Detailed Tracing Research Articles

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature. Rebecca Davis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. ix+272.

<i><i>Piers Plowman</i> and the Books of Nature</i>. Rebecca Davis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. ix+272.

Problem Structuring Methods, 1950s-1989: An Atlas of the Journal Literature

Scholars of Problem Structuring Methods (PSMs) have yet to develop an articulated history of their field. This paper paves the way toward such a history. It maps the theoretical development of four PSMs up to 1989, that is, just prior to the publication of the first edition of Rational Analysis for a Problematic World. A networked bibliography of journal articles is offered, from which are extracted various types of subnetworks as well as associated statistics. Taken together, the networks and accompanying data compose a bibliographic atlas that facilitates multiple views of the literature, ranging from high-level panoramas to detailed tracings of the development of the literature through time. The atlas serves as a foundation from which future research may not only extend historical understanding, but also expand the temporal and contentual coverage of the atlas itself. Ten ways of tackling the literature are presented, culminating in initial reading lists for each of the four PSMs, thus providing orientation for those who wish to enter the territory. The paper is accompanied by an electronic supplement to the atlas that provides additional maps and descriptive statistics.

Sources and processes affecting the distribution of dissolved Nd isotopes and concentrations in the West Pacific

In the Atlantic, where deep circulation is vigorous, the dissolved neodymium (Nd) isotopic composition (expressed as ɛNd) is largely controlled by water mass mixing. In contrast, the factors influencing the ɛNd distribution in the Pacific, marked by sluggish circulation, is not clear yet. Indication for regional overprints in the Pacific is given based on its bordering volcanic islands. Our study aims to clarify the impact and relative importance of different Nd sources (rivers, volcanic islands), vertical (bio)geochemical processes and lateral water mass transport in controlling dissolved ɛNd and Nd concentration ([Nd]) distributions in the West Pacific between South Korea and Fiji. We find indication for unradiogenic continental input from South Korean and Chinese rivers to the East China Sea. In the tropical West Pacific, volcanic islands supply Nd to surface and subsurface waters and modify their ɛNd to radiogenic values of up to +0.7. These radiogenic signatures allow detailed tracing of currents flowing to the east and differentiation from westward currents with open ocean Pacific ɛNd composition in the complex tropical Pacific zonal current system. Modified radiogenic ɛNd of West Pacific intermediate to bottom waters upstream or within our section also indicates non-conservative behavior of ɛNd due to boundary exchange at volcanic island margins, submarine ridges, and with hydrothermal particles. Only subsurface to deep waters (3000 m) in the open Northwest Pacific show conservative behavior of ɛNd. In contrast, we find a striking correlation of extremely low (down to 2.77 pmol/kg Nd) and laterally constant [Nd] with the high-salinity North and South Pacific Tropical Water, indicating lateral transport of preformed [Nd] from the North and South Pacific subtropical gyres into the study area. This observation also explains the previously observed low subsurface [Nd] in the tropical West Pacific. Similarly, Western South Pacific Central Water, Antarctic Intermediate Water, and Lower Circumpolar Deep Water in the southern and equatorial West Pacific are marked by vertically and laterally almost invariant [Nd] indicating a dominance of conservative behavior of [Nd]. In contrast, Central and Intermediate Water in the North West Pacific are characterized by increasing [Nd] with depth reflecting Nd release from particles.Overall, our data demonstrate a dominant lateral transport control on [Nd] distributions and clear non-conservative modification of ɛNd in the West Pacific. The latter affords tracing of surface and subsurface zonal transport in the tropical Pacific, but prevents the use of ɛNd as strictly conservative tracer of the major meridionally circulating water masses in the West Pacific between 15°S and 28°N.

