US Southern Research Articles

Assessment of sociodemographic disparities in outcomes among pts with metastatic NSCLC (mNSCLC) receiving select immuno-oncology (IO) regimens: CORRELATE.

9055 Background: IO treatment (tx) has transformed the care of pts with mNSCLC, persistently demonstrating significant survival benefits over chemotherapy. Prior analyses have shown OS and PFS are shorter in the real-world (rw) setting compared with randomized clinical trials (RCTs). A contributing factor may be the more diverse sociodemographic characteristics of pts in the rw. Race and socio-economic status (SES), in particular, have been associated with disparities in cancer outcomes, which may be related to inequalities in healthcare access. One aim of CORRELATE was to assess whether outcomes differ based on sociodemographic characteristics in pts receiving IO in the rw setting. Methods: Eligible pts from the US Flatiron Enhanced Datamart database had mNSCLC (progressed or de novo), started 1L IO tx between Nov 1 2016 and May 31 2021, and met eligibility criteria based on 6 RCTs (KEYNOTE [KN]-024, KN-189, KN-407, IMpower150, CheckMate [CM] 9LA and CM 227) for IO regimens approved in the US for mNSCLC. Flatiron’s area-level measure of SES, available for pts treated at community oncology centers, was based on a validated composite index and has 5 levels (highest [5] to lowest [1]). Multivariate Cox regression models were used to determine the association of sociodemographic variables (age, sex, race, US region and SES) with OS and rwPFS separately; smoking history, ECOG performance status (PS) and PD-L1 expression were also included in the models, as were any pairwise interactions that were statistically significant ( P< 0.05). Results: 2070 pts with non-missing data on the variables of interest were included in the dataset: 60% were aged ≥65 y, 86% white, 55% male and 53% were from the US Southern region. SES was relatively evenly distributed (SES 1–5: 18%, 22%, 21%, 24% and 15%, respectively); 41% of pts had PD-L1 ≥50% (17% unknown PD-L1 expression), 61% had ECOG PS 1 and 92% were former/current smokers. Median OS was 13.3 mos (95% CI 12.3–14.7); median rwPFS was 5.9 mos (5.6–6.2). In the multivariate analyses, race, region and SES did not have a statistically significant association with either OS or rwPFS. Older age (≥65 y; P= 0.0091) and male sex ( P< 0.0001) were associated with a higher risk of death (HR [95% CI] 1.16 [1.04–1.29] and 1.28 [1.15–1.43], respectively). For rwPFS, the interaction between sex and smoking status was statistically significant ( P= 0.0312); specifically, female non-smokers had a higher risk of progression or death vs female smokers (HR 1.45 [95% CI 1.15–1.82]). Conclusions: Our results from a nationally representative dataset of pts with mNSCLC treated at non-academic facilities show that, in pts who had equivalent access to IO tx, the OS and rwPFS benefits derived from IO were similar, irrespective of race, region or SES. More efforts are required to identify and address barriers of access to care to ensure that all pts receive appropriate cancer tx.

Integrating machine learning with otolith isoscapes: Reconstructing connectivity of a marine fish over four decades.

Stable isotopes are an important tool to uncover animal migration. Geographic natal assignments often require categorizing the spatial domain through a nominal approach, which can introduce bias given the continuous nature of these tracers. Stable isotopes predicted over a spatial gradient (i.e., isoscapes) allow a probabilistic and continuous assignment of origin across space, although applications to marine organisms remain limited. We present a new framework that integrates nominal and continuous assignment approaches by (1) developing a machine-learning multi-model ensemble classifier using Bayesian model averaging (nominal); and (2) integrating nominal predictions with continuous isoscapes to estimate the probability of origin across the spatial domain (continuous). We applied this integrated framework to predict the geographic origin of the Northwest Atlantic mackerel (Scomber scombrus), a migratory pelagic fish comprised of northern and southern components that have distinct spawning sites off Canada (northern contingent) and the US (southern contingent), and seasonally overlap in the US fished regions. The nominal approach based on otolith carbon and oxygen stable isotopes (δ13C/δ18O) yielded high contingent classification accuracy (84.9%). Contingent assignment of unknown-origin samples revealed prevalent, yet highly varied contingent mixing levels (12.5-83.7%) within the US waters over four decades (1975-2019). Nominal predictions were integrated into mackerel-specific otolith oxygen isoscapes developed independently for Canadian and US waters. The combined approach identified geographic nursery hotspots in known spawning sites, but also detected geographic shifts over multi-decadal time scales. This framework can be applied to other marine species to understand migration and connectivity at a high spatial resolution, relevant to management of unit stocks in fisheries and other conservation assessments.

