abolition. It recognizes that the economic and political structure of Britain in 1807 was different from that of 1707 or 1757, revealing how antislavery was intertwined with urbanization and the emergence of the professional and manufacturing middle class that redistributed political power. It effectively registers the role of Black resistance to the slave trade by both captive and free Africans. But, in the end, its treatment of abolition remains firmly within the humanitarian tradition, viewing abolition as the victory of decent ordinary people over powerful entrenched interests—an uncomplicated early mass movement for social justice and human rights. Moreover, its treatment of individuals reflects an earlier uncritical tradition. In the brief introduction, for example, Richardson characterizes Clarkson as working “tirelessly” for fifty years, overlooking his withdrawal from the struggle in the late 1790s and early 1800s, his marginalization both in 1807 and 1834, and his final demoralizing conflict with Wilberforce’s sons over the roles and responsibilities of the early abolitionists.The book falls short of the much-needed synthesis for three reasons. First, rather than seeking to understand Williams’ scholarship, it oddly rejects it from the outset as “narrow-minded cynicism,” an extraordinary position to adopt in a book published in 2022. Second, given that the book has its origins in lectures given in 2007, it references subsequent works but does not fully absorb them into the argument. Third, the book tends to treat the abolition of the slave trade as the end of the process, leaving only its final three pages to deal with the abolition of slavery itself thirty years later (for which the humanitarian and materialist explanations largely converge). Future scholars will need to build on Richardson’s new book and to draw from his life’s work in order to complete the task at hand.

Telling the Story of the (Female) Body: Metaphorical Narratives of the Thyroid Gland

One of the mysteries of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is the metaphorical language it uses in describing conditions of the body. The human body is seen as an integrated system operating within the larger context of the natural system. Illnesses are therefore the results of imbalance within the individual system, and/or an imbalance between the individual system and the external natural system, which is very different from western medicine’s more localized and focused attention given to specific organs. This article looks at the TCM’s narrative of the thyroid (gland) and how this presents a different imagination as well as treatment of the related illnesses. Although western medicine relies on figures for indicating thyroid health, and surgery (or thyroid-targeted medication) as main measures of treatment, TCM refers to a holistic picture of the patient’s wellness to diagnose and treat thyroid conditions. This article is a first-person narrative of a middle-aged female who found herself in the extraordinary position of having visible thyroid swellings, and yet all of the vital signs were within healthy parameters. Visits to TCM clinics empowered the narrator with an alternative framework to understand and experience the body, and a refocus on life habits and emotional practices.

The role of immersive technologies in value creation in marketing

Technological innovations and their potential as a tool for creating added value in marketing have long been underused, or insufficiently researched. This paper describes the use of immersive technologies and their potential for application in marketing. The use of immersive technologies in marketing has great potential and has attracted a lot of attention in the last few years. Incorporating the use of the concept of immersive technologies is increasingly becoming the subject of research in business and marketing. Initiating the use of immersive technologies in modern business is becoming the root of managing and creating a completely new customer experience. Reality can be shaped by using this type of technological innovation and as such immersive technologies with their role create an extraordinary position in communication with users. The use of immersive technologies, especially the use of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) has been used successfully in the entertainment sector for some time, but it becomes clear that there is a much greater need for immersive technologies in various fields and industries to recognize them as a huge potential for value creation in marketing.

Być celebrytą, być paparazzim. Fellini i jego postaci w "Słodkim życiu"

In his essay the author discusses the question of film spectator of the particular movie, namely “La Dolce Vita”, directed by Federico Fellini. Since its premiere in February 1960, the movie has produced a lot of controversies, concerning both the artistic aspects, as well as manners and customs. The author concentrates on the extraordinary position of the spectator inside the film narration. He discusses the question of the intertextual place of the viewer both inside the narration and syuzhet. The viewer in many cases plays a role of authors porte parole. The different roles of protagonists are named: fallen aristocrats, petit bourgeois, artists, intellectuals, foreign celebrity. The one of the most important is the role of paparazzi, coined for the first time in the Fellini’s film. It created the aggressive photographer, the “bandit” of the camera. The variety of the roles, with emphasis of the paparazzi, produce the situation, where Fellini brilliantly makes an illusion of fully controlled narration by the spectator. But it is the artistic illusion, nothing more.

