Detailed Tracing Research Articles

Learning Individual Behavior Using Sensor Data: The Case of GPS Traces and Taxi Drivers

The ubiquitous deployment of mobile and sensor technologies has led to both the capacity to observe human behavior in physical (offline) settings as well as to record it. This provides researchers with a new lens to study and better understand the individual decision processes that were previously unobserved. In this paper, we study decision making behavior of 11,196 taxi drivers in a large Asian city using a rich data set consisting of 10.6 million fine-grained GPS trip records. These records include detailed taxi GPS trajectories, taxi occupancy data (i.e., whether a taxi was occupied with a passenger or was vacant) and taxi drivers’ daily incomes. This capacity to use data where occupancy of the taxi is known is a distinctive feature of our data set and sets this work apart from prior work which has attempted to study driver behavior. The specific decision we focus on pertains to actions drivers take to find new passengers after they have dropped off their current passengers. In particular, we study the role of information derivable from the GPS trace data (e.g., where passengers are dropped off, where passengers are picked up, longitudinal taxicab travel history with fine-grained time stamps) observable by or made available to drivers in enabling them to learn the distribution of demand for their services over space and time. We conduct our study using a heterogeneous Bayesian learning model. We find strong heterogeneity in individual learning behavior and driving decisions, which is significantly associated with individual economic outcomes. Drivers with higher incomes benefit significantly from their ability to learn from not only demand information directly observable in the local market, but also aggregate information on demand flows across markets. Interestingly, our policy simulations indicate information that is noisy at the individual level becomes valuable after being aggregated across various spatial and temporal dimensions. Moreover, the value of information does not increase monotonically with the scale and frequency of information sharing. Finally, our study has important welfare implications in that efficient information sharing leads to an income increase among all drivers, instead of a redistribution of income between different types of drivers. Our work allows us not only to explain driver decision making behavior using these detailed behavioral traces, but also to prescribe information sharing strategy for the firm in order to improve the overall market efficiency.

Cold gas and the disruptive effect of a young radio jet

AbstractNewly born and young radio sources are in a delicate phase of their life. Their jets are fighting their way through the surrounding gaseous medium, strongly experiencing this interaction while, at the same time, impacting and affecting the interstellar medium (ISM). Quantifying this interplay has far reaching implications: the rate of occurrence and the magnitude of the interaction between radio jets and ISM can have consequences for the evolution of the host galaxy. Despite the hostile conditions, cold gas ‐ neutral atomic hydrogen and molecular ‐ has been often found in these objects and can be also associated to fast outflows. Here we present the results from two studies of H I and molecular gas illustrating what can be learned from these phases of the gas. We first describe a statistical study of the occurrence and kinematics of H I observed in absorption with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio telescope. This allows a comparison between the properties of the gas in extended and in compact/young radio sources. The study shows that the young radio sources not only have an higher detection rate of H I, but also systematically broader and more asymmetric H I profiles, most of them blueshifted. This supports the idea that we are looking at young radio jets making their way through the surrounding ISM, which also appears to be, on average, richer in gas than in evolved radio sources. Signatures of the impact of the jet are seen in the kinematics of the gas, but the resulting outflows may be characteristic of only the initial phase of the radio source evolution. However, even among the young sources, we identify a population that remains undetected in H I even after stacking their profiles. Orientation effects can only partly explain the result. These objects either are genuinely gas‐poor or have different conditions of the medium, e.g. higher spin temperature. The upcoming blind H I surveys which are about to start with large‐field‐of‐view radio facilities (i.e. Apertif at the WSRT and ASKAP) will allow us to expand the statistics and reach even higher sensitivity with stacking techniques. We further present the case of the radio source IC 5063 where we have used the molecular gas observed with ALMA to trace in detail the jet impacting the ISM. The kinematics of the cold, molecular gas co‐spatial with the radio plasma shows this process in action. The ALMA data reveal a fast outflow of molecular gas extending along the entire radio jet (∼1 kpc), with the highest outflow velocities at the location of the brighter hot‐spot. The results can be described by a scenario of a radio plasma jet expanding into a clumpy medium, interacting directly with the clouds and inflating a cocoon that drives a lateral outflow into the ISM. This is consistent with the scenario proposed by numerical simulations for the expansion of a young radio jet, confirming the disruptive effect the radio plasma jet can have. Following this case, more ALMA observations of nearby young radio sources will be able to confirm if this process is common, as expected, in the initial phase of the evolution of the radio source. (© 2016 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Collecting Shared Experiences through Lifelogging: Lessons Learned

