Spatial Paradox Research Articles

‘Solving’ the Paradox of the Odyssean Ethiopians’ Twin Dual Localization

Abstract This paper considers the narrative significance of localization in Homer’s Odyssey, in particular singular places that are associated with multiple spaces (identified here as dual localization). Our reading posits that spatial features hold narrative significance and, once uncovered, this resolves ‘problematic’ issues that may arise from spatial paradoxes. The chosen case study is the Odyssean land of the Ethiopians with its twin dual localization: (1) it is located simultaneously at the eastern and western peripheries of the world while also located singularly ‘with Poseidon’; and (2) this peripheral localization contrasts with a later ‘real world’ setting in Egypt/North Africa. While this people’s localization has been the subject of prior study, this paper presents a novel analysis: these localizations serve a characterizing function which, in turn, relates to the thematic function of Menelaus’ embedded narrative as foreshadowing the primary narrative of Odysseus’ nostos.

Using outlier elimination to assess learning-based correspondence matching methods

Recently, deep learning (DL) technology has been widely used in correspondence matching. The learning-based models are usually trained on benign image pairs with partial overlaps. Since DL model is usually data-dependent, non-overlapping images may be used as poison samples to fool the model and produce false registrations. In this study, we propose an outlier elimination-based assessment method (OEAM) to assess the registrations of learning-based correspondence matching method on partially overlapping and non-overlapping images. OEAM first eliminates outliers based on spatial paradox. Then OEAM implements registration assessment in two streams using the obtained core correspondence set. If the cardinality of the core set is sufficiently small, the input registration is assessed as a low-quality registration. Otherwise, it is assessed to be of high quality, and OEAM improves its registration performance using the core set. OEAM is a post-processing technique imposed on learning-based method. The comparison experiments are implemented on outdoor (YFCC100M) and indoor (SUN3D) datasets using four deep learning-based methods. The experimental results on registrations of partially overlapping images show that OEAM can reliably infer low-quality registrations and improve performance on high-quality registrations. The experiments on registrations of non-overlapping images demonstrate that learning-based methods are vulnerable to poisoning attacks launched by non-overlapping images, and OEAM is robust against poisoning attacks crafted by non-overlapping images.

Articulating relational rurality amidst urbanization: Agency, spatial paradox and the de/reterritorialization of lineage landscapes in contemporary rural China

AbstractThis paper seeks to offer a nuanced understanding of how the rural responds to and speaks back to the urban in the context of increasingly blurred rural‐urban landscapes. The prevailing theorizations remain entrenched in an intellectual impasse that still treats the rural as a residual space or a reactive actor besieged by external urban forces. Using lineage spaces as an empirical lens, this paper delves into rural geographies of lineage landscapes in post‐reform China by articulating rural agencies in more active, non‐lineal ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural Wenzhou, southeast China, this paper argues that the articulation of rural voices amidst China's urban modernity unveils a spatial paradox of landscape de/reterritorialization at the dimensions of discourse, practice and (trans)locality. We first reveal how official rural discourses de‐territorialize and lessen lineage groups' control over their symbolic buildings while simultaneously opening up opportunities for them to mobilize officially‐sanctioned discourses to expand lineage spaces and reterritorialize their power. Second, we show how villagers embrace the de‐territorializing practice of landscape commodification, which becomes a crucial source of finance for them to perform ritual activities at specific festivals, thereby re‐asserting rural collectivism, sociality and sacredness. Third, we unpack the trans‐local dimension of rural de/reterritorialization by exploring how villagers forge lineage‐based rural networking that transcends space‐time, which paradoxically reinforces the spatial claim for territorializing rural power that is demarcated from urban/modern orientations. We further argue that these multiple spatial processes of rural de/reterritorialization challenge a reactive or neatly‐divided account of rural agency during its engagement with urbanizing relations and processes. In all, this paper offers a more complex, paradoxical account of relational rurality in a rapidly urbanizing China, and foregrounds an agenda towards more ‘inclusive’ rural studies.

Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China

Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China

A multi-scale approach to simulate atomisation processes

Most interfacial flows of practical interest typically involve length- and time-scales that span over several orders of magnitude. Their accurate modelling, using interface-capturing or interface-tracking methods, therefore presents a prohibitively large computational cost. Over the past few years, hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian approaches have been proposed with the aim to predict the behaviour of such flows both efficiently and accurately. These approaches rely on the assumption that small detached interfacial structures are spherical due to the dominant influence of surface tension, therefore allowing for their modelling using classical Lagrangian particle tracking techniques. The dynamics of large interfacial structures are thus fully resolved on the Eulerian grid, whereas the smaller interfacial structures, resulting from breakup instances, are transferred to a Lagrangian frame of reference and tracked as point-particles. In doing so, a main issue arises due to the competing requirements of both the Eulerian and Lagrangian approaches: on one hand, interfacial structures modelled with the Eulerian approach should be resolved by at least a few mesh cells; and on the other hand, Lagrangian particle tracking classically requires the tracked particles to be much smaller than the Eulerian mesh cells. Interfacial structures that lie between these two limits – typically shortly before and/or after their transfer from one framework to the other – are therefore poorly represented by any of the two approaches. So-far, a successful strategy to deal with this spatial paradox has not been proposed.To address this issue, a hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian approach relying on an enhanced Lagrangian particle tracking method is proposed in this paper. Through the derivation of the filtered flow equations for a gas-droplets mixture, it is shown that the filtering of relevant quantities allows for the consistent tracking of Lagrangian particles that are of a similar size as, or larger than the Eulerian mesh cells. Numerical simulations of a particle settling under the influence of gravity are conducted to demonstrate the ability of the framework to accurately and consistently deal with Lagrangian particles that are larger than the Eulerian mesh cells. Finally, the full hybrid framework is tested on a realistic spray atomisation case, and the impact of the proposed filtering on the dynamics and the statistics of the spray is investigated.

Parasites, ghosts and mutualists: a relational geography of microbes for global health

Scientific research on the microbiome offers an ecological model of the human, comprised of myriad forms of microbial life. The composition and dynamics of this human microbiome are increasingly implicated in discussions of health. Attention has focused on missing microbes and their links to a range of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Pathological dysbiosis is understood to result from both the excessive presence and the absence of microbes. Microbial declines have been indexed to modern hygiene and healthcare practices and there is a growing interest in the therapeutic use of beneficial microbes. This reappraisal of the salutary potential of microbes challenges the negative associations prevalent in health geography and the field of global health. This paper develops relational and multispecies approaches to health geography to examine situations of microbial excess, absence and controlled reintroduction. The analysis focuses on human relations with hookworms. Hookworms are animal members of the microbiome. They co‐evolved with humans, live in us and are understood to manage the human microbiome to enable immunological tolerance. Both the excessive presence and the absence of hookworms can be pathological. They are currently the subjects of concurrent, but spatially discrete, programmes to deworm and reworm a variegated world. Focusing on this seeming spatial paradox, the analysis examines three types of human–hookworm relation: the parasite, the ghost and the mutualist. The conclusion reflects on the implications of this analysis for the human and nonhuman subjects of global health and the microbiopolitics of prevalent forms of antibiotic and probiotic healthcare.

Universe, Incarnation and Humanity: Theology of Thomas Torrance and Modern Cosmology

In this paper we give a philosophical analysis of the spatial paradox of incarnation in theology of the famous XXth century Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance. The paradox is interpreted in the context of modern cosmology, in particular in relation to a basic cosmological principle of uniformity of space in the universe. As a step beyond Torrance’s theology the paper analyses the paradox of the incarnation for the elucidation of the sense of the human condition and, in particular, the concept of person as the center of disclosure and manifestation of the universe.

Owner occupation: at home in a spatial, financial paradox

The normalisation of home ownership is well-rehearsed, yet ongoing. In a bid to free up the intellectual, political and practical imagination around owner occupation, this paper confronts its absurdity. By way of four ‘thought experiments’, the text interrogates: a spatial paradox enabling housing services to deliver investment returns; a financial paradox enacted to wrest the rabbit of fiscal well-being from the hat of indivisible assets; some uncanny qualities infusing the security of home ownership; and the ill-fated anticipation that leveraged ownership might conjure something out of nothing where welfare needs arise. Having reviewed some limits to tenure-divided, ownership-centred housing systems, the paper concludes with a practical and ethical reflection on the future.

Spatial Politics and Paradox in the Borderlands of East Sea Rim

Spatial Politics and Paradox in the Borderlands of East Sea Rim

Syndecan and integrin interactomes: large complexes in small spaces

The syndecan family of transmembrane proteoglycans cooperate with integrins to regulate both early and late events in adhesion formation. The heparan sulphate chains substituted on to the syndecan ectodomains are capable of engaging ligands over great distance, while the protein core spans the plasma membrane and initiates cytoplasmic signals through a short cytoplasmic tail. These properties create a spatial paradox. The volume of the heparan sulphate chains greatly exceeds that of the integrins with which it cooperates, while the short cytodomain must bind to multiple cytoplasmic factors, despite being long enough to bind only one or two. In this review we consider the structural rearrangements that a cell undertakes to overcome spatial restrictions and compare the interactomes of syndecans and integrins to gain insight into the composition of adhesions and how they are regulated over time.

