Historical Process Research Articles

New Developments in the Theory of Historical Process: Polish Contribution to Non-Marxian Historical Materialism, edited by Krzysztof Brzechczyn

New Developments in the Theory of Historical Process: Polish Contribution to Non-Marxian Historical Materialism, edited by Krzysztof Brzechczyn

Critical re-evaluation of the identification of iron deficiency states and effective iron repletion strategies in patients with chronic heart failure.

According to current guidelines, iron deficiency is defined by a serum ferritin level <100 ng/ml or a transferrin saturation (TSAT) <20% if the serum ferritin level is 100-299 μg/L. These criteria were developed to encourage the use of intravenous iron as an adjunct to erythropoiesis-stimulating agents in the treatment of renal anaemia. However, in patients with heart failure, these criteria are not supported by any pathophysiological or clinical evidence that they identify an absolute or functional iron deficiency state. A low baseline TSAT-but not serum ferritin level-appears to be a reliable indicator of the effect of intravenous iron to reduce major heart failure events. In randomized controlled trials, intravenous iron decreased the risk of cardiovascular death or total heart failure hospitalization in patients with a TSAT <20% (risk ratio 0.67 [0.49-0.92]) but not in patients with a TSAT ≥20% (risk ratio 0.99 [0.74-1.30]), with the magnitude of the risk reduction being proportional to the severity of hypoferraemia. Patients who were enrolled in clinical trials solely because they had a serum ferritin level <100 μg/L showed no significant benefit on heart failure outcomes, and it is noteworthy that serum ferritin levels of 20-300 μg/L lie entirely within the range of normal values for healthy adults. Current guidelines reflect the eligibility criteria of clinical trials, which inadvertently adopted unvalidated criteria to define iron deficiency. Reliance on these guidelines would lead to the treatment of many patients who are not iron deficient (serum ferritin level <100 μg/L but normal TSAT) and ignores the possibility of iron deficiency in patients with a low TSAT but with serum ferritin level of >300 μg/L. Importantly, analyses of benefit based on trial eligibility-driven guidelines substantially underestimate the magnitude of heart-failure-event risk reduction with intravenous iron in patients who are truly iron deficient. Based on all available data, we recommend a new mechanism-based and trial-tested approach that reflects the totality of evidence more faithfully than the historical process adopted by clinical investigators and by the guidelines. Until additional evidence is forthcoming, an iron deficiency state in patients with heart failure should be defined by a TSAT <20% (as long as the serum ferritin level is <400 μg/L), and furthermore, the use of a serum ferritin level <100 μg/L alone as a diagnostic criterion should be discarded.

Disappearance, emergence, and appearance: garbage and the politics of placemaking in Cartagena, Colombia

ABSTRACT This paper examines the politics of placemaking in an expanding self-built settlement in the city of Cartagena, Colombia, under everyday conditions of disposability and waste toxicity. Based on 11 months of ethnographic research, the paper introduces the triptych of disappearance, emergence, and appearance to categorize residents’ everyday garbage-based practices. The paper argues that these three forms of garbage-based practices are racialized and forged through historical processes of urban displacement, shifting socio-political backgrounds, and legacies of violence. This paper highlights the intimate links between the material and social production of Black placemaking and embodied experiences of toxicities in Cartagena. It draws attention to the multiple ways in which Afro-Colombian residents endure and contest cumulative processes of embodied experiences of waste exposure through politics of placemaking. Garbage socio-material entanglements allow for the acknowledgement of the relationality of space, materials, people, and politics, which are constitutive of contentious relational politics of placemaking. As residents in urban contexts contend with ever-evolving waste challenges, this paper proposes novel ways of reading the inherent plurality of relational politics of placemaking, which can foreshadow alternative urban environmental futures.

