Unexplored Land Research Articles

German-speaking travelers of the XVIII-XIX centuries in the Crimea.

The annexation of Crimea to the Russian Empire in 1783 is one of the most significant dates in the history of the Russian state. The unexplored lands of the Russian Empire aroused great interest not only among its rulers, but also among a large number of foreigners, including German-speaking travelers. Among them were writers, scientists, geographers, naturalists, encyclopedists. Among the foreign researchers of the Crimean nature, not a few Germans were observed. Germans appeared in the Crimea as early as 1805. In Simferopol county they found such colonies as: Neizatz, Friedenthal, Rosenthal (Wirtenbergers), in Feodosia County – Heilbrunn, Sudak and Herzenberg. In the same year, the Swiss colony of Zurichtal appeared on the territory of the Crimean peninsula, and later, in 1811, another German colony, Kronental. The subject of the study are German-speaking travelers who visited the Crimea in the period XVIII-XIX. Despite numerous studies conducted in various periods, not only by domestic but also by foreign scientists, there are currently no historical and linguistic works of a German-speaking travelogue about the Crimea. The authors of the German - language travelogue about Crimea as informants can be divided into categories: a) chronology b) pragmatics. Due to the fact that Crimea has a unique and diverse nature, the region was often explored in the 18th and 19th century, not only by Russian researchers who had to expand Catherine II's knowledge about her state, but also by scientists of German origin. The region was explored by the Kippen family, Peter Simon Pallas, Moritz von Engelhart, Friedrich Parrott, Biberstein, and Karl Gablitz.

Projectively Enriched Symmetry and Topology in Acoustic Crystals.

Symmetry plays a key role in modern physics, as manifested in the revolutionary topological classification of matter in the past decade. So far, we seem to have a complete theory of topological phases from internal symmetries as well as crystallographic symmetry groups. However, an intrinsic element, i.e., the gauge symmetry in physical systems, has been overlooked in the current framework. Here, we show that the algebraic structure of crystal symmetries can be projectively enriched due to the gauge symmetry, which subsequently gives rise to new topological physics never witnessed under ordinary symmetries. We demonstrate the idea by theoretical analysis, numerical simulation, and experimental realization of a topological acoustic lattice with projective translation symmetries under a Z_{2} gauge field, which exhibits unique features of rich topologies, including a single Dirac point, Möbius topological insulator, and graphenelike semimetal phases on a rectangular lattice. Our work reveals the impact when gauge and crystal symmetries meet together with topology and opens the door to a vast unexplored land of topological states by projective symmetries.

Casarão Amália Noll: An architectural mosaic of the immigration in southern Brazil

At the end of the XXI century, a big immigration phenomenon happened in the south of Brazil, when thousands of European decided to leave their native country to look for new and unexplored lands. The material and immaterial multicultural patrimony generated by them remains as history legacy from the European colonization (Portuguese, German and Italian), and many other ethnic groups developed and raised the people of Rio Grande do Sul. In these work we are going to deal particularly with the heritages from the peoples who debarked at Guimarães’ harbor, in São Sebastião do Caí, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, that were spread out through communities as the Rio Branco road was opened. This road has an extension of 250 Kilometers moreover, nowadays, it passes through one of the most important industrial developed regions of Brazil. Even so, we can still find through this road many architectonic exemplars of the immigration period, as well as descendants residing on its banks.
 The Casarão Amália Noll, in Feliz city, is one of these exemplars of the survival architecture from the past period. This building shows distinct steps and constructive techniques, furthermore we can identify in one single room the presence of the characteristics from the Portuguese, German and Italian architecture. In 2015, the construction finds itself in low state of preservation, when at the time begins the woks of cadastral surveys, diagnosis of pathologies and proposal of intervention.
 The present article aim to show the proposed solutions for the first stage of architectonic intervention, in which we opted for the ruin stabilization and for the architectonic volumes restoration. At the new restored space will work a traditional German brewery, called Biergarten of Amália, beyond the museum of craft beer, immaterial heritage brought by the Germany people to the region.
 