The emergence of widespread pervasive sensing, personal recording technologies, and systems for the quantified self are creating an environment in which one can capture fine-grained activity traces. Such traces have wide applicability in domains such as human memory augmentation, behavior change, and healthcare. However, obtaining these traces for research is nontrivial, especially those containing photographs of everyday activities. To source data for their own work, the authors created an experimental setup in which they collected detailed traces of a group of researchers over 2.75 days. They share their experiences of this process and present a series of lessons learned for other members of the research community conducting similar studies.

Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend by Jr. Ron J. Jackson and Lee Spencer White

Reviewed by: Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legendby Jr. Ron J. Jackson and Lee Spencer White Carina Hoffpauir Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend. By Ron J. Jackson Jr.and Lee Spencer White. Foreword by Phil Collins. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Pp. xxiv, 325. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-4703-1.) Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legendrecounts the story of Joe, an enslaved man who was one of the few Texian survivors of the Alamo siege. Joe provided “the clearest and most complete account of the final assault on the Alamo,” one that solidified his name in Texas history (p. xvii). Despite his acclaim, little has been known about Joe other than what could be found in scant primary source fragments. Authors Ron J. Jackson Jr. and Lee Spencer White intervene in this deficient history with an impressive examination of Joe’s experiences before and after the Alamo. The result of a seventeen-year investigation, their book takes into account legal documents, newspapers, slave narratives, travel logs, census records, journals, and letters. “We opened and closed county courthouses, state archives, and university collections,” the authors write, “often skipping lunch to read old documents until they were blurry from our exhaustion” (p. xvi). Jackson and White posit that this labor of love was necessary to overcome the particular difficulties in researching enslaved people. Their approach has resulted in hard-won breakthroughs in Joe’s story, which simultaneously fills important gaps in the scholarship on the Alamo and on slavery in the state of Texas. The text begins with a tense imagining of Joe’s actions and mood on March 5, 1836, the night preceding the final assault on the Alamo. From there, Jackson and White backtrack to consider the events that led to Joe’s presence at the battle. The second half of the book is devoted to the incidents that took place once Joe’s owner, William Barret Travis, was drawn into the Texas Revolution along with his slave. Scholars of Texas military history will appreciate the detailed tracing of the pair’s route along the Texas frontier from Joe’s perspective, which brings new life to a likely familiar narrative of the revolution. Along the way, Jackson and White provide a comprehensive view of the debates over slavery that raged in Texas in order to portray Joe’s legal status as a bondman and his complex relationships with his owners. Linking Joe’s story with the story of Texas implicitly suggests that slavery is central to what W. Fitzhugh Brundage refers to as “Texas’ mythic past” (Gregg Cantrell and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, eds., Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas[College Station, Tex., 2007], xiii). The rendering of this past in earlier accounts has too often silenced enslaved voices and minimized slavery in favor of mythologizing and glorifying Texas as part of what Randolph B. Campbell calls the “romantic West” ( An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865[Baton Rouge, 1989], 1). [End Page 925]Jackson and White’s text provides an important counternarrative for these partial narratives that have overlooked the perspectives of people of color on the Texas frontier. Jackson and White, however, overreach in their somewhat novelistic renderings of Joe’s interactions and innermost thoughts. Indeed, the text occasionally provides intimate details that would be difficult for a researcher to obtain without resorting to imagination. For example, Jackson and White write with descriptive emotion about Joe’s possible responses to seeing his mother whipped and his family divided; elsewhere, there is the problematic claim that “given their perilous position,” Travis and Joe “likely spoke as equals, as two souls standing on the doorstep of eternity” (p. 5). Flowery and romanticizing inferences aside, these moments of fictive liberty function not as detraction but ultimately as invitation to understand the story of Joe as central to the drama of the Texas Revolution. By approaching Joe’s life in this manner, the authors also open the text to audiences both scholarly and popular. Though Joe’s story is engaging, equally entertaining is the story of the authors’ own research and obsession with their subject...

