Globalization, migration, citizenship, and sport celebrity: Locating Lydia Ko between and beyond New Zealand and South Korea

The contested terrain surrounding globalization, migration, citizenship, and national identity shape the context in which modern sport celebrity develops in Asia. Focusing on female golf phenomenon Lydia Ko, the analysis locates her celebrity and national identity between her place of birth–Korea–and her place of citizenship–New Zealand. Several intersecting factors influenced Ko’s celebrity and identity construction including changes in New Zealand immigration policy, changes in Korean state policy towards overseas nationals, negatively viewed attitudes and behaviours of previous foreign-born celebrities of Korean-descent, and Ko’s own public proclamations regarding her national identity

GSA2016A: Turning back the clock: Reconstructions of historical forest composition, stem density, and biomass using Public Land Survey, fossil pollen data, and STEPPS

Presented at 2016 GSA Conference. Abstract:<div><p>North American forests have been transformed by human action, challenging both paleoecologists and global change ecologists who use contemporary ecosystems as a baseline for past or future inferences.  As part of the Paleoecological Observatory Network (PalEON) project, we present new gridded (8x8km) reconstructions of historic forest composition, stem density, and biomass for 28 tree taxa in northern US forests for the pre-settlement era (ca. 1700 to 1890 CE), based on Public Land Survey (PLS) data.  These PLS-based reconstructions include multiple corrections for potential surveyor biases, including spatially varying correction factors to accommodate sampling design, azimuthal censoring, and biases in tree selection.  We employ these pre-settlement vegetation reconstructions, in combination with networks of fossil pollen records drawn from the Neotoma Paleoecology Database (<a href="http://www.neotomadb.org/">www.neotomadb.org</a>), to calibrate the STEPPS pollen-vegetation model and reconstruct forest composition in the northern US over the last two millennia.  STEPPS, as a hierarchical Bayesian model, includes estimates of uncertainty in parameter estimation and state variable reconstruction.  We apply the pre-settlement datasets to map the distributions of lost forests (pre-settlement forests with no current analog) and novel forests (modern forests with no past analogs). We demonstrate shifts in tree-climate relationships over the last two centuries due to historic land use and climate change.   The next stage of work is to use these paleovegetation reconstructions to initialize, validate, and improve the simulations of terrestrial ecosystem models; this work is underway.</p></div

Processes, challenges and optimisation of rum production from molasses: A contemporary review

The rum industry is currently worth USD 16 billion, with production concentrated in tropical countries of the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific regions. The primary feedstock for rum production is sugar cane molasses, a by-product of sugar refineries. The main variables known to affect rum quality include the composition of the molasses, the length of fermentation, and the type of barrels and length of time used for aging the rum. The goal of this review is to provide an overview of the impact of these variables on rum quality, and to highlight current challenges and opportunities in the production of rum from molasses. In order to achieve this, we review the relevant contemporary scientific literature on these topics. The major contemporary challenges in the rum production industry include minimising the effects of variability in feedstock quality, ensuring the fermentation process runs to completion, preventing microbial contamination, and the selection and maintenance of yeast strains providing optimum ethanol production. Stringent quality management practices are required to ensure consistency in the quality and organoleptic properties of the rum from batch to batch. Further research is required to fully understand the influences of many of these variables on the final quality of the rum produce