Freud ve Lacan’ın Psikanalitik Kuramlarında Yastan Ayrışan Melankolik Özne

Mourning is one of the two concepts that emerged from Freud's article Mourning and Melancholia and is frequently subjected to research. However the concept of melancholia is studied less. Furthermore, melancholia remains in an ambiguous position: sometimes it is attributed to a person's personality pattern and sometimes to a depressive mood or even sometimes to a psychotic structure. From this point of view, in this article, the work of Freud and Lacan (who recontextualized Freud’s literature), on mourning and melancholia are examined comparatively. Accordingly, Freud expressed that mourning and melancholia are similar in the loss of a loved object and while mourning is an ordinary response to loss melancholia is an extraordinary position. Faced with Freud's view that mourning and melancholia are similar in terms of lost object, but differ in terms of their functioning, Lacan reconsidered these two concepts through the topological structure of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. In Lacan's conceptualization, mourning as a process connects the subject to the symbolic order through rituals or ceremonies. The subject who does not/cannot pass beyond this process is stuck in jouissance staying alone with Real in melancholia. In this recent article, several clinical practice and research examples are included following the theoretical examination. Based on this, it is thought that in a state of melancholia, the person is in pain while maintaining a position that one takes as a move from castration to escape and that the way out of this pain is only possible with a symbolic study. However, it is important to study the appearance of melancholia in different subject formations together with today's changing cultural background. As a result, it is thought that how melancholia is expressed in language and its relationship with the defense mechanism related to subject formation of the individual determines the central point in an analytical study.

75 Years of International Law-Making at the United Nations

For the last 75 years, the UN has been placed at the centre of international law-making. The Organization can be considered both as a place where international law is discussed, made and interpreted by its Member States and as a proper actor, with its own international legal personality, voice and practice, engaged in the creation and implementation of international law. This article considers the extraordinary position of the UN in providing a unique contribution to the development, codification and implementation of international law in branches ranging from the law of treaties to the legal principles governing the protection and preservation of the marine environment or the criminal accountability for graves violations of international humanitarian law. On its 75th anniversary, the Organization has demonstrated its flexibility and adaptability to the changing priorities and concerns of the international community and facilitated the commitment of its Member States to multilateralism and the principles enshrined in the Charter signed on 26 June 1945 in San Francisco. Indeed, the outlook for the next 25 years of international law-making at the UN looks brighter than it may at first appear.

Subdivision Schemes for Quadrilateral Meshes with the Least Polar Artifact in Extraordinary Regions

AbstractThis paper presents subdivision schemes with subdivision stencils near an extraordinary vertex that are free from or with substantially reduced polar artifact in extraordinary regions while maintaining the best possible bounded curvature at extraordinary positions. The subdivision stencils are firstly constructed to meet tangent plane continuity with bounded curvature at extraordinary positions. They are further optimized towards curvature continuity at an extraordinary position with additional measures for removing or for minimizing the polar artifact in extraordinary regions. The polar artifact for subdivision stencils of lower valences is removed by applying an additional constraint to the subdominant eigenvalue to be the same as that of subdivision at regular vertices, while the polar artifact for subdivision stencils of higher valances is substantially reduced by introducing an additional thin‐plate energy function and a penalty function for maintaining the uniformity and regularity of the characteristic map. A new tuned subdivision scheme is introduced by replacing subdivision stencils of Catmull‐Clark subdivision with that from this paper for extraordinary vertices of valences up to nine. We also compare the refined meshes and limit surface quality of the resulting subdivision scheme with that of Catmull‐Clark subdivision and other tuned subdivision schemes. The results show that subdivision stencils from our method produce well behaved subdivision meshes with the least polar artifact while maintaining satisfactory limit surface quality.

Blicke aus Mitteleuropa: Zu neueren Texten von Christoph Ransmayr und Martin Pollack

This article analyzes the ways of constructing Central European identity in the essays and reports of Christoph Ransmayr and Martin Pollack, starting from the early texts of the democratic transformation period through up until the most recent publications. The Central Europe of Ransmayr and Pollack is not a utopia of the past Habsburg Empire, nor is it a political construction from the countries of the former Eastern Bloc; rather it is a socio-historically shaped space of the experiences of the two totalitarianisms and the two forms of terror: those of the Nazi and the Soviet regimes. The specific perspective of the authors’ recent texts (Kontaminierte Landschaften, Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes, and most of all Der Wolfsjäger) can be described as “an emancipatory consciousness of being different.” Pollack and Ransmayr share this perspective with other Central-European researchers and writers (including Karl Schlögel, Timothy Snyder, Andrzej Stasiuk, Jurij Andruchowicz, Jachym Topol, and György Konrád), but the extraordinary position of Austria with respect to both the crimes of the Third Reich and the Soviet repressive measures makes the Austrian notion of a “Central-European separate path,” of crucial importance.