Finding Wang Tonghui: The life and after‐life of a pioneer female Chinese anthropologist

AbstractOur article recovers the obscured intellectual trajectories and contributions of Wang Tonghui (1912–1935AD), a pioneering female Chinese anthropologist, introducing her story for the first time to the Anglophone anthropological audience. By tracing her life, death, and after‐life, we critically examined how Wang's image as an ambitious and talented anthropologist was gradually erased and replaced by that of a supportive wife and a muse of a prominent male scholar. This shift highlights the challenges faced by female scholars within the entanglement of anthropology and China's political process since the early 20th century. Through interrogating the gendered power dynamics in the historical process of knowledge production in anthropology, we further seek to better understand our own condition as female anthropologists from the perspective of a non‐Anglophone context.

Advertisement call variation is related to environmental and geographic distances in two anuran species inhabiting highland forests in northeastern Brazil

AbstractHighlands are of paramount importance to the study of evolution as they are frequently implicated in historical and ecological processes that generate and maintain biological diversity. In northeastern Brazil, sparse rainforest remnants located in highlands north of the São Francisco River are surrounded by the dry and open landscape of the Caatinga biome. Earlier studies suggested that these forests were historical refuges to the rainforest fauna and flora during Pleistocene's climatic cycles. However, it is still unclear whether populations in distinct highlands experienced phenotypic differentiation as a result of adaptation to environmental conditions of each forest remnant. Herein, we used two frog species widely distributed and ecologically different, Dendropsophus oliveirai, a habitat specialist, and Physalaemus cuvieri, a habitat generalist, to investigate the relationships between environmental variation, geographic, genetic, and body size distance with advertisement call variation among populations inhabiting different highlands. Our results indicated that acoustic variation among P. cuvieri populations is strongly influenced by environmental variation, but also by the geographic distance among populations. In D. oliveirai, environment is also the most influent factor on acoustic variation, followed by a lower influence of genetic and morphological variation. Associations between environmental and geographic factors suggest indirect effects of geographic distance on acoustic variation in both species through an environmental gradient. We believe that selective processes and isolation by distance possibly act together in driving interpopulational acoustic variation with habitat‐specific species being more affected by geographic isolation in suitable habitats.Abstract in Portuguese is available with online material.

Policy Recommendations and Key Takeaway Points

Blue Papers was set up to connect academic and practical analysis of water, culture, heritage and sustainable development and provide concepts, methodologies and case studies to guide policymakers in developing value-based decisions and strategies. The first five issues of the journal brought together over 130 authors from academia, practice, private sector, major public institutions and NGOs. Their insights from multiple sectors and scientific fields – including policymaking, governance, water management, biology, urban planning, heritage and history – shed light on global and local dynamics, challenges and approaches to contemporary urgencies in the water sector and their impact on space, society and culture. The 85 articles so far published in Blue Papers have explored examples from 31 countries, highlighting positive and negative aspects of governance, historical processes and socio-cultural practices related to water.

Unified framework for multi-sensor distributed fusion with memory configuration

This paper investigates the multi-sensor distributed fusion with memory configuration for multi-target automatic tracking (MTAT) in clutter. Aimed at fully addressing the problems of both track origin ambiguity and the strong-correlation among system track and its paired local tracks in the framework, this paper derives an Exact Unified Multisensory Tracks Fusion with Memory (EU-MTFwM) method that fuses the system track with enumerated combinatorial tracks to achieve fusing all sensors' local tracks at once. It deploys track-to-track probabilistic association (T2TPA) and target-existence based track automatic management (TAM) to mitigate track origin ambiguity caused by clutter disturbance and the presence of multiple targets. Additionally, it implements the exact distributed kinematic state estimation (exact DKSE) to remove strong correlation stemming from common historical measurements and process noise. However, as the number of sensors to be fused increases, the proposed EU-MTFwM suffers from the combinatorial explosion. An Implementable Unified Multisensory Tracks Fusion with Memory (IU-MTFwM) method is then derived to sequentially fuse the system track with origin-ambiguous local tracks from multiple sensors one-by-one, providing a unified but computationally efficient alternative to the EU-MTFwM. Furthermore, a novel system track initialization technology is proposed to trigger the multisensory tracks fusion recursion. Numerical results show the proposed two unified methods achieve comparable tracking performance to the centralized fusion benchmark but with significantly reduced communication consumption, and demonstrate intensive improvement over the enhanced state-of-the-art that incorporates our proposed system track initialization into its fusion recursion.