Unraveling the presence of multiple plagioclase populations and identification of representative two-dimensional sections using a statistical and numerical approach

Many plagioclase phenocrysts from volcanic and plutonic rocks display quite complex chemical and textural zoning patterns. Understanding the zoning patterns and variety of crystal populations holds clues to the processes and timescales that lead to the formation of the igneous rocks. However, in addition to a “true” natural complexity of the crystal population, the large variety of plagioclase types can be partly artifacts of the use of two-dimensional (2D) petrographic thin sections and random cuts of three-dimensional (3D) plagioclase crystals. Thus, the identification of the true number of plagioclase populations, and the decision of which are “representative” crystal sections to be used for detailed trace element and isotope analysis is not obvious and tends to be subjective. Here we approach this problem with a series of numerical simulations and statistical analyses of a variety of plagioclase crystals zoned in 3D. We analyze the effect of increasing complexity of zoning based on 2D chemical maps (e.g., backscattered electron images, BSE). We first analyze the random sections of single crystals, and then study the effect of mixing of different crystal populations in the samples. By quantifying the similarity of the compositional histogram of about a hundred 2D plagioclase sections it is possible to identify the so-called reference and ideal sections that are representative of the real 3D crystal populations. These section types allow filtering out the random-cut effects and explain more than 90% of the plagioclase compositional data of a given sample. Our method allows the identification of the main crystal populations and representative crystals that can then be used for a more robust interpretation of magmatic processes and timescales.

Assessing Human Error Against a Benchmark of Perfection

An increasing number of domains are providing us with detailed trace data on human decisions in settings where we can evaluate the quality of these decisions via an algorithm. Motivated by this development, an emerging line of work has begun to consider whether we can characterize and predict the kinds of decisions where people are likely to make errors. To investigate what a general framework for human error prediction might look like, we focus on a model system with a rich history in the behavioral sciences: the decisions made by chess players as they select moves in a game. We carry out our analysis at a large scale, employing datasets with several million recorded games, and using chess tablebases to acquire a form of ground truth for a subset of chess positions that have been completely solved by computers but remain challenging for even the best players in the world. We organize our analysis around three categories of features that we argue are present in most settings where the analysis of human error is applicable: the skill of the decision-maker, the time available to make the decision, and the inherent difficulty of the decision. We identify rich structure in all three of these categories of features, and find strong evidence that in our domain, features describing the inherent difficulty of an instance are significantly more powerful than features based on skill or time.

Bent Bragg–Laue monochromator for high-energy X-rays

A bent Bragg–Laue monochromator (BLM) is proposed for high-energy X-ray (∼25–60 keV) beamlines. The BLM has the unique feature of bi-directional focusing. A sagittally bent Laue crystal can focus the large horizontal fan of a bending magnet or wiggler source. A meridionally bent Bragg crystal focuses the beam vertically and corrects for the anticlastic bending effects of the Laue crystal. This monochromator geometry relies on the crystal orientations being optimized. It is shown that the focusing condition and Rowland condition can be simultaneously satisfied at a given energy. Detailed ray tracings indicate that a BLM can provide similar energy resolution and higher flux density compared to a sagittally bent double-Laue monochromator configuration. A prototype BLM with a symmetric Bragg crystal and an asymmetric Laue crystal was tested. Matching of the bend radii of the two crystals in the meridional direction was demonstrated. In general, the horizontal acceptance of the sagittally bent Laue crystal is limited by the large curvature. This horizontal BLM acceptance could be increased by translating the Laue crystal along its sagittal bending axis.

Solar Active Region Coronal Jets. II. Triggering and Evolution of Violent Jets

Abstract We study a series of X-ray-bright, rapidly evolving active region coronal jets outside the leading sunspot of AR 12259, using Hinode/X-ray telescope, Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)/Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) and Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), and Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) data. The detailed evolution of such rapidly evolving “violent” jets remained a mystery after our previous investigation of active region jets. The jets we investigate here erupt from three localized subregions, each containing a rapidly evolving (positive) minority-polarity magnetic-flux patch bathed in a (majority) negative-polarity magnetic-flux background. At least several of the jets begin with eruptions of what appear to be thin (thickness ) miniature-filament (minifilament) “strands” from a magnetic neutral line where magnetic flux cancelation is ongoing, consistent with the magnetic configuration presented for coronal-hole jets in Sterling et al. (2016). Some jets strands are difficult/impossible to detect, perhaps due to, e.g., their thinness, obscuration by surrounding bright or dark features, or the absence of erupting cool-material minifilaments in those jets. Tracing in detail the flux evolution in one of the subregions, we find bursts of strong jetting occurring only during times of strong flux cancelation. Averaged over seven jetting episodes, the cancelation rate was Mx hr−1. An average flux of Mx canceled prior to each episode, arguably building up ∼1028–1029 erg of free magnetic energy per jet. From these and previous observations, we infer that flux cancelation is the fundamental process responsible for the pre-eruption build up and triggering of at least many jets in active regions, quiet regions, and coronal holes.

