Places You Research Articles

Always Relative to Somewhere: Regional Studies in (Not So) Unique Alaska

Always Relative to Somewhere: Regional Studies in (Not So) Unique Alaska Ross Coen (bio) The issue of historical regionality is a particularly interesting one in the case of Alaska. The state is unique and distinct from all others in a number of respects, and its inhabitants embrace a form of frontier exceptionalism so profound, so provincial that for Alaskans there are really only two places you can ever be: Alaska or Outside (always spelled with a capital O).1 And yet, when it comes to historical scholarship, the central question that occupied the attention of Alaska historians for decades had nothing to do with the perceived uniqueness of the region, but rather its relationship with another. That question was this: Was Alaska part of the American West? That is, did America’s farthest north possession experience the same or similar historical patterns and processes? Historians identified in Alaska large federal land holdings, a small and isolated population of non-indigenous settlers, the removal of Native peoples, a sizeable and valuable natural resource base, and a peripheral geographic position far from the centers of capital and governance—all of which demonstrated the answer was an unequivocal yes. Not for nothing is the state’s motto “The Last Frontier.” And just as study of the American West has been driven in recent decades by the New Western History, so has the Alaska field brought previously marginalized voices to the fore and in so doing has revealed the American settlement of Alaska to be not quite triumphant but rather a process of exclusion, violence, and upheaval. So, yes, Alaska history has a regional essence that is relative to American history more broadly. One might say this relationship is not uncommon in regional historical studies, and that the emerging field of midwestern studies might well benefit from comparative analyses of other regions. [End Page 51] But the field has advanced beyond such binary thinking, and straight comparisons between the Midwest and Region X are unlikely to result in penetrating insights. Historical scholarship in Alaska is changing in two fundamental ways, and I will close this short essay with a few thoughts on each and their potential utility for midwestern studies. The first change, revised perspectives having to do with climate change, is likely to be profound. The effects of a changing global climate, including higher air temperatures, ocean acidification, and rising sea levels, to name but three, are being experienced at northern latitudes to greater degrees than elsewhere. Alaska history, and now we might call this Arctic history as well, faces challenges unique to its geography, such as the thawing of permafrost and corresponding release of methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, not to mention social changes such as infrastructure impacts and relocation of rural, predominately Alaska Native populations. Although these changes are happening in the present, and therefore may seem largely beyond the purview of historians, countless historical topics in the Arctic are connected to the climate and physical environment, thus any changes to present environmental conditions will open new perspectives on humankind’s relationship with nature in the past. To wit, the United States’ insouciance in Arctic affairs, as demonstrated by, for example, a lack of investment in infrastructure such as icebreaking ships and a failure to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty, is part of diplomatic and environmental histories that will be reassessed again and again as the effects of a changing climate become better known a century from now. Will such changes to one degree or another be experienced in the American Midwest insofar as historical study is concerned? The effects may or may not be as immediately dramatic as those in Alaska, but if we consider the agriculture, industry, and transportation sectors of the Midwest as being similarly subject to the vagaries of climate change, there are certain to be resultant effects on the political, economic, and social institutions of the region. I am immediately reminded of the rampant oil development taking place in my home state of North Dakota and how histories of the land, people, and industry will be intertwined with future historians’ perspectives on climate change. The emergence of the Pacific World as a...