Anticipo cinematográfico: América: Lo actual del trauma

<p>Telupaï es un niño de diez años que vive en un pueblo en la cordillera de Los Andes y que anhela convertirse en chamán. Para ello emprende junto a su amiga Naïra un viaje por tierras inexploradas de riesgos acechantes. Van en busca de un tótem perdido que es de gran valor ceremonial para su pueblo. La Pachamama es ese tótem que los protege y que ha sido confiscado por los incas. Esta búsqueda lleva a los protagonistas hacia Cuzco, la capital del imperio, asediada por los conquistadores, de manera que allí se yuxtaponen la conquista de los incas y la de los españoles.</p><p>Para saber más deberemos esperar a junio, cuando se estrene Pachamama, el film de animación del director argentino Juan Antin. La película se presentó en París en diciembre de 2018 y está nominada por los Premios César del cine francés como mejor film animado. Netflix ha adquirido los derechos de su distribución por lo que se auspicia una audiencia global.</p>

Explorări în microuniversul mitologic la Ardeu. Despre uriași și comori / Exploring the mythological micro-universe at Ardeu. About giants and treasures

About the archaeological discoveries from Ardeu (Balşa commune, Hunedoara county), many pages have been written over time1. We tried to present a different overview on the site „Ardeu-Cetăţuie”2. On this paper we set out to undertake an exploration of the mythological micro-universe, in the form in which it is still preserved among the members of the community of Ardeu village. %e investigation is based on small sequences collected from local folklore, directly from the locals, during the research campaigns, as well as by the Hunedoara journalist Laura Oana. %e study area is located in the south of the Apuseni Mountains3, in a place dominated by rocky cliffs (Fig. 1) and caves, where there are traces of habitation of populations from many historical times.%e walls of some fortifications, visible for centuries on top of the Cetăţuie hill, were a source of inspiration for the collective imaginary of the place, allowing the adaptation of some archetypes widespread in mythology, to the geographical framework of the place. %us, we had the opportunity to capture details that ensure the connection with the intimate environment of popular beliefs. We noticed the persistence of a series of significant elements, with their own function, which are correlated with each other: giants and their homes, huge guardians and/or treasure owners, underground rooms and tombs of giants. In the mythical universe, the giants lived in “Colţ”, on/in Dealul Cetăţuie (Cetăţeauă), an archeological site registered in the National Archaeological Repertory and in the List of monuments and archeological sites. From the point of view of archeological research, the association of the site with the treasures brings disadvantages, and the activity of the treasure hunters can only be classified as harmful for the national cultural heritage.%e material proof of the presence of the giants at Ardeu, in antiquity, is a skeleton, or rather the accidentally unearthed head of a person with larger dimensions than the usual ones. As it is still preserved, the legends with and about giants are part of the general structure and limits of the genre, with details that are widespread, in large spaces, but also with some particular ones. %ese fairy tales and stories are in a process of updating, but nevertheless we tried to understand their ancestral meanings and to draw research directions124.%e folklore of Ardeu village is vast unexplored land, in full transformation, land from which representative details are lost every day. Sequences of the mythological universe can still be recovered in Ardeu, such as the set of customs during the winter seasons, whose „piece of resistance” is represented by Căluşerii

The Greek Dream by Monsieur de Choiseul: The Travels of a European of the Enlightenment by Frédéric Barbier