Greek Tragedy: Lost Plays and Neglected Authors

Greek Tragedy: Lost Plays and Neglected Authors J. MICHAEL WALTON At the bottom of page 1 of The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Volume 1,* Matthew Wright adds a footnote to his résumé of some of the views of early Greek tragedy before Aeschylus’ Persians. “I do not discuss the early twentieth-century ‘ritualists’—e.g. Harrison, Cornford, Murray—whose work is refuted at length by Pickard-Cambridge (1927), because I regard their theories as pure fantasy .” This is an encouraging opening if only because Greek drama is curiously prone, in generalized summaries of Athenian culture or of theatre history, to maintaining obsolete notions about anything from kothornoi to compulsory attendance at the theatre as a civic obligation. An exclusively ritual origin to the dramatic festivals is another of these that has recently re-raised its implausible head, and it is good to see it summarily dismissed. Wright continues to lay out his stall in this chapter, entitled “The Earliest Tragedies,” and to consider the possible contributions of Thespis, Choerilus, Pratinas and Phrynichus as “prototragedy.” He follows with the account of origins offered by Aristotle in the Poetics. What is missing, and is, I would suggest, a serious oversight in such a study, is any critical assessment of the importance of Homer, either in terms of subject matter or how epic may have become dramatic. Skeptical as Wright may be about approaching Greek drama from a performance perspective, there is surely room for the moment, Thespian or otherwise, when the rhapsode’s “Agamemnon spoke and said” morphs into “Enter Agamemnon.” *Matthew Wright, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Volume 1: Neglected Authors, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2016, 277 pages. arion 24.3 winter 2017 What follows is for the most part more persuasive. In the five chapters after this opening, Wright marshals a mass of references from the best part of a thousand years about a strong tragic tradition which lasted well into the Hellenistic period before declining from Greek into Latin. Numerous lost playwrights are identified, traced as far as maybe with a diligence that is admirable, indeed formidable. A whole chapter (chap. 3) devoted to Agathon is justified if only because more is known about him, though not his work, than about any other of these “neglected authors.” The suggestion, however, that he might somehow have influenced Oscar Wilde carries little conviction. Chapter 4 on “Tragic Family Trees” is the most intriguing . Wright takes off in a different direction here, asking interesting questions about the possibility of theatrical dynasties in Athens. But some of the questions, though asked, can produce no proper answer, at least at this point in his argument. The reason for novel approaches is surely more to do with the need for innovation in the well-trodden path of Greek myth, which Wright later emphasizes for the fourth century BCE (121), than with the agonistic nature of theatrical production (92). A couple of passing references to Harold Bloom serve only to remind us how marginal his reading of the Greeks now seems. On the other hand, the detailed tracing of Carcinus, best known as a choreographer (or a comic butt) from the finale to Aristophanes ’ Wasps, identifies first his son, then his grandson, another Carcinus, as an important figure of the fourth century stage. The trouble is, and it is something of which Wright is clearly aware, what sense can you make tracing a dramatic tradition via plays that are not there? And none of them are. Most of the tragedians whose existence is recognized from fragments, quotations or didascaliae are at best ghostly presences represented, if they are lucky, by the odd speech of twenty or so lines without a context. And with dramatic dialogue context is everything. greek tragedy: lost plays and neglected authors 160 Imagine, for example, if nothing was left from Euripides’ Medea but the following: Oh, Jason, I’m sorry. Forgive me For what I said. I was angry . . . “What a fool you are, Medea,” I tell myself “To get upset with those who want to help . . .” (869–74) Even if aware of Euripides’ other work, might we not imagine from such lines in...