The US Southern Command and the Militarization of US-Latin America Foreign Relations

This proposal aims to analyze the militarization of US-Latin America foreign relations by discussing the role played by the U.S. Southern Command in the implementation of U.S. foreign policy for the region in the aftermath of the September 11th 2001 attacks. Since the last decades of Cold War, civilian and diplomatic agencies stationed in the region, notably the State Department and the USAID, suffered budgetary constraints that were aggravated at the beginning of the Global War on Terror. For instance, in Latin America, the Southcom has been adapted to perform the so called “military missions other than war,” including non-military functions such as the provision of humanitarian assistance, law enforcement, and the management of security assistance programs aimed to dismantle drug trafficking networks. As we intend to argue, the overreliance on security and military means reflects the militarized character of U.S. influence in the region and has impacts on how the local coercive systems are organized and deployed by the domestic political elites. By analyzing the annual posture statements and the initiatives conducted in the field by the Southcom, between 2001 and 2021, we hope to clarify how the violence structures from abroad are connected to those from within.

From Hydrometeor Size Distribution Measurements to Projections of Wind Turbine Blade Leading-Edge Erosion

Wind turbine blade leading-edge erosion (LEE) is a cause of increased operation and maintenance costs and decreased annual energy production. Thus, detailed, site-specific quantification of likely erosion conditions are critically needed to inform wind plant owner/operator decisions regarding mitigation strategies. Estimating the damage potential at a wind plant site requires accurate measurement of precipitation intensity, phase, droplet size distributions, wind speeds and their joint statistics. The current work quantifies the effect of disdrometer type on the characterization of LEE potential at a site in the US Southern Great Plains. using observations from three co-located disdrometers (an optical, an impact and a video disdrometer), along with hub-height wind-speed observations from a Doppler lidar and two LEE models: a kinetic energy model and the Springer model. Estimates of total kinetic energy of hydrometeor impacts over the four-year study period vary by as much as 38%, and coating lifetime derived from accumulated distance-to-failure estimates from the Springer model differ by an even greater amount, depending on disdrometer type. Damage potential at this site is concentrated in time, with 50% of impact kinetic energy occurring in 6–12 h per year, depending on which set of disdrometer observations is used. Rotor-speed curtailment during the most erosive 0.1–0.2% of 10 min periods is found to increase blade lifetimes and lead to the lowest levelized cost of energy.