Permanent areas and changes in forests, grasslands, and wetlands in the North European Plain since the eighteenth century—a case study of the Kościan Plain in Poland

This study investigates the intricate and enduring interplay of historical events, human activities, and natural processes shaping the landscape of North European Plain in western Poland over 230 years. Topographic maps serve as reliable historical data sources to quantify changes in forest, grassland, and wetland areas, scrutinizing their fragmentation and persistence. The primary objectives are to identify the permanent areas of the landscape and propose a universal cartographic visualization method for effectively mapping these changes. Using topographic maps and historical data, this research quantifies land cover changes, especially in forest, grassland, and wetland areas. With the help of retrogressive method we process raster historical data into vector-based information. Over time, wetlands experienced a substantial reduction, particularly in 1960–1982, attributed to both land reclamation and environmental factors. Grassland areas fluctuated, influenced by wetland and drier habitat dynamics. Fragmentation in grassland areas poses biodiversity and ecosystem health concerns, whereas forested areas showed limited fluctuations, with wetland forests nearly disappearing. These findings highlight wetland ecosystems’ sensitivity to human impacts and emphasize the need to balance conservation and sustainable development to preserve ecological integrity. This study advances landscape dynamics understanding, providing insights into historical, demographic, economic, and environmental transformations. It underscores the imperative for sustainable land management and conservation efforts to mitigate human impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity in the North European Plain.

One Health approach to Coxiella burnetii in Brazilian indigenous communities

Indigenous health has posted complex challenges worldwide, particularly due to historical economic, territorial, social and environmental processes, which may lead to emergence and reemergence of pathogens. In addition to few Coxiella burnetii serosurveys in vulnerable populations, especially in developing tropical countries, no comprehensive One Health approach has focused on human-animal infection along with potential environmental determinants. Accordingly, this study aimed to assess the seroprevalence of anti-C. burnetii antibodies in indigenous populations and their dogs from 10 indigenous communities distributed in southern and southeastern Brazil, along with the correspondent healthcare professionals. In overall, 8/893 (0.90%; 95% CI 0.45–1.76) indigenous and 1/406 (0.25%) dog samples were seropositive, with 7/343 (2.04%) individuals the 1/144 (0.69%) dog from the Ocoy community, located in the city of São Miguel do Iguaçu, bordering Argentina at south, and far 10 km at west from Paraguay. All 84 healthcare professionals tested seronegative.

Between forests and coasts: Fishworkers on the move in India

AbstractThe Covid‐19 lockdown in India in March 2020 revealed the presence of Adivasi communities in the marine fishing industry of Goa, a coastal state in India. While the migration for work of Adivasi communities from the central regions of the country is well recorded, their movement across geographies of the forest and the coast is relatively unknown. Working with initial data collected during the lockdown, interviews conducted after the pandemic and using secondary materials, the paper sought to understand the social and material conditions in the forest and the coastal regions that shape this movement. Centring the waged relation of Adivasi workers opened the door to thinking about the marine fishing sector in India as a capitalist industry, while paying attention to social reproduction highlighted how the coastal and forest regions are spatially linked through their movement and labour. This highlights that the coasts and forests are going through distinct processes of capitalist intensification and expansion. Making connections between ecological appropriation, historical processes of resource extraction and marginalization, the paper finds that the extraction of fish resources in Goa is made productive through the hierarchization and differentiation of Adivasi workers. It reveals how the social relations of identity and caste mediate access to and define conditions of work at sea.

Dynamic Gastrointestinal Digestion of Bovine, Caprine and Ovine Milk Reconstituted from Commercial Whole Milk Powders.

