Western Merchants and Intra-Asian Trade: John Henry Duus at Treaty port Hakodate (Part One 1861-68)

This article examines the business activities of John Henry Duus, a long-standing foreign resident of the treaty port of Hakodate. In the first of this two-part article, I trace Duus’ background and focus in on his efforts to conduct business at Hakodate in the 1860s. Though Duus’ efforts to foster trade between Japan and western countries proved largely fruitless, he played an important role as a local agent for Chinese and China-based western firms and thus was active in fostering intra-Asian trade. As an Asia-born Anglo-Dane who first came to Hakodate as a British merchant but later switched allegiances to Denmark and served as Danish consul, Duus’ career also points to the cosmopolitan background of western treaty porters at the more peripheral treaty ports such as Hakodate

Western Merchants and the Meiji Transition: John Henry Duus at Treaty Port Hakodate (Part Two 1868-89)

In the second of this two-part article I examine the business activities of John Henry Duus in the years after the Meiji Restoration. Duus was already an experienced treaty port trader by the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and from his base in Hakodate, where he also served as Danish consul, he played a role in facilitating trade between Hakodate and Chinese treaty ports. Duus’ career in Japan spanned almost three decades including the transition from Tokugawa (Edo) to Meiji—Duus died in 1889, the year the Meiji constitution was promulgated. An examination of his activities utilizing fragments of his correspondence shows the opportunities and difficulties that Western merchants had to overcome as they sought to prosper in a turbulent era. Duus should have been well-placed to take advantage of the new opportunities that Meiji modernization presented, however, as this paper shows, Meiji reform efforts often disrupted Western commercial interests

Considering Practical Verifiability and Open Referencing in Wikipedia

The authors have made a preprint available for convenience. The article is forthcoming in 2019. Please contact authors if you intend on citing for accurate page numbers

Colonial settlement and migratory labour in Karafuto 1905-1941

Following the Russo-Japanese War Japan acquired its second formal colony, Karafuto (southern Sakhalin), which became thoroughly integrated with mainland Japan, developing into an important supplier of marine products, lumber, paper and pulp, and coal. This sparsely populated colony offered the prospect of large scale settlement and over the course of the Japanese colonial period the population of the Karafuto increased to over 400,000 before the Pacific War. This thesis traces the course of migration to Karafuto and assesses the role of settlement policy, and migratory labour in colonial settlement. Utilizing colonial media, government reports and local documents, as well as the recollections of former settlers, this study argues that the phenomenon of migratory labour acted as an indirect means for establishing a permanent settler community in Karafuto. This study stresses that the colonial government of Karafuto’s efforts towards the establishment of permanent settlements based on agriculture largely failed. Instead, it was industries that involved the utilization of migratory labour which acted as base-industries for economic life in the colony, and helped support Karafuto’s more enduring communities. Indeed, even in the few cases of successfully established government sponsored agricultural communities in Karafuto, seasonal migratory labour and nonagricultural activity were a persistently crucial component of the community’s economic life. A further implication of this study relates to the comprehensive integration of Karafuto with migratory labour markets in northern mainland Japan and Hokkaido. Evidence presented in this study allows us to question the prevalent notions that northern Japan was an isolated, or poorly connected, region. Instead, it is found that the prefectures of Japan’s northeast were actively engaged in northward bound settlement and migratory labour circuits

Measurement of disruption forces in JET using fiber-optic sensors

Monitoring the forces induced on the vacuum vessel when a disruption occurs is essential for the protection of the machine. Since divertor coils have been installed in JET, during disruptions a significant difference between the forces measured on the top and the bottom of the machine has been observed. In order to investigate these further, optical fiber transducers FBGs (Fiber Bragg Gratings) were installed in addition to the currently used strain gauges. During VDE (Vertical Displacement Event) tests, these new transducers were used to measure different level of disruptions ranging from 80T up to 230T vertical forces. The results were then compared with the strain gauges. The FBG measurement was carried out using a broadband light source illuminating an array of 4 FBGs through a combination of directional couplers, connectors and fiber-optic cable. The forces measured both by FBG and by the strain gauges are within the same range, except for the initial swing where large random differences are observed. The tests have demonstrated that the FBG-based force measurement system has adequate resolution (±1.52strain corresponding to a force of 4kN due to the geometry of the leg) and measurement range (50002strain or 13000kN) for this application

“Blind Trust is Not Enough”: Considering Practical Verifiability and Open Referencing in Wikipedia

This article draws attention to the often-unseen information inequalities that occur in the way that Wikipedia content is referenced. Drawing on digital information control and virtual gatekeeping scholarship, we contend that by not considering the degree to which references are practically accessible and verifiable, Wikipedia editors are implicitly promoting a control mechanism that is limiting the potential of Wikipedia to serve, as Willinsky puts it, “as a gateway to a larger world of knowledge.” We question the widespread practice of referencing peer-reviewed literature that is obscured by prohibitive paywalls. As we see it, two groups are disadvantaged by this practice. First, Wikipedia editors who lack access to the most current scholarly literature are unable to verify a reference or confirm the veracity of a fact or figure. Second, and perhaps most important, general readers are left with two unsatisfactory options in this scenario: they can either trust the authority of the citation or pay to access the article. Building on Don Fallis’ work on epistemic consequences of Wikipedia, this paper contends that promoting practically verifiable references would work to mitigate these inequalities and considers how relatively new initiatives could be used to improve the quality and utility of Wikipedia more generally. Pre-print first published online 03/03/201

The Influence of Chemical Composition on LNG Pool Vaporization

A model is used to examine the influence of chemical composition on the vaporization rate of LNG during spreading. Calculations have been performed whereby the vaporization rate of the LNG mixtures has been compared to the vaporization of pure methane under the initial conditions. The detailed results indicate that the vaporization rate LNG mixture is different to that of pure methane. LNG as the liquid mixture gets rich in ethane and isobaric latent heat increases rapidly, leading to the rate vaporization of LNG decrease in compared to pure methane