Historical Coverage Research Articles

A review of evaporative cooling system concepts for engine thermal management in motor vehicles

The evaporative cooling system concepts proposed over the past century for engine thermal management in automotive applications are examined and critically reviewed. The purposes of this review are to establish the evident system shortcomings and to identify the remaining research questions that need to be addressed to enable this important technology to be adopted by vehicle manufacturers. Initially, the benefits of the evaporative cooling systems are restated in terms of the improved engine efficiency, the reduced carbon dioxide emissions and the improved fuel economy. This is followed by a historical coverage of the proposed concepts dating back to 1918. Possible evaporative cooling concepts are then classified into four distinct classes and critically reviewed. This culminates in an assessment of the available evidence to establish the reasons why no system has yet been approved for serial production commercially. Then, by systematic examination of the critical areas in evaporative cooling systems for application to automotive engine cooling, the remaining research challenges are identified.

Air pressure effects on sea level changes during the twentieth century

AbstractInterpretation of tide gauge data in terms sea level (η) and ocean dynamics requires estimates of air pressure (pa) to determine the ocean's isostatic response—the inverted barometer effect ( ). Three gridded pa products (HadSLP2, NOAA‐20CRv2, and ERA‐20C) are used alongside meteorological station pa and tide gauge η records to evaluate the contribution of to η changes over the twentieth century. Agreement between gridded products is better during more recent periods and over regions with good historical data coverage, whereas it is worse for earlier time periods or in ocean areas with poor observational data coverage. Comparison against station data reveals the presence of systematic errors in the gridded products, for example, such that uncertainties estimated through differencing the gridded products underestimate the true errors by roughly 40% on interannual and decadal time scales. Notwithstanding such correlated errors, gridded products are still useful for interpretation of tide gauge data. Removing gridded estimates of from η records reduces spatial variance in centennial trends across tide gauges by 10–30%, formal errors in centennial trends from individual gauges by ∼5%, and the temporal variance in detrended records by 10–15% on average (depending on choice of gridded product). Results here advocate for making the correction to tide gauge records in studies of ocean circulation and global η over long, multidecadal, and centennial time scales using an ensemble mean taken across several gridded products.

From identity to issue: policy agenda and framing shifts within long-term coalitions

ABSTRACTRecent research calls for increased attention to the development of interest group policy agendas, the effects of agenda shifts, and the process of issue framing. Some scholars argue that identity-based groups and coalitions have a particularly difficult time surviving policy agenda shifts. Drawing upon historical archives, interview data, and media coverage of a long-term, identity-based coalition, the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition (JRLC), this article examines how and why the group’s policy agenda and framing of issues changed over time. The study finds that the JRLC’s policy agenda and framing strategy changed from emphasizing policies identifying a specific target population to emphasizing policies with a broad or undefined target population. These shifts suggest a strategic response by the coalition both to changes in the external environment and to organizational challenges related to coalition maintenance.

American architecture: a history

A wide-ranging, yet substantive, account of the history of American architecture from pre-historic times to the present. . In American Architecture , Leland Roth introduces the reader to the major developments that shaped the American-built environment from before the arrival of the Europeans to the present, from ceremonial enclosures and homes to Modernism and its discontents. There is extensive historical coverage of 17th and 18th century architecture and regional styles. On both the high style architecture of aspiration and the everyday vernacular architecture, Roth presents the historical impact of changes in conceptual imagery, style, building technology, landscape design, and town planning theory. He charts the gradual development of towns, cities, and suburbs along with the social, cultural, and political forces that shaped their growth. Buildings, like politics, are based on the fine art of compromise, and every building represents a judicious balance between the conflicting needs and aspirations of the client, architect, and builder. Americans, especially, it would seem, have been caught between divergent needs and desires, between the impulse, on the one hand, to build pragmatically and efficiently, and the wish, on the other hand, to realize a conceptual ideal, writes Roth. These ten chapters provide a full, reliable, and up-to-date description, analysis, and interpretation of American buildings and their architects. The 612 illustrations consisting of photographs, drawings, plans and maps are integrated throughout the text. Well-written and comprehensive, Roths American Architecture is invaluable as a guide, a study, and a reference.

Temporal variability in potential connectivity of Vallisneria americana in the Chesapeake Bay

Context Submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) performs water quality enhancing functions that are critical to the overall health of estuaries such as the Chesapeake Bay. However, eutrophication and sedimentation have decimated the Bay’s SAV population to a fraction of its historical coverage. Understanding the spatial distribution of and connectedness among patches is important for assessing the dynamics and health of the remaining SAV population.