Crane's Speech Figures and the Making of Whilomville's Monster

Odd phrases—certain vaguely humorous idiomatic figures of speech—are far too instrumental in the narrative development of Crane's fiction to be considered incidental, though their precise role remains obscure. At times, particular phrases and figures even seem to exert a surreal or supernatural agency over Crane's fictional terrain. Accounting for these in terms of fairly conventional modes of realism and naturalism, critics often presume that Crane's plotting works to literalize clichés of common speech and thus to reveal, in a manner of action, social significance latent in a manner of speaking. I argue, however, that rather than using narrative to literalize figurative phrases, ironically displaying hidden social mechanisms, Crane's fiction is directly concerned with the processes by which such phrases are themselves born and naturalized in narration. These rhetorical processes counterpose conventional modes of novelistic figuration against the historical and social developments of actual speech figures. Alongside brief discussions of The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Crane's shorter fiction, this essay traces in detail the figurative process of The Monster (1898). Published just at the historical moment when the phrase losing face was entering common usage in English, The Monster confronts the invention and spread of this figure (and others) in novelistic terms, as a post-Reconstruction small-town tragedy. Ultimately, the processes by which phrases are made and come to preside destructively over more familiar narrative patterns suggest an irresolvable formal conflict in Crane's literary naturalism, with broader implications for the relationship between narrative and rhetoric in the novel form.

Peter Scott. The Making of the Modern British Home: The Suburban Semi and Family Life between the Wars.

Peter Scott presents in this book a revisionary history of the genesis of the modern British suburb which concentrates especially on how, in the decades between the two world wars, large sections of the British working classes became suburbanites. The author dismantles the often-heard opinion that modern suburbs were primarily a middle-class phenomenon. As such, they were financially beyond the reach of even the upper layers of the working classes even if developers, politicians, real estate agents, and building societies tried to recklessly impose the suburban way of life onto them. Eschewing any a priori dismissive or appreciative attitude toward suburbs, Scott relies instead on datasets like, for example, 600 returns from “Britain's first detailed national household expenditure survey, conducted by the Ministry of Labour over the year beginning October 1937” (p. vii). Other sources include personal testimonies, such as interviews, biographies, and contributions to oral history projects, from migrants who moved into suburbs. The main thesis of the book is that the interwar years were characterized by a process of suburbanization that allowed approximately 25 percent “of non-agricultural British working-class households [to] move to suburban estates … with around 13 per cent taking the municipal housing route to suburbia, around 9 per cent taking the mortgage route, and perhaps 3 per cent renting privately developed suburban housing” (p. 10). Even more, the end of the Great War brought with it the end of terraced housing, until then one of Britain's favorite types of building for housing the working classes and sections of the middle classes. Drawing on prewar garden city ideas, the new suburban housing was mostly low-density, short terraces, and especially “semis,” or semi-detached houses. Finally, Scott traces in great detail the manifold social changes that came with swapping urban housing for suburban homes. “[A] new form of working-class respectability emerged, based around maintaining minimum accepted standards of dress and other visible markers of consumption, restrained speech and behaviour, high standards of personal and domestic hygiene, ‘privatized’ family- and home-centred lifestyles, and an increased commitment of resources to the welfare and material advancement of the next generation” (p. 11).

Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science by Shauna Devine (review)

Reviewed by: Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science by Shauna Devine Caroline Lieffers (bio) Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science. By Shauna Devine. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. 384. Cloth, $39.95.) Shauna Devine’s Learning from the Wounded is a major, ambitious, and on the whole successful effort in bridging the gap between two relatively discrete historiographies: that specific to Civil War medicine, and the larger body of work on the nineteenth-century American medical profession and medical science. Focusing on the Union side (leaving the Confederacy for her next book), Devine argues that the war “was more than a broad school of experience; it was also a conduit for the production, development, and dissemination of new medical ideas” (5). Government support for the collection of medical information, the rise of laboratory and clinical research and experimentation, increased medical specialization, and emerging techniques for the management of infectious diseases characterize what she terms the “Civil War medical model,” which would have a profound effect on American medicine (5). Devine begins by discussing William Hammond’s ascension to the position of surgeon general, his strict standards for military surgeons, and “Circular No. 2,” a one-page directive instructing medical officers to prepare case reports and specimens for the new Army Medical Museum. Further directives reinforced this project, and the dividends of such institutional support for the creation and dissemination of medical knowledge were rich. Devine argues that surgeons’ efforts to dissect bodies (to which they had unprecedented access) and produce such reports developed both their practical skills and an increasingly critical approach to physiology and pathology, especially if they were among the eager few with access to microscopes. In contending that Civil War physicians were primed to query the nature of disease, Devine provides a fuller context for developments in laboratory medicine and bacteriology later in the century. Indeed, she traces in fresh detail the study of gangrene and erysipelas, observing “epistemological innovation” as physicians explored and debated these infections’ causation, pathology, transmission, and treatment through microscopy, pathological chemistry, and even “clinical trials” with different therapies and prophylactics (101, 114). Devine then turns to other trends in medical history. She observes new opportunities for specialization, focusing on Silas Weir Mitchell’s well-known leadership in neurology, along with experts on cardiac diseases and facial surgery. Facilitated by larger patient volumes and dedicated hospital divisions, specialization’s success during the war, Devine argues, secured its place in the postbellum period. She also examines sentiment [End Page 177] around soldiers’ dead bodies, which fell under military control. The Army Medical Museum, open to the public, framed these specimens as significant national contributions, both for their personal sacrifice and for their value to orthodox medical practice, scientific discovery, and the country’s international reputation. Devine, moreover, considers how the Civil War medical model changed public health practice. Revisiting the 1866 cholera epidemic, she witnesses a more authoritative medical profession, the maturation of wartime techniques in disease investigation and management, and the Surgeon General’s Office as a hub for sharing information across civilian and military lines. Learning from the Wounded’s aim to map the relationship between the Civil War and these larger issues of nineteenth-century medical knowledge, research, and professional authority—a relationship that other historians have explored but never fully expounded—is laudable and much needed, and Devine’s research is impressive. Rather than relying on the predigested Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, she returns to individual physicians’ dynamic, inquisitive, and ultimately revealing case notes, memoirs, and correspondence, as well as government publications and medical texts. The results are persuasive. With a firm grasp of contemporary medical understanding, she emphasizes the war’s extraordinary opportunities and commensurate impact on the orthodox profession. In Devine’s words, the war “had contributed to a new identity as producers of medical knowledge for many American physicians and provided an important catalyst for the development of American scientific medicine” (272). Of course, like all “rise of” books, Devine’s text bears an innate teleology: she seeks out examples that...

The Design and Implementation of Eggs\' Traceability System Based on Mobile QR Code

The study proposed an egg package tracing system which is composed of mobile phone software, database management system, server system, also includes egg production, sale information, transportation, inurement, communication with costumers' functions according to the tracking and tracing requirements of food supply chain management and quality and safety. The design describes Mobile phone client software system, the background data management system and the server database system modules of achieving food tracking management, detailed electronic trace information about food could be inquired through Web Service or intelligent mobile phones or other devices.

Embeddings of Besov spaces on fractal $h$-sets

Let $\Gamma$ be a fractal $h$-set and ${\mathbb{B}}^{\sigma}_{p,q}(\Gamma)$ be a trace space of Besov type defined on $\Gamma$. While we dealt in our earlier papers with growth envelopes of such spaces mainly and investigated the existence of traces in detail, we now study continuous embeddings between different spaces of that type on $\Gamma$. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for such an embedding to hold, and can prove in some cases complete characterisations. It also includes the situation when the target space is of type $L_r(\Gamma)$ and, as a by-product, under mild assumptions on the $h$-set $\Gamma$ we obtain the exact conditions on $\sigma$, $p$ and $q$ for which the trace space ${\mathbb{B}}^{\sigma}_{p,q}(\Gamma)$ exists. We can also refine some embedding results for spaces of generalised smoothness on $\mathbb{R}^n$.