The global dairy market has been increasingly diversified with more dairy product offerings of milk products from different animal species. Meanwhile, milk powders remain the main exported dairy product format due to their ease of transportation. In this work, we studied the structural changes, protein hydrolysis and nutrient delivery during dynamic gastric digestion and small intestinal digestion of cow, goat and sheep milk reconstituted from commercial whole milk powders. The results show that the reconstituted milks digest similarly to processed fresh milk. The digestion behaviors of the three reconstituted ruminant milks are broadly similar (gastric coagulation, kinetics of gastric emptying of protein and fat and the high digestibility in the small intestine) with some differences, which are likely contributed by the processing history of the milk powders. The delivery of individual amino acids to the small intestine differed between the early and late stages of gastric digestion, which were primarily affected by the abundance of amino acids in caseins and whey proteins but also by the difference between milk types associated with their gastric coagulation behaviors. This work showed that powdered milk is similar to fresh processed milk in digestion behavior, and the inherent differences between ruminant milks can be modified by processing treatments.

Probing sediment burial age, provenance and geomorphic processes in dryland dunes and lake shorelines using portable luminescence data.

Luminescence signals from portable optically-stimulated luminescence readers (POSL or port-OSL) can provide expedient insights into sample relative age, and under certain conditions can be simplistically calibrated against existing luminescence chronologies to provide first-order estimates of burial age. This is most straightforward in simple sedimentary systems where samples share a common provenance and geomorphic process history. The spatially extensive southern African dune and palaeolake shoreline luminescence database, for which hundreds of non-light exposed bulk sediments are available, offers a valuable test case to examine the conditions under which POSL-bulk sediment calibration approaches are feasible. To do this we combine measurements of inherent luminescence sensitivity of bulk sediment (BSS) with analysis of sedimentary composition (petrology and presence of calcium carbonate) and texture. We show that BSS, along with POSL IRSL:BSL ratios and petrological data, account for region-to-region variations, whilst internal variability (scatter) within the lake shorelines dataset relates to variations in BSS and sediment texture. At the scale of southern African subcontinent drylands, we see that provenance and geomorphological process history influence sample mineralogical composition and POSL signal characteristic, including BSS.

EL VAPOR COMO SOLUCIÓN AL DRENAJE DE LAS MINAS DE ALMADÉN

A historical improvement process was realized through the traditional drainage methods used in the Almadén mines, such as the use of the hand winch or the winch systems that used human and animal power, until the application of the first steam engine in 1785. The steam engine solution significantly improved the mine drainage process, despite the inconveniences caused by the technological transfer of steam, the lack of technical knowledge, and inadequate materials or consumables. The solution to the problem was provided by using electricity in the following periods. Although the steam engine was used at a lower performance due to the indicated inadequacies, the drainage process was operated and production was increased in the Almadén mines.

The ethnic aspect of the Yuan Empire’s liquidation

This paper examines the importance of Chinese ethnicity through the example of the historically first dynasty named the Yuan Dynasty, where the rulers were nomadic conquerors and not of Han descent. The aim of the paper is to explore the ethnic aspect of the process of liquidating the Yuan Empire and the importance of the unity of the Chinese people. The methodology of the paper includes the use of different resources, including chronicles, historical research and sources showing the realities not only from the Chinese side, but also from the Mongol side. This approach makes it possible to consider the issue from both sides and obtain more objective conclusions. The results show that the importance of the unity of the Chinese people became evident as early as the Han era, when the concept of "Han man" became politically significant. For the first time, cultural attributes were no longer the only factor uniting people, and nationality became crucial to the unity of the state. The scope of the work includes the study of Chinese history, ethnic relations and nationality issues. The novelty of the work lies in the use of different sources and consideration of the issue from different angles, which allows for a more complete picture of historical process. The conclusions of the paper emphasise the importance of nationality as a sign for state unity and show that national problems can become a factor that can weaken and destroy even the most powerful states.

Rapid identification of flood-prone settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin in Turkey

Territories and settlements in low plains are at risk of flooding. Therefore, determining the areas at risk of flooding before preparing city plans or country development plans is essential. The number of hydrological models is increasing day by day; on the other hand, the solution of these models requires too many parameters. Long-term measurements are required to perform flood analysis with these models. However, in some regions, data from previous years may not always be available. Therefore, a method that enables the determination of flood-prone areas in a short time based on historical records is proposed in the current study. In the current study, the Eastern Mediterranean basin has an area of 21,682 km2 was examined. Using geographic information system (GIS) and the current population information (growth trend) as well as evaluating the historical process and archival records, 157 flood-prone settlement areas were identified. Different flood scenarios were examined and settlement areas that needed to be further examined by modeling were digitized. We aimed to create a base for basin-based flood modeling and to provide information about flood-prone areas to local administrators for national and local plans.