American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation

Roberto Saba's new book offers a modernization saga integrating São Paulo province's more dynamic sectors with US Northern capitalists on a path that slowly converted Brazil from slavery to free labor during the second half of the nineteenth century. This capitalist odyssey started in the 1850s: US Northerners conceived of a mild transition for Brazil modeled on the acceptance of free labor and gradual emancipation. This proposal was unacceptable to leaders of the US Southern states, which seceded and fought a civil war to maintain slavery. On the Brazilian side, termination of Atlantic slave traffic made slavery's end inevitable. Some elites awakened to the need to adapt labor strategies in view of how a shortage of African slaves would negatively affect the imperial economy. As slave labor's political and social costs increased, more Brazilian elites looked to the US North for a strategy to increase productivity by growing entrepreneurship and spreading technical innovation. Their modernization efforts were rewarded in the late 1880s, when a broad abolitionist coalition ended slavery without major upheavals.The book's first part depicts US Southern slaveholders' failure to create a partnership with their Brazilian counterparts. By 1850, Brazil and the US South were the Western Hemisphere's two major independent slave societies, with a combined population of around six million enslaved people. Enslaved Africans and their descendants fueled both national economies, producing commodities for global markets and strengthening slaveholders' political position in their respective countries. A continental alliance might be expected from these convergent interests. US Secretary of State John C. Calhoun desired such a partnership, explaining in 1844 that “it is our policy to cultivate the most friendly relations with all the countries on this continent, and with none more than with Brazil” (p. 17). But in his well-researched evaluation of the correspondence produced by US diplomats serving in Rio de Janeiro, Saba shows that, despite the South's dominance in the US State Department, its partisans were incapable of creating a hemispheric alliance of slaveholders. Southern diplomats serving in Brazil during the 1840s and 1850s were too arrogant to establish a real partnership. They despised the empire's form of government and its racial mix, and publicly expressed a reckless imperialist impulse to annex the Amazon Basin. Ultimately, an alliance between slaveholding elites became impracticable. Deep, insightful research on US diplomatic dispatches shows that, after interacting with envoys like Matthew Fontaine Maury and politicians like Henry A. Wise, Brazilian elites lost hope in what the Confederacy could offer in terms of capital and expertise. Consequently, “Southern slaveholders . . . could not establish an effective foreign policy in defense of slavery” and “failed to convince” Brazilian slaveholders “to embark on a proslavery crusade” (pp. 18–19).After the debacle of the Confederacy, some 5,000 die-hard Southerners immigrated to Brazil, hoping to reestablish their slave society. One-third employed slaves on their farms. But the new settlers did not consider the transition taking place in the empire. By the time the Confederates had established themselves in Brazil, São Paulo's regional barons were coming to terms with the technological innovations taking place in the US North. The wealthy landowners were fascinated with the mechanization of agriculture, which promised improved land productivity despite slave labor's growing scarcity. Many of them would send their sons to study in the United States to learn new techniques and to gain entrepreneurial skills, thus increasing their commitment to develop modern work relationships under capitalist rules. Consequently, despite the Southerners' efforts to re-create a lost environment in the tropics, they ended up subsidizing Brazilian farmers with all kinds of professional expertise and enforcing coffee planters' modernization efforts.In the second part of the book Saba realizes an extensive and intensive archaeology of the era's political thought, recovering the opinions of both US travelers and Brazilian visitors from diaries, newspapers, letters, and published memoirs. His research shows that, by the 1870s, both groups agreed on the superiority of free labor over slave labor and the need to rapidly develop wage labor relationships in the empire. Saba, however, does not investigate how far such impressions were correct.Analyses connecting Brazil's antislavery turn with modernization are not new; they date from the 1960s, when pioneering works by Emília Viotti da Costa and Warren Dean pointed to Paulista capitalism as an alternative to the Brazilian/Northeast patriarchy. Saba's contribution lies in his emphasis on antislavery movements in the making of capitalism, as well as on reformers' lack of empathy for the formerly enslaved, who were incorporated as free and destitute laborers under the new order of things. The transition from slave to free labor had never been about creating an egalitarian society. Only a few abolitionists, such as André Rebouças and Andrew Jackson Lamoureux, denounced how postemancipation working relations affected dispossessed Brazilian workers.

Abstract 1950: Socioeconomic status and lung cancer incidence: An analysis of data from 15 countries in the Lung Cancer Cohort Consortium

Abstract Background: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide. We explored the relationship between socioeconomic status and lung cancer incidence across world regions, using educational level as a proxy for socioeconomic status. Methods: We analyzed the harmonized database of the Lung Cancer Cohort Consortium (LC3). The current study included data from 18 prospective cohorts from 15 countries in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Separately for participants who never or currently/formerly smoked, we estimated the association between educational level and incident lung cancer using Cox proportional hazards models. Information on education was harmonized using the International Standard Classification of Education and then modeled as an ordinal variable in 4 categories. Models were adjusted for age, sex, and for participants who currently/formerly smoked, smoking duration, cigarettes per day, and time since cessation. Results: Among 2.6 million participants from 15 countries, 62,645 developed lung cancer during follow-up (median follow-up = 12.6 years). Among current/former smokers, increased educational level was associated with decreased lung cancer incidence in most cohorts after adjustment for age, sex, and detailed smoking information, with HRs ranging from 0.77 (95%CI: 0.42-1.41) per 1-unit increase in educational level in the Iranian Golestan Cohort Study to 1.02 (95%CI: 0.95-1.09) in the Australian Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study. When grouping by world region, the association between education and lung cancer incidence among currently/formerly smoking participants was similar for the US (HRpooled=0.88, 95%CI: 0.87-0.89), Europe (HRpooled=0.89, 95%CI: 0.88-0.91), and Asia (HRpooled=0.91, 95%CI: 0.86-0.96), but attenuated in the Australian cohort (HR=1.02, 95%CI: 0.95-1.09). Among never smokers, after adjustment for age and sex, there was no statistically significant association between educational level and lung cancer incidence (p-trend>0.05 in all cohorts), with the exception of the US Southern Community Cohort Study, which comprises primarily African-Americans and showed a HR of 0.75 (95%CI: 0.62-0.90). Conclusion: Among currently and formerly smoking individuals, higher educational level showed a strikingly consistent decreased risk of incident lung cancer across cohorts from 4 continents, after detailed adjustment for smoking. In contrast, among people who never smoked, there was no association between education and lung cancer incidence in any cohort, with the exception of the Southern Community Cohort Study. Further research is needed to clarify the mechanisms, either related or unrelated to smoking, that contribute to the association between education and lung cancer risk. Citation Format: Justina U. Onwuka, Hana Zahed, Xiaoshuang Feng, Karine Alcala, Mattias Johansson, Hilary A. Robbins, Lung Cancer Cohort Consortium. Socioeconomic status and lung cancer incidence: An analysis of data from 15 countries in the Lung Cancer Cohort Consortium [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 1950.

