Immense Distances Research Articles

Turkestan’s Place in the Russian Empire

Abstract This article examines Turkestan’s position in the tsarist empire to argue that it was a distinctly colonial territory, directly comparable to the overseas colonies of other contemporary empires and less like other older parts of the Russian empire. This article locates Turkestan’s coloniality not in formal structures, but in its immense distance — moral, political and legal — from the metropolis and the imperial authorities’ use of Islam as a marker of immutable difference.

The impact of COVID-19 on patients with neurological disorders and their access to healthcare in Africa: A review of the literature.

IntroductionThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic has hampered the progress of neurological healthcare services for patients across Africa. Before the pandemic, access to these services was already limited due to elevated treatment costs among uninsured individuals, shortage of medicines, equipment, and qualified personnel, immense distance between residing areas and neurological facilities, and a limited understanding of neurological diseases and their presentation by both the health workers and the African population.MethodologyThe databases PubMed, Google Scholar, Science Direct, and the National Library of Medicine were searched for literature. All articles on neurological disorders in Africa were considered.AimThis review article explores the challenges of providing the best services for patients suffering from neurological disorders in Africa amid the COVID‐19 pandemic and provides evidence‐based recommendations.ResultsAs Africa's governments made more resources available to support patients affected by COVID‐19, neurological care received less priority and the capacity and competency to treat patients with neurological disorders thus suffered substantially. Both short‐term and long‐term strategies are needed to improve the quality of neurological services after the pandemic in the region.ConclusionTo strengthen Africa's neurological services capability during and after the COVID‐19 pandemic, African governments must ensure appropriate healthcare resource allocation, perform neurology management training, and increase health security measures in medication supply. Long‐term strategies include incorporating responsible finance and resource procurement and advancement of tele‐neurology. International collaboration is essential to promote the sustainable improvement of neurological services in Africa.

Navigation and star identification for an interstellar mission

The possibility of interstellar scientific missions, even if only to explore the local Interstellar Medium (ISM), has received increased consideration in recent years. Due to the immense distances involved, an interstellar spacecraft must be capable of autonomous navigation. Many autonomous navigation strategies exist, but nearly all of these depend in some way on star observations and an ability to match these observations to a catalog of known stars. This is generally accomplished by computing and matching a star pattern descriptor that is invariant to changes in the spacecraft attitude. Unlike missions within the Solar System, an interstellar spacecraft will require a catalog that treats stars as 3D points rather than directions. This is problematic, since it has long been known that view invariants do not exist for sets of 3D points—making the classical method (or any modifications thereof) completely ineffectual for star identification in interstellar space. Moreover, other effects for a spacecraft traveling at relativistic speeds – such as stellar aberration and the relativistic Doppler effect – can negatively affect star identification, navigation observability, and sensor design. These challenges of star identification during interstellar flight are discussed and some possible solutions are suggested. Numerical examples are provided for a variety of motivating mission concepts.

Review of Richardson's "Nietzsche's Values"

This article examines John Richardson’s Nietzsche’s Values. Richardson’s book is systematic in the very best sense. He patiently works through the apparently contrary claims that Nietzsche makes about each topic pertaining to values. In each chapter, Richardson shows that these apparently contrary claims are not only reconcilable, but are interlocking: they support one another, constituting an impressively unified analysis of the human condition. By the end of the book, Richardson produces a comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche’s thought on values, will to power, life, consciousness, agency, freedom, culture, and religion. While the book is impressive, I critique Richardson’s treatment of four points. Section One argues that the form of internalism that Richardson attributes to Nietzsche is somewhat underspecified. Section Two asks whether Richardson’s version of internalism can account for the immense distance between what we do value and what we should value. There, I also raise some questions Richardson’s interpretation of will to power. Section Three suggests that Richardson’s reading of Nietzsche’s ethics is much closer to constitutivism than he acknowledges, and that fully endorsing constitutivism would resolve some of the problems that Richardson’s account otherwise faces. Section Four argues that Richardson’s distinction between animal drives and socially induced drives is problematic.