Spatial paradox: educational and social in/exclusion at St Giles

This paper draws on case study data from a study of independent schools in Scotland, to examine school space as a site of mediation of educational dis/advantage and in/exclusion. A threefold and scalar conceptualisation of space is used together with social capital theory to analyse staff and student identifications with relations within and beyond school space. The analysis indicates the existence of specific territorial bonding and prevailing spatio-temporal boundaries, both of which produce educational advantage of benefit to students and the institution but can also, for some, lead to alienation and frustration. The conclusion reached is that strong in-school bonding is central to the reproduction of educational advantage, but that possibilities exist for its interruption which may offer key messages for schools more generally. The approach to analysis is discourse-based and draws on spatial and social and multiple capitals theory.

Scales of care and responsibility: debating the surgically globalised body

This paper initiates debate for geographers on the nature of care in relation to the self explored through the practices of aesthetic surgery. Central to debates on the meanings and relations of aesthetic surgery are a set of problematics related to the scales of care and responsibility. These are captured in the distinctions between caring for or caring about and between self-care or care of the self. Aesthetic surgery is a particularly ambivalent ‘extreme care’, which for many is always the expression of consent to an aesthetic hegemony or the exercise of disciplinary power. The paper draws out some of the spatial paradoxes involved in care related to the self in aesthetic surgery and proposes some routes forward. The framework of landscapes of care that enhances a temporal dimension and the concept of reworking the social relations of hegemony may help mediate the inherent tensions of scales of care and responsibility. Specifically, this combination may offer a way to allow for a limited, or bounded, care of the self without negating the networks of power within which the practices of self-care are enacted.

Traveling Bax and Forth from Mitochondria to Control Apoptosis

Antiapoptotic Bcl-2 proteins on mitochondria inhibit prodeath proteins, such as Bax, which are found primarily in the cytosol. In this issue, Edlich et al., (2011) show that Bax and Bcl-xL interact on the mitochondrial surface and then retrotranslocate to the cytosol, effectively preventing Bax-induced permeabilization of mitochondria.

Nitrogen driving force and pressure relationships at contrasting scales: Implications for catchment management

The major objective of this study was to compile and examine empirical relationships between the driving forces and pressures that affect nitrogen cycling. Special attention was paid to riverine loads, fluxes, and concentrations of nitrogen in relation to agricultural factors (e.g., land use and fertilisers) at various spatial scales (plot, field, catchment, river basin, nation, region, continent, and world). Results of the present analyses and assessments reported in the literature indicate that at global, continental and inter‐river basin scales, the level of riverine nitrogen loads (pressures) can be readily derived from simple empirical relationships with driving forces like population density and agricultural factors (e.g., proportion of arable land and fertiliser use). It seems that statistically derived relationships do not hold or are much weaker at the scales of single river basins and smaller catchments, whereas nitrogen losses appear to be correlated with fertiliser use at the smallest scales (plot and field). It is important to recognise this spatial nutrient paradox, particularly when such functional relationships are applied in the contexts of management and decision making. The implications for management are given further consideration in this paper.

Paradoxes, Protests and the Mujeres de Negro of Northern Mexico

On November 25, 2002, thousands of people marched through the streets of Mexico City and demanded, in the name of social justice, an end to the violence against women in northern Mexico. ‘Ni Una Más’ (not one more) was their chant and is also the name of their social justice campaign. Their words referred to the hundreds of women and girls who have died violent and brutal deaths in northern Mexico and to the several hundred more who have disappeared over the last ten years. These Ni Una Más marchers, many working with human rights and feminist organizations in Mexico, are protesting against the political disregard and lack of accountability, at all levels of government, in relation to this surging violence against women. And the symbolic leaders of their movement are the Mujeres de Negro (women wearing black), who are based in Chihuahua City. In this article, I examine how the Mujeres de Negro demonstrate how feminist politics so often plays upon the negotiation of spatial paradoxes in order to open new arenas for women's political agency. For while the Mujeres de Negro of northern Mexico are galvanizing an international human rights movement that is challenging political elites, they are also reinforcing many of the traditional prohibitions against women's access to politics and the public sphere. And I explore how the Mujeres de Negro devise a spatial strategy for navigating this paradox in an increasingly dangerous political environment.