Khalid, Adeeb Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (review)

REVIEWS 573 Khalid, Adeeb. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2015. xix + 415 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $39.95. Some twenty years ago, in his magnificent The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform (Berkeley, CA, 1998), Adeeb Khalid told the story — hitherto largely unknown to Western readers — of a group of Turkestani educational and religious modernizers, popularly known as the Jadids, who around the turn of the twentieth century undertook to introduce a wide-ranging programme of enlightenment, particularly through maktab and madrasah reform, into what at the time was one of the most under-developed regions of the tsarist empire. Tracing in fine-grained detail the various visions of modernity found in works by such figures as Behbudiy, Fitrat and Munavvar Qori, Khalid concluded his study by recounting how, following the events of 1917, the Jadids were able to align their reformist project with what would prove to be the very different modernizing agenda of the nascent Bolshevik regime. In its reference to a dazzling array of writings in both Russian, on the one hand, and Turkic and Persian, on the other, Khalid’s book remains to this day a foundational contribution towards the ongoing project to vivify Central Asian historical scholarship through the interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of Russian and Islamic studies; beautifully written, it remains also one of the few works in the field that I have repeatedly re-read for pleasure. In Making Uzbekistan, Khalid presents the long-awaited sequel to his earlier volume, picking up the story — after a brief prefatory overview (chapter 1, pp. 27–55) of pre-Revolutionary Jadidist reformism — where he previously left off in 1917: having concluded The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform with the alliance of Jadids and Russian Bolsheviks — an event here recounted in greater detail in chapter two (pp. 56–89) — he proceeds to trace the subsequent contours of this unlikely relationship. Initially, he shows, there existed a clear affinity of interest between both parties. By the mid 1920s, following the defeat of the Muslim Republic of Bukhara and the various other rival entities that had emerged amidst the post-imperial chaos (chapters 3 and 4, pp. 90–116 and 117–55), Soviet power in Central Asia was sufficiently well established (chapter 5, pp. 156–77) for the authorities to embark upon a fundamental restructuring of traditional forms of life, in what Khalid terms ‘[a] revolution of the mind’ (chapter 6, pp. 178–218). In this project the authorities found eager partners in the Jadidist intelligentsia, who were finally empowered to put in place those changes to the educational system (pp. 192–97), patriarchal gender relations (pp. 197–208) and a purportedly sclerotic religious establishment (chapter 7, pp. 219–56) for which they had been agitating for decades. Even as they savoured their successes, however, Muslim reformist intellectuals were beginning to SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 574 find themselves under pressure: by the late 1920s the Soviet project of social transformation had acquired dimensions more far-reaching than anything they themselves had advocated (chapter 11, pp. 342–62), and emergent doubts amongst the party leadership about the ideological correctness of non-Russian native cadres (chapter 10, pp. 316–41) would culminate in the 1930s with a purge of almost all the surviving Jadids of the 1917 generation (chapter 12, pp. 363–89). With The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform having contributed to a boom over the last two decades in Jadid-focused scholarship, much of the above story will already be broadly familiar to readers. Perhaps more original, and interesting, is a second narrative which Khalid recounts alongside the first. This is the story, alluded to in the book’s title, of the idea of Uzbekistan, whose appearance in its present form, Khalid suggests, was the result of discursive interaction between Jadidist and Bolshevik participants in the modernizing project. Whereas, prior to the revolution, the Jadids had initially focused their ambitions on reforming and revitalizing society in a Turkestan understood primarily as an Islamic confessional entity, exposure to the rhetoric of Bolshevism led them to reconceptualize Turkestan instead as a national, or ethnic one; and it...