Tetanus disease and deaths in men reveal need for vaccination.

With efforts focused on the elimination of maternal and neonatal tetanus, less attention has been given to tetanus incidence and mortality among men. Since 2007 voluntary medical male circumcision has been scaled-up in 14 sub-Saharan African countries as an effective intervention to reduce the risk of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) acquisition among men. As part of a review of adverse events from these programmes, we identified 13 cases of tetanus from five countries reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) up to March 2016. Eight patients died and only one patient had a known history of tetanus vaccination. Tetanus after voluntary medical male circumcision was rare among more than 11 million procedures conducted. Nevertheless, the cases prompted a review of the evidence on tetanus vaccination coverage and case notifications in sub-Saharan Africa, supplemented by a literature review of non-neonatal tetanus in Africa over the years 2003–2014. The WHO African Region reported the highest number of non-neonatal tetanus cases per million population and lowest historic coverage of tetanus-toxoid-containing vaccine. Coverage of the third dose of diphtheria–tetanus–polio vaccine ranged from 65% to 98% across the 14 countries in 2013. In hospital-based studies, non-neonatal tetanus comprised 0.3–10.7% of admissions, and a median of 71% of patients were men. The identification of tetanus cases following voluntary medical male circumcision highlights a gender gap in tetanus morbidity disproportionately affecting men. Incorporating tetanus vaccination for boys and men into national programmes should be a priority to align with the goal of universal health coverage.

Gendered Social-Networking Organizations

Research has consistently documented that women are disproportionately represented in upper management and in positions of power and still continue to dominate traditionally female occupations. Hence, recognizing that effective efforts needs to be made to assist women in their career development, many organizations have adopted mentoring programs to address gender differences in advancement without having a grounded plan. Organizations often do so out of competing for and achieving organizational longevity, organizational competitive advantage, or for legal accommodations for marketing purposes. Organizations often implement mentoring program(s) with the goal of having mentors provide mentees with psychosocial support, career development support, sponsorship and coaching, setting up challenging assignments, fostering positive visibility, and protecting the mentee from adverse forces. Hence, the purpose of this article will be on mentorship (brief historical coverage and definition), stereotypes of gendered advancement based on gender, and cross-gender mentorship in the U.S.

High Resolution Landscape Change Analysis with CORONA KH-4B Imagery. A Case Study from Iron Gates Reservoir Area

Mapping landscape change at detailed scales is an interesting task when the focus is not only the land cover change. The paper proposes the integration of a diachronic imagery set in a GIS application in order to obtain precise maps of the key qualitative changes along a representative sector of the Danube River Defile where the Iron Gates emerged between 1965-1972 to the border between Romania and Serbia. A photogrammetric process approach was developed for the building of precise historical orthophoto coverage on the basis of a CORONA KH-4B/ DECLASS-1 dataset. This was focused on reconstructing the image geometry and building a precise orientation, together with an aerial triangulation operation. The results were a Digital Surface Model and an orthophoto (about 5 m average geometric accuracy). This data was integrated into a GIS project with vector data extracted from the latest orthophotos (0.5 m, by ANCPI Bucharest) for mapping of landscape changes as an effect of the complex hydrotechnical works. The Iron Gates reservoir level was of about +33 m higher at the beginning of the 1970s in comparison with the primary Danube River level, the road and the railroad moved upslope like Orşova town and other villages. The most dramatic change was related to the total flooding of Ada-Kaleh Island with a Turkish settlement and a Vauban system fortress, an interesting historical and cultural site.

Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino New York City and Miami, 1940–1960 by Christina D. Abreu