Semicolonized Mind

Semicolonized Mind

IOverture is

iOverture is Stuart Moulthrop [In place of introduction, a gathering of places. Appearing in tonight’s show in the role of Writing, the artform otherwise known as Code. Compile and run in Inform 7, www.inform7.com. Props to Lebling and Blank, mages of Zork II. Life is a carousel.] Section – Place of Origin i0verture is a room with description “Code is hyperlinguistic yet still the words come trippily off the tongue, mouthpiece now answering to implicate orders moving through unseen dimensions. The man says poetry makes nothing happen but there is something happening here, or many things and all at once. Dualities and false dichotomies. Recognitions. Page and screen. Shadowplay, collide-o-scope, convergence… conjury. A voice here calls us up from flatland and urges on to other screen events, all those places you can go once you get off the plane. Consult the rose then follow your nose, away!” [but]before going when player is in i0verture: move the player to a random adjacent room; stop the action. [and then]before going when the player is not in i0verture: move the player to i0verture; stop the action.[though of course the action never stops…] Section – The Places You’ll Go INVISIBLE GAME is north of i0verture. “JASON NELSON says the printed page will be poetry, and when you click through to the game, all you have is a white screen with the character/hero/ moving-guy standing on a word in the upper right corner. The idea is the poetry in the printed page is the map for the invisible game.” ALTER EGO WORKSHOP is southwest of i0verture. “JOSEPHINE ANTSTEY invites you to attend a performance lecture that purports to be a scholarly account of human cognition from 2.5M BCE to 3,000 CE, but first you have to workshop your Alter Ego.” [End Page 7] HOUSE OF USEABLE DUST is northeast of i0verture. “NICK MONTFORT offers three systems of expression with remarks and comment. USE OF LIGHT BY THE SEA: SING A LIGHT BY PEOPLE WHO SLEEP. Also other random pages from the Library.” TIME JITTERS SQUARE is southeast of i0verture. “JODY ZELLEN splashes luminosity across a picture plane. Figures move through a mysterious space. Time winks and jitters.” ROSE GARDEN is east of i0verture. “DEENA LARSEN will teach you to sing in Rose, a new language. ‘Against all odds I now find God in its infinite wisdom refuses to exist in my mind.’ Now everybody.” [End Page 8] Copyright © 2016 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

A day in the life

“Look, I just don't think the drawbacks are going to be a big deal. We need to do something, and this sounds good overall; let's just do it”, says Evans. I've just been delivering a report about the feasibility of introducing non-native bass to the Sandy River near Mt Hood in Oregon. Introduction would support some ecosystem functioning and would maintain fisheries income, but would be the final nail in the coffin of the native trout eking out an existence in the Sandy. But Bill Evans didn't want to hear about the drawbacks. He's the current Head of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and he wanted to get something done. I was saddened it had come to this. The Sandy is one of the last places you can find native trout in Oregon, and while designing novel ecosystems and studying their functioning is a big part of my job, I was still hesitant to develop a new community in the Sandy as long as the old one was still hanging on. But I didn't have time to dwell on it. Evans was impatient, but there were still many forms to fill out and bureaucratic requirements to meet before anything changed. And I had a course to get to. My parents met while they were graduate students at the University of Washington. However, by the time I was old enough to go to school for my undergrad, the University had gone under. Bits and pieces of it still remained, taken over and funded by private institutes, but the decreased state funding, increased costs, and unsustainable student loan debt had driven UW, like most other public universities, into non-existence. Rather than going to one of the ultra-expensive private schools, I did what most of my peers did: took some basic classes online, paid for group lessons from former professors, and got involved with citizen-science projects and internships. Now, I've developed enough of a reputation that I get grants from private and government groups to lead scientific projects myself and I also teach new students in a rented lab. But I was running late. “Sorry, everyone”, I called out as I entered the lab. “First, I'd like to discuss the paper we read on how management of in-stream flow regimes can be used to create optimal conditions for novel ecosystems, then I'd like you to develop some simulation models to see how flow can alter various food-web structures, depending on the species present.” I love the teaching component of my work. Students pay just to take my course and they're always engaged with the material. I come out of class feeling tired but hopeful for the future of ecology. After class, it was off to a meeting with Mark. Teaching and doing research don't pay all the bills, so Mark and I also write mobile apps that help other scientists collect the data they need. “My students gave me an idea to create an app that would make it easier to record specific predator–prey observations; how about we brainstorm a way to put it together?” Mark thought it sounded interesting too, so we spent an hour or so coming up with ideas to make an app that would provide accurate and useful data to scientists but would also be easy for those without any scientific training to use. “Hey Mark, before you take off, do you have some time to give me feedback on this talk I'm prepping for tomorrow?” The decrease in government funding of science means that in order to get corporations and individuals to financially support my work, I spend a lot of time doing outreach. I don't enjoy writing grant applications and giving presentations to the higher-ups in corporations so much, but it's actually really fun to share my research with members of the public. They might only give $25–$100 each to fund my research, but I've also recruited students to my classes, citizen-science data collectors, and even collaborators through my public talks. My days are always full and varied like this, but I'm still glad I chose to go into ecology. Previous generations of ecologists might not have been able to stop extinctions, and we're still having to find new ways to deal with the ever-less-stable climate, but I'm excited about new directions of research. Recent studies of engineered diversity – genetic engineering with the goal of increasing diversity – are showing promise, and I'm hoping to work with some of those labs to do field studies to determine how engineered diversity might increase ecosystem functioning. Breakthroughs like these leave me optimistic about the next 50 years of ecological research.