Reviewed by: The Greek Dream by Monsieur de Choiseul: The Travels of a European of the Enlightenment by Frédéric Barbier Irene Kamberidou (bio) Frédéric Barbier, The Greek Dream by Monsieur de Choiseul: The Travels of a European of the Enlightenment. Paris: Arman Colin. 2010. Pp. 294. 40 illustrations, 2 maps. Paper $25.99. Frédéric Barbier takes us on a long journey, that of a French aristocrat of the Age of Enlightenment, "a man with a dream," a vision of a Europe in the process of construction, inspired by a "Greek antiquity not only idealized but accomplishable in modernity" (15). Barbier offers us a biography on a figure of the first generation of French Philhellenism. Biographies of male and female travel writers of the past centuries are extremely rare, such as Sture Linnér's (1965) book on nineteenth century Swedish traveler Fredrika Bremer i Grekland (Frederika Bremer in Greece), translated and published in Greek in 1997. Barbier provides the first biography of Count Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier (1752–1817; henceforth, Choiseul), a fervent admirer of ancient Greek civilization. Barbier's book consists of nine chapters, in addition to the author's acknowledgements (11–12), an epilogue (269–275), and a portrait of Choiseul (277), followed by a bibliographical appendix (279–286), an index (287–297), and a table of 40 illustrations (299–300) from Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, which include three illustrations of the women of Sifnos (105), Tinos (144), and Constantinople (265). By focusing on one specific traveler, here a French aristocrat during the Enlightenment, Barbier contributes to the research of other scholars on Philhellenism, while also shedding light on the spirit of the time. Through the travel accounts of Choiseul—Le voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (published in three volumes in 1782, 1809, and 1824)—Barbier illustrates the major social changes marking the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries: the French Revolution, Napoleon as First Council, the Congress of Vienna and Treaty of Paris, the Conservative Order and Counter-Enlightenment, the uprisings in Greece, and so forth. The intense concern of France in the affairs of the Near East and the imminence of the liberation of the Greeks is brought out by many travelers like Charles Nicolas Sigisbert Sonnini [End Page 564] de Manoncourt (1751–1812), a French nobleman, in his publication Voyage en Grèce et en Turquie (Sonnini 1801). During this period of social and political transformations, many western travelers like Choiseul visited and explored Greece—and not only for pleasure, profit, and culture. American and European volunteers participated in the struggle for Greek independence, producing, among other things, a body of travel writing about Greece (Larrabee 1957). Philhellenism in France had reached its peak during the Greek insurrection between the years 1820 and 1830, as illustrated in Emile Malakis's dissertation (1925) on French travelers to Greece from 1770 to 1820. Barbier's book, written in French, begins with a quote from Choiseul's Discourse preliminaire du voyage pittoresque en Grece (Choiseul-Gouffier 1789–1824, 9), which is indicative of the philhellenic spirit of his time: "I left Paris to visit Greece, as I wanted to satisfy a passion of my youth and see the most famous places in antiquity … the illustrious and beautiful topos of Homer and Herodotus." Many Western scholars and travel writers were convinced that Greece would soon experience a reawakening and a New Hellas would be created, free of Ottoman domination. Royalists, liberals, romanticists, classicists, and ordinary individuals all entered the philhellenic ranks. Scholars, both men and women of letters, joined with the poets in drawing attention to a "Greece in bondage" (Malakis 1925). Barbier's introductory chapter, "Europe, Greece and the Orient," is a welcome contribution, as it deals with the political conditions of Choiseul's world. Choiseul was a Hellenist and Philhellene with a vision enabled by the advantages provided through his social position as a member of the nobility (36–60). Choiseul's originality, the author argues, is that he integrated the unexplored lands of Greek antiquity into the established travel model of his time, along with an instructive album of new...

