Urban Palimpsests: Studying Enlightenment Influences in the Post-Earthquake Rebuilding of Lima and Lisbon, 1746–1765

Urban renewal has long existed as a vessel for the assertion of authority, embodying hierarchy, policy, and culture in the most tangible way with architecture and civic landscaping shaped to accommodate the upper strata of society. Particularly interesting to study through this lens is the latter half of the eighteenth century which marks the turning point between royal absolutism and the emergence of competing forms of power in the European Empire, through the growth of the Enlightenment movement. This paper offers a comparison of two imperial cities, Lima and Lisbon, which due to similarly tragic earthquakes, were provided the opportunity to implement reforms at an urban scale, bringing opposing thought to the forefront of cultural debate and identity and redefining the roles of Church and State. Through an analysis of primary and secondary texts as well as original architectural documents, this study focuses on highlighting how urbanism can be used as a mechanism of power. With these sources, the paper compares the two events to synthesize a greater understanding of the roles of Lisbon and Lima as parts of the greater Iberian empires. Ultimately, this juxtaposition of the two cities provides a unique study of how architecture and urban morphology manifested the Spanish and Portuguese empires’ respective Bourbon and Pombaline reforms, and the reasons for the differences in their impacts

Short- and Long-Term Outcomes of the Left Behind in China: Education, Well-Being and Life Opportunities

This report addresses the scope of China’s left-behind phenomenon and its roots in migration and education policies. It reviews evidence about disadvantages associated with left-behind status and discusses recent policy responses to the left-behind phenomenon. Empirical evidence is drawn from a national study of middle school students and a 15-year longitudinal case-study of children from rural Gansu, China. While a number of prior studies have shown mixed findings about the scale of educational disadvantage of left-behind children, compared to other groups, evidence presented here indicates that even after adjusting for school or community and household socioeconomic status, there are multiple domains in which homes of left-behind children are disadvantaged. They tend to live in households characterized by poorer health resources, cultural resources and social resources. By definition, they lose access, at least temporarily, to the “human capital” of their absent parents. Children in the short term thus experience more physiological, psychological, and (in the national comparison) educational disadvantages than their non-left-behind counterparts. In the long-term, our case study from Gansu Province suggests that father absence is associated with reduced educational attainment and possibly greater propensity to migrate, but not employment or long-term family relations. Overall, disadvantages appear to be more consistent and more generalized for mother-absent and dual-parent-absent families than for father-absent families. We discuss policy responses, and possible policy strategies, in the closing segment of the report. Policy reforms that obviate the need for children to be left behind are one evident solution to the problem, and some steps appear to be happening in this direction, but local resistance may be substantial. More immediately, boarding schools and community centers are commonly-proposed policy solutions to address the immediate needs of left-behind children, with promise but some clear pitfalls. Other possible supports are discussed

Effect Pathways of Informal Family Separation on Children’s Outcomes: Paternal Labor Migration and Long-term Educational Attainment of Left-Behind Children in Rural China

Informal family separation due to parental labor migration is an increasingly common experience in the lives of children in many countries. This paper proposes a framework and method for analyzing “effect pathways” by which parental labor migration might affect children’s outcomes. The framework incorporates home-environment and child-development mechanisms and is adapted from migration, sociology of education and child development literatures. We test these pathways using data on father absence and long-term educational outcomes for girls and boys in China. We apply structural equation models with inverse probability of treatment weighting to data from a 15-year longitudinal survey of 2,000 children. Significantly, fathers’ migration has distinct implications for different effect pathways. It is associated most significantly with reduced human capital at home, which has the largest detrimental effect on children’s educational attainment, among those studied. At the same time, father absence is associated with better family economic capital and mothers showing more parental warmth, which partially buffer the negative implications of father absence. Overall, father absence corresponds to a reduction of 0.364 years on average in children’s educational attainment, but the reduction is larger for boys than for girls. For boys and girls, the reduced availability of literate adults in the household linked to father absence is an important effect pathway. For girls, this detrimental effect is partially offset by a positive income effect, but for boys, no such positive effect is observed

Control Force Compensation in Ground-Based Flight Simulators

This paper presents the results of a study that investigated if controller force compensations accounting for the inertial force and moment due to the aircraft motion during flight have a significant effect on pilot control behavior and performance. Seven rotorcraft pilots performed a side-step and precision hovering task in light turbulence in the Vertical Motion Simulator. The effects of force compensation were examined for two different simulated rotorcraft: linear and UH-60 dynamics with two different force gradient of the lateral stick control. Four motion configurations were used: large motion, hexapod motion, fixed-base motion, and fixed-base motion with compensation. Control-input variables and task performance such as the time to translate to the designated hover position, station-keeping position errors, and handling qualities ratings were used as measures. Control force compensation enabled pilot control behavior and performance more similar to that under high- or medium-fidelity motion to some extent only. Control force compensation did not improve overall task performance considering both rotorcraft models at the same time. The control force compensation had effects on the linear model with lighter force gradient, but only a minimal effect on pilots? control behavior and task performance for the UH-60 model, which had a higher force gradient. This suggests that the control force compensation has limited benefits for controllers that have higher stiffness