Solar radiation inside greenhouses covered with semitransparent photovoltaic film: first experimental results

The southern Italian regions are characterized by climatic conditions with high values of solar radiation and air temperature. This has allowed the spread of protected structures both as a defense against critical winter conditions both for growing off-season. The major energy source for these greenhouses is given by solar energy and artificial energy is used rarely. So the problem in the use of greenhouses in these areas, if anything, is opposite to that of the northern areas. In these places you must try to mitigate often the solar radiation inside the greenhouses with suitable measures or abandon for a few months the cultivation inside these structures. The solar radiation intercepted by passive means can be used for other purposes through the uptake and transformation by the photovoltaic panels whose use however is problematic due to complete opacity of the cells. New photosensitive materials partially transparent to solar radiation onto flexible media, allow to glimpse the possibility of using them to greenhouses cover, getting the dual effect of partially screen the greenhouse and use the surplus to generate electricity. The research was carried out to evaluate the possibility of using a flexible photovoltaic film realized by the University of Rome Tor Vergata (research group of ECOFLECS project coordinated by prof. Andrea Reale) for covering greenhouses. Two greenhouses in small scale were built: one covered with photovoltaic film and one covered with EVA film for test. In both greenhouses during the first research period it was grown a variety of dwarf tomato. The research was carried out comparing the solar radiation that enters into greenhouse in the summer (August 2012) and in winter conditions (December 2012) in both greenhouses. The result show that the average ratio between the daily global solar radiation under the photovoltaic film and outside radiation is about 37%, while between the radiation under EVA film and outside radiation is equal to approximately 63%. These result allow us to assert that during the hot season the use of photovoltaic film might be useful to mitigate the excesses of solar radiation into the greenhouse. During the cold season the use of this film not allows to achieve the minimum indoor climate conditions for the cultivation, however, it is possible to think to remove it in the periods of low solar radiation because it is a very flexible film.

Solar radiation inside greenhouses covered with semitransparent photovoltaic film: first experimental results

The southern Italian regions are characterized by climatic conditions with high values of solar radiation and air temperature. This has allowed the spread of protected structures both as a defense against critical winter conditions both for growing off-season. The major energy source for these greenhouses is given by solar energy and artificial energy is used rarely. So the problem in the use of greenhouses in these areas, if anything, is opposite to that of the northern areas. In these places you must try to mitigate often the solar radiation inside the greenhouses with suitable measures or abandon for a few months the cultivation inside these structures. The solar radiation intercepted by passive means can be used for other purposes through the uptake and transformation by the photovoltaic panels whose use however is problematic due to complete opacity of the cells. New photosensitive materials partially transparent to solar radiation onto flexible media, allow to glimpse the possibility of using them to greenhouses cover, getting the dual effect of partially screen the greenhouse and use the surplus to generate electricity. The research was carried out to evaluate the possibility of using a flexible photovoltaic film realized by the University of Rome Tor Vergata (research group of ECOFLECS project coordinated by prof. Andrea Reale) for covering greenhouses. Two greenhouses in small scale were built: one covered with photovoltaic film and one covered with EVA film for test. In both greenhouses during the first research period it was grown a variety of dwarf tomato. The research was carried out comparing the solar radiation that enters into greenhouse in the summer (August 2012) and in winter conditions (December 2012) in both greenhouses. The result show that the average ratio between the daily global solar radiation under the photovoltaic film and outside radiation is about 37%, while between the radiation under EVA film and outside radiation is equal to approximately 63%. These result allow us to assert that during the hot season the use of photovoltaic film might be useful to mitigate the excesses of solar radiation into the greenhouse. During the cold season the use of this film not allows to achieve the minimum indoor climate conditions for the cultivation, however, it is possible to think to remove it in the periods of low solar radiation because it is a very flexible film.