Pores to Predictions: Nanoscale Clues to Larger Mysteries

The story of unconventional oil and gas technology development has been focused on fractures. The formula has been more stages, more sand, and more water, targeting the most productive spots. The trend continues, with rising production and larger completions at a time when the oil price bust has slashed the cost of services and supplies. Even so, production from unconventional wells leaves 90% of the oil in the ground, raising the question, what is next? Some have taken on the daunting task of trying to understand how oil and gas flows out of the tiny pores in ultratight rock that feed the fractures flowing to the well. Compared to what it takes to effectively fracture rock and target sweet spots, the science behind fluid and gas flows through pore networks is a difficult slog deep into the unknown. It is a frustrating search, but that is where the oil is. “The first part of the problem is that people started to say that oil and gas is stored in the fractures and that by fracturing a well you are simply exploiting that storage event,” said Richard MacDonald, the innovation, strategy and execution manager for EP Energy, which is among the companies looking deeper (Fig. 1). “We calculated what fractures will hold and that volume will last only a week or week-and-a-half of production. After 2 weeks, where is the oil from? The matrix.” The matrix is a frontier, like the unexplored lands shown in maps made centuries ago during the era of exploration when those vast uncharted spaces spawned fantastic tales. These explorers are looking at explanations for production patterns that diverge from what they know. “It is not something they taught us in school,” said Steve Jones, reservoir engineering advisor for Cimarex. “We are learning, figuring out what are the facts of life and the ground rules, the theory.” Based on his experience at Newfield Exploration, he delivered a technical paper at the recent Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTEC 2460396) explaining why changes in the gas/oil ratio (GOR) produced from certain unconventional wells, which would be alarming in a conventional field, are the norm in the unconventional plays he saw in Oklahoma (Fig. 2). Jones is among those working on field-scale problems. Others are doing pore-scale studies on this ultratight rock where standard terms such as reservoir and transient seem an odd fit based on the established definitions. While an online dictionary defines a reservoir as a place where fluid collects, especially in rock strata, it offers a poor mental image of unconventional rock. There the oil in the rocks is scattered throughout pore networks with openings ranging in size from a large virus down to just a bit bigger than a DNA molecule. Spaces at the low end of the range are so confined they can alter the physical properties that control production, particularly the bubblepoint—the pressure at which the gas in oil escapes from the liquid.

There be dragons: effects of unexplored religion on nurses' competence in spiritual care.

On ancient maps unexplored lands were simply labeled 'there be dragons' indicating the fear that attends the unknown. Despite three decades of theoretical and empirical work on spirituality in nursing, evidence still suggests that nurses do not feel competent to engage in spiritual care. In this paper I propose that one of the reasons for this is a theory-theory gap between religion and spirituality. Generalized anxiety about the role of religion in society has led to under-theorizing in nursing about religious care. As a result, when religion and spirituality overlap at the point of care, nurses are left without the substantive knowledge required for practice. Robust religious theorizing should include thick accounts of lived religion and integrative work that enables nurses to understand commonalities across religions that are relevant to practice. As a starting point to this integrative work, nurses can be introduced to the nature and lexicon of lived religion, religious perspectives on suffering, and religious reasoning that holds meaning and mystery in tension. Such an approach will better prepare them for the realities of practice where the complexities of spirituality and religion come to play.

Ecommerce in virtual worlds: a 'just do it' approach?

For the corporate world, virtual worlds (VWs) are still an unexplored land of opportunities. [...]

Synthetic biology: discovering new worlds and new words.

In the year 1493, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) returned from his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean with news of an unexplored land in the west. Most Europeans were convinced that Columbus had discovered a ‘new world’, yet it was not new at all. Some 400 years earlier, the Norse explorer Leif Ericson (circa 970–1020) had probably been the first European to set foot on North American soil, and some thousands of years earlier, the continent was populated by humans who had crossed the Bering Strait from Asia. > For many of its practitioners, the answer is clear: synthetic biology is about engineering and not about science… The ‘discovery’ of America in the late fifteenth century came to mind when engineers, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, MA, USA), started talking about a new discipline, which they called synthetic biology (Endy, 2005; Andrianantoandro et al , 2006). This term has subsequently evoked many great expectations, as its application might help to solve numerous social and environmental problems. However, it has also triggered the type of public alarm that molecular biologists are all too familiar with after the bitter debates about genetically modified organisms in the 1990s (Jansson, 1995; Ramos et al , 1994). So, can synthetic biology really be called a new field, or is it just the intensification of the genetic engineering of organisms that biologists have been carrying out since the 1970s? What is genuinely novel about this allegedly newborn discipline? The term synthetic biology was coined in 1912 by the French chemist Stephane Leduc (1853–1939; Leduc, 1912); however, it has only recently become an umbrella term to describe the interface between molecular biology and hard‐core engineering (Andrianantoandro et al , 2006). Synthetic biology is becoming an inclusive theoretical and technical framework in which to approach biological systems …