Friendship, Recognition and Social Freedom: A Sociological Reconstruction

ABSTRACTIn Freedom’s Right, Axel Honneth articulates the social freedom of friendship with reference to its institutionalised norms. These action norms, however, are not specific to friendship; they apply to modern intimacy per se. Such non-specificity cannot adequately account for the experience of social freedom in friendship. Addressing this issue, I evaluate friendship as a form of recognition and identify a generative recognition deficit functional to its relational autonomy. Then, taking Honneth’s institutional approach to friendship as a point of departure, I ascertain an institutional deficit that both sustains friendship’s autonomy and constrains the generalisability of its social freedom by way of institutional connectivity to heterosexuality. I suggest that only a differentiating approach to friendship that fathoms its extraordinary position among interpersonal relationships can yield new insights. That done, friendship can in turn provide a prism through which to assess the conceptual approaches deployed in its analysis.

Maureen Swick, RN, MSN, PhD, NEA-BC

Maureen Swick, RN, MSN, PhD, NEA-BC, was featured on the cover of our April 2016 issue as the incoming AONE president. During that interview, she discussed her leadership career and philosophy. This interview focuses on her new role as AONE chief executive officer (CEO) and senior vice president (SVP) and chief nursing officer (CNO) of the American Hospital Association (AHA).

A Request for Non-voluntary Euthanasia in Bangladesh: A Moral Assessment

Government authorities in Bangladesh recently were placed in an awkward and extraordinary position of having to make a presumably difficult decision: how to respond to a man’s request to have his two sons and grandson euthanized. This is an extraordinary request for a developing country’s health service authorities to consider, especially in the context of a Muslim-majority population where any appeal to the legitimacy of suicide (and, by extension, physician-assisted suicide) would be automatically rejected as contrary to Islamic moral and jurisprudential principles. Here the case is reviewed in the context of arguments that engage non-voluntary euthanasia and the local context of inadequate health service delivery.

Nietzsche in Mexico

Nietzsche in Mexico Lance Olsen (bio) Nietzsche on His Balcony Carlos Fuentes E. Shaskan Bumas and Alejandro Branjer, trans. Dalkey Archive www.dalkeyarchive.com 332 Pages; Print, $18.00 By the time Carlos Fuentes died at 83 from a massive hemorrhage in Mexico City on 15 May, 2012, he had attained an extraordinary position in global literature. A key figure in the Latin American Boom, his name was regularly mentioned in conjunction with those of Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Gárcia Márquez. His major works—arguably The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), and The Old Gringo (1985)—blend a formally innovative strain of European and American modernism (think Joyce and Faulkner) with a politically charged experimentation associated with Boom writing. Employing temporal disruptions, shifting points of view, rethinkings of syntax and punctuation, and frequent injections of magical realism designed to perplex communal notions of reality, those works complicate and nuance the political novel, often critiquing social evils even as they announce the ultimate uselessness of such critiques. Fuentes’ oeuvre was an expression of his own intellectual journey, which began in his teens with an interest in socialism sparked by the poetry of Pablo Neruda. That led him to Havana in 1959, where he penned pro-Castro articles—as well as to his increasingly critical position toward the regime. (In 1965 he was branded a traitor by Cuba for attending an international writers conference in New York.) His work became increasingly provocative—in the key, one might propose, of Nietzsche—embracing the idea of skepticism, difficulty, inconclusiveness, and ambivalence to a greater and greater extent, remaining both disparaging of the pragmatics of the revolutionary imagination and of capitalism’s profoundly flawed alternative. “Religion is dogmatic,” he once wrote. “Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.” “The thing to avoid,” as Beckett’s Unnamable has it, “is the spirit of system.” The opposite of equivocation, as Barthes had it, is a mode of propaganda. I find it remarkable, then, given his stature, his literary amazements, that Fuentes’ last novel, the mischievous and rich Nietzsche on His Balcony, published posthumously in Mexico, appeared in the States only last year. And I find myself turning to Dalkey Archive once again with gratitude and fondness for making an otherwise invisible innovative text visible here for the first time. The novel’s plot constitutes a bitter political parable in which some force (god? the universe? the brunt of his own will?) grants the heterodox philosopher a 24-hour return to earth every year following his death. On one of these, the novel’s narrator steps onto his balcony at the Hotel Metropol overlooking an unidentified city to get some air one hot humid night during that temporal in-betweenness after midnight and before dawn to discover a shadowy, hirsute Nietzsche doing the same on the next balcony. That uncanny moment in many ways is emblematic of the novel as a whole. The reader learns virtually nothing about the narrator, location, or time coordinates, and only a few quick familiar brushstrokes about the philosopher himself. It remains unclear whether the narrator is in fact meeting Nietzsche, imagining him, dreaming him, or whether his companion is the narrator’s doppelgänger. What ensues, in any case, is a series of ontological, epistemological, and political ambiguities, paradoxes, and willful contradictions. The pair begins exchanging a plethora of stories (I’m reminded of Fuentes’ observation that, like Scheherezade, we invent narratives in part to stall our own deaths), alternating over the course of more than a hundred short chapters and centering on murderers, rapists, the nature of pleasure and punishment, madness and power—all in a universe clearly beyond good and evil. Those fictive thought experiments slowly develop into a larger allegory about a hypothetical revolution. One day soldiers appear on the streets of the unnamed city, urging local shop owners to resist those in power by closing their businesses and mobilizing. Saul Mendes, a saintly leader (he evinces stigmata that won’t stop bleeding), rises to prominence and takes reluctant control as the former president’s head is...