Modeling Mitochondrial ROS: A Great Balancing Act

‘‘So be surewhen you step, Step with care and great tact. And remember that life’s A Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft, and never mix up your right foot with your left.’’ —Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go! Random House, 1990. The benefits and risks of a cell’s use of O2 can be a tricky balance. Consumption of O2 by mitochondria greatly enhances the efficiency of aerobic metabolism, allowing generation of 15-fold more ATP than is possible by anaerobic glycolysis alone. Most O2 consumption occurs in the electron transport chain. Under normal conditions, the electron transport chain takes high-energy electrons from NADH or FADH2 to generate a proton concentration gradient and membrane potential gradient between the inner mitochondrial space and the mitochondrial matrix. O2 plays a key role by capturing four low energy electrons coming out of the electron transport chain, forming H2O in the process. The proton gradient is used to power ATP synthase, which harnesses the energy from protons flowing back into the mitochondrial matrix to phosphorylate ADP, yielding ATP. Yet if a highenergy electron leaks from the electron transport chain too early, it may be captured by O2 to form the reactive oxygen species (ROS) known as superoxide (O2� ). Superoxide can be quite damaging because it has an extremely high affinity for electrons, ripping them away from nearby proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids via oxidation. Indeed, ROS species play a key role in a wide range of pathologies suchasatherosclerosis(1),Alzheimer’s disease (2), and cancer (3). Therefore the cell needs to balance the benefits of an efficient aerobic metabolism with the risks of generating toxic ROS. Although the interplay between ATP synthesis and ROS generation has been studied intensively, there have emerged apparent inconsistencies between explanations of the conditions and mechanisms responsible for mitochondrial ROS production from isolated mitochondria and intact cells. As an attempt to resolve these discrepancies, Aon et al. (4) showed that ROS overflow is minimal at intermediate redox states, increasing in either highly reduced/high mitochondrial membrane

Germany jump-starts the supergrid

New developments in high-voltage DC electronics could herald an epic shift in energy delivery. Stuttgart is one of the last places you'd expect to find in a power pinch. This south German city's massive automotive plants run 24-7 without a hiccup, efficiency measures have held industrial power consumption flat, and solar panels flash from atop its major buildings. But now all that is at risk. The country's accelerated shift from nuclear power and fossil fuels to renewable resources, such as wind and solar, has exposed a huge gap in its transmission capacity. If they are to survive, Stuttgart's factories-and power consumers across southern Germany-will need to import a lot more power from the north, and Germany's grid is already at capacity. To fill the gap, Germany is considering an aggressive plan that would push high-voltage direct current, or HVDC, from its conventional position on the periphery of AC grids to a central role. The primary reason is simple: For the first time, HVDC seems cheaper than patching up the AC grid. But Germany's transmission planners also have another motivation: They want to provide as much performance and reliability as they can to an AC grid that's already strained by excess wind power. For that, they're considering implementing power electronics that are capable of doing something that's never before been done on a commercial line: stop DC current in milliseconds flat.

Negotiating Liminal Spaces: Purposeful Pedagogy in Diverse Classrooms

This paper starts with a personal exploration of my life as an African immigrant in North America. I inhabit a liminal space, and this paper explores negotiating life as a person “inbetween” worlds. Notable theories have been put forward concerning liminality (Anzaldúa, 2002, Ledgister, 2001; hooks, 1984). I discuss the origins of liminality and its various permutations with the aim of clarifying what it means to inhabit this space. Liminality represents a powerful vantage point that accords inhabitants, “not just one set of eyes but half a dozen, each of them corresponding to the places you have been…..” (Said, 1988, p. 48). I acknowledge the ability of liminars to analyze circumstances differently, creating alternative ways of knowing and being. My discussion will draw from personal experiences, postcolonial, and feminist theory. In conclusion, I suggest how we can create purposeful pedagogy considering the changing demographic face of our classrooms.