Futurist mediterraneità between Emporium and Imperium

Futurist mediterraneità between Emporium and Imperium Claudio Fogu "In the golden years of rationalist architecture, Mediterranean-ness became our polar star" (Carlo Belli, cited in Danesi, 25). Thus architectural and art critic Belli recalled in 1976 the key role that the idea of mediterraneità (Mediterranean-ness) had come to play for both avant-garde Italian artists and rationalist architects in the early 1930s. Whether identified with a modern sense of the "classic" intended as an art of "intimacy cum narrative depth"—which accommodated equally the abstractism of Milanese painters, the "scuola Romana" of Giuseppe Capogrossi, Emanuele Cavalli e Corrado Cagli, and "les Italiens de Paris" united around Giorgio De Chirico—or with the "solar-ness" of Italian-rationalist architecture, Mediterranean-ness became the most effective line of defense in the Italian-modernist town (Vescovo 24). It allowed Italian modernists under Fascism to unify around a common discursive strategy in order to simultaneously distinguish themselves from their Northern European rivals, and to fence off the increasingly worrisome accusations of esterofilia (love of everything foreign) levied against them by the ever more vocal proponents of an official fascist style responding to the idea of romanità (ancient Roman-ness) (Benzi 30). Already between 1928 and 1929, Italian emigré painters in Paris, from the ex-futurist Gino Severini to the sui generis novecentisti Massimo Campigli and Filippo De Pisis, gathered around De Chirico, father of the most intuitively Mediterranean style in painting (metafisica), to combine "magical realism" and "abstract classicism" in order to create a Mediterranean alternative to the Surrealist "appeals to the unconscious, unexplored lands, and elementary forces"(Benzi 31).Similarly, in 1931, [End Page 25] the rationalist architects known as Gruppo 7 began their polemic against the "cold rationalism" and "socialistic" tendencies of Bauhaus architecture, opposing to it the "solar" and "spontaneous" rationalism of Southern Italian and Greek islands architecture (Danesi 25). Pointing to the geographical consistency of the connection between sun, Mediterranean sea, and white walls-architecture, and linking it to the diachronic consistency of climate and natural landscape across the Mediterranean area, the adherents to the most foreign-inspired modernist trend—rationalist architecture—could thus construct, a posteriori, a most convenient national-natural foundation for their daring architectural choices. Modern architecture was projected to be a natural outgrowth of Mediterranean climate and that had always been there in the combination of solar whiteness and sezione aurea (Golden section), characterizing even the so-called spontaneous architecture of Mediterranean islands. But was mediterraneità anything more than a politically convenient strategy for carving a vital space for the avant-garde under Fascism, while at the same time continuing to feed the cultural mill of Italian-ness? Did, for example, Malaparte-Libera's architectural masterpiece in Capri, or the villa Oro (Golden villa) by Luigi Cosenza in Naples, share substantial traits with both the centuries-old spontaneous architecture of the Corricella harbor in the island of Procida and the "marine landscapes" that became a statistically relevant reality of Italian-modernist painting in the second half of the 1930s? (Vescovo 20). To these questions, Belli's friend Edoardo Persico responded throughout the 1930s from the pages of the influential journal Casabella with a resounding "no." For Persico the idea of mediterraneità was as vague, rhetorical, and banal as its more official and conservative counterparts such as romanità, latinità, italianità. Worse still, a serious brand of Latin-Mediterranean modernist architecture existed, but not in Italy. It was, of course, Le Corbusier's (Danesi 25). Surely Persico's opinion was just one. But even if one were to connect more architectural and artistic dots than he was prepared to recognize as avant-garde, would the mediterraneità of Italian rationalism and metafisica amount to much more than a certain suggestion of the naturalness of the classic, an idea of natural purity distilled from the sea and bathed in light, an abstract genealogy without the burden of history? Where, in other words, was the "modern" element in this Mediterranean-ness? This question was never addressed by Persico, nor by champions...