Spatial and literacy practices of Chinese international students across a bridge writing classroom and WeChat

ABSTRACTThe study is situated in a bridge writing course that serves multilingual international students during their first year in college. Based on interviews with 36 Chinese international students and detailed tracing of one focal student's literacy activities, this study examines the social production of a translocal literacy learning space that spans a writing classroom, informal spaces of learning, and a digital study group on WeChat (a popular smart phone social networking application among Chinese students). It explores students’ literacy and spatial practice as inscribed with historical and geographic meanings students draw from spaces that are both local and translocal, digital and real. Findings from the study extend current research in two ways. It challenges theoretical demarcations of spaces (classroom, digital, informal) by considering literacy and its ‘context’ as dynamically co-constituted through literacy and spatial practices. It problematizes current narratives of the expanding potential of digital tools, as students’ reliance on informal, digital spaces of learning might also constrain their learning through self-segregation, ascribed identities, and lost opportunities. Literacy teachers are encouraged to consider the challenges of implementing pedagogical practices that are sensitive to students’ spatial and literacy practices.

Dissolved barium as a tracer of Kuroshio incursion in the Kuroshio region east of Taiwan Island and the adjacent East China Sea

From May to June 2014, the geochemical characteristics of dissolved barium (Ba) in sea water and its influx from the Kuroshio into the East China Sea (ECS) were studied by investigation of the Kuroshio mainstream east of Taiwan Island and the adjacent ECS. This allowed for the scope and extent of the Kuroshio incursion to be quantitatively described for the first time by using Ba as a tracer. The concentration of Ba in the Kuroshio mainstream increased gradually downward from the surface in the range 4.91–19.2 μg L−1. In the surface layer of the ECS, the Ba concentration was highest in coastal water and gradually decreased seaward, while it was higher in coastal and offshore water but lowest in middle shelf for bottom layer. The influx of Ba from Kuroshio into the ECS during May to October was calculated to be 2.19×108 kg by a water exchange model, in which the subsurface layer had the largest portion. The distribution of Ba indicated that Kuroshio upwelled in the sea area northeast of Taiwan Island. The north-flowing water in the Taiwan Strait restrained the incursion of Kuroshio surface water onto the ECS shelf, while Kuroshio subsurface water gradually affected the bottom of the ECS from outside. The results of end member calculation, using Ba as a parameter, showed that the Kuroshio surface water had little impact on the ECS, while the Kuroshio subsurface water formed an intrusion current by climbing northwest along the bottom of the middle shelf from the sea area northeast of Taiwan Island into the Qiantang Estuary, of which the volume of Kuroshio water was nearly 65%. Kuroshio water was the predominant part of the water on the outer shelf bottom and its proportion in areas deeper than the 100 m isobath could reach more than 95%. In the DH9 section (north of Taiwan Island), Kuroshio subsurface water intruded westward along the bottom from the shelf edge and then rose upward (in lower proportion). Kuroshio water accounted for 95% of the ocean volume could reach as far as 122°E. Ba was able to provide detailed tracing of the Kuroshio incursion into the ECS owing to its geochemical characteristics and became an effective tracer for revealing quantitative interactions between the Kuroshio and the ECS.

Living and Learning as Māori: Language Stories from Three Generations

Through tracing in detail the story of schooling for three individuals, this article provides a rich description of the way that education impacted on the lives of many Māori between the early 1900s and the year 2000. Although there is extensive research on the historical colonising effects of schooling on Māori and te reo Māori (the Māori language), this article approaches these effects by bringing them alive and illustrating them in the everyday lived experience of women from three generations: my mother, myself, and my daughter. Through this method, the article maps in evocative detail the important historical period between the banning of Māori language in schools and the renaissance of Māori language teaching and speaking in schools.