Taxonomic and functional diversity of zooxanthellate corals and hydrocorals in Southwestern Atlantic reefs

Taxonomic and functional diversity of zooxanthellate corals and hydrocorals in Southwestern Atlantic reefs

Physical education and positivism: some considerations in this scenario

In the historic process of breaking with the aristocracy and the clergy, giving way to the republic, industrialization and the bourgeoisie, Comtean positivism arose with the intention of legitimizing this new social structure, subordinating imagination to observation. In different movements in Physical Education, the presence of positivism is legitimized. The aim of this theoretical essay is to bring up some considerations about the marks of positivist thinking in Physical Education. Physical Education has undergone several transformations, but the biologicist, technicist and experimental character remains part of its essence, whether in professional practice or in research. Through the courses of this social practice, we see the "tool-body" inside and outside the school, the result of restricted perceptions of its possibilities, being the object of political manipulation equated in history. From its inception to its scientific flights, Physical Education emanates the consecrated vestiges of positivism, neglecting its reactive possibilities for understanding the humanized body.

Importance of pressing temperature on protein enrichment by electrostatic separation of rapeseed press cakes

Electrostatic separation presents a promising method to concentrate protein from rapeseed. Previous research, with focus on meals neglected, the impact of de-oiling methods on the separation process and protein functionality. Therefore, this study describes the impact of processing history on the electrostatic protein enrichment from rapeseed press cakes pressed at varying temperatures on separation efficiency and hydration properties. A defatted meal was used as control. Pressing temperatures ranging from 60 to 130 °C resulted in varied oil removal, with most removal at 80 °C, yielding final oil and protein contents of 20 and 24 g/100 g dry matter, respectively. Subsequent milling and electrostatic separation produced protein fractions with protein enrichment levels of 17 %–30 % compared to the initial press cakes. Recovery of these fractions was influenced by residual oil content and heat-induced structural changes. The press cake with the least oil demonstrated protein yields comparable to rapeseed meal, recovering 0.4 g protein/g press cake protein. Hydration properties revealed that protein solubility was improved by protein enrichment. No significant effect on water holding capacity was noted due to protein enrichment. These findings demonstrate a promising approach for producing protein-rich ingredients from rapeseed press cakes using tribo-electrostatic separation.

Points of Incompatibility Between the Turkish Education System and Human Resources Management

This study aims to explain the reasons for the difficulties in the implementation of Human Resources Management (HRM) in the Turkish education system by revealing the incompatibilities between them. A literature review and document analysis on official statistics, laws, and newspapers were conducted. First, we reviewed the implementation of HRM functions in Turkey. After that, we tried to reveal its basic features by examining the factors that led to the emergence of HRM in the historical process and the new forms it took over time. In addition, we examined the effects of neoliberal policies on the working conditions of teachers in public and private schools. We discussed the working conditions of teachers in public and private schools in Turkey separately. As a result of the review, we argue that acting in line with the efficiency/success target and the contradictions between Industrial Relations and HRM are among the main reasons for the incompatibility between the education system and HRM in Turkey.

Food-Oral Processing: Current Progress, Future Directions, and Challenges.

Oral processing refers to the series of physical, chemical, and biological processes inside the oral cavity when we consume food. This process affects the taste, quality, and nutrient absorption of the body. In the human diet, oral processing plays a crucial role because it impacts not only the food flavor and texture but also the absorption and utilization of nutrients. With the progress of science and technology and the increasing demand for food, the study of oral processing has become increasingly important. This paper reviews the history and definition of oral processing, its current state of research, and its applications in food science and technology, focusing on personalized taste customization, protein structure modification, food intake and nutrition, and bionic devices. It also analyzes the impact of oral processing on different types of food products and explores its potential in the food industry and science research.