University Of Texas In Austin Research Articles

Harry Ransom Center Lecture

abstract This lecture was composed to be delivered at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin in 2020 to mark the full opening of Arthur Miller’s archive.

Maneuvering into the future: Open-Architecture Data Repository (OADR) prototype: Towards civil and commercial space traffic coordination

In 2018, the US National Space Council released Space Policy Directive-3 (SPD-3), which instructed relevant US government agencies to begin re-assigning many aspects of space traffic management (STM) and space traffic coordination (STC) serving non-military US space operators. This was identified as a ‘whole of government’ approach, and the organization identified to lead many of the efforts was the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Space Commerce (OSC), in the US Department of Commerce (DOC). The US Congress, in Public Law 116–93, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020, legislation directed that the Secretary of Commerce contract with the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) to study the Trump Administration's proposal. The NAPA study affirmed OSC would be best suited. Congress also mandated that OSC accomplish an important first step: assemble an Open Architecture Data Repository11Since this paper was first presented, the name for the effort, the Open Architecture Data Repository (OADR), has been changed to TraCSS (Traffic Coordination System for Space). As the focus of this work is on the prototype demonstration system, we will retain the use of OADR in this paper. (OADR) prototype to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach and architecture.OSC, along with The Aerospace Corporation, MITER, MIT Lincoln Laboratories and the University of Texas-Austin, architected and assembled a working prototype in 2021. The team obtained two-months of data from the US Space Surveillance Network (SSN), along with data from commercial space surveillance data providers and satellite operator ephemerides. Using the prototype, the authors analyzed the data, identified potential satellite conjunctions, calculated probabilities of collision, and generated Conjunction Data Messages (CDMs). The team compared the results to existing operational systems, with good agreement. OSC and their partners demonstrated the OADR prototype results to the Congress, as funded and directed by Public Law 116–260, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021. This paper describes some of the background and rationale for the prototype, goals and derived requirements of the prototype, the architecture, software deployed, data utilized, conjunction analysis results, comparison of the prototype's results with existing operational US government systems, and possible next steps for the OADR.

The people behind the papers - Junghyun Kim and Sibum Sung.

Plants respond to changes in temperature using complex mechanisms, with decreases in temperature inducing vernalisation and high temperatures causing thermo-morphogenesis. A new paper in Development investigates how VIL1, a PHD finger-containing protein, functions in plants during thermo-morphogenesis. To find out more about this research, we spoke with co-first author of the study, Junghyun Kim, and corresponding author Sibum Sung (Associate Professor of Molecular Bioscience at the University of Texas in Austin, USA). Co-first author Yogendra Bordiya was not available to interview, having now moved to a different sector.

Articulations of power: Guns on campus and the protests against them

When carrying concealed handguns on campus was legalised at The University of Texas (UT) at Austin in 2015, students and faculty positioned themselves in relation to the new law in very different ways, ranging from large demonstrations and the use of various types of rhetoric to non-vocal representations and deliberate silence. This essay examines an important transitional moment in the educational environment by focusing on the respective relationships and modes of expression—or articulations—of the affected parties regarding the issue of firearms on university premises, as these reflected opposing camps within the academic community. Drawing on interviews and quantitative research, and proposing a novel theoretical frame to understand the complex subject of guns, this essay examines the polemics, polarisation, and power dynamics around Campus Carry at UT Austin.

Web Exclusive. Annals Graphic Medicine - Dr. Mom: Assorted Clinical Pearls From 2022.

Web ExclusivesFebruary 2023Annals Graphic Medicine - Dr. Mom: Assorted Clinical Pearls From 2022FREEGrace E. Farris, MDGrace E. Farris, MDUniversity of Texas, Austin, Texas (G.E.F.)Search for more papers by this authorAuthor, Article, and Disclosure Informationhttps://doi.org/10.7326/G22-0081 SectionsAboutVisual AbstractPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail Download figure Download PowerPoint Comments0 CommentsSign In to Submit A Comment Author, Article, and Disclosure InformationAffiliations: University of Texas, Austin, Texas (G.E.F.)Disclosures: Disclosures can be viewed at www.acponline.org/authors/icmje/ConflictOfInterestForms.do?msNum=G22-0020.Author/Illustrator Information: Grace E. Farris, MD, is an assistant professor of medicine at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. You can view her work at her website: www.farrisgrace.com.About Dr. Mom: In Dr. Mom, physician and cartoonist Grace Farris examines work–life balance while mothering and doctoring. Dr. Mom appears quarterly in Annals Graphic Medicine at Annals.org.This article was published at Annals.org on 24 January 2023. PreviousarticleNextarticle Advertisement FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Metrics Current IssueFebruary 2023Volume 176, Issue 2 ePublished: 24 January 2023 Issue Published: February 2023 Copyright & PermissionsCopyright © 2023 by American College of Physicians. All Rights Reserved.PDF downloadLoading ...