Who BannedThe War Game? A Fifty-Year Controversy Reassessed

The War Game (BBC TV, 1965), directed by Peter Watkins, is one of the most famous films from the 1960s. Banned from TV for twenty years, it gained a limited cinema release which saw it go on to win an Oscar in 1967. Suspicions have long circulated that the BBC's decision to ban the film from TV arose as a result of pressure from government amid fears of the effect that Watkins' documentary dramatisation of a nuclear attack on the UK might have on mass TV audiences. On the fiftieth anniversary of the censorship of the film, this article takes a fresh look at the controversy, examining previously classified Cabinet Office papers and tracing in greater detail than ever before how ministers and civil servants working for Harold Wilson's 1964–70 Labour government reacted to and dealt with the issue. From this evidence, the article argues that the TV censorship of The War Game involved a complex interaction between civil servants in Whitehall, government ministers, including Prime Minister Harold Wilson himself, the Director-General of the BBC and the Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors. The article traces the close relationship between Whitehall and the upper echelons of the BBC during this Cold War period, and argues that The War Game offers a very interesting historical case study which raises disturbing questions both about the limits of the BBC's professed liberalism of the 1960s and about the true extent of its much-vaunted independence from government. The latter is particularly important in the light of more recent and current threats to that independence.

Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City by Christoph Mick

Reviewed by: Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City by Christoph Mick Samuel J. Kessler Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City. By Christoph Mick. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015. Pp. 458. Paper $59.95. ISBN 978-1557536716. In Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City, Christoph Mick uses the method of local history to unfold an interesting and complex thesis about the causes of ethnic violence in the former Habsburg crown land of Galicia. To explain what happened, he writes, we cannot merely credit historical differences among groups; we must likewise delve into how shifting regimes of governmental power reinforced, subjugated, or excluded certain populations along ethnic lines, and further, how cultures of memorialization and national remembrance (sometimes supported by existing political systems, sometimes not) valorized and inscribed particular historical episodes to the benefit or detriment of other indigenous groups. Tracing in scrupulous detail the political and social interactions of L'viv's three main ethnic groups (Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews) between 1914 and 1947, Mick argues that "ethnicity and religion were the most important identity markers" in the city (2). Nevertheless, changing administrative regimes and wartime occupations also served to define those ethnic identities in new and often negative ways. At the end of World War I, "religious and social conflicts became nationally charged" (7), with Poles and Ukrainians competing to include L'viv in their newly independent states. Narrating this history through the actions and words of L'viv's city councilors, journalists, academics, and "ordinary" folk—people for whom "L'viv [was] to be both a site and object of contention" (76)—Mick's work is a visceral, often numbingly brutal account of the dreams, hatreds, and fears of L'viv's population during Eastern Europe's darkest hours. The book's structure is informed by the seven "regime changes" that marked the [End Page 661] city's first five decades in the twentieth century: Austro-Hungarian to Russian (1914), Russian to Austro-Hungarian (1915), Austro-Hungarian to Ukrainian (1918), Ukrainian to Polish (1918), Polish to Soviet (1939), Soviet to German (1941), and German to Soviet (1944). Mick's thesis relies on the interplay of ethnicity and economics to explain the relationships of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews during these political transitions. His method is that of local, descriptive history (what he calls Erfahrungsgeschichte, a history of how events are given meaning), allowing the sources to carry the narrative. Rarely does Mick engage with a broader European context. Instead, he lets Europe and its wars come to L'viv. In so doing, he has written a meticulous account of the interactions of L'viv's ethnic communities before, during, and after each regime change. The fourth chapter, "Reconstruction and Remembrance, 1920–1939," which covers the years after the successful establishment of L'viv as a Polish city following World War I, is perhaps the most theoretically stimulating. It traces the ultimately short-lived attempt by the Poles of L'viv to create a memory culture for their new state, the Second Polish Republic. These pages should be the starting point for a number of fascinating future dissertations. Much of the book is devoted to chronicling successive administrative changes in L'viv—the seemingly mundane, even petty, details that mark political transitions. I remain somewhat skeptical that shifting governments did much more than exacerbate existing tensions, which, by starting the volume in 1914, Mick has little time to mention. Rather, one of the profound insights to be found here is how ethnic strife—and more specifically, the near-continuous eruption of anti-Jewish violence—predated not only the Soviet and German occupations, but the Russian one in 1914 as well. Though Mick seeks repeatedly to stress underlying economic motivations (75, 293), the sources make clear that wealth and class were often merely rhetorical devices serving to disguise other motivations for violence. This seems particularly true for the recurring anti-Jewish pogroms, which (before the arrival of the Soviets and the Germans) tended to erupt during periods of political transition, rather than as the result of...