γ-Secretase Exists on the Plasma Membrane as an Intact Complex That Accepts Substrates and Effects Intramembrane Cleavage*

Research on Alzheimer's disease led to the identification of a novel proteolytic mechanism in all metazoans, the presenilin/gamma-secretase complex. This unique intramembrane-cleaving aspartyl protease is required for the normal processing of Notch, Jagged, beta-amyloid precursor protein (APP), E-cadherin, and many other receptor-like proteins. We recently provided indirect evidence of gamma-secretase activity at the cell surface in HeLa cells following inhibition of receptor-mediated endocytosis. Here, we directly identify and isolate gamma-secretase as an intact complex (Presenilin, Nicastrin, Aph-1, and Pen-2) from the plasma membrane, both in overexpressing cell lines and endogenously. Inhibition of its proteolytic activity allowed cell surface gamma-secretase to be captured in association with its plasma membrane-localized APP substrates (C83 and C99). Moreover, non-denaturing isolation of the intact enzyme complex revealed that cell surface gamma-secretase can specifically generate amyloid beta-protein from an APP substrate and similarly cleave a Notch substrate. These data directly establish the proteolytic function of gamma-secretase on the plasma membrane, independent of a hypothesized substrate trafficking role. We conclude that presenilin/gamma-secretase exists as a mature complex at the cell surface, where it interacts with and can cleave its substrates, consistent with an essential function in processing many adhesion molecules and receptors required for cell-cell interaction or intercellular signaling.

Quality of Place and the Rescaling of Urban Governance: The Case of Toronto

Globalization is best described as a complex process embodying conditions of instant communication and the rapid movement of people, goods, and ideas. Aligned with this process is a reorganization of state and society that some geographers have referred to as “rescaling”—a reconfiguration of the spatial scales at which governance occurs. The emerging landscapes of a rescaled global economy reveal not a diminishing role for the local, but rather the resurgence of place—cities—as deterritorialized centres of global control. The prominence of these command and control nodes within a global post-industrial economy is increasingly being linked to discourses of economic efficiency. Using the case of Toronto, Canada, the authors interpret changing governance structures as evidence of a rescaling process that has seen resources and responsibilities move in opposite directions, to the detriment of the quality of place in the city. Rhetorical calls for global competitiveness have led to a withering of the state’s role in providing the context for the emergence of locally enriched social and cultural environments. The case of Toronto reveals a spatial paradox where changes in governance aimed at enhancing global competitiveness have actually diminished the local qualities cities depend upon to sustain such advantage. None the less, economic competitiveness and quality of place need not necessarily work in opposition, and we advance a general planning framework to balance these desires.

Base Station Fears

This article discusses a central paradox behind mobile geography – mobile phones are ubiquitous and bodily intimate technologies, yet the public seems particularly fearful of any spatial proximity to mobile phone masts. Such fears are generally understood in terms of ‘risk perception’, an irrational consequence of media hype, faulty cognitive processing, or communication failure. This merely psychologises what is a deeply spatial paradox. Tbe routine ‘nomadic intimacy’ of mobile phone use establishes place as a mere backdrop to being always ‘on-call’, too absorbed In the ‘busy-ness’ of everyday life to notice what is close at hand. In contrast, what we term ‘place intimacy’ becomes evident when public protest over the unwanted intrusion of phone masts helps refashion familiar places as meaningful, safe and worth protecting.

The role of the endosomal/lysosomal system in amyloid-beta production and the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's disease: reexamining the spatial paradox from a lysosomal perspective.

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease is the cerebral deposition of plaques composed of a 37-43 amino acid amyloid-beta (Abeta) peptide. Abeta is produced by the sequential proteolytic cleavage of an integral-membrane protein, amyloid beta-protein precursor (AbetaPP), first by beta-secretase (BACE), and then by gamma-secretase, a complex containing presenilin and Nicastrin. Although these cleavages were originally documented to occur in the endosomal/ lysosomal system, other lines of evidence suggest that the responsible proteins and activity reside in the ER or Golgi. This lack of intracellular co-localization of enzyme and substrate has been referred to as the spatial paradox of Alzheimer's disease. Here we will review the biology of the lysosome and the literature supporting the endosomal/ lysosomal production of Abeta. We will also examine some of the data supporting Abeta production in the biosynthetic compartments and demonstrate its compatibility with an endosomal/ lysosomal model. Finally, we will discuss the possible role of the acidic environment of the lysosome in the amyloidogenic process, and review the evidence for intracellular amyloidogenesis preceding amyloid plaque formation.

Hospice and the Spatial Paradoxes of Terminal Care

The purpose of my paper is to offer an understanding of home hospice from a perspective of political geography. Informed by critical political theories of care, and recent work on the geographies of public and private spheres, I explore one set of consequences of the spatial shift towards home death in metropolitan Seattle, Washington. Terminal hospice care done in the home creates an especially paradoxical home space. By blurring public–private boundaries, hospice care produces a political geography of home interpretable through four spatial paradoxes: a normative paradox of home being a good and bad place to die, a territorial paradox of control itself changing the home, a constitutive paradox between heart and welfare politics, and a relational paradox between autonomy and dependency. The implications for political and health geography, as well as political theory and hospice work itself are discussed as a consequence of recognizing these spatial paradoxes.