Directed Panspermia, Wild Animal Suffering, and the Ethics of World‐Creation

ABSTRACTDirected panspermia is the deliberate seeding of lifeless planets with microbes, in the hopes that, over evolutionary timescales, they will give rise to a complex self‐sustaining biosphere on the target planet. Due to the immense distances and timescales involved, human beings are unlikely ever to see the fruits of their labours. Such missions must therefore be justified by appeal to values independent of human wellbeing. In this article, I investigate the values that a directed panspermia mission might promote. Paying special attention to the outcome in which sentient animals evolve, I argue that we have strong reasons to believe the value of a mission would be negative. Research on wild animal suffering has shown that there is a huge amount of suffering among wild animals on Earth. I argue that there are structural features of evolution by natural selection which explain the prevalence of suffering on Earth and make it predictable that suffering would prevail on the target planet too. Finally, using insights from procreative ethics I argue on non‐consequentialist grounds that creators have duties to their sentient creations which cannot be met in directed panspermia missions.

Trends, regional inequalities and determinants in the utilization of prenatal care and skilled birth attendant in Ethiopia: A multilevel analysis

BackgroundEthiopia has made a substantial reduction in maternal mortality over the last two decades. However, maternal health care utilization among 15–49 aged women remains low despite this progress. The study aimed to examine trends, regional inequalities, and potential determinants associated with prenatal care utilization and a skilled birth attendant from 2000 to 2016 in Ethiopia. MethodsNationally representative data extracted from the 2000 to 2016 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Surveys (EDHS), conducted every five years among 15–49 age women in Ethiopia. We used multilevel logistic analysis incorporating the demographic, socioeconomic, and health variables that are independently associated with prenatal care (PNC) and skilled birth attendant (SBA) use. ResultsThe prevalence of prenatal care utilization was relatively stagnant between 2000 and 2011 but showed an overall increase nationwide from 26.7% to 62.4% between 2000 and 2016 (p-value < 0.001). The prevalence of skilled birth assistance increased only by 16.5% in the past fifteen years, from 5.6% in 2000 to 22.1% in 2016. Rural type of residence, lower maternal education, lower household wealth index, lower partner's education, an immense distance of getting medical help were steadily significantly associated with prenatal health care use and skilled birth attendants. Further, male household heads, younger age women, and no covered health insurance were associated with lower odds of skilled birth attendant use. ConclusionsThough overall prenatal care and skilled birth attendant use prevalence have improved nationally, the regional disparity is uneven. Therefore, to sustain the progress equals more attention is needed for Afar, Somali, and Oromia regions to increase maternal health care services utilization in Ethiopia.

Preface

The 19th Annual International Astrophysics Conference (AIAC) was held at the beautiful La Posada de Santa Fe Hotel, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA from March 9 to 13, 2020. This year’s meeting was exceptionally challenging, coming immediately prior to the onset and shutdown of the U.S. in response to the then rapidly developing COVID-19 outbreak. Of course, our Asian, Oceania, African, and European friends and colleagues were already either in or about to enter their own shutdowns. In addition, organizations such as NASA and various universities imposed their own travel restrictions just before the start of the meeting. Faced with the chaos and absence of any meaningful public health advice at the time, we made the difficult decision to go forward with the meeting in a truncated form and at the last minute managed to introduce conference meeting technology Zoom to aid us with those speakers who could not physically be there. I would like to thank conference organizer Adele Corona of ICNS, her assistant Kathy Tolbert, and the entire staff at the La Posada for their immense and untiring efforts in making the meeting the success that it was. Their acute ability to adapt to these last-minute changes, and their efforts to ensure as safe an environment as possible for all our attendees was crucial. Little did we know that this worldwide crisis was simply a foretaste of much, much worse to come. Therefore, and not surprisingly, we have pushed the 20th AIAC meeting well back into Fall of 2021 and we sincerely hope that the world will have recovered some degree of normalcy that will allow us to return to social activities of the past!The theme of the 19th AIAC was “From the Sun’s Atmosphere to the Edge of the Galaxy: A Story of Connections” and had a format of 25-minute presentations punctuated by selected 40-minute invited talks that explored various themes in greater detail.The oldest and the newest heliospheric space missions are distinguished by being the farthest and closest human-made objects ever to the Sun. Plunging into the depths of the atmosphere of the Sun, the Parker Solar Probe, launched in August 12, 2018, had completed the first three closest encounter passes to the Sun, edging closer and closer with each orbit, at the time of the meeting. The venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, entered the very local interstellar medium on 25 August 2012 and at ∼141 astronomical units from the Sun is now further from the Earth than any other human-made object. Voyager 2, following suit, likewise entered the interstellar medium on 5 November 2018. It is astonishing that, since the start of the space age in October 1957, humankind is now reaching for the stars and reaching into a star itself. Despite the immense distance separating the Voyager spacecraft from the Sun, the Sun’s influence is still felt in the immensely cold distant very local interstellar medium. This conference addressed the connected story of how the Sun and interstellar medium collectively shape their environment.