Reviewed by: Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino New York City and Miami, 1940–1960by Christina D. Abreu Mario Rey Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino New York City and Miami, 1940–1960. By Christina D. Abreu. Envisioning Cuba. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 303. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2084-8.) In Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino New York City and Miami, 1940–1960, Christina D. Abreu presents a reconstruction of the experiences and contributions of racially diverse Cuban musicians to the commercial music entertainment industry of the mid-twentieth-century United States. Mining oral history interviews, archival news sources, and print media, Abreu offers a comparative analysis of cultural self-representations in the diasporic enclaves of New York and Miami, focusing on popular music production and consumption and their role in the local construction of Latino identity. The book is organized in six chapters framed by an introduction and a brief conclusion. In the first chapter, Abreu examines the professional lives and participation of musicians in New York’s Hispanic community, positioning Afro-Cubanness as central to nationalistic cultural reaffirmation, while problematizing “Cuban” and “Latin” as static identity categories. Chapters 2 and 3 investigate the racial component in Cuban American associational life, underscoring the exclusionary practices sanctioned by the social clubs and community institutions that forged separate discursive spaces and challenged the fluidity of identity categories. In chapter 4, Abreu uses print culture to explore the maintenance of cultural memory in the promotion of Cubanness within music festivals and contests, underlining the use of Afro-Cuban idioms in such forums. Chapter 5 centers on dance hall performance of Cubanness for English-speaking audiences, exploring the fictionalized narratives of Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo in the television program I Love Lucy. Chapter 6 relocates the narrative to the social spaces associated with Miami’s tourism industry, tracing the city’s “Latinization” before the mass influx and politicization of Cuban exiles after the 1959 revolution (p. 4). Clearly, the book does not provide a balance of historical coverage between the two cities in a comprehensive manner. Abreu surprisingly devotes only one chapter to Miami, a curious imbalance given the city’s subsequent status as the capital of the Latin recording industry. This disproportion undermines her assertion of an active Cuban presence before the revolution of 1959 and weakens the comparative approach implicit in the book’s title. While the [End Page 969]chapters contain substantive information speckled with many astute observations, there are also redundancies in content. Moreover, the persistent racialized readings and color categorizations that understandably permeate the study may become wearisome to the reader. These criticisms notwithstanding, Abreu’s historiographical approach is successful on the whole. Addressing postmodern preoccupations with cultural displacement and the varied constructs of identity, ethnicity, and nationality, she engages many provocative issues that intersect with music, including the effects of race on the attribution of musical authenticity, the purveyance of exotica, the dispensation of Jim Crow laws with regard to black “otherness,” and the notion of “black innovation and white commercialization” (p. 73). Abreu’s avoidance of musical transcriptions and specialized terminology renders the book accessible to general readership. The multilayered narratives are suited to both undergraduates and casual readers interested in Latino cultural studies, musical migrations, and identity politics. While the Floridian locus deserves a more thorough treatment, the book is nonetheless a sprawling, yet detailed account that advances our understanding of Cuban American popular music practices and racial discourses as they existed before the postrevolution period that currently dominates Cuban cultural studies. The critical analysis of the historical data presented provides an insightful tool for the study of music production as a vehicle facilitating the articulation of hyphenated identities. Rhythms of Raceis a valuable addition to the Latino music-making historiography. Mario Rey East Carolina University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Flood Forecasting: A Global Perspective

Flood Forecasting: A Global Perspective describes flood forecast systems and operations as they currently exist at national and regional centers around the globe, focusing on the technical aspects of flood forecast systems. This book includes the details of data flow, what data is used, quality control, the hydrologic and hydraulic models used, and the unique problems of each country or system, such as glacial dam failures, ice jams, sparse data, and ephemeral streams and rivers. Each chapter describes the system, including details about its strengths and weaknesses, and covers lessons learned. This helpful resource facilitates sharing knowledge that will lead to improvements of existing systems and provides a valuable reference to those wishing to develop new forecast systems by drawing on best practices.Covers global systems allowing readers to see a worldwide perspective with different approaches used by existing flood forecast systemsProvides historical coverage allowing readers to understand why forecast systems have developed as they have and to see how specific systems have dealt with common problems encounteredPresents a vision of what appears to be the future of hydrologic forecasting and difficulties facing hydrologic forecastingProvides a helpful resource to facilitate improvements to existing systems based on a best practices approach

Conceptualizing and measuring migration policy change.

This paper outlines the methodology of DEMIG POLICY, a new database tracking around 6,000 migration policy changes in 45 countries between 1945 and 2014. The article conceptualizes the notion of migration policy change and presents the coding system used to operationalize policy content, changes in policy restrictiveness, as well as the magnitude of policy changes. The paper also discusses the potential of DEMIG POLICY to improve our understanding of the nature, evolution, and effectiveness of migration policies. Besides significantly extending the geographical and historical coverage of existing migration policy databases, DEMIG POLICY also tracks emigration policies in order to overcome the common ‘receiving country bias’ in migration research. By offering key insights into the main features of the largest migration policy database completed to date, this paper hopes to provide useful guidelines to improve future efforts to measure migration policies. Such improvement is crucial given the heated debates on migration policy effectiveness on one hand and the still limited empirical evidence on this issue on the other.

Reconstruction of cropland cover changes in the Shandong Province over the past 300 years.