The Witch in Flight

The Witch in Flight

About the social turn in foreign library science

The article presents an analysis of the bibliographic database of the Google Academy as a source for studying the most cited articles of leading foreign journals in library and information sciences. The most rated journals on library science are introduced. The crisis of foreign library science as a social discipline in the subjects of the journal Scientometrics is ascertained. The place of foreign library science in the interdisciplinary discourse for November 2022 has been estimated. The leader of the turn towards new library science with greater focus on knowledge management and socio-ethical component in researches is designated R. David Lankes Professor of Library Science at the University of Texas in Austin. Based on the analysis of the most cited articles in the leading foreign journals on library science, the ways of modern library studies within the framework of the so-called “social turn”, as well as the directions of interdisciplinary research in the field of social sciences with the participation of specialists in library and information sciences, are shown. When searching for a new library methodology, the so-called “chronotopy” and “altmetrics” are considered as a compromise option for combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, which also involve the author’s immersion in the content under study – the basis for scientific introspection, self-reflection and self-control.

Indoor Pollen Concentrations of Mountain Cedar (Juniperus ashei) during Rainy Episodes in Austin, Texas.

Standard pollen monitoring programs evaluate outdoor pollen concentrations; however, information on indoor pollen is crucial for human wellbeing as people spend most of the day in indoor environments. In this study, we investigated the differences in indoor mountain cedar pollen loads between rooms of different uses and with different ventilation at The University of Texas in Austin and focused on the effect of rainy episodes on indoor/outdoor ratios of pollen concentrations. Pollen were sampled outdoors and indoors, specifically in seven rooms and in two thermal labs with controlled ventilation, during the daytime on 6 days in 2015. We calculated daily pollen concentrations, campaign pollen integrals (CPIn, the sum of all daily pollen concentrations) and ratios between indoor and outdoor concentrations (I/O ratio). Pollen concentrations differed substantially based on features related to room use and ventilation: Whereas the highest CPIn was observed in a room characterized by a frequently opened window and door, the smallest CPIn was related to a storeroom without any windows and no forced ventilation. Our results showed that rainy episodes were linked to a higher mean I/O ratio (0.98; non-rainy episodes: 0.05). This suggests that pollen accumulated indoors and reached higher levels than outdoors. Low ratios seem to signal a low level of risk for allergic people when staying inside. However, under very high outdoor pollen concentrations, small ratios can still be associated with high indoor pollen levels. In turn, high I/O ratios are not necessarily related to a (very) high indoor exposure. Therefore, I/O ratios should be considered along with pollen concentration values for a proper risk assessment. Exposure may be higher in indoor environments during prevailing precipitation events and at the end of the pollen season of a specific species. Standardized indoor environments (e.g., thermal labs) should be included in pollen monitoring programs.