The Impacts of Fiscal Openness: A Review of the Evidence

Fiscal transparency and participation in budgeting are increasingly promoted and jointly enshrined in international standards and norms. Yet, claims about the benefits of increased budgetary disclosure and participation are not always based on convincing evidence. We provide the first systematic review of the impacts of “fiscal openness” interventions in 38 empirical studies published between 1991 and early 2015. Fiscal openness variables are associated with the quality of the budget, including macro-fiscal outcomes, resource allocation, and service delivery, as well as governance and development outcomes. While only a handful of studies identify causal effects, these find that fiscal transparency or participation in budgeting have desirable impacts in the form of reduced corruption, enhanced electoral accountability, and improved allocation of resources. We highlight gaps and set out a research agenda that consists of: (a) disaggregating broad measures of budget transparency to uncover which specific disclosures are doing the work; (b) detailed tracing of the causal mechanisms that connect fiscal openness interventions with ultimate impacts on human development; (c) investigating the relative effectiveness of alternative interventions; (d) examining the relationship between transparency and participation in budgeting; and (e) clarifying the contextual conditions required for specific interventions to have desired effects.

Legends and liturgy in the Old English prose Andreas

AbstractThis article examines liturgical language and motifs potentially interwoven with the Old English prose account of ‘St Andrew amongst the Cannibals’, located in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 198. The article traces in detail the possible parallels between the liturgy of the Mass and the language of the account, and then considers explanations for liturgical elements in the saintly legend and what this may contribute to our aesthetic understanding of that account.

Methods and software tools to support combined binary code analysis

Methods and tools for binary code analysis developed in the Institute of System Programming, Russian Academy of Sciences, and their applications in algorithm and data format recovery are considered. The executable code of various general-purpose CPU architectures is analyzed. The analysis is performed given no source codes, debugging information, and specific OS version requirements. The approach implies collecting a detailed machine instruction level execution trace; a method for successively increasing presentation level; extraction of algorithm's code followed by structuring of both code and data formats it processes. Important results are obtained, viz. an intermediate representation is developed that allows carrying out most preliminary processing tasks and algorithm code extraction without having to focus on specifics of a given machine; and a method and software tool are developed for automated recovery of network message and file formats. The tools are integrated into the unified analysis platform that supports their combined use. The architecture behind the platform is also described. Examples of its application to real programs are given.

Understanding the foreign policy of autocratic actors: ideology or pragmatism? Russia and the Tymoshenko trial as a case study

While the literature on the autocratic regimes has been rapidly growing in the last years, there still exists a research gap in this field: which impact do autocratic regimes have on the regime transition in the neighbouring countries? The literature on autocracies has demonstrated that autocratic political leaders tend to support each other. This article argues that the external influence of an autocracy may be more complex. The article analyses the case of Russia's international standing in relation to the trial of Yulia Tymoshenko. Using detailed process tracing, it has been shown that in terms of the Russian position, pragmatic goals may undermine ideological goals. Thus, while the main objective of Russia is to ensure the stability of gas contracts, the unintended consequences of its actions undermine the consolidation of autocratic regime in Ukraine. The article builds on the literature on regime transition, autocracy, and international relations.

