Global Intraurban Intake Fractions for Primary Air Pollutants from Vehicles and Other Distributed Sources

We model intraurban intake fraction (iF) values for distributed ground-level emissions in all 3646 global cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, encompassing a total population of 2.0 billion. For conserved primary pollutants, population-weighted median, mean, and interquartile range iF values are 26, 39, and 14-52 ppm, respectively, where 1 ppm signifies 1 g inhaled/t emitted. The global mean urban iF reported here is roughly twice as large as previous estimates for cities in the United States and Europe. Intake fractions vary among cities owing to differences in population size, population density, and meteorology. Sorting by size, population-weighted mean iF values are 65, 35, and 15 ppm, respectively, for cities with populations larger than 3, 0.6-3, and 0.1-0.6 million. The 20 worldwide megacities (each >10 million people) have a population-weighted mean iF of 83 ppm. Mean intraurban iF values are greatest in Asia and lowest in land-rich high-income regions. Country-average iF values vary by a factor of 3 among the 10 nations with the largest urban populations

Urban coral reefs: Degradation and resilience of hard coral assemblages in coastal cities of East and Southeast Asia

© 2018 The Author(s) Given predicted increases in urbanization in tropical and subtropical regions, understanding the processes shaping urban coral reefs may be essential for anticipating future conservation challenges. We used a case study approach to identify unifying patterns of urban coral reefs and clarify the effects of urbanization on hard coral assemblages. Data were compiled from 11 cities throughout East and Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Singapore, Jakarta, Hong Kong, and Naha (Okinawa). Our review highlights several key characteristics of urban coral reefs, including “reef compression” (a decline in bathymetric range with increasing turbidity and decreasing water clarity over time and relative to shore), dominance by domed coral growth forms and low reef complexity, variable city-specific inshore-offshore gradients, early declines in coral cover with recent fluctuating periods of acute impacts and rapid recovery, and colonization of urban infrastructure by hard corals. We present hypotheses for urban reef community dynamics and discuss potential of ecological engineering for corals in urban areas

Visualizing sound as functional n-grams in Homeric Greek poetry

This work in progress attempts to examine internal heterogeneity in poetic language using the tools of computer-based authorship analysis. As stylometric tools become finer-grained, scholars such as Hoover (2007) and Andreev (n.d.) have turned their gaze from the characterization of an author or corpus as a whole to considerations of an author’s stylistic evolution over time, and the differences between and even within individual works. The question of the stylistic integrity of Homer’s corpus is a venerable one. For centuries, diverse models, subjective as well as quantitative, have claimed to explain the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey: some scholars have seen it as the work of a single, literate genius (West, 2001, 3); others as a collective multitext, the superposition of generations of continually-changing performances handed down from one illiterate bard to the next (Nagy, 1996, 107 ff.). Often much of the support for these claims is the perceived homo- or heterogeneity of the text. And what is at stake in these examinations is larger than a nineteenthcentury romantic notion of the artist and his genius; recent studies have used th