To advance global change rssearch, it is essential to reconstruct changes in historical cropland coverage on a regional scale in China. This paper presents data collected from 244 local gazetteers, government statistical records and remote-sensing land cover data from the Shandong Province. The study reconstructed the spatial distribution of the rate of reclaimed land at the county level and compared this map with a map of the current spatial distribution of suitable cropland. The following conclusions were drawn: (i) The rate of cultivated land grew exponentially. The extent of reconstruction in cropland areas during the 17th century, 18th~19th centuries, the beginning of the 20th century, the 1980 s, and the beginning of the 20th century are 4.51 mha, 6.51 mha, 7.52 mha, 8.53 mha and 11.80–12.00 mha, respectively. (ii) Several agricultural centers formed during the late 17th century. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the reclamation rate increased rapidly near the four southern lakes, which are located in the Zaozhuang and Linyi regions. (iii) Most reclamation activities before the 19th century occurred in suitable agricultural areas, and the cultivated land was already reclaimed by the beginning of the 20th century.

Landscape history improves detection of marginal habitats on semi-natural grasslands

Semi-natural grassland habitats have markedly declined from their historical coverage, thus causing substantial losses for agricultural biodiversity and establishing a consequent need to spot the remaining habitat patches. These patches are generally remnants of once larger habitat areas, formed by uninterrupted and low-intensity management for centuries, but then later being isolated and fragmented into smaller pieces. In the light of this development, past landscape phases have a crucial role for the present existence of semi-natural grasslands. The importance of historical factors has been indicated in many studies but evaluation of their added value, or actual site-specific effects compared to observations of only the present landscape characteristics, is not generally provided. As data related to the past is often difficult to obtain, tedious to process and challenging to interpret, assessment of its advantages and related effects – or consequences of potential exclusion – would be needed.In this study, we used maximum entropy approach to model the distribution of Fumewort (Corydalis solida) which in the study area is a good indicator of valuable semi-natural habitats. We constructed three different models – one based on only the contemporary environment with expected indicators of habitat stability, one solely on the historical landscape phases and long-term dynamics, and one combining variables from the past and the present. Predictions of the three models were validated and compared with each other, followed by an analysis indicating the similarity of model results with known Fumewort occurrences. Our results indicate that present landscapes may provide workable surrogates to delineate larger core habitats, but utilization of historical data markedly improves the detection of small outlying patches. These conclusions emphasize the importance of previous landscape phases particularly in detecting marginal semi-natural grassland habitats, existing in contemporarily suboptimal conditions and being prone to disappear if no further actions are taken.

Conflict in West Papua: The contrast between historic and contemporary media coverage in New Zealand

Many New Zealanders, even in politically aware circles, have a limited understanding of West Papua and frequently confuse the Indonesian-controlled territory with its neighbour Papua New Guinea. This reflects the limited mainstream media coverage of the territory and of the ongoing conflict that is taking place there. However, in 1962 and again in 1969, the New Zealand media gave considerable attention to the crises that enveloped West Papua and determined its subsequent destiny. The territory’s Pacific location was often highlighted and the statements of West Papuan leaders were reported. The year 1962 saw escalating Indonesian military intervention in the territory and subsequently the signing of the controversial US-brokered New York Agreement between the Netherlands and Indonesia. In 1969 Indonesia conducted an ‘Act of Free Choice’ which was widely seen by external observers as a fraudulent act of self-determination. This article gives examples of this historic coverage and considers what might be done to bring about change and to bring West Papua back into the frame as a Pacific neighbour.

Evapotranspiration based on equilibrated relative humidity (ETRHEQ): Evaluation over the continental U.S.

AbstractA novel method of estimating evapotranspiration (ET), referred to as the ETRHEQ method, is further developed, validated, and applied across the U.S. from 1961 to 2010. The ETRHEQ method estimates the surface conductance to water vapor transport, which is the key rate‐limiting parameter of typical ET models, by choosing the surface conductance that minimizes the vertical variance of the calculated relative humidity profile averaged over the day. The ETRHEQ method, which was previously tested at five AmeriFlux sites, is modified for use at common weather stations and further validated at 20 AmeriFlux sites that span a wide range of climates and limiting factors. Averaged across all sites, the daily latent heat flux RMSE is ∼26 W·m−2 (or 15%). The method is applied across the U.S. at 305 weather stations and spatially interpolated using ANUSPLIN software. Gridded annual mean ETRHEQ ET estimates are compared with four data sets, including water balance‐derived ET, machine‐learning ET estimates based on FLUXNET data, North American Land Data Assimilation System project phase 2 ET, and a benchmark product that integrates 14 global ET data sets, with RMSEs ranging from 8.7 to 12.5 cm·yr−1. The ETRHEQ method relies only on data measured at weather stations, an estimate of vegetation height derived from land cover maps, and an estimate of soil thermal inertia. These data requirements allow it to have greater spatial coverage than direct measurements, greater historical coverage than satellite methods, significantly less parameter specification than most land surface models, and no requirement for calibration.