IDENTIFICATION OF LAND COVER IN THE PAST USING INFRARED IMAGES AT PRESENT

Abstract. Czech landscape is an old residential area used by humans since ancient times. People have influenced it since their arrival and various activities in different periods create landscape layers called a palimpsest. Land Cover of one location could have changed several times. The most important reason is meandering and subsequent straightening of rivers, deforestation, relocation and change in soil layers. These changes in the past affected the present management and it is important to identify them. A suitable tool for the determination of different sites is remote sensing in the infrared spectrum, which monitors changes in the vegetation with the support of archival materials. After identifying the different places you can search the archival materials, how the land cover looked in the past. There have been used these archival materials: maps II. and III. military mapping, basic maps and other maps and historical orthophotomap. Czech Republic has a national archive of aerial photographs with aerial photographs from the thirties of the last century maintained by MGHO Dobruska. A comparative analysis of Land Cover shows the increases and decreases in agricultural land, changes in communication line elements, forest losses and increases, comparing the legal and actual status of the forest boundaries and their changes over time, changes in the built areas and links to the surrounding countryside. Land Cover of this study was created primarily with a visual interpretation of each area with their vectorization and assigning attributes to these areas and then comparing each of archival materials.

Creative suburbs? How women, design and technology renew Australian suburbs

Australian suburbs have long been subjected to negative stereotyping – as aesthetic wastelands, politically conservative, socially isolated and environmentally rapacious – as the last places you would expect creativity. A critical engagement with this discourse and an examination of older as well as some newer suburbs unsettles these characterizations. A broad definition of ‘creativity’ directs attention to what was occurring in 20th century Australian suburbs – with a creative domestic economy and modernist architecture providing strong counters to their negative portrayal. Further, as a sample of Melbourne’s contemporary master-planned estates will illustrate, at least some of this city’s houses and neighbourhoods are at the leading edge of architectural innovation, community building and environmental sustainability – creatively developing alternatives to the stereotypical suburb.

Leadership

Back to table of contents Next article Taking IssueFull AccessLeadershipLloyd I. Sederer, M.D.Lloyd I. SedererSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Feb 2012https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.20110p103AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail I have had a lot of jobs, maybe more than most people of even my vintage. In the workplace, as well as in other domains, my basic premise is that leadership is earned. It is not granted by role or rite of passage. Once achieved, leadership is not sustainable without continuous proof of concept: what did you do today, or at least yesterday? In other words, leaders must demonstrate their value in a ceaseless and tireless way. For physicians, in a world dominated by administrators and insurance plans, our leadership may best be rendered through what is called “expert authority”—where a physician's unique and extensive knowledge of diseases and therapeutics, and of human nature, serves as the basis of his or her authority and the platform for leading.Expert authority, like the leadership it seeks to exercise, must be earned. It is earned by having the capacity to know what works medically and why; translating the complex into the comprehensible; speaking clearly and concisely and in language meaningful to others; having the emotional intelligence to understand and respond to the concerns of others, particularly patients and families; and working well in teams and being able “to manage your boss.”Be grateful to those who do good work. Find opportunities to thank them and enable them to shine. Find ways for them to do more. Don't be afraid to push people; they usually need it. When you do, make sure that you let them know you believe in them, and then support them. Don't be afraid to set high standards; no one I know has died of hard work.Measure, measure, measure. Establish metrics that are understandable to your mother. Because when your efforts meet the undying forces of clotted interests, as they surely will, you will need to prove that what you are doing is working. Then despite any criticism that is raining down on your efforts, you can resolutely point to the evidence that what you are doing is working (and kindly acknowledge their concerns).Enjoy the journey. The Spanish have an expression: se hace camino al andar—the road is made by walking it. You will be surprised by where you go and by the places you will discover, in yourself and in the community you call work.New York State Office of Mental Health, Albany, and Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York City FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byAnalysis of the impacts of selling liquid fertilizer on the operation of biomass recycling facilitiesJOURNAL OF RURAL PLANNING ASSOCIATION, Vol. 36, No. Special_Issue Volume 63Issue 2 February 2012Pages 103-103 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 February 2012 Published in print 1 February 2012

Autism On the Web: “Oh, the Places You'll Go!”

In July 2010, entering the term “autism” into the Google search box resulted in more than 19 million hits in 0.21 seconds. Although this is much too general of a search term for such an immense topic, it does provide some measure of the vast amount of information about autism on the World Wide Web (web)...

Continuing professional development – time for a different experience?

When did you last undertake a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) activity that made you laugh until you nearly cried, made you realise you had muscles in places you had forgotten existed, and, most importantly, challenged you to reflect on the very essence of therapy and rehabilitation? If you have not had such experiences for some time, it might be worth contacting your local wheelchair basketball team and booking into a training session.

