Thermometer screens and the geographies of uniformity in nineteenth-century meteorology

By the 1860s a number of thermometer stands, screens and boxes were being used at public observatories and in private settings. The ultimate object of these humble pieces of scientific infrastructure was to protect the thermometers from precipitation and radiation. In response to concerns over the quality of designs and the comparability of results a trial of the various apparatuses was staged at Strathfield Turgiss, Hampshire, in 1868, and subsequent discussions were organized by Britain's Meteorological Society (from 1883 the Royal Meteorological Society). In an attempt to guarantee uniformity of exposure, the Society recommended the adoption of the Stevenson screen, a double-louvred box designed by Thomas Stevenson in 1866. It was promoted as an essential part of the Society's network of second-order and climatological stations across England. Despite the Meteorological Society's aim of overcoming the idiosyncrasies of geography through recourse to a uniform pattern screen, their chosen design ended up embodying a particular geography: the aesthetic and moral codes of the suburban domestic garden

Neighborhood and community interactions determine the spatial pattern of tropical tree seedling survival

Factors affecting survival and recruitment of 3531 individually mapped seedlings of Myristicaceae were examined over three years in a highly diverse neotropical rain forest, at spatial scales of 1–9 m and 25 ha. We found convincing evidence of a community compensatory trend (CCT) in seedling survival (i.e., more abundant species had higher seedling mortality at the 25-ha scale), which suggests that density-dependent mortality may contribute to the spatial dynamics of seedling recruitment. Unlike previous studies, we demonstrate that the CCT was not caused by differences in microhabitat preferences or life history strategy among the study species. In local neighborhood analyses, the spatial autocorrelation of seedling survival was important at small spatial scales (1–5 m) but decayed rapidly with increasing distance. Relative seedling height had the greatest effect on seedling survival. Conspecific seedling density had a more negative effect on survival than heterospecific seedling density and was stronger and extended farther in rare species than in common species. Taken together, the CCT and neighborhood analyses suggest that seedling mortality is coupled more strongly to the landscape-scale abundance of conspecific large trees in common species and the local density of conspecific seedlings in rare species. We conclude that negative density dependence could promote species coexistence in this rain forest community but that the scale dependence of interactions differs between rare and common species

Tree-squares in Anatolia : what does an emergent public space mean?

Urban places, besides their physical characteristics, are regarded as grounds where personal or collective meanings are created and accumulated. An individual can capture the meaning of a place, or create new meanings by relying on his/her own feelings and experiences. This research, by discussing the idea of togetherness of meaning and design in urban spaces, presents trees both as place making and meaning generating features, which honors the local identity of a site. Tree-squares are, therefore, the unique urban public places where this relationship is observed clearly. The researcher’s encounter with a Çınaraltı Square - a Turkish term used to define public places under massive and historical plane trees and will be referred as Tree-Square within the scope of this paper - which is marked by a plane tree that is called Musa (Moses) Plane in Antakya/Turkey has triggered an idea of questioning the urban planning and design approaches beyond the broadly accepted role of trees as natural and aesthetic beings in cities. Later on, Yalvaç Plane in Yalvaç/Isparta site, and the outstanding public place under its tremendous branches carried this wonder one step further, since this Tree-Square was not only an attractive place with a magnificent plane tree, but also the heart of the city. It was unplanned and un-envisioned by any kind of legal planning or design authority; instead, it was emerged and developed out of the cultural beliefs and traditions. This emergent public space is a product of a long term social and historical interaction process that created the main public place of a medium-sized Turkish city, as in many Anatolian cities. It carries significant urban qualities, such as forming the heart of cities and having a visible impact on the urban macroform. Therefore, a case study research has been conducted in Yalvaç Tree-Square to gain a comprehensive grasp of the social and spatial organization of an urban place that is dominated by a historical plane tree. In this sense, the role of Yalvaç Plane in the historical and spatial development of an urban space will be evaluated by relying on socially produced meaning in the built environment

The influence of forest regrowth, original canopy cover and tree size on saproxylic beetles associated with old oaks

Abandoned management has caused many sites with free-standing, large oaks (Quercus robur) to become more shaded. This study shows how forest regrowth affects beetle species associated with old oaks in south-eastern Sweden. Beetles were trapped by pitfall traps placed in hollows and window traps placed near hollows in oak trunks in pasture woodlands. We assessed the influence of forest regrowth, tree size and original canopy cover on the species richness of saproxylic beetles (a total of 120 species identified) and the occurrence of 68 saproxylic beetle species in particular. Species richness was greatest in stands with large, free-standing trees. Large girth as well as low canopy cover increased frequency of occurrence for several species. Forest regrowth was found to be detrimental for many beetle species. As most localities with endangered beetles living in old oaks are small and isolated, ongoing management and the restoration of abandoned pasture woodlands should have a high priority in nature conservation

