Automatic transmission: ethnicity, racialization and the car

YesThis article is based on ethnographic research carried out in Bradford, an ethnically diverse city situated in the north of England. The sample of over 60 participants mostly comprises males of British Pakistani Muslim heritage but varies in terms other markers of identity such as social class, profession and residential/working locale. The article analyses the cultural value and meaning of cars within a multicultural context and how a consumer object can feed into the processes which refine and embed racialized identities. Small cases studies reveal the concrete and discursive ways through which ideas around identity and ethnicity are transmitted and how, in particular, racialization continues to feature as a live, active and recognisable process in everyday experience

The South Pole Telescope

A new 10 meter diameter telescope is being constructed for deployment at the NSF South Pole research station. The telescope is designed for conducting large-area millimeter and sub-millimeter wave surveys of faint, low contrast emission, as required to map primary and secondary anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. To achieve the required sensitivity and resolution, the telescope design employs an off-axis primary with a 10m diameter clear aperture. The full aperture and the associated optics will have a combined surface accuracy of better than 20 microns rms to allow precision operation in the submillimeter atmospheric windows. The telescope will be surrounded with a large reflecting ground screen to reduce sensitivity to thermal emission from the ground and local interference. The optics of the telescope will support a square degree field of view at 2mm wavelength and will feed a new 1000-element micro-lithographed planar bolometric array with superconducting transition-edge sensors and frequency-multiplexed readouts. The first key project will be to conduct a survey over approximately 4000 degrees for galaxy clusters using the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect. This survey should find many thousands of clusters with a mass selection criteria that is remarkably uniform with redshift. Armed with redshifts obtained from optical and infrared follow-up observations, it is expected that the survey will enable significant constraints to be placed on the equation of state of the dark energy.Comment: Written prior to SPIE conference, June 21-25, 2004. 19 pages, 13 figures. Also available (with higher resolution figures) at http://spt.uchicago.edu

Exploring the implementation barriers of eco-toilet system in the Philippines using Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) approach

© 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd. Eco-Toilet system (ETS) is an emerging sanitation technology that promotes water conservation and nutrient recovery. Although many kinds of literature support the promising benefits of ETS, the implementation of such technology in the Philippines still faces a myriad of challenges. The study found out that the implementation of ETS in the country was affected by the following barriers: (a) policy and institutional capacity/commitment, (b) investment/financial issues, (c) technology and operation viability, and (d) social acceptance. DEMATEL was used as an analytical framework to investigate these key barriers. This method utilized the value judgments of experts and converted this information into quantitative data. Several computations were applied to reveal the causal relationships and prominence of the implementation barriers of ETS in the Philippines. Therefore, this study can benefit decision-makers in addressing implementation issues involving ETS projects in the country

Optimizing grain yields reduces CH(4) emissions from rice paddy fields

Microbial production in anoxic wetland rice soils is a major source of atmospheric CH(4,) the most important non-CO(2) greenhouse gas. Much higher CH(4) emissions from well managed irrigated rice fields in the wet than in the dry season could not be explained by seasonal differences in temperature. We hypothesized that high CH(4) emissions in the wet season are caused by low grain to biomass ratios. In a screenhouse experiment, removing spikelets to reduce the plants' capacity to store photosynthetically fixed C in grains increased CH(4) emissions, presumably via extra C inputs to the soil. Unfavorable conditions for spikelet formation in the wet season may similarly explain high methane emissions. The observed relationship between reduced grain filling and CH(4) emission provides opportunities to mitigate CH(4) emissions by optimizing rice productivity