Cultural citizenship, media and sport in contemporary Australia

Mediated sport has assumed an extraordinary position in contemporary global culture. It is enormously popular, especially when stimulated by both artful and ‘carpet bomb’ marketing and promotion. It is, correspondingly, in high commercial demand in the transition from scheduled, ‘appointment’ broadcast television to a more flexible, mobile system of on-demand viewing on multiple platforms. The ‘nowness’ of sport means that it is highly effective in assembling massive, real-time audiences in an era of increasing fragmentation both in terms of numbers and viewing rhythms. At the same time, sport routinely insinuates itself into the everyday lives of citizens in ways that are no more uniform than the people who encounter it. Even among enthusiastic participants in, and aficionados of, sport, there is considerable experiential diversity in engagement with it in mediated form. Socio-cultural variables such as age, gender, ethnicity and social class, as well as dispositions of sporting taste, are responsible for considerable differences in the practices associated with mediated sport. This article addresses current research on cultural citizenship and sport in Australia, drawing on qualitative data from Greater Western Sydney, Australia’s most demographically diverse region, in analysing the various ways in which citizens engage with sport as participants and spectators. It explores the research participants’ views concerning their rights to access ‘live’ mediated sport within a broad framework of cultural citizenship, analysing the tension between commercial and citizen relationships in the production of public culture. Finally, the article considers problems associated with such access, including with regard to the so-called ‘gamblification’ of sport.

Brief Lives, by John Aubrey, ed. Kate Bennett John Aubrey: My Own Life, by Ruth Scurr

John Aubrey maintains an extraordinary position among English writers of the seventeenth century: the interest which he holds for the academy is proverbially matched by the affection in which he is held by the general reader. His range and his immediacy give him a particular claim on the attention of an unusually wide community of topographers, historians and (in the best sense) amateurs. There is a haunting quality to this immediacy, the seductive illusion of almost hearing the voice of a person long dead, and, through him, the voices of a circle of mid-seventeenth-century clerics, virtuosi, artisans and scholars. His range, his friendships, his improvisations, and his attachments to particular English places give him a complex status as forerunner of many kinds of writing which are now practised and admired. His sprawling, largely-unfinished manuscript works are in no known genre (only his supernatural collections, the Miscellanies , saw print in his lifetime) and this incompleteness is part of the seduction—although, to some degree, it masks his acuity as a forerunner in the disciplines which were later to become archaeology and anthropology.