The Golden Age and the Reversal of the Myth of Good Government in Plato’s Statesman. A Lesson on the Use of Models

We would be wrong to state that Plato’s approach to the Golden Age in the Statesman occurs through nostalgia, even if he stresses the immense distance between our world and that blessed time. After evoking the shepherd-god as a ruler, Plato shows that the completely abandoned disposition of the ruled is only justifiable in presence of an unbridgeable chasm between the two, such as that between gods and men, or men and beasts. The real question in the Statesman is how to single out the peculiar form of knowledge possessed by the few men that are truly capable to rule.

Island Fictions, Intellectual Fictions: Dramas of Pacific Isolation in Stevenson, Wells, and Conrad

“Consider the Island,” Deryck Scarr invites us in his history of the Pacific: “the idea of the island.”1 That idea, which Westerners brought to and imposed upon the insular Pacific, is of serious antiquity, in existence well before Magellan’s entry to it in 1521. “Those of us involved in Pacific studies,” Kerry Howe writes,2 “have been too impressed with the apparent novelty of the eighteenth-century Pacific dream island. But that Tahitian mirage was at the end of a very long imaginative tradition, one that long predated the Enlightenment, and even the Renaissance. Indeed it goes back to the very beginnings of Western civilization”—in Greek myth, Plato’s Atlantis, the Bible, and stories like the supremely imaginative “The Shipwrecked Sailor” from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Rousseauesque dream and mirage faded rapidly enough in Western thought after first contact with Tahiti in the 1760s, as stories of Polynesian infanticide and homosexuality were eagerly circulated by the fourth estate in an atmosphere of religious revival in late eighteenth-century England. (John Hawkesworth’s editorial compendium of 1773, An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the order of his present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, was an important early revelation in that process.) But a myth inverted need lose little of its power and influence. That which was once utopian became dystopian, and the noble savage became ignoble, but the precedent myth of island isolation, augmented as it had been by accounts of Magellan’s travels by Antonio Pigafetta and others, accompanied and intensified almost every aspect of the West’s imaginative involvement with the “South Sea.” It does so still, though indigenous writers and historians have long since cast doubt upon it. The most important revisionary intervention in that respect is probably Epeli Hau’ofa’s essay, “Our Sea of Islands,” which does a good deal of myth-inversion of its own as regards Western views (political, economic, and cultural) of the islands of the Pacific as “tiny, confined spaces” at immense distances from both each other and the cosmopolitan epicentres of the First World. The peoples of Oceania, Hau’ofa argued, “did not conceive of their world in such microscopic proportions”:

On A Hypothetical Mechanism of Interstellar Life Transfer Trough Nomadic Objects

Lethal radiation, low vacuum pressure and low temperatures – this is how space welcomes organisms. Crossing of immense interstellar distances inflates the exposure time of biological material to harmful space conditions. This paper discusses the intriguing possibility of a life-bearing exoplanet being ejected from its planetary system and carrying life across interstellar distances (nomadic = free floating = rogue planet). The proposed interstellar panspermia mechanism reduces the exposure time to space conditions and provides multiple chances for interactions between microbes-bearing rock debris and exoplanets within system the nomadic object encountered on its way. The testing strategy is outlined and discussed in the paper, including testable predictions the proposed hypothesis makes.

To Sin No More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683–1830

To Sin No More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683–1830

“Sunday is the Hardest Day to Bear”: Absence and Anxiety of Soldiers’ Mothers during the Great War

ABSTRACTDuring times of war, the immense distance between Australia and the battlefront caused mothers of soldiers to feel a pervasive sense of helplessness. To endure a son’s absence, many mothers attempted to manage their emotional vulnerability and anxiety by keeping their hands busy, writing continual correspondence or sending comfort packages to the front. While historical literature regarding the experiences of Australian women during the First World War has been extensive, these studies have tended to focus on wives and war widows, usually depicting mothers through their sacrificial and caregiving roles. This article seeks to broaden the current literature relating to the experiences of the soldier’s mother during the First World War and investigate the ways in which they distracted themselves from the absence of their sons. To do this, this study uses an empirical historiographical approach to create a wider understanding of the impact that war had on the home front. In doing so, it becomes clear that, although mothers’ experiences of the war were all unique, their sacrifices and struggles united them.

