Elective Affinities in the Anthropocene: Christianity and the Natural Environment Reconsidered

To reach a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between religion and the natural environment, it is important to move beyond essentializing any religious tradition as having a pro-environmental or anti-environmental ethic. Rather, prior work has shown that the canonical, scholarly, and popular literatures and discourse of a number of religious traditions can and have been socially and rhetorically constructed as supporting an array of positions, from preservation to profligacy, and much in between those two ideal types. In this paper, we develop Max Weber’s theory of “elective affinities” and adapt it to the Anthropocene, to make the case that in a fragmented society, people and communities of convenience tend to choose the tropes and framing from the dominant culture to justify self-interested action. That often can take the form of religious discourse. In the sense of finding a wide array of practical interpretations relative to the environment, the theory is largely supported, although we do find important nuances. It is instructive to look at how the language and legitimacy of one institution (e.g. religion) has been used to justify and legitimate that of others (e.g. the polity). While these processes of institutional co-optation can be effective in the short run, they may have corrosive longer-term effects. Key rhetorical, and in fact political, battles in the Third Millennium, will likely be organized around how to adapt pre-industrial religion to late industrial and perhaps post-industrial times, and it remains to see how central the natural environment will be in what communities hold sacred

Is Islam Pro- or Anti-Environmental? Interpretations and Implications

Religion has, throughout the centuries, been a powerful institution on the macro level, yet also stands as a force having significant influence in people’s personal lives. This does, however, lead to questions of how a traditional institution such as religion may or may not be adequate to address problems of the Late Industrial Era, most notably the environmental crisis. In this paper, we inquire how various dimensions of Islamic literature and thought can contribute to preserving the natural environment. We find that concepts such as “dominion of men over the earth” and “specialness of humankind” can lead to anti-environmental interpretations of Islam. Nevertheless, other interpretations of Islamic teachings emerge that are compatible with environmental stewardship. However, a number of Islamic governments have shown a decided bias against environmental stewardship, particularly in cases where there is an authoritarian government and one placing an emphasis on economic “development”. In counterpoint, Islamic Mysticism, or Sufism, can provide a spiritual context for environmentally conscious action

A magnetic field diagnostic for sonoluminescence

This study is motivated by the extraordinary process of single bubble sonoluminescence (SBSL), where an acoustically driven spherical shock is thought to power the emitted radiation. We propose new experiments using an external magnetic field which can induce anisotropies in both the shock propagation and radiation pattern. The effects will depend on the temperature, conductivity, and size of the radiating region. Our predictions suggest that such a laboratory experiment could serve as an important diagnostic in placing bounds on these parameters and understanding the physics of sonoluminescence.Comment: Latex File, Two .eps files, 5 pages, submitted to PR

Disentangling controls on animal abundance: Prey availability, thermal habitat, and microhabitat structure

The question of what controls animal abundance has always been fundamental to ecology, but given rapid environmental change, understanding the drivers and mechanisms governing abundance is more important than ever. Here, we determine how multidimensional environments and niches interact to determine population abundance along a tropical habitat gradient. Focusing on the endemic lizard Anolis bicaorum on the island of Utila (Honduras), we evaluate direct and indirect effects of three interacting niche axes on abundance: thermal habitat quality, structural habitat quality, and prey availability. We measured A. bicaorum abundance across a series of thirteen plots and used N-mixture models and path analysis to disentangle direct and indirect effects of these factors. Results showed that thermal habitat quality and prey biomass both had positive direct effects on anole abundance. However, thermal habitat quality also influenced prey biomass, leading to a strong indirect effect on abundance. Thermal habitat quality was primarily a function of canopy density, measured as leaf area index (LAI). Despite having little direct effect on abundance, LAI had a strong overall effect mediated by thermal quality and prey biomass. Our results demonstrate the role of multidimensional environments and niche interactions in determining animal abundance and highlight the need to consider interactions between thermal niches and trophic interactions to understand variation in abundance, rather than focusing solely on changes in the physical environment

Scalable Cross-lingual Document Similarity through Language-specific Concept Hierarchies

With the ongoing growth in number of digital articles in a wider set of languages and the expanding use of different languages, we need annotation methods that enable browsing multi-lingual corpora. Multilingual probabilistic topic models have recently emerged as a group of semi-supervised machine learning models that can be used to perform thematic explorations on collections of texts in multiple languages. However, these approaches require theme-aligned training data to create a language-independent space. This constraint limits the amount of scenarios that this technique can offer solutions to train and makes it difficult to scale up to situations where a huge collection of multi-lingual documents are required during the training phase. This paper presents an unsupervised document similarity algorithm that does not require parallel or comparable corpora, or any other type of translation resource. The algorithm annotates topics automatically created from documents in a single language with cross-lingual labels and describes documents by hierarchies of multi-lingual concepts from independently-trained models. Experiments performed on the English, Spanish and French editions of JCR-Acquis corpora reveal promising results on classifying and sorting documents by similar content.Comment: Accepted at the 10th International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2019

Quenched hadron spectroscopy with improved staggered quark action

We investigate light hadron spectroscopy with an improved quenched staggered quark action. We compare the results obtained with an improved gauge plus an improved quark action, an improved gauge plus standard quark action, and the standard gauge plus standard quark action. Most of the improvement in the spectroscopy results is due to the improved gauge sector. However, the improved quark action substantially reduces violations of Lorentz invariance, as evidenced by the meson dispersion relations.Comment: New references adde

Unoccupied aerial vehicles as a tool to map lizard operative temperature in tropical environments

