Assembling a Blue Economy moment? Geographic engagement with globalizing biological-economic relations in multi-use marine environments

In the 2010s, the Blue Economy' has been widely advocated by a spectrum of interests as a strategy to save the world's oceans and water. This article explores what the Blue Economy moment is and how geographers can engage with it. It acknowledges recent efforts by geographers to understand Blue Economy but goes further by outlining the European Union's Blue Economy programmes and by discussing these in relation to recent agenda setting in marine science. We argue that in spite of apparent convergence on this goal, the Blue Economy imaginary disciplines disparate knowledge for economic projects, when the planetary reality is that every economic project is axiomatically a biological project, with some economic aspects. In this context, the article outlines how assemblage thinking could be relevant to a human geography engagement with Blue Economy and what this could like, and how a relational conception of Blue Economy helps advance understanding. Finally, we discuss the difficulties and potential for human geographers to be genuinely enactive given the disciplinary framings that have already been assumed or imposed through Blue Economy. This last is highlighted by discussing engagement in a particular New Zealand Blue Economy initiative. Rather than either promoting or critiquing Blue Economy, we encourage informed and critical engagement with Blue Economy by geographers

Further assembly work: A mountains to seas Blue Economy imaginary

In response to the suggestions of our commentators, we sketch in some new directions for geographic assembly work aimed at developing situated holistic Blue Economy imaginaries. We focus on several interlinked provocations: conceptualizing mountains to seas imaginaries, centring water, rethought relations of governmentality and governance derived from new ethically informed behaviours, strategies for transitioning conceptions into new policy models and attentiveness to global economic and environmental futures

On the missing 2175 Angstroem-bump in the Calzetti extinction curve

The aim of the paper is to give a physical explanation of the absence of the feature in the Calzetti extinction curve. We analyze the dust attenuation of a homogeneous source seen through a distant inhomogeneous distant screen. The inhomogeneities are described through an idealized isothermal turbulent medium where the probability distribution function (PDF) of the column density is log-normal. In addition it is assumed that below a certain critical column density the carriers of the extinction bump at 2175 Angstroem are being destroyed by the ambient UV radiation field. Turbulence is found to be a natural explanation not only of the flatter curvature of the Calzetti extinction curve but also of the missing bump provided the critical column density is N_H >= 10^21 cm^-2. The density contrast needed to explain both characteristics is well consistent with the Mach number of the cold neutral medium of our own Galaxy which suggests a density contrast sigma_(rho/) 6.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures accepted for publication in A&A, section

Surgery formulae for finite type invariants of rational homology 3--spheres

We first present three graphic surgery formulae for the degree $n$ part $Z_n$ of the Kontsevich-Kuperberg-Thurston universal finite type invariant of rational homology spheres. Each of these three formulae determines an alternate sum of the form $$\sum_{I \subset N} (-1)^{\sharp I}Z_n(M_I)$$ where $N$ is the set of components of a framed algebraically split link $L$ in a rational homology sphere $M$, and $M_I$ denotes the manifold resulting from the Dehn surgeries on the components of $I$. The first formula treats the case when $L$ is a boundary link with $n$ components, while the second one is for $3n$--component algebraically split links. In the third formula, the link $L$ has $2n$ components and the Milnor triple linking numbers of its 3--component sublinks vanish. The presented formulae are then applied to the study of the variation of $Z_n$ under a $p/q$-surgery on a knot $K$. This variation is a degree $n$ polynomial in $q/p$ when the class of $q/p$ in \QQ/\ZZ is fixed, and the coefficients of these polynomials are knot invariants, for which various topological properties or topological definitions are given.Comment: 51 pages, uses pstrick

Hyperbolic Audio Source Separation

We introduce a framework for audio source separation using embeddings on a hyperbolic manifold that compactly represent the hierarchical relationship between sound sources and time-frequency features. Inspired by recent successes modeling hierarchical relationships in text and images with hyperbolic embeddings, our algorithm obtains a hyperbolic embedding for each time-frequency bin of a mixture signal and estimates masks using hyperbolic softmax layers. On a synthetic dataset containing mixtures of multiple people talking and musical instruments playing, our hyperbolic model performed comparably to a Euclidean baseline in terms of source to distortion ratio, with stronger performance at low embedding dimensions. Furthermore, we find that time-frequency regions containing multiple overlapping sources are embedded towards the center (i.e., the most uncertain region) of the hyperbolic space, and we can use this certainty estimate to efficiently trade-off between artifact introduction and interference reduction when isolating individual sounds.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 2023, Demo page: https://darius522.github.io/hyperbolic-audio-sep

Pre-Clinical Grades Predict Clinical Performance in the MBBS Stage II Examination at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus

Summary: In the preclinical sciences, statistically significant predictive values have been reported between the performances in one discipline and the others, supporting the hypothesis that students who perform well in one discipline were likely to perform well in the other disciplines. We  therefore decided to conduct a retrospective study to investigate the  predictive effects of preclinical subjects on clinical subjects from 87 students of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus who took the MBBS Stage II examination at various times between May 2000 and May 2002. The grade in Pathology was significantly predicted by scores in  Anatomy and Pharmacology; Medicine by Physiology and Pharmacology scores; Surgery by Anatomy and Social and Preventive Medicine scores;  while, the Obstetrics and Gynecology grade was predicted by the Anatomy score. The results support the hypothesis that the scores in some  preclinical subjects can predict the performance in specific clinical subjects, which could be interpreted to suggest that poor performance in specific  preclinical disciplines could be a warning sign of future poor performance in the related clinical disciplines.Keywords: Medical education, preclinical grades, clinical grades, predictors of performanc