From museum to memory institution: the politics of European culture online

Museums, libraries and archives have long been considered the retainers of some form of collective memory. Within the last twenty years, the term ‘memory institution’ has been coined to describe these entities, which is symptomatic of the fact that such places are increasingly linked through digital media and online networks. The concept of the memory institution is also part of the vocabulary used to promote broader cultural integration across nations, and appears in discussions of European heritage and in policy documents concerning the digitization of cultural heritage collections. To explore the relationship between cultural heritage, memory and digital technology further, this paper will examine the large-scale digitization project Europeana, under which museums, libraries and archives are re-defined as cultural heritage institutions or memory institutions. My purpose is to trace the conceptual trajectory of memory within this context, and to address how the idea of a European cultural memory structured by technology holds implications for institutions traditionally associated with practices of remembering

The nature and value of cultural policy research for early career researchers.

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New priorities for climate science and climate economics in the 2020s

Climate science and climate economics are critical sources of expertise in our pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals. Effective use of this expertise requires a strengthening of its epistemic foundations and a renewed focus on more practical policy problems

On the physics of three integrated assessment models

Differing physical assumptions are embedded in an important class of integrated assessment models. Reverse-engineering a common description of their underlying physics facilitates inter-comparisons that separate economic and physical uncertainties. Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are the main tools for combining physical and economic analyses to develop and assess climate change policy. Policy makers have relied heavily on three IAMs in particular—DICE, FUND, and PAGE—when trying to balance the benefits and costs of climate action. Unpacking the physics of these IAMs accomplishes four things. Firstly, it reveals how the physics of these IAMs differ, and the extent to which those differences give rise to different visions of the human and economic costs of climate change. Secondly, it makes these IAMs more accessible to the scientific community and thereby invites further physical expertise into the IAM community so that economic assessments of climate change can better reflect the latest physical understanding of the climate system. Thirdly, it increases the visibility of the link between the physical sciences and the outcomes of policy assessments so that the scientific community can focus more sharply on those unresolved questions that loom largest in policy assessments. And finally, in making explicit the link between these IAMs and the underlying physical models, one gains the ability to translate between IAMs using a common physical language. This translation-key will allow multi-model policy assessments to run all three models with physically comparable baseline scenarios, enabling the economic sources of uncertainty to be isolated and facilitating a more informed debate about the most appropriate mitigation pathway

An evaluation of planktonic foraminiferal zonation of the Oligocene

42 p., 8 pl., 7 fig.http://paleo.ku.edu/contributions.htm

Excavating the Future: Utopia as a Method of Historical Analysis

This article explores the question of “excavating the future” and utopia’s potential to expand the modalities within which history has been written and thought. Here, utopia is positioned both as a lens through which to understand the growth of modern historical thinking and as a method for historical analysis. The first part of the article investigates the emergence of the temporal utopia in the modern period and its entanglement with history. The second part of the article begins to trace the contours of utopia as a framework for interrogating history. This framework draws from a branch of utopianism, adapted from the work of Ruth Levitas and Fredric Jameson, via reference to Michel Foucault’s writing on genealogical methods. The article ends by highlighting some examples of historical studies in which the future emerges as an analytical category, to signal a way forward for utopia as a method of historical analysis

Assessing pricing assumptions for weather index insurance in a changing climate

Weather index insurance is being offered to low-income farmers in developing countries as an alternative to traditional multi-peril crop insurance. There is widespread support for index insurance as a means of climate change adaptation but whether or not these products are themselves resilient to climate change has not been well studied. Given climate variability and climate change, an over-reliance on historical climate observations to guide the design of such products can result in premiums which mislead policyholders and insurers alike, about the magnitude of underlying risks. Here, a method to incorporate different sources of climate data into the product design phase is presented. Bayesian Networks are constructed to demonstrate how insurers can assess the product viability from a climate perspective, using past observations and simulations of future climate. Sensitivity analyses illustrate the dependence of pricing decisions on both the choice of information, and the method for incorporating such data. The methods and their sensitivities are illustrated using a case study analysing the provision of index-based crop insurance in Kolhapur, India. We expose the benefits and limitations of the Bayesian Network approach, weather index insurance as an adaptation measure and climate simulations as a source of quantitative predictive information. Current climate model output is shown to be of limited value and difficult to use by index insurance practitioners. The method presented, however, is shown to be an effective tool for testing pricing assumptions and could feasibly be employed in the future to incorporate multiple sources of climate data

An assessment of the foundational assumptions inhigh-resolution climate projections: the case of UKCP09

The United Kingdom Climate Impacts Programme’s UKCP09 project makes highresolution projections of the climate out to 2100 by post-processing the outputs of a large-scale global climate model. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the methodology used and then urge some caution. Given the acknowledged systematic, shared shortcomings in all current climate models, treating model outputs as decision relevant projections can be significantly misleading. In extrapolatory situations, such as projections of future climate change impacts, there is little reason to expect that postprocessing of model outputs can correct for the consequences of such errors. This casts doubt on our ability, today, to make trustworthy, high-resolution probabilistic projections out to the end of this century

Collective memory or the right to be forgotten? Cultures of digital memory and forgetting in the European Union

This article investigates cultures of digital memory and forgetting in the European Union. The article first gives some background to key debates in media memory studies, before going on to analyse the shaping of European Commission and European Union initiatives in relation to Google’s activities from the period 2004–present. The focus of inquiry for the discussion of memory is the Google Books project and Europeana, a database of digitized cultural collections drawn from European museums, libraries and archives. Attention is then given to questions of forgetting by exploring the tension between Google’s search and indexing mechanisms and the right to be forgotten. The article ends by reflecting on the scale of the shift in contemporary cultures of memory and forgetting, and considers how far European regulation enables possible interventions in this domain