To understand how ectotherms will respond to warming temperatures, we require information on thermal habitat quality at spatial resolutions and extents relevant to the organism. Measuring thermal habitat quality is either limited to small spatial extents, such as with ground‐based 3D operative temperature (T e ) replicas, representing the temperature of the animal at equilibrium with its environment, or is based on microclimate derived from physical models that use land cover variables and downscale coarse climate data. We draw on aspects of both these approaches and test the ability of unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) data (optical RGB) to predict fine‐scale heterogeneity in sub‐canopy lizard (Anolis bicaorum) T e in tropical forest using random forest models. Anolis bicaorum is an endemic, critically endangered, species, facing significant threats of habitat loss and degradation, and work was conducted as part of a larger project. Our findings indicate that a model incorporating solely air temperature, measured at the centre of the 20 × 20 m plot, and ground‐based leaf area index (LAI) measurements, measured at directly above the 3D replica, predicted T e well. However, a model with air temperature and UAV‐derived canopy metrics performed slightly better with the added advantage of enabling the mapping of T e with continuous spatial extent at high spatial resolutions, across the whole of the UAV orthomosaic, allowing us to capture and map T e across the whole of the survey plot, rather than purely at 3D replica locations. Our work provides a feasible workflow to map sub‐canopy lizard T e in tropical environments at spatial scales relevant to the organism, and across continuous areas. This can be applied to other species and can represent species within the same community that have evolved a similar thermal niche. Such methods will be imperative in risk modelling of such species to anthropogenic land cover and climate change

Prediction modelling for trauma using comorbidity and 'true' 30-day outcome

BACKGROUND: Prediction models for trauma outcome routinely control for age but there is uncertainty about the need to control for comorbidity and whether the two interact. This paper describes recent revisions to the Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN) risk adjustment model designed to take account of age and comorbidities. In addition linkage between TARN and the Office of National Statistics (ONS) database allows patient's outcome to be accurately identified up to 30 days after injury. Outcome at discharge within 30 days was previously used. METHODS: Prospectively collected data between 2010 and 2013 from the TARN database were analysed. The data for modelling consisted of 129 786 hospital trauma admissions. Three models were compared using the area under the receiver operating curve (AuROC) for assessing the ability of the models to predict outcome, the Akaike information criteria to measure the quality between models and test for goodness-of-fit and calibration. Model 1 is the current TARN model, Model 2 is Model 1 augmented by a modified Charlson comorbidity index and Model 3 is Model 2 with ONS data on 30 day outcome. RESULTS: The values of the AuROC curve for Model 1 were 0.896 (95% CI 0.893 to 0.899), for Model 2 were 0.904 (0.900 to 0.907) and for Model 3 0.897 (0.896 to 0.902). No significant interaction was found between age and comorbidity in Model 2 or in Model 3. CONCLUSIONS: The new model includes comorbidity and this has improved outcome prediction. There was no interaction between age and comorbidity, suggesting that both independently increase vulnerability to mortality after injury

Orbit size and estimated eye size in dinosaurs and other archosaurs and their implications for the evolution of visual capabilities

Vision is one of the most important senses for animals, allowing them to interact with their environment and with further implications for evolutionary histories. However, relevant soft tissues, such as the eye and associated structures, are not preserved in fossil vertebrates, limiting our knowledge of their visual capabilities. Here, we quantified absolute and relative orbit size for 400 species of dinosaurs and other extinct archosaurs using linear measurements of the preserved skeletal elements as a proxy for visual capabilities. Our results demonstrate that the orbit makes up on average 20% of skull size with a strong and consistent correlation across all sampled groups. This trend is largely independent of temporal distribution, species richness, and phylogeny. In fact, relative orbit size is narrowly constrained and did not surpass 45% of skull size, suggesting physiological and functional controls. Estimated eye size was found to be absolutely larger in herbivores, whereas carnivores tended to have smaller eyes absolutely and compared with skull size. Relatively large eyes only occurred in small-bodied species and vice versa. However, eye size alone was not sufficient to discriminate between different activity patterns or to characterize visual capabilities in detail.</p

Mosaic structural variation in children with developmental disorders

Delineating the genetic causes of developmental disorders is an area of active investigation. Mosaic structural abnormalities, defined as copy number or loss of heterozygosity events that are large and present in only a subset of cells, have been detected in 0.2–1.0% of children ascertained for clinical genetic testing. However, the frequency among healthy children in the community is not well characterized, which, if known, could inform better interpretation of the pathogenic burden of this mutational category in children with developmental disorders. In a case–control analysis, we compared the rate of large-scale mosaicism between 1303 children with developmental disorders and 5094 children lacking developmental disorders, using an analytical pipeline we developed, and identified a substantial enrichment in cases (odds ratio = 39.4, P-value 1.073e − 6). A meta-analysis that included frequency estimates among an additional 7000 children with congenital diseases yielded an even stronger statistical enrichment (P-value 1.784e − 11). In addition, to maximize the detection of low-clonality events in probands, we applied a trio-based mosaic detection algorithm, which detected two additional events in probands, including an individual with genome-wide suspected chimerism. In total, we detected 12 structural mosaic abnormalities among 1303 children (0.9%). Given the burden of mosaicism detected in cases, we suspected that many of the events detected in probands were pathogenic. Scrutiny of the genotypic–phenotypic relationship of each detected variant assessed that the majority of events are very likely pathogenic. This work quantifies the burden of structural mosaicism as a cause of developmental disorders