The Ups and Downs of Louis Grabu

This article explores the career of Louis Grabu, Master of the Music to Charles II of England and an important but often overlooked and unnecessarily denigrated figure in the history of English music and music-making during the last third of the seventeenth century. While both his origins and his ultimate fate remain obscure, Grabu's activities between 1665 and 1694 are sufficiently documented to enable us not only to trace in considerable detail the periodic fluctuations in his fortunes, but also to establish a paradigm for exploring the lives of the vast number of seventeenth-century court musicians whose personal details must be gleaned from a mix of administrative records, surviving musical compositions and occasional observations recorded in contemporary diaries and correspondence. When these sources are carefully and exhaustively mined, a picture begins to emerge that belies the often glib dismissal of the musician's activities and abilities by contemporaries and modern scholars alike.

Nepal Ambient Monitoring and Source Testing Experiment (NAMaSTE): emissions of trace gases and light-absorbing carbon from wood and dung cooking fires, garbage and crop residue burning, brick kilns, and other sources

Abstract. The Nepal Ambient Monitoring and Source Testing Experiment (NAMaSTE) campaign took place in and around the Kathmandu Valley and in the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) of southern Nepal during April 2015. The source characterization phase targeted numerous important but undersampled (and often inefficient) combustion sources that are widespread in the developing world such as cooking with a variety of stoves and solid fuels, brick kilns, open burning of municipal solid waste (a.k.a. trash or garbage burning), crop residue burning, generators, irrigation pumps, and motorcycles. NAMaSTE produced the first, or rare, measurements of aerosol optical properties, aerosol mass, and detailed trace gas chemistry for the emissions from many of the sources. This paper reports the trace gas and aerosol measurements obtained by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, whole-air sampling (WAS), and photoacoustic extinctiometers (PAX; 405 and 870 nm) based on field work with a moveable lab sampling authentic sources. The primary aerosol optical properties reported include emission factors (EFs) for scattering and absorption coefficients (EF Bscat, EF Babs, in m2 kg−1 fuel burned), single scattering albedos (SSAs), and absorption Ångström exponents (AAEs). From these data we estimate black and brown carbon (BC, BrC) emission factors (g kg−1 fuel burned). The trace gas measurements provide EFs (g kg−1) for CO2, CO, CH4, selected non-methane hydrocarbons up to C10, a large suite of oxygenated organic compounds, NH3, HCN, NOx, SO2, HCl, HF, etc. (up to ∼ 80 gases in all). The emissions varied significantly by source, and light absorption by both BrC and BC was important for many sources. The AAE for dung-fuel cooking fires (4.63 ± 0.68) was significantly higher than for wood-fuel cooking fires (3.01 ± 0.10). Dung-fuel cooking fires also emitted high levels of NH3 (3.00 ± 1.33 g kg−1), organic acids (7.66 ± 6.90 g kg−1), and HCN (2.01 ± 1.25 g kg−1), where the latter could contribute to satellite observations of high levels of HCN in the lower stratosphere above the Asian monsoon. HCN was also emitted in significant quantities by several non-biomass burning sources. BTEX compounds (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes) were major emissions from both dung- (∼ 4.5 g kg−1) and wood-fuel (∼ 1.5 g kg−1) cooking fires, and a simple method to estimate indoor exposure to the many measured important air toxics is described. Biogas emerged as the cleanest cooking technology of approximately a dozen stove–fuel combinations measured. Crop residue burning produced relatively high emissions of oxygenated organic compounds (∼ 12 g kg−1) and SO2 (2.54 ± 1.09 g kg−1). Two brick kilns co-firing different amounts of biomass with coal as the primary fuel produced contrasting results. A zigzag kiln burning mostly coal at high efficiency produced larger amounts of BC, HF, HCl, and NOx, with the halogenated emissions likely coming from the clay. The clamp kiln (with relatively more biomass fuel) produced much greater quantities of most individual organic gases, about twice as much BrC, and significantly more known and likely organic aerosol precursors. Both kilns were significant SO2 sources with their emission factors averaging 12.8 ± 0.2 g kg−1. Mixed-garbage burning produced significantly more BC (3.3 ± 3.88 g kg−1) and BTEX (∼ 4.5 g kg−1) emissions than in previous measurements. For all fossil fuel sources, diesel burned more efficiently than gasoline but produced larger NOx and aerosol emission factors. Among the least efficient sources sampled were gasoline-fueled motorcycles during start-up and idling for which the CO EF was on the order of ∼ 700 g kg−1 – or about 10 times that of a typical biomass fire. Minor motorcycle servicing led to minimal if any reduction in gaseous pollutants but reduced particulate emissions, as detailed in a companion paper (Jayarathne et al., 2016). A small gasoline-powered generator and an “insect repellent fire” were also among the sources with the highest emission factors for pollutants. These measurements begin to address the critical data gap for these important, undersampled sources, but due to their diversity and abundance, more work is needed.