Kepler’s Sygkepleriazein

In the three last centuries, especially in the nineteenth century, Johannes Kepler has played an eminent part in the German history of ideas. Largely ignored for more than 50 years after his death, due in part to the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War and in part to increasing interest in new astronomical discoveries in the solar system, Kepler would not be comprehensively considered before G. W. Leibniz reviewed his work. A century later, G. W. F. Hegel appreciated Kepler's idea of planetary harmony as an expression of belief that the universe is reigned by reason but not by chance. At that time, around 1800 idealistic philosophers, especially F. W. Schelling (1775-1854), assigned an extraordinary position to Kepler in German history.This book edited by Paul Ziche (University of Utrecht) and Petr Rezvykh (Research Higher School of Economics, Moscow) presents two main traditions of the Kepler reception of the nineteenth century: the veneration of Kepler in Wurttemberg in connection with the awaking German national identity, and the high regard of Kepler as a representative of speculative natural philosophy of German Idealism. These two moments are recognized by the authors as essential motives for the first edition of Kepler's collected works by Christian Frisch (in eight volumes, 1858-1871). Schelling and other philosophers praised Kepler's holistic view of nature in his search for the structure of the Mysterium cosmographicum , in contrast to Newton who was viewed as a representative of mechanical science with analysing and splitting procedures. This distinction between speculative and inductive science in Germany would not fade before the mid-nineteenth century, when the inductive science of William Whewell was absorbed especially by the philologist Joseph Kopp (1788-1842) in Erlangen, in context of the planned Kepler edition (pp. 115-54).Frisch's edition, Joannis Kepleri Astronomi opera omnia (KOO), is the central point of interest in the book. This first essential Kepler edition was prepared by an invisible circle of congenial contemporaries described by Ziche as a virtual Kepler commission, referring evidently to the subsequent Kepler-Kommission (1934-2003) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Key source material is the presentation of 30 documents, particularly taken from members of the virtual Kepler commission in the years 1839-1855 (pp. 177-270). The planning and realization of the Frisch edition is well illustrated in both scientific and political aspects. The virtual Kepler commission collaborated informally, a modus operandi nicely expressed by the term Sygkepleriazein in the title of the book. This expression comes from a letter of Joseph Kopp in the year 1839, inviting his brother-in-law Christian Frisch to the Kepler project: Wir wollen so recht gemeinschaftlich keplerianisieren (We really want to keplerianize mutually) (p. …

Suriname: Reconciling agricultural development and conservation of unique natural wealth

National and transboundary adverse effects of competition for land are being increasingly recognized by researchers and decision-makers, however the consideration of these impacts within national planning strategies is not yet commonplace. To estimate how increasing agricultural production can be conciliated with protection of natural resources at the national scale, we analyzed current land use in Suriname, and investigated opportunities for, and constraints to developing a sustainable agricultural sector.Suriname is a remarkable case study. To date, Suriname has retained most of its natural resources with forest areas covering over 90% of the country. Surinamese forests combine extremely high levels of both biodiversity and carbon, making them top priority from a global ecosystem services perspective. Among other national and international pressures from increased demand for agricultural products, the country is also considering significant expansion of agricultural output to both diminish imports and become a ‘bread basket’ for the Caribbean region, which collectively may pose risks to natural resources.In this study, combining locally-obtained primary data, expert consultation and secondary data from the Food and Agriculture Organization we analyzed a range of scenarios, we show the complexities associated with current land management and we discuss alternatives for developing a sustainable agricultural sector in Suriname. We show that Suriname can increase the production of rice, which is the most important agricultural activity in the country, without expanding rice area. Rather, future increase in rice production could be promoted through an increase in rice productivity, and the employment of more environmentally-favorable management methods, in order to both diminish pollution and avoid encroachment of the agriculture into pristine areas. Further, we show a potential to both contribute to greening of the agricultural sector and to higher economic returns through expanding the production of ‘safe food’ and through possible development of organic agriculture in Suriname.If Suriname develops a ‘greener’ agricultural sector, it may both increase economic returns from the agricultural sector and benefit from continuing protection of natural resources. Because most of Suriname forests present top levels of carbon and biodiversity, the country could benefit from so-called ‘early-action’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) finance, which is already being paid mostly through bilateral agreements. Further, by adopting land-use planning that protects natural resources, Suriname may be in extraordinary position to benefit from both improved-quality agricultural production and from incentives to conserve forest carbon and biodiversity, such as payments for ecosystem services. Given the high stakes and the severe lack of both primary data and applied analyses in Suriname, further research focused on better informing land-use policies would be a valuable investment for the country. Although this analysis was performed for Suriname, conclusions drawn here are transferrable and may assist formulation of policy recommendations for land use elsewhere.