Enhancing Cooperative Coevolution for Large Scale Optimization by Adaptively Constructing Surrogate Models

It has been shown that cooperative coevolution (CC) can effectively deal with large scale optimization problems (LSOPs) through a divide-and-conquer strategy. However, its performance is severely restricted by the current context-vector-based sub-solution evaluation method since this method needs to access the original high dimensional simulation model when evaluating each sub-solution and thus requires many computation resources. To alleviate this issue, this study proposes an adaptive surrogate model assisted CC framework. This framework adaptively constructs surrogate models for different sub-problems by fully considering their characteristics. For the single dimensional sub-problems obtained through decomposition, accurate enough surrogate models can be obtained and used to find out the optimal solutions of the corresponding sub-problems directly. As for the nonseparable sub-problems, the surrogate models are employed to evaluate the corresponding sub-solutions, and the original simulation model is only adopted to reevaluate some good sub-solutions selected by surrogate models. By these means, the computation cost could be greatly reduced without significantly sacrificing evaluation quality. Empirical studies on IEEE CEC 2010 benchmark functions show that the concrete algorithm based on this framework is able to find much better solutions than the conventional CC algorithms and a non-CC algorithm even with much fewer computation resources.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1802.0974

When users generate music playlists: When words leave off, music begins?

Music systems that generate playlists are gaining increasing popularity, yet ways to select songs to be acceptable to users is still elusive. We present the results of an explorative study that focused on the language of musically untrained end users for playlist choices, in a variety of listening contexts. Our results indicate that there are a number of opportunities for playlist recommendation or retrieval systems, particularly by taking context into account

Daughters and Left Wing Voting

What determines human beings' political preferences? Using nationally representative longitudinal data, we show that having daughters makes people more likely to vote for left-wing political parties. Having sons leads people to favor right-wing parties. The paper checks that our result is not an artifact of family stopping-rules, discusses the predictions from a simple economic model, and tests for possible reverse causality.Voting, gender, daughters, political preferences, attitudes.

Gray Market Goods: A Lighter Shade of Black Symposium: The Controversy over the Importation of Gray Market Goods: Is a Resolution Forthcoming

If a street vendor offers a famous brand-name product for a substantially lower price than one would expect, the average consumer\u27s initial reaction might be that the product had been stolen or was hot - a product of the black market. While such discounted goods might indeed be stolen, sophisticated consumers have come to expect similar discounts in stores and mail-order houses throughout the country on goods not from the black market but rather from the gray market. These products, naturally enough, are called gray market goods or simply gray goods. Gray goods are brand-name products manufactured abroad which bear an authentic trademark authorized by the owner of the trademark in the market for which the goods are intended. The owner of the trademark is usually foreign. These goods are normally intended for markets outside the United States at the time of manufacture. At some point, however, the gray goods are diverted or imported into the United States for the purpose of competing with the U.S. trademark owner\u27s authorized goods. Historically, the importation of gray goods was rare and sporadic. As a consequence, the U.S. Customs Service\u27s regulations which permit their importation were ignored. Gray goods, as a legal topic, were confined to the backwaters of antitrust and intellectual property law. In the last few years, however, the importation of gray goods has become a growth industry and has generated numerous lawsuits and commentaries. While the initial growth in the gray market was spurred by the very high value of the U.S. dollar in international currency markets, it appears that now a permanent gray market network has developed that will make the subject of gray-goods importation one of importance for years to come regardless of the value of the dollar

The art of tropical travel, 1768-1830

Book synopsis: Georgian Geographies provides an innovative interdisciplinary examination of the geographical nature of culture and society in eighteenth-century Britain and the British world. The book's introduction identifies the key areas of study as the geographical constitution of empire, the Enlightenment and the public sphere. These themes are explored by examining the connections between space, place and landscape in the eighteenth century in relation to the emergent empire in the Caribbean and north-west America, and in Britain itself. The topics considered include landscape painting, London's art world, geography's book, mapping, the geography of erotic fiction, provincial science, and the production of domestic space in the early English novel. It will be an essential contribution to eighteenth-century studies for research and teaching staff, postgraduates and advanced undergraduate students in geography, history, literary studies, the history of art, postcolonial studies and the history of science