Socioeconomic marginality in sentencing: The built-in bias in risk assessment tools and the reproduction of social inequality

This article develops a sociological analysis and critique of including socioeconomic factors such as education, employment, income and housing in risk assessment tools that inform sentencing decisions. In widely used risk assessment tools such as the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) (Canada, US), the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) (US), the Offender Assessment System (OASys) (UK) and the Recidive InschattingsSchalen (RISc) (the Netherlands), socioeconomic marginality contributes to a higher risk score, which increases the likelihood of a (longer) custodial sentence for underprivileged offenders compared to their more privileged counterparts. While this has been problematized in relation to gender and racial/ethnic bias, the problem of socioeconomic bias in itself has received little attention. Given the already marginalized position of many justice involved individuals and longstanding concerns about such disparities, and the adverse effects of imprisonment on socioeconomic opportunities, it is essential to evaluate the unintended social consequences of assessing socioeconomic marginality as ‘risk factor’. Elaborating on earlier critiques, I conceptualize risk-based sentencing as a meaning-making process through which (access to) resources and recognition are distributed among offender populations. Through tracing in detail two cultural processes – stigmatization and rationalization – I analyse how risk assessment is likely to produce sentencing disparities as well as to reproduce, and possibly exacerbate, social inequalities more generally.

Extraction of Dynamic Trajectory on Multi-Stroke Static Handwriting Images Using Loop Analysis and Skeletal Graph Model

The recovery of handwriting’s dynamic stroke is an effective method to help improve the accuracy of any handwriting’s authentication or verification system. The recovered trajectory can be considered as a dynamic feature of any static handwritten images. Capitalising on this temporal information can significantly increase the accuracy of the verification phase. Extraction of dynamic features from static handwritings remains a challenge due to the lack of temporal information as compared to the online methods. Previously, there are two typical approaches to recover the handwriting’s stroke. The first approach is based on the script’s skeleton. The skeletonisation method has highly computational efficiency whereas it often produces noisy artifacts and mismatches on the resulted skeleton. The second approach deals with the handwriting’s contour, crossing areas and overlaps using parametric representations of lines and thickness of strokes. This method can avoid the artifacts, but it requires complicated mathematical models and may lead to computational explosion. Our paper is based on the script’s extracted skeleton and provides an approach to processing static handwriting’s objects, including edges, vertices and loops, as the important aspects of any handwritten image. Our paper is also to provide analysing and classifying loops types and human’s natural writing behavior to improve the global construction of stroke order. Then, a detailed tracing algorithm on global stroke reconstruction is presented. The experimental results reveal the superiority of our method as compared with the existing ones.