Historical and Current Perspectives of Neuroactive Compounds Derived from Latin America

Plants and invertebrates in Latin America have contributed to a great extent in the use, discovery and development of novel neuroactive tools. Significantly, these neuroactive drugs have proven to be particularly important for our current understanding of the physiology and pharmacology of the nervous system. In addition, these discoveries have helped to build the modern and successful pharmacological business that we know today. For example, curare helped to introduce the use of muscle relaxing agents into modern surgical techniques. The discovery of cocaine from the leaves of Peruvian coca plants was instrumental in the discovery of local anesthetics. The search and discovery for useful neuroactive compounds derived from Latin America has also been ongoing in other areas and new applications for quinine, capsaicin and epibatidine were recently described. Besides these organic compounds, several peptides produced by spiders and other invertebrates to hunt their prey also induce effects in channels and membrane receptors at very low concentrations, indicating their high potency and selectivity. It is likely that new pharmaceutics will be developed from these molecules. The interest to renew the search for new compounds is timely, since largely unexplored lands, such as the Amazon and Patagonia, hold an important number of plants and animals that contain exciting new active compounds. With the introduction of new techniques to isolate, identify and characterize the molecular targets and actions of chemical entities, together with the need for more potent and selective compounds to treat neurological conditions, it is necessary to broaden the current exploratory effort in order to find more beneficial uses.

"A Distinct Place in America where All Mestizos Reside": Landscape and Identity in Ana Castillo's Sapogonia and Diana Chang's The Frontiers of Love

At very root of concept of an American nationality lies myth of a limitless frontier that unites with unconstrained mobility as an essence of freedom, both physical and spiritual. Early American literature recreated that sense of ceaseless movement into new frontiers that carried with it endless opportunity for adventure, escape, exploration, and quest. But by 1900, unexplored land was no longer limitless and our ethos about land was reversed: instead of penetrating landscape, United States (1) was newly threatened with penetration by advancing numbers of immigrants landing on shores. With closing of frontier by end of 1800s, the very boundlessness of this racial and ethnic diversity generated a need to reinforce interior (Takaki 83). This desire for protection from encroachment by minority groups led, among other things, to relocation of Native Americans from their homelands to reservations and to segregation laws of 1890s that restricted African American from mainstream American social or political arenas. Likewise, in 1800s, Mexican settlers and Chinese immigrants faced loss of land rights. For Mexicans in frontier territory, discovery of America entailed loss of their land. For centuries, natives of Latin American countries and Mexico had crossed Rio Grande in search of work, political asylum from oppressive regimes, and opportunity. With Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, United States government remapped western territory by annexing an entire territory, its possessions and its people, creating borders where there had been none. To end conflict, Mexico accepted Rio Grande as Texas border and ceded southwest territories to United States for $15 million, a territory that includes present day California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and Utah. The treaty moved borders and ushered in a perpetual struggle over land and its inhabitants' place on that land. The very meaning of land and ownership unstable, subject to shifting borders and constant redefinition: those who had been Mexican suddenly found themselves inside United States, foreigners on their own land, politically vulnerable, powerless, and economically dispossessed. With intrusion of Anglos, land itself a site for clash of political and cultural ideologies which, according to Americo Paredes, has contributed to sense of an in-between existence (qtd. in Saldivar 17) that characterizes Mexican-American border culture. At that historical moment in 1848 when all Mexican nationals in conquered borderlands overnight became United States citizens, the Mexican American people were created as a people: Mexican by birth, language, and culture; United States citizens by might of arms (Rodolfo Alvarez qtd. in Saldivar 17). So how does that subject survive in exile? Divested of nationhood and reinvested with new loyalties, wanderer claims or feels claimed by no nation and bears emotional costs for losing placement in history and in time. For Chinese immigrants, perceptions of an open continent and limitless opportunity were attractive, but harsh exclusionary laws enacted in 1890s and reinforced in early twentieth century constrained their ability to move within American landscape. The Exclusion Laws of 1924 prohibited entry of aliens ineligible for citizenship, further restraining Chinese-American population. Chinese were systematically denied more lucrative forms of livelihood and were concentrated in low-wage jobs. In early years of immigration, Chinese who had joined Gold Rush in California were soon taxed out of their mining claims; they sought work in other areas, mainly in laying new railroads. In urban areas, they were relegated to low paying jobs as cigar workers, tailors, and seamsters. …

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life and the Expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's account of the doomed Narvaez expedition to the vast unexplored lands beyond the northern frontier of New Spain has long been heralded as the quintessential tale of the European confronting the wilderness of North America and its native inhabitants for the first time. After living captive among native peoples of the present-day Texas coast for almost six years, Cabeza de Vaca traveled overland through present-day western Texas and northern Mexico until being reunited with his countrymen near the Pacific coast. His account offers an isolated glimpse of areas of Gulf coastal Texas and northeastern Mexico that would not be visited again by Europeans for over 150 years and is the earliest authentic eyewitness description of the North American bison. Volume 1 presents the first modern edition of Cabeza de Vaca's original 1542 relacion and a new, annotated, facing-page English translation. It concludes with a newly researched study of Cabeza de Vaca's life. Volume 2 analyzes the narrative in discrete segments, putting into context Cabeza de Vaca's descriptions of the landscape, ecology, and peoples he encountered. It also includes new research into the preparations of Narvaez's expedition in Spain and a fresh study of the lives and fates of Cabeza de Vaca's three surviving companions. Volume 3 considers the literary and historical contexts of Cabeza de Vaca's relacion. The literary inquiry examines the work's creation, publication history, and literary and cultural legacy from the sixteenth century to the present. The historical analysis presents new studies of Spanish exploration in the Gulf of Mexico (1508-28), Spanish speculation on and exploration of the South Sea (1502-39), and Nuno de Guzman's conquest of Nueva Galicia (1530-31).

A Brazilian perspective

The concept of tropical medicine as a medical specialty has varied considerably according to the operational needs of each period and/or country. The concept in South America has moved away from the practice of medicine (all medicine) in the tropics to restrict itself to diseases that are endemic in the intertropical regions and less common or even non-existent in the temperate zones (the pathologies exotiques of the French authors). In many countries, including Brazil, tropical medicine has become inextricably linked to parasitic and helminthic diseases, which are associated with poverty, crowding, lack of sanitation, and patterns of land occupation. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, institutes were established in Rio de Janeiro and S~o Paulo, the largest Brazilian cities, to help combat the then endemic and epidemic diseases. Arguably, the driving force behind the creation of these institutions was an economic one, the control of diseases being necessary to allow the vital flow of European migrants to continue, to maintain the country's maritime trade (the fear of tropical diseases, especially yellowfever, was driving ships away from Brazilian ports), and to permit the occupation of vast tracts of unexplored land. These institutes bred generations of renowned investigators, Carlos Chagas being the most famous. Today, Brazil is the eighth largest economy in the world, and its market size in pharmaceuticals ranks even higher. Sadly, Brazil also comes near the top of the table for inequality of wealth distribution, and this is reflected in the quality and type of medical care available. The wealthy have access, through private physicians and health insurance, to treatment that is virtually identical to what is offered in the best centres in Europe and the USA while the vast majority of the population receives substandard medical attention from governmental institutions. For the rich, new drugs and treatments are available almost as soon as they are in developed countries, and their physicians are, to a large extent, acquainted with the principles of modern practice, including evidence-based medicine. For the less well off, newer (and older) drugs and diagnostic tools are unavailable or have very limited availability, regional differences are enormous, and for their physicians the marketing representatives of the drug companies are the major source of new medical information. Over the past three decades, Brazil has gone through major social and economic transformations, becoming a predominantly urban, industrialised society. In the same period, the relative importance of health-related problems also changed considerably. For the country as a whole, infant mortality and child malnutrition rates, although still substantial, were much reduced; ancient scourges like smallpox and poliomyelitis were eradicated and