Using Cameras To Understand What Is Happening While Drilling

Can a camera do a better job than humans at creating a minute-by-minute record of drilling activity? Or evaluate damaged drill bits better? Based on two papers at the SPE/IADC International Drilling Conference and Exhibition, the answer might soon be yes. Schlumberger researchers showed that video from a camera on the drill floor and on the drilling cuttings shaker kept an accurate record of what the rig was doing at the time, also known as the rig state (SPE 204086). A paper from The University of Texas-Austin (UT-Austin) showed a camera phone could create images for use in their bit-evaluation program to assess the damage and offer a reasonable explanation for what caused it (SPE 204124). A year ago Teradata announced its Bit-Box, which houses cameras and lights to create 3D bit images. It is now on the market; other companies are working on competing products. Cameras have gotten small and cheap at a time when innovations like self-driving cars have driven tech companies to speed development of computer-vision tools. Schlumberger’s goal is to convert video from rig cameras into a constant record of the rig state. It is being done with data gathered by sensors while drilling, or by people if the sensors stop working or generate bad data. The system leaves gaps when sensor issues are missed or workers are otherwise occupied, which is a maddening problem for those who need to know what is going on at any moment to interpret drilling data. “We need to understand what the rig was doing when we look at and try to solve problems” using digital analysis, said Crispin Chatar, a drilling subject matter expert for Schlumberger, who presented the paper at the virtual conference. The bit-evaluation program used phone camera images as a lower-cost substitute for 3D imaging, like the system sold by Teradata. Mobile phone images come with the risk of bad lighting and varying angles, which the authors said affected the analysis. But those devices are small, and there are plenty of backups available. “Everybody has a mobile phone at a rig site,” said Pradeep Ashok, a research scientist in the petroleum engineering department at UT-Austin. He believes cameras on mobile devices are the future because “if you could build something that requires no added equipment it will allow more rapid adoption.” Mobile phone owners also worry about breaking their phone. They may not be so concerned about rig equipment, which is a concern to those selling more-complex imaging devices. Both projects were early efforts to test what can be done with camera data, which is likely to expand over time. Schlumberger’s goal of tracking the rig state more reliably and cheaper than when using sensors may not be enough to convince users to change their ways at a time when sensors are proliferating to support more digitally controlled activities. The Schlumberger data were gathered at a test well for an automated rig.

Multienergy Load Forecasting for Regional Integrated Energy Systems Considering Multienergy Coupling of Variation Characteristic Curves

Multienergy load forecasting (MELF) is the premise of regional integrated energy systems (RIES) production planning and energy dispatch. The key of MELF is the consideration of multienergy coupling and the improvement of prediction accuracy. Therefore, a MELF method considering the multienergy coupling of variation characteristic curves (MELF_MECVCC) for RIES is proposed. The novelty of MELF_MECVCC lies in the following three aspects. 1) For the trend stripping and volatility extraction of multienergy load time series, the extreme-point symmetric mode decomposition-sample entropy (ESMD-SE) method is introduced to decompose and reconstruct the variation characteristic curves of multienergy, including trend curve and fluctuation curve. 2) The multienergy coupling of the variation characteristic curves is considered to reflect the variation characteristics of the multienergy loads. 3) Different methods are applied according to different variation characteristics; i.e., the combined method based on multitask learning and long short-term memory network (MTL-LSTM) is applied to predict the trend curve with strong correlation and the least square support vector regression (LSSVR) method is applied to predict the fluctuation curve with strong volatility and high complexity. Based on the actual data set of the University of Texas in Austin, the MELF_MECVCC model is simulated and verified, which shows that the model reduces the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and the root mean square error (RMSE) and fits better with the original load and has higher prediction accuracy, compared with current advanced algorithms.

Why Trump Lost and How? A Rhetorical Explanation

Discovering why the 2020 election turned out as it did will, given the complexities of American politics, take considerable time. Discovering how Trump lost and how Biden won will take longer. This article presents an initial foray in the latter direction by subjecting the rhetoric of the campaign to computerized language analysis via the DICTION program. In doing so, this study is the most recent outgrowth of the Campaign Mapping Project, begun at the University of Texas in Austin in 1995 and designed to produce comparative rhetorical data about presidential campaigns from 1948 to the present. The argument being made here is that Donald Trump lost the election by making excessive use of what Richard Hofstadter calls the Paranoid Style. In addition, Trump made exaggerated claims about abstract and unprovable conspiracies, all of which seemed derivative to voters worried about their health and their jobs in 2020. Joe Biden, in contrast, stressed Commonality—the need for shared purpose during a dangerous and dispiriting time. Biden also spoke directly of and to the people, thereby taking a page out of Trump’s own 2016 playbook. In many ways, Donald Trump’s self-preoccupations made him blind to the needs of the electorate, a habit that developed over the course of his presidency and that ultimately cost him his job.