Investigation of severe water problem in urban areas of a developing country: the case of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The present study evaluated water supply geochemistry in Dhaka City, Bangladesh, to provide detailed trace level (subppb) water quality data that include major ions, low dissolved oxygen (DO) and toxic trace metals for sustainable development. Dhaka Groundwater, which almost uniformly meets the World Health Organization guideline, has become the preferred source. Due to groundwater depletion and an ever-increasing need to meet water demands by city residents, Dhaka water supply and sewerage authority has initiated the treatment of river water, despite the fact that very little is known about the geochemical structure, and trace metal content in the Dhaka water supply. Major ion composition of water samples was determined, and the results used to generate Stiff diagrams. The diagrams served to visually compare water from different sources based on units of mass/volume. Hydrochemical facies analysis showed supply ground and surface waters are comprised predominately of Ca-Na-Mg-HCO3 and Ca-Na-Mg-HCO3-Cl types. Spatial distribution of ions, and Na/Cl and Na/SiO2 molar ratio indicated that silicate weathering is the dominant geochemical process. Chemical data revealed that toxic Cr metal mobilization is associated with chemical hazards from the leather industry. The vulnerability of deep wells to contamination by As is governed by the geometry of induced groundwater flow paths and the geochemical conditions encountered between the shallow and deep regions of the aquifer. Quantifying total arsenic (As) and As from interlocking geochemical cycles (Fe, Mn) may assist in interpreting As dynamics in Dhaka well water. The surface source water was hypoxic to anoxic low DO associated with very high concentrations of biological oxygen demands, and electrical conductivity compared to industrial and non-industrial urban processes and standard activity guidelines. The results of this study should be applied to future research focused on the potential to improve water quality in urban and surrounding areas.

Structural evolution in LiFePO4-based battery materials: In-situ and ex-situ time-of-flight neutron diffraction study

Neutron diffraction has been used for in-situ studying of the charge–discharge processes in commercial lithium batteries with LiFePO4 (LFP) and graphite electrodes. The diffraction data were obtained with time-of-flight diffractometer in the process of three complete charge–discharge cycles performed at a low rate (0.1 C) at room temperature. The experimental data allowed detailed tracing of the multistage process of Li insertion into graphite followed by the formation of several LiCn phases, as well as the reversible transition of LiFePO4 ↔ FePO4. A comparison of the charge–discharge processes in a battery with a pure LFP cathode and LFP containing ∼1% of vanadium (LFPV) is made. In the second case, an evidently larger part of the anode material passes into the final LiC6 state. Analysis of the diffraction patterns of LFP and LFPV powders revealed a marked shrinkage of crystallite size in the LFPV case, which correlates with better electrochemical properties of LFPV compared to LFP.

AHerschelview of IC 1396 A: Unveiling the different sequences of star formation

The IC1396A globule in the young cluster Tr37, hosting many young stars and protostars, is assumed to be a site of triggered star formation. We mapped IC1396A with Herschel/PACS at 70 and 160 micron. The Herschel maps trace in great detail the very embedded protostellar objects and the structure of the cloud. PACS data reveal a previously unknown Class 0 object (IC1396A-PACS-1) located behind the ionization front. IC1396A-PACS-1 is not detectable with Spitzer, but shows marginal X-ray emission. The data also allowed to study three of the Class I intermediate-mass objects within the cloud. We derived approximate cloud temperatures to study the effect and potential interactions between the protostars and the cloud. The Class 0 object is associated with the densest and colder part of IC1396A. Heating in the cloud is dominated by the winds and radiation of the O6.5 star HD 206267 and, to a lesser extent, by the effects of the Herbig Ae star V 390 Cep. The surroundings of the Class I and Class II objects embedded in the cloud also appear warmer than the sourceless areas, although most of the low-mass objects cannot be individually extracted due to distance and beam dilution. The observations suggest that at least two episodes of star formation have occurred in IC1396A. One would have originated the known, ~1 Myr-old Class I and II objects in the cloud, and a new wave of star formation would have produced the Class 0 source at the tip of the brigth-rimmed cloud. From its location and properties, IC1396A-PACS-1 is consistent with triggering via radiative driven implosion (RDI) induced by HD 206267. The mechanisms behind the formation of the more evolved population of Class I/II/III objects in the cloud are uncertain. Heating of most of the remaining cloud by Class I/Class II objects and by HD 206267 itself may preclude further star formation in the region.