The Humean Way to China: Beyond the Stereotype

David Hume seems to receive several stereotypes and commonplace sentiments about China regarding its religion, national character, government, practices and economy, that he goes on to dismantle. Doing so, he allows the eighteenth-century reader to look at China from a different perspective. This perspective can still be useful especially today, when the “immense distance” between China and Europe has been reduced and, as Hume would say, almost everything we use is Chinese. In the name of an ambivalent European tradition, we are often inclined to revive these commonplace sentiments (for example, the uniformity of Chinese character) and neglect that part of our own tradition that tries to understand what is behind them and that also offers us the tools to go beyond them. This study endeavors to assemble an array of Hume’s scattered remarks, consider them in their context, and explore their possible sources in order to obtain not only a more Humean China, but also a more Chinese Hume.

Nasal CPAP on paediatric air transport in the Canadian Arctic: A case series.

Paediatric transport in remote regions of Canada represents a huge challenge given the acuity of the patients, immense distances, weather and lack of road infrastructure. Transport of patients in the Baffin region of Nunavut is completed entirely by air transport. Two very common paediatric transports are in regards to lower respiratory tract infections and premature deliveries in small rural communities north of Iqaluit. Recently, the advent of noninvasive ventilation has been introduced to the region. We report five cases of long-distance air transport of paediatric patients in respiratory distress using nasal continuous positive airway pressure (nCPAP). Two cases involve lower respiratory tract infections, and three cases involve neonates (two premature infants and one term infant). Overall, these cases highlight effective and safe use of noninvasive ventilation in air transport of patients in respiratory distress and demonstrate how this modality can improve patient transport in rural and remote regions.

The First French Settlement in Texas

Abstract The initial European incursions in the American continent were marked by tenuous and sometimes provocative cultural exchanges, relentless uncertainty and confusion, muddled nostalgia, horrific violence, and immense distances. The recent discovery of the shipwreck The Belle in Matagorda Bay has reinvigorated scholarly interest in the French colony founded by René-Robert Cavelier (Sieur de La Salle) in Texas in the late seventeenth century. The company's attempt to bring European culture and life to the Americas was colored by local customs, class distinctions, long stints of boredom, vengeance, and murder; there were also several important social transitions, including that of men and women who abandoned European life altogether, conflicting in-group etiquettes among the French (including mutiny), and the looming complications of a return home. This article examines the diary of Henri Joutel, one of the members of the La Salle company who survived the ordeal and returned to France. It focuses on how the company affiliates balanced harsh labor and constant uncertainty with home-rituals involving food consumption and religious ceremony, and measured interactions (including military alliances) with Native Americans, which became enormously important to their subsistence.

Nursing Education in Rural Environments

Nursing education in rural areas brings about both challenges and rewards. Immense distances between students, clinical sites, and resources often require faculty to teach over videoconference and internet mediums. Additionally, clinical site assignments extend beyond the traditional hospital units. Rural teaching in distance programs takes motivated faculty who are willing to approach challenges using innovative techniques and exceptional communication skills. Approaches to bridge the education gaps while teaching over videoconference are possible; however, they do require abstract thinking, preparation, learning, and motivation to adapt from the traditional synchronous classroom structure. Similarly, faculty must look beyond the common hospital placements for clinical sites when in the rural environment. Patients can be found in their natural and sometimes unconventional settings. Baccalaureate nursing students can receive an exceptional learning experience in a rural environment; however, this does require significant skills and innovation for instructors who wish to take on the challenge.

Overview of laser-driven generation of electron–positron beams

Electron–positron (e–p) plasmas are widely thought to be emitted, in the form of ultra-relativistic winds or collimated jets, by some of the most energetic or powerful objects in the Universe, such as black-holes, pulsars, and quasars. These phenomena represent an unmatched astrophysical laboratory to test physics at its limit and, given their immense distance from Earth (some even farther than several billion light years), they also provide a unique window on the very early stages of our Universe. However, due to such gigantic distances, their properties are only inferred from the indirect interpretation of their radiative signatures and from matching numerical models: their generation mechanism and dynamics still pose complicated enigmas to the scientific community. Small-scale reproductions in the laboratory would represent a fundamental step towards a deeper understanding of this exotic state of matter. Here we present recent experimental results concerning the laser-driven production of ultra-relativistic e–p beams. In particular, we focus on the possibility of generating beams that present charge neutrality and that allow for collective effects in their dynamics, necessary ingredients for the testing pair-plasma physics in the laboratory. A brief discussion of the analytical and numerical modelling of the dynamics of these plasmas is also presented in order to provide a summary of the novel plasma physics that can be accessed with these objects. Finally, general considerations on the scalability of laboratory plasmas up to astrophysical scenarios are given.

