The last universal man : the local and the universal in Humboldt’s science

Dettelbach, M. (2008). El último de los hombres universales: lo local y lo universal en la ciencia de Humboldt. Redes, 14(29), 113-126.El presente trabajo indaga en el universalismo de Humboldt en tanto científico omniabarcador y cosmopolita, para señalar que su manera de trascender las fronteras tanto disciplinarias como políticas cumplía funciones políticas particulares en los albores del siglo XIX. En especial, se analiza cómo su enfoque omniabarcativo del conocimiento científico se basaba en una relación particular entre lo local y lo universal.This paper wants to localize Humboldt’s universalism in two ways: a) by showing that his all-embracing approach to scientific knowledge was predicated on a particular relationship between the local and the universal, as fragment and whole, as ruin and living culture. Humboldt’s universalism was the product not of a capacious mind, but of a carefully constructed way of reading data and understanding measurement of a whole range of different disciplines. The very lawfulness of Nature Humboldt set out to discover and reveal in the first half of the 19th century depended on the recognition of the essentially local character of measurement and observation; and b), by showing Humboldt’s universalism to have particular, local meanings, and to have served particular, local purposes. Both forms of universalism performed particular political functions between France and Prussia at the turn of the 19th century, and were part of a single culture

Romanticism and administration mining, galvanism and oversight in Alexander von Humboldt's global physics.

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Rapid Quantification of Film Thickness and Metal Loading for Electrocatalytic Metal Oxide Films

The thicknesses and metal loadings of amorphous nickel, iron, and iridium oxide films widely used for solar fuel electrocatalysis were determined by cross-sectional scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy measurements. The thicknesses for a series of films, which were systematically varied from 10 to 400 nm using photodeposition techniques, were accurately measured by cross-sectional SEM using a protocol that successfully resolves the relevant catalyst layers. XRF measurements recorded on each of the films provided a strong linear correlation (<i>R</i>² > 0.97) with the thicknesses determined by cross-sectional SEM. The electrochemical surface areas (ECSAs) determined by double-layer capacitance measurements, a technique widely used in the electrocatalysis community, showed a linear relationship for iridium oxide film thicknesses but not with those consisting of nickel and iron. These results highlight the limitations of using ECSA to determine catalyst film thicknesses and metal loadings. The noninvasive XRF technique is demonstrated to be a far superior method for reporting on the thickness and loadings of thin metal oxide films