Elizabeth Robins's Alaskan Fiction and the Global New South

ABSTRACT: In the summer of 1900, at the height of the Nome gold rush, actress and soon-to-be suffragist Elizabeth Robins traveled to Alaska. Following her return, Robins published two novels and several stories set in the region. Yet even as she capitalized on the popularity of gold rush settings and tropes, Robins's Alaskan fiction consistently undermines the romantic mythology that typically characterizes gold rush narratives, highlighting instead the environmental and human degradation that gold mining entailed. Focusing primarily on her novel The Magnetic North (1904) and the connected story "Monica's Village" (1905), this essay explores how Robins's Alaskan fiction recycles US Southern plantation mythology in order to imagine an alternative form of Alaskan development, one that would transform Alaska's Indigenous population into a racialized labor force to be exploited in ways comparable to African Americans under Jim Crow. Though the environmental conditions of Alaska foreclosed the possibility of traditional plantation agriculture, Robins's fiction maps plantation dynamics onto the forms of mineral extraction transforming the region. In doing so, these texts reveal the pliability of the plantation imaginary as well as the global scope of plantation modernity. This essay argues that the Plantationocene offers a useful framework for reconsidering the intertwined histories of plantation agriculture and mineral extraction. Robins's vision of Alaska as a New South ultimately highlights the ways in which mineral extraction in the Far North follows a pattern established by plantation agriculture throughout the Global South.

Elizabeth Robins's Alaskan Fiction and the Global New South

ABSTRACT: In the summer of 1900, at the height of the Nome gold rush, actress and soon-to-be suffragist Elizabeth Robins traveled to Alaska. Following her return, Robins published two novels and several stories set in the region. Yet even as she capitalized on the popularity of gold rush settings and tropes, Robins's Alaskan fiction consistently undermines the romantic mythology that typically characterizes gold rush narratives, highlighting instead the environmental and human degradation that gold mining entailed. Focusing primarily on her novel The Magnetic North (1904) and the connected story "Monica's Village" (1905), this essay explores how Robins's Alaskan fiction recycles US Southern plantation mythology in order to imagine an alternative form of Alaskan development, one that would transform Alaska's Indigenous population into a racialized labor force to be exploited in ways comparable to African Americans under Jim Crow. Though the environmental conditions of Alaska foreclosed the possibility of traditional plantation agriculture, Robins's fiction maps plantation dynamics onto the forms of mineral extraction transforming the region. In doing so, these texts reveal the pliability of the plantation imaginary as well as the global scope of plantation modernity. This essay argues that the Plantationocene offers a useful framework for reconsidering the intertwined histories of plantation agriculture and mineral extraction. Robins's vision of Alaska as a New South ultimately highlights the ways in which mineral extraction in the Far North follows a pattern established by plantation agriculture throughout the Global South.

Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas by Thomas Genova

Reviewed by: Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas by Thomas Genova Felipe Martínez-Pinzón Keywords International Education, Nation Formation, Republicanism, Motherhood, Gender, Race, Thomas Genova, Felipe Martínez-Pinzón genova, thomas. Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. U of Virginia P, 2021, 342 pp. Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas offers a refreshing approach to Latin American literary and cultural studies, specifically 19th-century studies, through rigorous transnational [End Page 323] archival work and a literary review of three national literatures placed in dialogue, friction and mutual influence: the United States, Cuba and Argentina. As part of a recent trend in hemispheric studies of our 19th-century literatures, alongside important names and titles in Hemispheric Studies such as Ronald Brigg's The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education in Lima Women's Circuit, 1876–1910 (2017) and Rodrigo Lazo's Writing Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (2005), Thomas Genova offers a nuanced analysis of a critical trope—or at least one that reveals itself as critical thanks to his book—to the construction of the American republics as "Bourgeois Republics": the racialized figure of the republican mother as teacher, and the teacher as mother. Spanning the mid-19th century all the way to the postwar Spanish–Cuban–American war of 1898, Genova traces this trope in a fascinating array of canonical and noncanonical literary texts, as well as in legal writings, poetry, private correspondence, political essays, travelogues and memoirs. His book offers new readings of classics such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Viajes: Europa, Africa, América (1849), Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés (1882), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), in dialogue with other, lesser known texts that reveal the outstanding level of hemispheric cultural porosity among foundational novels, travelogues and memoirs. In conversation with scholarship that reads nationalism and regionalism as a reaction and at the same time a product of imperialism, Genova invites us, among other original interventions, to read Eduarda Mansilla's Lucía Miranda as an old creole Hispanophile's reaction to the Americanization of the national-civilizatory discourse mobilized by Sarmiento's readings of Cooper. The book also offers nuanced readings of Mary Mann's recently recovered Juanita (1887) and Martín Morúa Delgado's (1891) Sofía as different, yet dialoguing, interventions about what model of cultural reproduction (or miscarriage) is better suited for racially diverse republics such as Cuba. Genova's central argument is that education—as a republican duty assigned to women—traversed the debates about how to civilize and incorporate into the fledgling republic a vastly diverse panorama of racialized peoples. The consequences of focusing on the crossings of education, gender and race with a hemispheric scope are manifold and inspiring. First, in line with other scholars, this crossing entails seeing Latin America as a "deeper South" that partakes of northern North American stereotypes of the US South. Secondly, and stemming from this, Genova invites us to see the cultural (and sometimes familial) [End Page 324] connections between, say, the Cuban plantation elite and the US southern gentry. Thirdly, the book places emphasis on novelists writing foundational fictions at the end of the 19th century not only as writers but as readers of this particular genre, and as such, conscious of the narrative opportunities and shortcomings of this pedagogical literary corpus. Thanks to it, Cirilo Villaverde is uncovered as a reader not only of the mid-19th-century Latin American and US canon (Marmol's Amalia, Blest Gana's Martín Rivas or even Delaney's Blake?), and Cuban (Morúa Delgado) and non-Cuban writers (Mary Mann) are seen as readers that rewrite Cecilia Valdés (for Morúa Delgado this has been the typical read), but in doing so, center other ways of conceiving of gender, race and education in the island's turn-of-the-century literature. Imperial Educación is divided into two parts composed of three chapters each. Chapters one, two and three dwell on Argentina–US relations after Rosa's exile, while chapters...

Introduction: Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation

Introduction: Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation

Maternal comorbidity index and severe maternal morbidity among medicaid covered pregnant women in a US Southern rural state

Background The rates of SMM have been steadily increasing in Arkansas, a southern rural state, which has the 5th highest maternal death rate among the US states. The aims of the study were to test the functionality of the Bateman index in association to SMM, in clustering the risks of pregnancies to SMM, and to study the predictability of SMM using the Bateman index. Study design From the ANGELS database, 72,183 pregnancies covered by Medicaid in Arkansas between 2013 and 2016 were included in this study. The expanded CDC ICD-9/ICD-10 criteria were used to identify SMM. The Bateman comorbidity index was applied in quantifying the comorbidity burden for a pregnancy. Multivariable logistic regressions, KMeans method, and five widely used predictive models were applied respectively for each of the study aims. Results SMM prevalence remained persistently high among Arkansas women covered by Medicaid (195 per 10,000 deliveries) during the study period. Using the Bateman comorbidity index score, the study population was divided into four groups, with a monotonically increasing odds of SMM from a lower score group to a higher score group. The association between the index score and the occurrence of SMM is confirmed with statistical significance: relative to Bateman score falling in 0–1, adjusted Odds Ratios and 95% CIs are: 2.1 (1.78, 2.46) for score in 2–5; 5.08 (3.81, 6.79) for score in 6–9; and 8.53 (4.57, 15.92) for score ≥10. Noticeably, more than one-third of SMM cases were detected from the studied pregnancies that did not have any of the comorbid conditions identified. In the prediction analyses, we observed minimal predictability of SMM using the comorbidity index: the calculated c-statistics ranged between 62% and 67%; the Precision-Recall AUC values are <7% for internal validation and <9% for external validation procedures. Conclusions The comorbidity index can be used in quantifying the risk of SMM and can help cluster the study population into risk tiers of SMM, especially in rural states where there are disproportionately higher rates of SMM; however, the predictive value of the comorbidity index for SMM is inappreciable.