Paleolimnological record of the climate and pre-historic settlement from chalk karst region (Chełm Hills, SE Poland)

The multi-proxy study (subfossil Cladocera and Ostracoda, palynology, sediment chemistry, stable isotopes) of the sedimentological record from three, closely situated, shallow lakes reveals multiple interactions between the lake esosystems and the main drivers of their mid- and late-Holocene development – climate changes and human actions within their vicinity. Such multi-proxy studies, built upon four complete cores obtained from three nearby situated sites, provide us with an unique advantage/opportunity to disentangle climate and human influence, as well as to trace in detail the ecosystem response. Starting from the Atlantic period, the favourable natural conditions of the Chelm Hills region (mainly rich, workable soils) attracted early settlement more than did nearby regions. This settlement grouped with close vicinity to natural water sources: lakes and small river valleys. Despite the rather low impact of the early settlement on the natural environment, its traces can be made visible from the pollen record of lake archives, as well as from eutrophication signals revealed by subfossil Cladocera and Ostracoda. In this study, three main settlement phases were noted. Herein, hemp retting practices were identified for all the lakes. This is put forward as the most profound factor in this lake ecosystem development (resulting, among other issues, in severe anoxia) and therefore, it was studied in detail as well as the issue of its further recovery

An equatorial solar wind model with angular momentum conservation and nonradial magnetic fields and flow velocities at an inner boundary

AbstractAn analytic, self‐consistent, theoretical model for the solar wind is developed that generalizes previous models to include all of the following: conservation of angular momentum, frozen‐in magnetic fields, both radial (r) and azimuthal (ϕ) components of the magnetic field (Br and Bϕ) and velocity (vr and vϕ) from the inner boundary rs to 1 AU, and the detailed tracing back of observations at 1 AU to the inner boundary and all intervening (r,ϕ). The new model applies near the solar equatorial plane, assumes constant radial wind speed at each heliolongitude, and enforces corotation at the inner boundary. It is shown that the new theoretical model can be reduced to the previous models in the appropriate limits. We apply the model to two solar rotations of Wind spacecraft data, one near solar minimum (1–27 August 2010) and one near solar maximum (1–27 July 2002). The model analytically predicts the Alfvénic critical radius ra from the radial Alfvénic Mach number observed at 1 AU. Typically, the values are less than 15 solar radii, in agreement with some recent observations, and vary with longitude. Values of vϕ(r,ϕ) are predicted from the model, being always in the sense of corotation but varying in magnitude with r and ϕ. Reasonable and self‐consistent results are found for Br(r,ϕ), Bϕ(r,ϕ), vϕ(r,ϕ), and n(r,ϕ) from rs to 1 AU. Both the azimuthal and radial magnetic fields at rs vary with time by more than an order of magnitude and usually |Br(rs,ϕs)|≥|Bϕ(rs,ϕs)|. Typically, though not always, magnetic contributions to the total angular momentum are small. Interestingly, however, the azimuthal flow velocities observed at 1 AU are not always in the corotation direction and usually have much larger magnitudes than predicted by the model. Conservation of angular momentum alone cannot explain these azimuthal velocities and the standard interpretation involving stream‐stream interactions and dynamical behavior seems reasonable. Issues regarding the model's applicability appear to be due to the assumptions of corotation and constant wind speed breaking down below the Alfvén critical radius.

Light‐curve solutions of 20 ecipsing Kepler binaries, most of them with pronounced spot and flare activity

AbstractWe carried out light curve solutions of the Kepler light curves of twenty detached eclipsing binaries with circular orbits and determined the orbital inclinations, temperatures. relative radii and luminosities of their components. We studied the quality of the solutions with respect to the adopted limb‐darkening law and its coefficients. The detailed tracing of the numerous and uninterrupted data of our targets gave us an unique possibility to detect and learn their spot and flare activity. We established that the out‐of‐eclipse variability of the most targets gradually changes from small‐amplitude two‐waved type to big‐amplitude one‐waved type and vice versa, i.e. their spot activity cycles pass through phase of two almost diametrically opposite spots and phase of big polar cool spot. We found that the low‐temperature targets show flare activity of UV Cet‐type with amplitudes of 0.002–0.22 mag and duration of up to several hours. (© 2016 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH &amp; Co. KGaA, Weinheim)