Seeking Serious Tourists – Balancing Culture, Conservation and Economic Gains from Aboriginal Tourism

Ethnic culture, often complemented by attractive relatively natural environments, is the core tourism attraction for indigenous areas. With the rise of aboriginal tourism, many regions with indigenous people intend to reform their economies by introducing tourism development. However, some places where this has occurred have exhibited adverse consequences, such as the breaking up of conventional social/cultural norms and distortion of unique ethnic cultures. Thus, it is critical to establish an approach to development that can satisfy both cultural and economic concerns to achieve sustainable development in aboriginal regions. Based on serious leisure theory, it is proposed that serious travelers can contribute offer enhanced prospects of contributing to aboriginal communities in terms of both economic gains and cultural conservations. The idea is assessed in the context of aboriginal community in Taiwan and the empirical findings mostly verify the above claims. Serious aboriginal tourists express their support for ethnic culture with real spending on culture-related products and services. Likewise, serious aboriginal travelers reveal their passions for ethnic culture by demanding more cultural experiences and, more willingly donate for aboriginal cultural conservation. Thus, it is suggested that, aboriginal destinations should cater more to the serious traveler market to make sustainable development possible

Wo. Defy - designing wearable technology in the context of historical cultural resistance practices.

This paper presents the design process and technical development of Wo.Defy, an interactive kinetic garment that explores a suffragette cultural critique of the 'Self-Combing Sisters', a group of women in early twentieth century Chinese society who challenged and questioned the role of women's agency.Through elements of self-connection with hair and breath, Wo.Defy investigates intimacy with natural materials and technology that are close to one's skin, and provokes self-actuation through critique of social expectation within one's culture. We gathered feedback from participants at 5 exhibitions through open-ended interviews. Self-reported experience illustrated that wearable interaction can support self-reflection contextualized through cultural artifacts such as interactive clothing

Primary Cardiac Lymphoma: Importance of Tissue Diagnosis

Primary cardiac lymphoma (PCL) is a rare disease entity that can present with severe cardiac and cardioembolic symptoms. We present a 79-year-old male with history of polymalgia rheumatica on chronic prednisone who presented with a two-week history of progressively worsening dyspnea, cough, and a 10 pound weight loss. Transthoracic echocardiogram (TTE) and computed tomography (CT) of the chest showed a large mediastinal mass with invasion of the pericardium. A biopsy of an abdominal soft-tissue mass confirmed the diagnosis of PCL. The patient was treated with two cycles of rituximab plus cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, and prednisone (R-CHOP) which was complicated by progressive heart failure requiring substitution of liposomal doxorubicin. The epidemiology, presentation, diagnosis, and treatment options of PCL are discussed

Wo. Defy - designing wearable technology in the context of historical cultural resistance practices.

This paper presents the design process and technical development of Wo.Defy, an interactive kinetic garment that explores a suffragette cultural critique of the 'Self-Combing Sisters', a group of women in early twentieth century Chinese society who challenged and questioned the role of women's agency.Through elements of self-connection with hair and breath, Wo.Defy investigates intimacy with natural materials and technology that are close to one's skin, and provokes self-actuation through critique of social expectation within one's culture. We gathered feedback from participants at 5 exhibitions through open-ended interviews. Self-reported experience illustrated that wearable interaction can support self-reflection contextualized through cultural artifacts such as interactive clothing

Keck Integral-Field Spectroscopy of M87 Reveals an Intrinsically Triaxial Galaxy and a Revised Black Hole Mass

The three-dimensional intrinsic shape of a galaxy and the mass of the central supermassive black hole provide key insight into the galaxy's growth history over cosmic time. Standard assumptions of a spherical or axisymmetric shape can be simplistic and can bias the black hole mass inferred from the motions of stars within a galaxy. Here we present spatially-resolved stellar kinematics of M87 over a two-dimensional 250\mbox{^{\prime\prime}} \times 300\mbox{^{\prime\prime}} contiguous field covering a radial range of 50 pc to 12 kpc from integral-field spectroscopic observations at the Keck II Telescope. From about 5 kpc and outward, we detect a prominent 25 $\mathrm{km~s}^{-1}$ rotational pattern, in which the kinematic axis (connecting the maximal receding and approaching velocities) is $40^\circ$ misaligned with the photometric major axis of M87. The rotational amplitude and misalignment angle both decrease in the inner 5 kpc. Such misaligned and twisted velocity fields are a hallmark of triaxiality, indicating that M87 is not an axisymmetrically shaped galaxy. Triaxial Schwarzschild orbit modeling with more than 4000 observational constraints enabled us to determine simultaneously the shape and mass parameters. The models incorporate a radially declining profile for the stellar mass-to-light ratio suggested by stellar population studies. We find that M87 is strongly triaxial, with ratios of $p=0.845$ for the middle-to-long principal axes and $q=0.722$ for the short-to-long principal axes, and determine the black hole mass to be $(5.37^{+0.37}_{-0.25}\pm 0.22)\times 10^9 M_\odot$, where the second error indicates the systematic uncertainty associated with the distance to M87.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJL. 15 pages, 8 figure