Image Analysis – Comparison of Recipe Composition Effect

Abstract Bread and bread crumb characteristics as the results of laboratory baking test were used to assess bread profile. Its texture was quantified by image analysis technique, performed by using the Kaiser reproset (stand, lighting), the COHU CCD camera and the NIS Elements 2.0 AR software. In the case of common cereals fortification (wheat, rye, barley, oat and corn wholemeal flours), tested substitution level were chosen from 10% to 50% of commercial wheat flour standard “M’09”. Its analytical parameters correspond with satisfying bakery quality (protein content 14.1%, Zeleny's value 36 ml, Falling Number 396 s). Non-fortified bread from M’09 reached specific volume of 365 mL/100 g, and bread texture was described by 14 cell/cm2 and mean cell area (MCA) 2.538 mm2. The second fortification attempt included four non-traditional wheat (spelt, dicoccum, spring wheat ‘Trinaldina’, one with purple grain) and millet. These recipe components were tested on two commercial wheat samples, marked as “M’06” and “M’07”. Their baking values differed in protein content only (12.3% vs. 11.5%, respectively), while the Zeleny's sedimentation and the Falling Number test results were comparable (49 ml vs. 49 ml and 324 s vs. 363 s, respectively. Lower protein content as well as higher Falling Number contributed to lower bread volume from M’07 flour (252 mL/100 g vs. 343 mL/100 g), and also its texture was less open (20 cells/cm2 at mean cell area 1.160 mm2 against 15 cells/cm2 at 1.520 mm2). Statistical approach comprised correlation and variation analyses (Tukey's test) on significance level of 95% for both methods. Addition of common cereals wholemeal caused progressive changes of both specific bread volumes and crumb morphology, i.e. volume of bread with 10% and 50% of rye wholemeal fell from z 235 mL/100 g up to 155 mL/100 g. An extraordinary position was revealed out for wheat wholemeal, which did not affect dough volume rise at baking stage due to similar protein structure (specific values of 233 mL/100 g a 259 mL/100 g, respectively). Cell densities were 21 cells/cm2 and 25 cells/cm2 for recipes with 10% and 50% of rye, respectively. Corresponding MCA's were evaluated on levels of 1.617 mm2 and 1,365 mm2, respectively. Compared to standard M’09, a decrease about 25% was registered. Influence of wheat wholemeal was equivocal likewise the specific bread volume – numbers of cell in bread crumb with 10% and 50% of that component were 18 per cm2 for both cases, whereas the proper MCA's were 1.830 mm2 in the former and 2.128 mm2 in the latter case (72% and 83% of standard M’09). Texture of the selected samples is documented on Fig. 1. Bread prepared from “M’07” was affected differently due to lower baking quality – crumb texture changes oscillated up to 20%. Figure 2 shows major influence for bread with TSP (77% increase in mean cell area, 23% decrease in number of cells/cm2). The most levelled change in these two bread crumb parameters was observed for bread with WPG – mean cell area increased about 20%, while number of cells/cm2 decreased about 23%.

On the round burial pit of the Yin Period at Hougang, Anyang

In the light of the unearthed objects and stratigraphic relations, it can be inferred that the round burial pit (HGH10) of the Yin period at Hougang, Anyang, was formed in the late Yin or at the turn from the Yin to the Zhou period. The dead buried in the pit were seriously maimed or even beheaded and their skeletons were in an extraordinary position and in disorder. However, they were offered large-sized bronze ritual vessels and a great number of other precious grave goods. This suggests that the Hougang burial pit was not a normal tomb or a sacrificial pit; it must have been a peculiar burial of persons in higher status. It is likely that the pit occupants belonged to the sizi 嗣子 mentioned in the inscription of the Shu Sizi ding-tripod, who were the officials stationed at the Lan 阑 or the State Guesthouse in the capital of the Yin Dynasty, in charge of guest reception and massage transmission. Perhaps they were killed in the Muye campaign and buried in this round pit.