The UbuWeb Electronic Music Corpus: An MIR investigation of a historical database

A corpus of historical electronic art music is available online from the UbuWeb art resource site. Though the corpus has some flaws in its historical and cultural coverage (not least of which is an over-abundance of male composers), it provides an interesting test ground for automated electronic music analysis, and one which is available to other researchers for reproducible work. We deploy open source tools for music information retrieval; the code from this project is made freely available under the GNU GPL 3 for others to explore. Key findings include the contrasting performance of single summary statistics for works versus time series models, visualisations of trends over chronological time in audio features, the difficulty of predicting which year a given piece is from, and further illumination of the possibilities and challenges of automated music analysis.

Snow-cover reconstruction methodology for mountainous regions based on historic in situ observations and recent remote sensing data

Abstract. Spatially distributed snow-cover extent can be derived from remote sensing data with good accuracy. However, such data are available for recent decades only, after satellite missions with proper snow detection capabilities were launched. Yet, longer time series of snow-cover area are usually required, e.g., for hydrological model calibration or water availability assessment in the past. We present a methodology to reconstruct historical snow coverage using recently available remote sensing data and long-term point observations of snow depth from existing meteorological stations. The methodology is mainly based on correlations between station records and spatial snow-cover patterns. Additionally, topography and temporal persistence of snow patterns are taken into account. The methodology was applied to the Zerafshan River basin in Central Asia – a very data-sparse region. Reconstructed snow cover was cross validated against independent remote sensing data and shows an accuracy of about 85%. The methodology can be used in mountainous regions to overcome the data gap for earlier decades when the availability of remote sensing snow-cover data was strongly limited.

A water coverage extraction approach to track inundation in the Saskatchewan River Delta, Canada

Tracking surface water coverage changes is a complicated task for many regions of the world. It is, however, essential to monitor the associated biological changes and bioproductivity. We present a methodology to track contemporary water coverage changes using optical remote sensing and use it to estimate historical summer water coverage in a large river delta. We used a geographical information system automated routine, based on the modified normalized difference water index, to extract the surface water coverage area (SWCA) from optical satellite data sets using the surface water extraction coverage area tool (SWECAT). It was applied to measure SWCA during drought and flood peaks in the Saskatchewan River Delta in Canada, from Landsat, SPOT and RapidEye images. Landsat results compared favourably with Canadian National Hydro Network (CNHN) GeoBase data, with deviations between SWCA classifications and the base CNHN GeoBase shapefile of ~2%. Difference levels between the extracted SWCA layer from Landsat and the higher resolution commercial satellites (SPOT and RapidEye) were also less than 2%. SWCA was tightly linked to discharge and level measurements from in-channel gauges (r2 > 0.70). Using the SWCA versus discharge relationship for the gauge with the longest record, we show that peak summer SWCA has declined by half over the last century, from 13% of our study area to 6%, with likely implications for fish and wildlife production.

Landmark legislation, 1774-2012: major U.S. acts and treaties

The Second Edition of this renowned treasure trove of information about the most important laws and treaties enacted by the U.S. Congress now deepens its historical coverage and examines an entire decade of new legislation. Landmark Legislation 1774-2012 includes additional acts and treaties chosen for their historical significance or their precedential importance for later areas of major federal legislative activity in the over 200 years since the convocation of the Continental Congress. Brand new chapters expand coverage to include the last five numbered Congresses (10 years of activity from 2003-2012), which has seen landmark legislation in the areas of health insurance and health care reform; financial regulatory reform; fiscal stimulus and the Temporary Asset Relief Program; federal support for stem cell research; reform of federal financial support for public schools and higher education; and much more.

The Crosstown initiative: art, community, and placemaking in Memphis.

This case study examines an arts organization at the center of an urban neighborhood revitalization effort and its contributions to creative placemaking and inclusive community building. The study documents innovative arts practices and explores their meaning for a local context, an understudied city in the Mid-South region of the United States. It builds on the research team's ongoing work as teachers, students, and scholars in partnership with the arts organization. It includes systematic participant observation, interviews with stakeholders, and a review of historical and contemporary media coverage. We found that the organization and its practices provided a rich context for exploring an expanded sense of community including bridging social capital and place-based frameworks. Analysis suggests that the organization's intentional arts based practices bring multiple understandings of community and art into meaningful dialogue through the generation of creative and social friction. These practices illustrate one context-specific strategy addressing the tensions in a community-diversity dialectic (Townley et al. in Am J Commun Psychol 47:69-85, 2011).