The Lonely Humans, and: Time, Rampant and Flourishing

The Lonely Humans, and: Time, Rampant and Flourishing Jennifer Chang (bio) The Lonely Humans About solitude, I don't need proofit's lost. Outside, the rain practicesloss, is losing to infinitude. Now there'sa river the city can't contain, rushingagainst the wishes of infrastructure.I know these streets, and then I don't.I carry my child with the current,and we are the rain, the falling songand the song of rain. Have I ever felthappier. Felt the human wrongnessof crossing human streets, carsstalling on waterlogged curbs. I had thought words could makenew oceans, my thoughts tiltingabove all like a lighthouse. Suchsovereignty, bearing a lightneither wave nor sail could regard,my goddamn power ablazein the peerless dark. Bicycles goingnowhere. The noise of strangerssoundless in so much rain. To survivewhat must perish: if we want,want not as water wants, to floodand to fathom us, our perishing. [End Page 193] Time, Rampant and Flourishing Certain forests, like this one, invokethe twentieth century, though this is not a forest but a city park, land cordonedfor natural recreation—a manmade stream,black willow trees loved by honeybees, paper-white moths,and so loved by the wood thrush. Often a trailis taken with little thought as to wheretime leads, what place permits the bodyto think and be [End Page 194] more, then who measures the centuries anddoes a forest conclude?This one, tucked away like a dream, belongs first to the municipalityand then to a population of white-tailed deer, some say rampant,some say flourishing. Once it belongedto a senator of a western state, who set a small stone housenear that loamy clearing. He found these trees peculiar. Hardwood, deciduous,not unlike the woman he loved but would notmarry. Why not? It was a different century.Consider the tree of heavenconsider the bamboo. What is not nativetakes over, and here their roots tangle [End Page 195] underfoot, form an unexpected grove,an alteration within all this green. The senator's househas turned now into a heap of ruin. Otherwise unremarkable,he was not so prosaic as to wed himself to habit: how easilybeing young can be a habitof being wrong, of writing lettersonly to hear one's own voice. Love is hardbecause who it affirmsis not always the loved one, is not always the lover, so what does it affirm?I used to never care about affirmation. I merely followed younight after nightuntil one morning I grew tired [End Page 196] of particularity and was alone. Does it matter, then,that the senator never married, dithering instead between such mute trees,which, yes, we may have passed once,tenderly, and a meadow of copious grasses, the names becominga secret lexicon, each name a blade of law. It is a parkor it is a forest. It is olderthan any heart. [End Page 197] Jennifer Chang jennifer chang is the author of Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. Copyright © 2021 Yale University

Defiant Geographies: Race & Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro by Lorraine Leu

Reviewed by: Defiant Geographies: Race & Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro by Lorraine Leu Jamie L. Worms Lorraine Leu Defiant Geographies: Race & Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro. Place of Publication: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. CCXXXVIII + 238 pp. Maps, diagrams, tables, ills., notes, appendices, references, index. $42.00 paper (ISBN); $00.00 cloth (ISBN); $00.00 electronic (ISBN 9780822946007). Defiant geographies is written to honor the people of color who, in the face of racialized violence, continue to live and occupy spaces in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Lorraine Leu, Associate Professor at the University of Texas Austin and the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies contributes a well-researched and thought-provoking cultural studies project to analyze how race, not class, makes place in Rio in 1922 alongside the construction of the Centennial World Fair. Leu utilizes a stunning array of primary sources and cultural texts including, but not limited to, news articles, photographs, lithographs, poems, and advertisements to analyze how urbanization and the pursuit of modernity coincided with racial oppression in Rio. This book also provides a perspective on the ways in which racialized people resist, reinvent, reorganize, and generally, “defy” the ambitions of dominant spaces. The greatest strength of this book comes in the form of these rich and fascinating examples of defiance. While Leu does not provide a definition for race, which may be problematic for some, she does explain that the terms whiteness and blackness are necessary to understand the production of space in Rio. At a time when 60 percent of the Brazilian population was black, urbanization and modernization associated with the Centennial World Fair provided Rio the opportunity to change its image as a black city in phenotype and culture. In preparation for the Centennial World Fair, hosted in Rio to celebrate Brazil’s 100th anniversary of independence from Portugal, public discourse employed descriptors like “backward, colonial, criminal, indolent, [and] unsanitary” (p. 8) to justify the removal of Castelo Hill, a historic community located in downtown Rio. Leu argues that the perception of Castelo Hill in the public imaginary as a black space is why the community was vehemently destroyed and replaced with a newly envisioned modern city, that had no room for blackness or a legacy of slavery. The four chapters and epilogue that follow the introduction, all make the same basic point: urbanization obscures racialized people and practices and is often used as a mechanism of topocide, “the deliberate annihilation of place” (p. 37). Yet, this book is never boring. Leu cleverly highlights cultural examples of the ways in which black bodies defy the ambitions of this dominant space. Leu organizes her examples of how race makes space thematically by chapter 1) discourse, 2) visuality, 3) spatial practices, and 4) material form. Leu’s examples are diverse, intriguing, and thoughtfully analyzed. Defiant Geographies contributes an overwhelmingly unique and intimate analysis of race making place in Rio and its multitude of examples would make this a great book for in-class discussion. [End Page 213] In Race, Ethnicity, and Urbanization, Leu provides examples of discourse to explain that while Brazil was modernizing through the implementation of immigration policies, public health campaigns, and urban renewal projects, it was simultaneously reconfiguring its “class and racial composition” around ideals of beautification and whiteness (p. 27). I loved the example Leu used from Revista da Semana, a national magazine that hosted beauty contest promoting “diverse types of beauty” that upheld the ideals of the raça Brasiliera (Brazilian race) (p. 32). Meanwhile, the first seven winners were white. It is this type of discourse consumed by the governing and middle class that help justify the violent demolition and topocide of black communities like Castelo Hill. In Race, Ethnicity and Visuality, Leu explains that images like lithographs and photographs were influential texts for a largely illiterate populations and could be used strategically to reflect the ambitions, modernity, and progress of dominant geographies. Photographs like the one Leu uses on her book cover, had power to fix and embed notions of race in the landscape, highlight incompatibilities with modernization, and obscure the city’s legacy of slavery. As such, the gaze...