Classical Rabbinic Literature and the Making of Jewish Ethics

Classical Rabbinic Literature and the Making of Jewish Ethics

Flaubert's Proposition

Flaubert's Proposition Claire Chi-ah Lyu Flaubert's "La légende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier" presents a conundrum: how are the readers of 21st-century post-modernity to approach a text of 19th-century modernity, which tells a hagiographic legend of the Middle Ages? The difficulty stems from the immense distance that separates the medieval hagiographic genre from Flaubert's modern style. Hagiography's principal purpose was to renew and deepen faith and incite readers to live a Christian life by producing an affective response, considered to be the first step in the process of conversion. It sought "the complete conversion of intelligence into feeling (affectus) and action (opus)" as Robertson writes (Saints' Lives 14). In the eleventh and twelfth centuries when "adult conversion [was] of essence to all religious movements," saints' lives "serve[d] as recruitment propaganda" for the church, which was "actively reaching out to the laity" (13). More than anything, saints' lives were to be imitated.1 Through the injunction to follow in the footsteps of saints, hagiography brought the readers to the original model one was to imitate: the passion of Christ. Telling and reading a hagiographic tale amounted to accompanying Jesus through his birth, death, and resurrection through empathetic participation. Saints' lives guided the readers in their life-long journey of conversion toward God, which, as Morrison informs us, referred less to a single dramatic event and more to a perpetually renewed process of transforming "the entire direction of human existence itself from a movement toward the grave into a transit toward endless life" (xii). In the Christian tradition, "the idea of continuous conversion intersected with that of God's continual creation of the world" (xv). Hagiography pointed to a life rightly lived as created beings of God: reading led to believing and to believing in God. [End Page 41] This is not quite the case with Flaubert in the 19th century. In Madame Bovary, reading and believing (in God) are inflected otherwise, to say the least, than in traditional hagiography. For Emma, believing in the love stories she reads leads her nowhere and even contributes directly to her own disastrous demise: believing in what one reads has fatal, not salutary, consequences. For we readers of the novel, Flaubert's signature style—free indirect discourse and irony—denies us any possibility of relying on a providential point of view; we are uncertain whom to believe in, or whether to believe at all in what we read. The relationship between reading and believing unravels from within and without. Moreover, although acquitted, Flaubert was taken to court for outrage to religion and public morality for the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857, accused, among other things, of glorifying adultery and devaluing the institution of marriage sanctified by the Church.2 Even though it appeared twenty years after Madame Bovary, the publication in 1877 of "La légende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier" as part of his Trois contes cannot fail to surprise. For in a genre that seems radically contrary to his, Flaubert re-opens issues that he seemed to have dismissed as non-issues, because deflated and emptied of meaning, in Madame Bovary: imitation, conversion, and edification. If the edifying "happy" ending of Flaubert's legend follows the genre of traditional hagiography, it is profoundly and puzzlingly at odds with the ironic tenor of Flaubert's fictional universe. Flaubert in fact has written on two other saints: Saint Anthony in La Tentation de saint Antoine of 1874, and Saint John the Baptist in the third and last tale "Hérodias" of Trois contes. On June 19, 1876, Flaubert writes to Edma Roger des Genettes: "je trouve que, si je continue, j'aurai ma place parmi les Lumières de l'Eglise. Je serai une des colonnes du temple. Après saint Antoine, saint Julien; et ensuite saint Jean-Baptiste; je ne sors pas des saints. Pour celui-là je m'arrangerai de façon à ne pas édifier" (Correspondance 5: 58, original emphasis). He informs with delight Léonie Brainne on August 23, 1877: "les Trois contes de 'ce bon M. Flaubert' sont recommendés sur le catalogue d'une librairie catholique, comme pouvant circuler...

Assessment of a Solar System Walk

The idea of sending students and the general public on a walk through a scale model of the solar system in an attempt to instill an appreciation of the relative scales of the sizes of the objects compared to the immense distances between them is certainly not new. A good number of such models exist, including one on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., starting at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum.1 A pioneering model and inspiration for our own is on the campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder,2 and there are others.3 Those at science museums are often used by the general public and field-trip groups, while the ones on college campuses are also used by students of introductory astronomy.