Overrepresentation of Whiteness Is in Sign Language As Well: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

Overrepresentation of Whiteness Is in Sign Language As Well: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

Decolonizing US anthropology

AbstractAfter Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the crisis of refugees at the US southern border, there have been renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology. Dissatisfaction on the domestic front runs parallel to an unease over US anthropology's failure to adequately address militarism, imperialism, and predatory capitalism abroad. Finally, there is the fraught question of US anthropology's oversized influence within world anthropologies. We propose that a reassessment of US anthropology might fruitfully begin with some counterfactual history. How would US anthropology been different had the founding generations conceptualized the discipline as a decolonizing project? What topics or themes might have become central to US anthropology? How might our methods have been different? To make anthropology departments more diverse, inclusive, and equitable, we need to do more than add faculty and students of color. Despite being a field whose central concept is “culture,” we have paid far too little attention to the culture of anthropology departments. Do unexamined practices of “white‐norming” that shape the everyday lives of faculty and students in anthropology departments persistently “Other”—marginalize and alienate—people of color?

Developmental Significance of the Social Context as an Additional Self-Continuity Strategy: A Comparison of Emerging Adults From Brazil and the United States

Self-continuity refers to the strategies individuals use to justify a stable sense of self despite the various changes they experience. Among young adults, in particular, self-continuity over time has been associated with indicators of mental health. The aim of the current project was to identify whether aspects of the social context are measurably distinct from other established strategies of self-continuity. Data were collected from emerging adults from the US Midwest (n = 309) and southern Brazil (n = 285). Self-continuity and its opposite, self-discontinuity, were measured, in addition to essentialism or narrativism and the social context as strategies. Structural equation modeling supported the contention that self-continuity is positively associated with strategies of essentialism, narrativism, and the social context. Models confirmed that the social context was measurably distinct from the other strategies of self-continuity and higher among older emerging adults. Finally, though the factor structure was largely identical between the two samples, some mean differences emerged.

Towards a Unified Setup to Simulate Mid‐Latitude and Tropical Mesoscale Convective Systems at Kilometer‐Scales

AbstractMesoscale convective systems (MCSs) are the main source of precipitation in the tropics and parts of the mid‐latitudes and are responsible for high‐impact weather worldwide. Studies showed that deficiencies in simulating mid‐latitude MCSs in state‐of‐the‐art climate models can be alleviated by kilometer‐scale models. However, whether these models can also improve tropical MCSs and whether we can find model settings that perform well in both regions is understudied. We take advantage of high‐quality MCS observations collected over the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) facilities in the US Southern Great Plains (SGP) and the Amazon basin near Manaus (MAO) to evaluate a perturbed physics ensemble of simulated MCSs with 4 km horizontal grid spacing. A new model evaluation method is developed that enables to distinguish biases stemming from spatiotemporal displacements of MCSs from biases in their reflectivity and cloud shield. Amazon MCSs are similarly well simulated across these evaluation metrics than SGP MCSs despite the challenges anticipated from weaker large‐scale forcing in the tropics. Generally, SGP MCSs are more sensitive to the choice of model microphysics, while Amazon cases are more sensitive to the planetary boundary layer (PBL) scheme. Although our tested model physics combinations had strengths and weaknesses, combinations that performed well for SGP simulations result in worse results in the Amazon basin and vice versa. However, we identified model settings that perform well at both locations, which include the Thompson and Morrison microphysics coupled with the Yonsei University (YSU) PBL scheme and the Thompson scheme coupled with the Mellor‐Yamada‐Janjic PBL scheme.