Adam Ganz and Steven Price, Robert De Niro at Work. From Screenplay to Screen Performance

As the leading exponent of Method Actors, Robert De Niro is well known for his preparation to the hilt as an actor. Memories of the shootings recounted by creative collaborators are full of anecdotes about his work and his constant search to create a link between the identity of his roles and his own personality. In 2006, De Niro gifted all of his working papers to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, including numerous scripts he had annotated during production. It i...

Dell Medical School at the University of Texas, Austin.

Dell Medical School at the University of Texas, Austin.

AJP-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology: Looking Toward the Future

<i>AJP-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology</i>: Looking Toward the Future

Political Hippies and Hip Politicos: Counterculture Alliance and Cultural Radicalism in 1960s Austin, Texas

Political Hippies and Hip Politicos:Counterculture Alliance and Cultural Radicalism in 1960s Austin, Texas John A. Moretta* Click for larger view View full resolution University of Texas students affiliated with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) protest the Vietnam War at the Texas State Capitol. Mariann Wizard Papers, di_06907, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. [End Page 266] In recent decades, residents of Texas's capital city have been enjoined to "Keep Austin Weird." Although this slogan evades precise definition, it does capture something important about the city's collective identity.1 It has long been a haven for the offbeat, and its progressive politics often put it at odds with much of the rest of Texas. While several recent books have challenged the idea that Austin has lived up to its progressive self-image, especially in terms of racial equality, urban development, and conservation, there is at least some truth that Austin is defined by its "weirdness," even as the city's tech-oriented economy booms and its population swells.2 It is the city Willie Nelson and others put firmly on the [End Page 267] nation's cultural map with the "outlaw country" music scene of the 1970s. However, that scene did not come out of nowhere; it was built on a foundation largely established in the 1960s.3 It was during that decade that the blend of progressive politics and cultural experimentation that still makes Austin "weird" was defined on the campus of the University of Texas (UT), the result of the unlikely alliance of hippies and New Left politicos. UT's hip/radical coalition transcended the antagonisms between these two groups evident in countercultural centers such as the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City and forged an enduring identity for Texas's capital city. To be sure, Austin was not the only college town in 1960s America defined by the blending of radical politics and cultural libertinism. From Madison, Wisconsin, to Norman, Oklahoma, and many other places in the American Midwest and on the Southern Plains, the "prairie power" student movement within the New Left proved to be a more open, less uptight, spontaneous, and more action-oriented alternative to the more doctrinaire New Left traditionalism of the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts—indeed, it also helped to give some of these "heartland" places a progressive identity that still endures.4 But as Austin has grown to be a much larger city than these other centers of "prairie power," it might be argued that its national—perhaps even international—influence and reputation is that much greater. With apologies to Portland, Oregon, among other places, Austin is the "weird city," par excellence. Austinites have fully embraced both their dissident past and current political and cultural singularity, often viewing their city as "a progressive island in a sea of intolerance" and a "liberal Mecca in a desert of conservatism." The roots of the city's eccentricities were planted in the late 1960s when a rebellious and contentious spirit emerged from the radical fusion of the University of Texas's Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and their community's hip counterparts. Together they transformed Austin from a "sleepy, beautiful little town" to a city "vilified by the rest of Texas as the long-haired, hippie, pot-smoking, hell-raising Gomorrah of the Western [End Page 268] world."5 Indeed, for many Austin natives, the sixties and early seventies was the city's Golden Age, a time "Old hippies … blather endlessly about while picking dope seeds out of their dentures. … It was a good time to be in Austin … [when] it was cooler to be a hippie than be in a frat. It was really like what you read about. And it allowed for more weird things to happen … and that gave you time to do something weird."6 The alliance of UT student radicals and Austin's hip community challenges most standard interpretations of the era that contend that SDS affiliates, such as the one at UT, who welcomed the hippies as fellow rebels, contributed to both the New Left's and SDS's eventual demise by...