It May Be the Chance of Your Life

It May Be the Chance of Your Life Ziva Flamhaft (bio) “How could you leave all this?” my daughter asked me as the two of us were walking with her daughter on Tel Aviv’s waterfront esplanade, on a hot, humid afternoon in July 2006. She did not allude to only the sweet scent of the Mediterranean summer, emanating from the vapor of the powder blue transparent sea, and the golden scorching sand under the bluest of skies. Neither was she alluding to only the energy emanating from the beachgoers, protected by rows of orderly placed umbrellas in persimmon orange, hunter green, or ultramarine blue, depending on the section in which the bathers sat, the beachfront cafés, the hip shops, and restaurants. Nor was she referring to just the neighborhood and home where I grew up—our visit there with her toddler daughter being the highlight of her trip—or the old and new sections of Tel Aviv, designated in 2003 by UNESCO (United Nations Education, Cultural and Scientific Organization) as one of the world’s heritage sights—and the history and art museums, the theatres and concert halls, all telling the story of a vibrant society and a rich culture. For among the most precious things that I left behind when I decided to leave my country some thirty-seven years earlier were the friendships and the deep love and warmth that are revealed to me by family and friends whenever I visit my place of birth, regardless of how often I do so. “Life can take you to places you had not planned to be in, and force upon you decisions you never thought you would have to make,” I answered my daughter, hoping that I had experienced my share of life’s uncertainties for her and her children too. I always hope that. My American-born daughter has been in my hometown often. But it was her first visit as a mother, and she was proud to introduce her then [End Page 82] one-and-a-half-year-old to my family and friends, whom I had left behind and who bestowed on my daughter and her child no lesser affection than they have on me. Something must have happened, I thought with alarm nearly four decades earlier, as I walked to the subway station on Lexington Avenue and Fifty-first Street, two days after my arrival in New York City in the autumn of 1969, or else why are so many people running in the same direction, looking as if they are in a frenzy? It was my first encounter with Manhattan on a Friday afternoon. I was on my way back to Brooklyn, after a short visit to the office where I would work for the following three and a half years. The tumult, I soon learned, was only the usual rush before the start of a weekend. That morning I joined my cousins’ tenant on a commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so that I could learn my daily route while staying with my relatives. “Remember, do not make eye contact with anyone on the train,” my cousins’ thin, pale, frightened-looking neighbor warned me seriously. Lucky to find a seat on the packed subway during the morning rush hour, and taking the warning seriously, I was sitting motionless, scared to look at any commuter. But I could hardly avoid the big, tall man standing in front of the passenger on my left, holding a half-opened newspaper in one hand, covering the front of the middle of his body; his other hand hidden underneath the paper. Curious but unsuspicious, I bent down to look under the newspaper, for the man was clearly not reading it. “look what he is doing!” I yelled in my fresh foreign accent when I saw the man masturbating. To my amazement, no one reacted, not even after the man ran out when the train stopped at the next station. Surely, where I came from only two days earlier, such an episode would have stirred a huge commotion. “Are you insane?” the neighbor who escorted me asked when we got off the train, paler than he was usually. “You...

Per non escluderlo. Appunti per un metodo che tenga conto di come le persone sentono lo spazio

- All too often architects and urban planners design and plan without taking account of how people will live and what they will experience in the places they create. The paper reports the experience of the course entitled ‘Analysis of urban space' in 2008-2009. The students and lecturers kept a diary based on ideas offered by artists, actors, directors and so on of the way in which they felt and sensed space: the space of listening, of contact and that of dreams. The work that emerged was very rich. It traced an unexpected and very interesting map of Milan and of the places in which they live: sadistic places, some praised by architecture journals; however, also attractive places, generally given little consideration. This experience is taken as an example of a method for assessing places and giving useful information to those called upon to plan and design them. It requires mutual trust and confidence in the capacities of one's body as a guide to assess the places you are in. Shared knowledge is created from the most personal experiences: right next to you, but generally inaccessible because not considered sufficiently cultured and academic.

Black Places

Black Placesi Clarissa Rile Hayward (bio) Several years ago, I interviewed a thirty-five year old Columbus, Ohio man, who self-identified as "African-American."ii His racial identity, this man told me, is "embedded in [his] mind." "[Race] was installed in my mind as a child," he explained. "You know, there's certain places you don't go. There's certain people you don't socialize with." He characterized the neighborhood in which he grew up as, "an all-black neighborhood." He said the school he attended was "an all-black school." He identified by name what he referred to as the "white" neighborhoods that were near to his own: neighborhoods he said he had been taught at an early age to avoid. If my interview respondent's racial identity is "embedded in his mind," these and similar comments suggest, this is the case in significant part because he learned race through place. The starting-point for the present essay is the claim—Bourdieuian, at base—that constructed social identities, when they are institutionalized in material form, are reproduced especially efficiently, because extra-discursively.iii When identities are (to borrow a word from Bourdieu's lexicon) "objectified"—when they are translated, that is, from discursive forms, such as identity-narratives, into objects, or into things—then competent social actors master them practically. They learn them and they re-learn them, less by mastering the meanings from which they have been constructed, than through a kind of "know-how" that supplements deliberate, conscious learning. To be sure, at times, as my respondent's comments suggest, people are expressly informed of identitarian conventions: "This is your place. That is not, because you are a member of this race and not that." But such explicit lessons are inherently vulnerable. They invite difficult questions. "What is a black person?" for example. "What is it that makes me black, and how do you know?" "What is a white place, and how is it that a place becomes white?" When, by contrast, identities are written in material form, they acquire a facticity that renders them lived reality. If race is embedded in our minds, if race is installed in our minds when we are children, this is not simply because we are told, "There's certain places you don't go." It is because we come to know—as a matter of fact, as a matter of practical knowledge—that "there's certain places you don't go. There's certain people you don't socialize with." Learning to function as competent actors in racialized space means learning the common sense of racial practice. In what follows, my principal question is, "How was racial ‘common sense' built into the American urban and suburban fabric?" My principal claim is that, over the course of the twentieth century, racial identity and difference were, quite literally, objectified in the physical spaces of the American metropolis. Discourses of race as a significant and an enduring form of human difference were lent material form—and hence resilience—by the construction of the black ghetto and the racially exclusive (white) residential development (section one). The channeling of public and private investment away from black ghettos and toward white suburbs layered material inequalities atop identitarian distinctions, helping produce and reproduce, not just racial identities, but also racial interests (section two). At the same time, the concentration in "black places" of housing problems, of joblessness, poverty, and a host of social ills that accompany concentrated poverty, transformed what were, in a causal sense, collective problems into, in both practical effect and popular consciousness, "black problems" (section three). 1. Racial Stories, Racialized Places That twenty-first century Americans like my interview respondent (cited above) experience particular sections of particular cities as "black places" was made possible by the construction, starting in the early decades of the twentieth century, of the black American ghetto. Black ghettos did not exist in Columbus, Ohio—indeed, they did not exist in almost any American city—at the turn of the twentieth century. In Columbus, 1890 census data show that, although just over half of those residents who were identified as "black" lived in three of the city...

When the moon blows

Planning on building a moon base? There are some places you should definitely avoid, warns Marcus Chown

Special Reviews Section: Urban exploration as archaeological engagement: a review of http://infiltration. org/ -- `the zine about places you're not supposed to go': `Take only photos, leave only footprints' (Motto of infiltration.org)

Special Reviews Section: Urban exploration as archaeological engagement: a review of http://infiltration. org/ -- `the zine about places you're not supposed to go': `Take only photos, leave only footprints' (Motto of infiltration.org)

Remembrance of places you passed: Social spatial working memory in rats.

Pairs of rats were tested in a radial-arm maze to determine whether the spatial choices made by one rat affect the subsequent spatial choices of the other rat. In a free-choice procedure, rats showed an increased tendency to choose the location that had most recently been chosen by a foraging partner but a decreased tendency to visit locations that the foraging partner had visited earlier. Forced-choice procedures were used to better control the social stimulus and the interactions between the rats. Under some conditions, locations were chosen later in the choice sequence of a subject rat if another rat had been observed choosing that location. Odor and other physical traces of the other rat's visits were ruled out as explanations for this effect. The results demonstrate the existence of working memory for locations visited by a familiar conspecific.