RETHINKING THE LIBERIAN PREDICAMENT IN ANTI-BLACK TERMS

Liberia’s protracted civil conflict was sustained for a period of fourteen years (1989–2003), killing approximately 250,000 Liberians and displacing half of the population. Liberia’s war, like other contemporary African conflicts, has been persistently represented as an example of wanton violence, political tribalism, chaos, or an amalgamation of such elements. Founded in 1822, the Colony of Liberia was annexed by the American Colonization Society to expatriate and colonize “free” negros and their descendants on the coast of West Africa. “Re-colonization,” as it was recognized by the ruling US Southern class, was rendered a compromise between the absolute abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and perpetual black servitude. Yet, repatriation was treacherously crafted by abolitionists and their pro-slavery contemporaries, alike, as a fugitive project, an opportunity for “free” blacks to experiment with emancipation and take refuge from the sociopolitical and economic conditions which amounted to what was effectively slavery by another name. The rhetorical propagation of the West African settlement as a pre-racial site – of sorts – in which stolen peoples could escape the violence of American racialism has made articulable contemporary theorizations of the Liberian civil war as a paradigmatic example of the negro’s irresponsible experimentations with freedom. The following paper offers a re-contemplation of Liberian historiographical accounts, one that attends to the racialized global orders against which this national crisis has developed and limns the impossibility of freedom in the afterlife of slavery, where anti-black terror is not only temporally unbounded but transgeographical.

Blanket NOP rules and regional realities: from the field

AbstractThere are fewer Certified Organic producers in the Mid-South US (southern half of Missouri, western Kentucky and Tennessee, northern Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma) than in other regions of the country such as the Upper Midwest, West Coast, or Northeastern US. Taus et al. (2013) The Professional Geographer 65, 87–102, posit that these clusters suggest regional characteristics impact adoption of organic agriculture and admit that regional studies lack consensus on the role of factors that drive adoption. This paper seeks to understand if there are regionally distinct challenges and opportunities for organic production in the region. Fourteen certified organic producers in Missouri were interviewed and areas of challenges and opportunities specific to their certification were identified within the three a priori themes of (1) biophysical characteristics, (2) marketing infrastructure and (3) financial feasibility. We suggest directions for future policy support from the National Organic Program (NOP) and bolstered feedback structures within the National Organic Standards Board to address regional disparities.

How Does Land Cover and Its Heterogeneity Length Scales Affect the Formation of Summertime Shallow Cumulus Clouds in Observations From the US Southern Great Plains?

AbstractThis study investigates the effects of heterogeneous land covers on shallow cumulus (ShCu) clouds at the US Southern Great Plains using high‐resolution satellite and land cover data. During late summer, ShCu occurs over cities the most frequently and over open waters the least frequently, and more often over forest than over grassland. The preferential occurrence of ShCu over forest relative to grassland is consistent with surface measurements showing larger heat fluxes over forests. This preferential occurrence also varies with the length scales of land patches with the largest cloud occurrence difference shifting from smaller length scales (&lt;9 km) during midday to larger scales (&gt;9 km) in the early afternoon. Consistent with theory, these signals are more pronounced under low wind conditions. The preferential length scale shift with time suggests the existence of secondary circulations that strengthen and promote convergence over larger spatial scales as the differential land surface heating intensifies.

Slavery, market censorship and US antebellum schoolbook publishing

ABSTRACT This paper explores the representation and non-representation of slavery in US school textbooks from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the US Civil War. It reviews the major readers, almost none of which mentioned slavery despite the anti-slavery sentiments of many textbook editors. The few readers that addressed slavery did so in limited terms and were not popular. Despite this, a myth arose in the US southern states that the treatment of slavery in school readers contributed significantly to the start of the Civil War and drove post-war textbook purchasing in those states. A concluding section considers the role of market censorship in shaping representation of slavery in early schoolbooks.

Logjam fluctuations during the decade after a major blowdown along a mountain stream in the US Southern Rockies

AbstractA blowdown in 2011 along a 1200‐m length of Glacier Creek in the Southern Rockies of Colorado, USA substantially increased the number of channel‐spanning logjams and initiated formation of a 100‐m‐long multithread channel segment. Annual logjam surveys during 2012–2020 indicate that these effects have persisted for a decade, with the number of logjams remaining high despite inter‐annual variations in the location of individual jams. No single logjam has remained in place continuously since the blowdown, but logjams tend to persist longest and to re‐form at sites with large ramp pieces from one or both sides of the channel and a lateral constriction created by bedrock or large boulders that can buttress the ramped piece(s) downstream. The most persistent logjams also form in secondary channels in the multithread section and logjams in the multithread reach tend to have larger backwater storage than logjams in the single‐thread reaches. The results presented here are unique in detailing changes in logjams during the decade following abrupt recruitment of a substantial volume of large wood to a mountain stream.