Shawn Mikula

In the summer of 2017, I contacted Shawn, then working at the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried, to ask him to join the Editorial Board of the Journal of Comparative Neurology (JCN). I was very impressed by his scientific acumen and his research on high-throughput electron microscopy that he wanted to apply at the level of an entire brain. Shawn immediately accepted and became a member of our journal's board in January 2018. Even before he was officially a member of the board, with characteristic enthusiasm, he began to assemble a group of contributors for a special issue of JCN dedicated to cutting-edge methods and approaches to structural and functional mapping of the mouse brain. Most unfortunately, his tenure as a member of JCN's board was to be a short one. With great sadness, we learned in July 2018 Shawn's tragic passing. We lost a great friend, a highly dedicated and dynamic colleague, and one of the most talented and promising young investigator in neuroscience at a point when he was developing his career independently at Keio University in Japan. Shawn's career was brief and cut short, but remarkably productive. He received his College Education at the University of Texas in Austin, where he graduated in 1998 with no fewer than three BS degrees in Mathematics, Physics, and Biochemistry. He then completed his PhD in neuroscience in 2005 at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine at the Krieger Mind-Brain Institute in Baltimore, MD, under the mentorship of Ernst Niebur. Afterward, he was a postdoctoral researcher with Ted Jones at the University of California Davis where he developed the BrainMaps project, an internet-enabled multiresolution histochemical and tract-tracing brain atlas for various mammalian species. He moved on to Germany in 2009 for further postdoctoral work with Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, to pursue his work on comprehensive mapping the mammalian whole-brain circuitry and structure at the synaptic level using high-throughput volume electron microscopy. He became a Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology in Martinsried in 2013 where he developed methods to prepare small mammalian brains for electron microscopy and to image them using high-throughput multibeam scanning electron microscopy. In 2018, he moved to Japan, first at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, and a few months later to Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo, where he had just been appointed Assistant Professor at the time he passed away, working on a comprehensive ultrastructural mapping of the circuitry of the whole mouse brain at a single-synapse level of resolution. His goals were eventually to apply these approaches to small nonhuman primate brains. A list of Shawn's major scientific contributions appears at the end of this editorial. This special issue reflects Shawn's last efforts as an editor for our journal. It represents our recognition of his outstanding work and a memory of his contributions to understanding the mammalian whole-brain connectome and developing new techniques “to reconstruct the whole brain's wiring diagram.” The articles assembled in the present issue summarize recent efforts to attain a functional and structural connectome map of the mouse brain through multimodal and multiscale approaches. I am personally indebted to the many contributors who participated in the completion of this issue after Shawn's death and graciously helped me finalize it in a timely manner to celebrate the memory of our friend and colleague. We also express our most sincere and heartfelt condolences to his friends and family.