Optimal pricing, use and exploration of uncertain natural resources

We consider Arrow's model for an economy engaged in consuming a randomly distributed natural resource, and in exploring previously unexplored land to find more of the resource. After modifying the model so that each discovery reveals a random amount of the resource, we use dynamic programming techniques to derive the equations governing optimal rates of exploration, consumption, and pricing of the resource. We analyse these equations asymptotically when the typical amount discovered is small compared with the total amount of the resource, and approximately when the amount is medium or large. In both cases we obtain formulas for the optimal exploration, consumption, and pricing policies. We demonstrate the accuracy of these analytical results by comparing them with numerically-determined exact solutions, and discuss economic implications of these results.

Reserve and land prices with exploration under uncertainty

Arrow and Chang ( J. Econom. Environ. Manag. 9, 1–10 (1982) analyze an exploration-extraction model with uncertainty about the distribution of deposits. Reserve prices do not exhibit any rising trend when the unexplored land area is big but, in order to know what happens when the unexplored area is smaller, “a probabilistic analysis not yet performed” (ibid. p. 10) is required. Their conjecture of a rising trend at less than the discount rate is confirmed. However, land prices can be expected to grow faster than reserve prices, which helps discriminate between Arrow and Chang's, and other rationalizations of the failure of resource prices to rise at the discount rate.

Optimal pricing, use, and exploration of uncertain natural resource stocks

Units of natural resources, to be called “mines,” are assumed distributed over an unexplored territory according to a Poisson process in space. At any moment, total reserves and unexplored land are given. Society can determine the rate of consumption and the rate of exploration. Reserves are drawn down by consumption and increased by discoveries made during exploration; the amount of unexplored land is decreased by exploration. At any moment, the payoff of society is a concave function of consumption less a linear function of exploration with future payoffs discounted. Optimal policies are considered and, in particular, it is shown for a large amount of unexplored land the shadow prices of reserves and of unexplored land move in random cycles but show only a slight upward tread, thereby casting some light on the failure of mineral prices to rise at the market rate of interest.

The Physician's Assistant—Today and Tomorrow

This is a timely guidebook to the challenging and still largely unexplored land of the physician's assistant and the nurse practitioner. Writing from an unlikely source, the Trauma Program of the Yale Department of Surgery, the three authors manage to condense a great deal of information by merging their perspectives, which are those of surgeon, lawyer, and nurse-psychiatric social worker. The style is breezy, at times almost journalistic, and the book is refreshingly free of the familiar pomposity of professionals interacting at high levels. Lest the reader be lulled into a false sense of harmony, however, the authors include a large appendix consisting of the utterances of official government and professional organizations. These Guidelines, Statements, and Programs document the wrangles over titles, status, independent practice, liability, and professional education which stand in the way of the obvious and sensible step of providing the primary physician with the help he so

Children's Dreams. An Unexplored Land

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article ArticleNo AccessChildren's Dreams. An Unexplored LandA. MYERSONA. MYERSONSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Apr 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.99.6.900-aAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail "Children's Dreams. An Unexplored Land." American Journal of Psychiatry, 99(6), pp. 900-a–901 Access content To read the fulltext, please use one of the options below to sign in or purchase access. Personal login Institutional Login Sign in via OpenAthens Purchase Save for later Item saved, go to cart PPV Articles - American Journal of Psychiatry $35.00 Add to cart PPV Articles - American Journal of Psychiatry Checkout Please login/register if you wish to pair your device and check access availability. Not a subscriber? Subscribe Now / Learn More PsychiatryOnline subscription options offer access to the DSM-5 library, books, journals, CME, and patient resources. This all-in-one virtual library provides psychiatrists and mental health professionals with key resources for diagnosis, treatment, research, and professional development. Need more help? PsychiatryOnline Customer Service may be reached by emailing [email protected] or by calling 800-368-5777 (in the U.S.) or 703-907-7322 (outside the U.S.). FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 99Issue 6 May 1943Pages 900-a-901 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 April 2006 Published in print 1 May 1943