小澤儀明の外遊

Yoshiaki Ozawa is a significant figure in the early history of Japanese geology and paleontology, and his scientific contributions during the 1920's still attract attention today. It is known that Ozawa was granted a precious opportunity of foreign study and travel under a fellowship program of the Ministry of Education, visiting the United States and European countries over a period of more than two years. Unfortunately, his sudden premature death at the age of 31, only five months after returning to Japan, left few clues about what Ozawa actually experienced and contemplated through his opportunity abroad, and how he interacted with foreign scientists. Reposited in the Cushman Collection of Foraminifera of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C., U.S.A.), are personal correspondence and other auxiliary material of Joseph A. Cushman, with whom Ozawa collaborated on the taxonomy of smaller foraminifera. Review of these secondary collections allows a detailed tracing, from the viewpoint of Ozawa himself, of his exact course of the foreign travel, his observations on major trends in U.S. petroleum geology, and his styles of initiating and implementing the collaboration with Cushman. Some details of those invaluable archives are introduced here to add color to the early history of modern geology in Japan. It seems that the productive experience of Ozawa overseas came about from the interplay of his talent and enthusiasm with fortunate circumstances he encountered during his travels.

Методы и программные средства, поддерживающие комбинированный анализ бинарного кода

This paper presents methods and tools for binary code analysis that have been developed in ISP RAS and their applications in fields of algorithm and data format recovery. The analysis subject is executable code of various general purpose CPU architectures. The analysis is carried out in lack of source code, debug records, and without specific OS version requirements. The approach consists of collecting a detailed machine instruction level execution trace; method for successive presentation level increase; extraction of code belonging to the algorithm followed by structuring of both code and data formats it processes. Important results have been achieved: an intermediate representation has been developed, that allows for carrying out most of the preliminary processing tasks and algorithm code extraction without having to focus on specifics of a given machine; and a method and software tool have been developed for automated recovery of network message and file formats. The tools have been incorporated into a unified analysis platform that supports their combined use. The architecture behind the platform is also described in the paper. Examples of its application to real programs are given.

A new protocol for the collection and cataloguing of reference material for the study of fossil Cyperaceae fruits: The Modern Carpological Collection

Fossil fruits of the species-rich family Cyperaceae (Poales) are frequently found in Cenozoic sediments of Europe and their taxonomical analysis is particularly difficult and poorly practised, because each fossil has to be compared with several tens of modern samples in order to pinpoint its nearest living relatives. This is only possible by using collections specifically prepared for archaeo- or palaeobotanical studies. We illustrate here the current status and organisation of one of these collections, developed in the frame of a more general “Modern Carpological Collection” (MCC) of the Turin University. Recent efforts in sampling, identifying and characterising cyperaceous fruits in Northern Italy permitted the gathering of 411 samples, covering 80% of the ca. 200 species spontaneously growing in this territory. Due to the still dynamic taxonomy, the large number of species and to the broad intraspecific variability of fruit morphology, we kept a very detailed trace of the sample's origin, by indicating whether and how they were related to the herbarium material. Modern samples from soils and sediments have also been collected, being affected by taphonomic processes that make modern fruits more similar and readily comparable to palaeobotanical samples. In order to test the usefulness of the collection for the identification of fossils, we selected some fossil samples of Cyperaceae fruits extracted from Pleistocene and Holocene sediments and we compared them with all the MCC samples containing similar material. The result of this trial demonstrates the advantage in using specimen-rich collections, such as the MCC, for the identification of fossils, against using only the literature and/or specimen-poor reference collections. We suggest that the procedures adopted for the MCC could become a standard protocol in collecting and cataloguing reference material for the study of fossil Cyperaceae fruits. Besides the possible future development of this relatively small and local collection, an even more promising perspective is seen in the networking activity amongst carpological collections, pointing to the compilation of a large worldwide list of comparative material available for archaeo- and palaeobotanical studies. Such an easy access to an abundant reference material would certainly favour the progress of fruit-morphological studies; moreover, the integration with molecular analyses would presumably yield a better definition of the phylogenetic history of the Cyperaceae within a time context.