Sea-level fingerprints emergent from GRACE mission data

Abstract. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission data have an important, if not revolutionary, impact on how scientists quantify the water transport on the Earth's surface. The transport phenomena include land hydrology, physical oceanography, atmospheric moisture flux, and global cryospheric mass balance. The mass transport observed by the satellite system also includes solid Earth motions caused by, for example, great subduction zone earthquakes and glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) processes. When coupled with altimetry, these space gravimetry data provide a powerful framework for studying climate-related changes on decadal timescales, such as ice mass loss and sea-level rise. As the changes in the latter are significant over the past two decades, there is a concomitant self-attraction and loading phenomenon generating ancillary changes in gravity, sea surface, and solid Earth deformation. These generate a finite signal in GRACE and ocean altimetry, and it may often be desirable to isolate and remove them for the purpose of understanding, for example, ocean circulation changes and post-seismic viscoelastic mantle flow, or GIA, occurring beneath the seafloor. Here we perform a systematic calculation of sea-level fingerprints of on-land water mass changes using monthly Release-06 GRACE Level-2 Stokes coefficients for the span April 2002 to August 2016, which result in a set of solutions for the time-varying geoid, sea-surface height, and vertical bedrock motion. We provide both spherical harmonic coefficients and spatial maps of these global field variables and uncertainties therein (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8UC8IR; Adhikari et al., 2019). Solutions are provided for three official GRACE data processing centers, namely the University of Texas Austin's Center for Space Research (CSR), GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ), and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), with and without rotational feedback included and in both the center-of-mass and center-of-figure reference frames. These data may be applied for either study of the fields themselves or as fundamental filter components for the analysis of ocean-circulation- and earthquake-related fields or for improving ocean tide models.

Notes From the Editors

Notes From the Editors Gregory S. Crider and Jürgen Buchenau Returning to Nashville, TN for the first time since 2005, the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies convened our Sixty-Fifth Annual Meeting on the lovely campus of Vanderbilt University 8–10 March 2018. Hosted by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the conference presented an abundance of opportunities to explore diverse themes. Program chairs Amy Borja (University of Dallas) and Lily Balloffet (Western Carolina University) put together panels in the areas of Literature & Humanities and History & Social Sciences, respectively; Jürgen Buchenau (University of North Carolina Charlotte) and Gregory S. Crider (Winthrop University) organized local arrangements. Following the SECOLAS Awards Banquet in the Student Life Center Ballroom, Dr. Jonathan Brown (University of Texas Austin) reflected on topics central to his wide-ranging and distinguished scholarship in Latin American history, including the main points of his most recent book, Cuba’s Revolutionary World. As this volume is the first published with our new partner, the University of North Carolina Press, The Latin Americanist enters a new period in its history. The transition should have limited impact on how readers access the journal and how authors submit manuscripts, but we anticipate that the new partnership will create new opportunities to enhance the TLA profile and expand readership. The journal will now be included in Project MUSE, an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and books. The editorial leadership team is also considering new formats for special issues as well as discipline-specific and interdisciplinary literature reviews. We also look forward to ongoing collaboration with the SECOLAS podcast, Historias, which frequently includes interviews with TLA authors and other Latin Americanists from diverse disciplines. As always, the editors welcome new ideas and suggestions. This volume features some of the best papers from the conference in article format. Twelve of the 148 presenters at the conference submitted revised papers of their papers for publication. Following editorial and peer review and another round of revisions, the seven articles published in this issue represent a range of disciplines in both the humanities and social sciences. We are happy to present these articles, and we are grateful for the help provided in this endeavor by our graduate assistant, Leah Walton, who did particularly great work in helping us through the transition to our new publishing platform, Submittable. We are also grateful for the support from John McLeod, Director of the Office of Scholarly Publishing Services and Sam Dalzell, Journals and OSPS Coordinator, both with UNC [End Page 5] Press. Finally, we very much appreciate the help of Dr. Louis A. Perez, Jr., J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill and Director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, in facilitating the new partnership with UNC Press. UNC Charlotte, Winthrop University, and Wingate University, the three SECOLAS host institutions, offer significant financial and institutional support for the publication and success of this journal. In particular, we offer our gratitude to Dr. Nancy Gutierrez, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UNC Charlotte; to Dr. Adrienne McCormick, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Ellison Capers Palmer, Jr. Professorship of History at Winthrop; and to Dr. Helen Tate, Provost at Wingate University, for their continuing encouragement of both The Latin Americanist and SECOLAS. [End Page 6] Copyright © 2019 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies