Jews and gender in British literature 1815-1865.

PhDThis thesis examines the variety of relationships between Jews and gender in early to mid-nineteenth century British literature, focussing particularly on representations of and by Jewish women. It reconstructs the social, political and literary context in which writers produced images and narratives about Jews, and considers to what extent stereotypes were reproduced, appropriated, or challenged. In particular it examines the ways in which questions of gender were linked to ideas about religious or racial difference in the Victorian period. The study situates literary representations of Jews within the context of contemporary debates about the participation of the Jews in the life of the modern state. It also investigates the ways in which these political debates were gendered, looking in particular at the relationship between the cultural construction of femininity and English national identity. It first considers Victorian culture's obsession with Rebecca, the Jewess created in Walter Scott's influential novel Ivanhoe (1819). It examines Rebecca's refusal to convert to Christianity in the context of Scott's discussion of racial separatism and modern national unity. Evangelical writers like Annie Webb, Amelia Bristow and Mrs Brendlah were prolific literary producers, and preoccupied with converting Jewish women. Particularly during the 18'40s and 1850s, evangelical writing provided an important forum for the construction and consolidation of women's national identity. Grace Aguilar's writing was an attempt to understand Jewish identity within the terms of Victorian domestic ideology. In contrast, Celia and Marion Moss, in their historical romances, offered narratives of female heroism and national liberation, drawing on the contemporary debate about slavery. Benjamin Disraeli's construction of a "tough version of Jewish identity was a response both to the contemporary stereotype of the feminised Jew and to the debate about Jewish emancipation. It also drew on the virile ideology of the Young England movement of the 1840s

An assessment of the potential for cloud computing and satellite thermal infrared sensing to produce meaningful river temperature insights for hydropower operations

Hydropower interacts heavily with river temperature to; meet regulations, maximise profits, and maintain dam safety. Often the operational decisions that dictate this interaction are made without monitoring of river temperature, and so it is proposed that satellite remote sensing may provide a quasi-regular cost-effective method to improve this. This dissertation assesses the viability of using Google Earth Engine cloud computing and Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared satellite measurements to provide actionable insights for hydropower managers. The method was tested in three large rivers (the Saint John River in Canada, the Colorado River in the USA, and the Ganges in India) to assess transferability. No previous study has attempted to extract river temperature from multiple sites in a single study. Three different methods were tested to find the most accurate atmospheric correction algorithm for the task of river temperature measurement. The Statistical Mono-Window algorithm was found to produce the most accurate comparison to kinetic temperature loggers on the Saint John River (±2oc) with a R2 value of 0.96 (n=40, p<0.001). However, this method was not transferable to the Colorado River indicating application in rivers without validation data should be carried out with caution. A Python Package named SatTemp (Valman, 2021b) was developed to assist hydropower operators in implementing the method along with a dashboard app to disseminate results (Valman, 2021a). Concerns were raised with the “black box” nature of Google Earth Engine and this App, meaning that errors and nuances in the method may be missed. These would need to be addressed before this method can be provided to hydropower operators

Kontextbeskrivningar eller komplexa och angelägna situationer - en studie i samtida beskrivningar av landskapsarkitektens kontext

Landskaparkitekturen kan beskrivas som ett brett och tvärvetenskapligt område. Det går dock ändå att tala om specifika landskapsarkitektoniska förhållningssätt, något som formuleras inom utbildningarna, olika debattforum, genom facklitteratur, facktidskrifter och genom praktiken självt. Någonstans börjar och slutar landskapsarkitektonisk kunskap. Någonstans börjar och slutar det landskapsarkitektoniska fältet. Hur beskrivs då landskapsarkitektens kontext i ett urval samtida arkitekturperiodika? I denna uppsats har ett antal artiklar publicerade mellan 2008 och 2011 analyserats. Beskrivningarna av landskapsarkitektens kontext i artiklarna har sedan fördjupats och breddats med hjälp av fyra teoretiska perspektiv. Analysen resulterar i en mångfald olika beskrivningar, där landskapsarkitekturens gränser och nödvändiga gränsöverskridande framträder. Här visas hur landskapsarkitekturen förhåller sig till andra discipliner och till omvärlden samtidigt som både omvärld och andra kunskapsområden gör avtryck i landskapsarkitekturen. Kontextbeskrivningarna fördjupar förståelsen för det samtida landskapsarkitekturfältets problem och begrepp samt etiska, estetiska och politiska föresatser. Resultatet redovisar en ömsesidig dynamik mellan globala skeenden, en förändrad världsbild och den enskilda disciplinen, en dynamik som i sin tur genererar metoder vilka tillåter prioriteringar och avgränsningar. Själva behovet av att ifrågasätta och påverka den egna kontexten framträder som en drivande kraft genom uppsatsen, och resultatet av detta ifrågasättande öppnar för en fortsatt diskussion om vad som är landskapsarkitekturens angelägenhet i varje nytt projekt och hur framtida uppgifter skulle kunna utformas.Landscape architecture can be described as a broad and interdisciplinary professional field. However, it is possible to speak of a specific landscape architectonic way of thinking, something that is framed by the higher education, various forums of debate, specialist literature, specialist journals and by the practice itself. At a certain point landscape architectural knowledge begins and has an end. At a certain point the landscape architectural field begins and has its end. How, then, is the landscape architectural context described in a selected number of contemporary architeture journals? In this essay a number of articles published between 2008 and 2011 has been analysed. The descriptions, in the articles, of the context of the landscape architect, has been further deepended and broadend by four theoretical perspectives. The analyse result in a diversity of descriptions, where the boundary of landscape architeture and where the necessity of crossing boundarys are revealed. What shows is how the field of landscape architecture relates to the surrounding world as well as to other professions and at the same time the surrounding world and other fields of knowledge is part of landscape architecture. The context descriptions increases the understanding of problems and concepts as well as ethics, aesthetics and politics within the contemporary landscape architectural field. The result state a reciprocal dynamics, between global processes, a changed worldview and the particular discipline, a process that generates intruments that allow some things to be of greater concern than others. The very necessity of questioning and to have an impact on the own context is revealed as a driving force throughout the essay and the results of the questioning opens up for a continuing discussion of what is the matter of concern for landscape architecture in every new project and how future assignments could take form

Resilient design for the extended Välen-Frölunda Valley

The global concern for sustainability and for issues connected to climate change engages a vast group of professions and fields of science. As cities worldwide are growing due to a great relocation of people, ecology research has partly shifted its focus towards urban conditions and development. Urban areas have simultaneously become vulnerable to the consequences of climate change due to their position in the landscape and to their being economic and social centers. The questions of how to handle natural processes, disturbances and dynamics thus become highly relevant. Within ecology the term resilience is used to describe a system’s ability to withstand disturbance. Urban resilience thus focuses on the processes, adaptability and transformability of the social systems of cities. Within landscape architecture there is no recipe for understanding resilience thinking or for applying it to landscape architectural design on the scale of urban design and urban planning. The purpose of this master project is therefore to explore the theories of resilience and to experiment with on-site design through the concept of resilience. As case study a southwest area of Gothenburg was used and test designs were made as interpretations of eight sites within that area. The suggested alterations take into account different scales and domains, which implies a need for further negotiation. The alterations thus invite to a discussion on the alteration principles and the issues of concern as well as on technical or management solutions. The thesis shows a possible method for reflective practice, using theories from other disciplines as evocative metaphors and building knowledge by combining theory and practice

An assessment of the potential for cloud computing and satellite thermal infrared sensing to produce meaningful river temperature insights for hydropower operations

Hydropower interacts heavily with river temperature to; meet regulations, maximise profits, and maintain dam safety. Often the operational decisions that dictate this interaction are made without monitoring of river temperature, and so it is proposed that satellite remote sensing may provide a quasi-regular cost-effective method to improve this. This dissertation assesses the viability of using Google Earth Engine cloud computing and Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared satellite measurements to provide actionable insights for hydropower managers. The method was tested in three large rivers (the Saint John River in Canada, the Colorado River in the USA, and the Ganges in India) to assess transferability. No previous study has attempted to extract river temperature from multiple sites in a single study. Three different methods were tested to find the most accurate atmospheric correction algorithm for the task of river temperature measurement. The Statistical Mono-Window algorithm was found to produce the most accurate comparison to kinetic temperature loggers on the Saint John River (±2oc) with a R2 value of 0.96 (n=40, p<0.001). However, this method was not transferable to the Colorado River indicating application in rivers without validation data should be carried out with caution. A Python Package named SatTemp (Valman, 2021b) was developed to assist hydropower operators in implementing the method along with a dashboard app to disseminate results (Valman, 2021a). Concerns were raised with the “black box” nature of Google Earth Engine and this App, meaning that errors and nuances in the method may be missed. These would need to be addressed before this method can be provided to hydropower operators

An AI approach to operationalise global daily PlanetScope satellite imagery for river water masking

Monitoring rivers is vital to manage the invaluable ecosystem services they provide, and also to mitigate the risks they pose to property and life through flooding and drought. Due to the vast extent and dynamic nature of river systems, Earth Observation (EO) is one of the best ways to measure river characteristics. As a first step, EO-based river monitoring often requires extraction of accurate pixel-level water masks, but satellite images traditionally used for this purpose suffer from limited spatial and/or temporal resolution. We address this problem by applying a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based model to automate water mask extraction from daily 3 m resolution PlanetScope satellite imagery. Notably, this approach overcomes radiometric issues that frequently present limitations when working with CubeSat data. We test our classification model on 36 rivers across 12 global terrestrial biomes (as proxies for the environmental and physical characteristics that lead to the variability in catchments around the globe). Using a relatively shallow CNN classification model, our approach produced a median F1 accuracy score of 0.93, suggesting that a compact and efficient CNN-based model can work as well as, if not better than, the very deep neural networks conventionally used in similar studies, whilst requiring less training data and computational power. We further show that our model, specialised to the task at hand, performs better than a state-of-the-art Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCN) that struggles with the highly variable image quality from PlanetScope. Although classifying rivers that were narrower than 60 m, anastomosed or highly urbanised was slightly less successful than our other test images, we showed that fine tuning could circumvent these limitations to some degree. Indeed, fine tuning carried out on the Ottawa River, Canada, by including just 5 additional site-specific training images significantly improved classification accuracy (F1 increased from 0.81 to 0.90, p < 0.01). Overall, our results show that CNN-based classification applied to PlanetScope imagery is a viable tool for producing accurate, temporally dynamic river water masks, opening up possibilities for river monitoring investigations where high temporal variability data is essential

Joint ICES/EUROMARINE: Workshop on common conceptual mapping methodologies (WKCCMM; Outputs from 2021 meeting)

The Joint ICES/EUROMARINE Workshop on Common Conceptual Mapping Methodologies (WKCCMM) aimed to advance approaches to support inter- and transdisciplinary science via qualitative conceptual models to inform Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) throughout Eu-ropean seas and beyond. The workshop focused on developing a common understanding of conceptual mapping meth-odologies, their key uses and limitations, and processes for effective conceptual modelling with stakeholders for a variety of applications (e.g. developing food-webs, socio-ecological modelling, scoping exercises, rapid/initial management action and/or impact evaluations). Discussion in-volved presentation and discussion of a range of conceptual modelling approaches and contexts through the examination of case studies. These case studies gave rise to a suite of recommenda-tions, including the development of a workflow for IEA, and more generic guidelines and best practice advice for the use of conceptual modelling approaches with stakeholders. Although stakeholders were not able to be included in this workshop, they were very much at the heart of discussions, with the challenges and good practices of stakeholder inclusion addressed. WKCCMM also investigated how the methodologies can be best used to contribute to IEA, and may otherwise be applied throughout the ICES community, including identifying opportunities for cross-collaboration and knowledge transfer within the network.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

InSAR-measured permafrost degradation of palsa peatlands in northern Sweden

Climate warming is degrading palsa peatlands across the circumpolar permafrost region. Permafrost degradation may lead to ecosystem collapse and potentially strong climate feedbacks, as this ecosystem is an important carbon store and can transition to being a strong greenhouse gas emitter. Landscape-level measurement of permafrost degradation is needed to monitor this impact of warming. Surface subsidence is a useful metric of change in palsa degradation and can be monitored using interferometric synthetic-aperture radar (InSAR) satellite technology. We combined InSAR data, processed using the ASPIS algorithm to monitor ground motion between 2017 and 2021, with airborne optical and lidar data to investigate the rate of subsidence across palsa peatlands in northern Sweden. We show that 55% of Sweden's eight largest palsa peatlands are currently subsiding, which can be attributed to the underlying permafrost landforms and their degradation. The most rapid degradation has occurred in the largest palsa complexes in the most northern part of the region of study, also corresponding to the areas with the highest percentage of palsa cover within the overall mapped wetland area. Further, higher degradation rates have been found in areas where winter precipitation has increased substantially. The roughness index calculated from a lidar-derived digital elevation model (DEM), used as a proxy for degradation, increases alongside subsidence rates and may be used as a complementary proxy for palsa degradation. We show that combining datasets captured using remote sensing enables regional-scale estimation of ongoing permafrost degradation, an important step towards estimating the future impact of climate change on permafrost-dependent ecosystems

Rules for the governance of coastal and marine ecosystem services: An evaluative framework based on the IAD framework

There is an increasing need for a comprehensive institutional understanding pertaining to ecosystem services (ESs) in coastal and marine fields. This paper develops a systematic framework to inform coastal and marine governance about the integration of ES concepts. First, as a theoretical basis, we analyze the generic rules that are part of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. Second, by an extensive literature review, we formulate a set of ES-specific rules and develop an evaluative framework for coastal and marine governance. Third, we examine this evaluative framework in a specific action situation, namely coastal strategic planning concerning Qingdao, China. Results from the literature review and the case study reveal that when designing ES-specific rules for coastal and marine governance, there are several socio-spatial and economic aspects that should be taken into account: (1) conceive of stakeholders as ES users, (2) capture the effect of ecological scaling, (3) understand ES interactions and clarify indirect impacts and causalities, (4) account for ES values, and (5) draw on economic choices for use rights to deal with ES issues

The capacities of institutions for the integration of ecosystem services in coastal strategic planning: The case of Jiaozhou Bay

This paper explains how the practice of integrating ecosystem-service thinking (i.e., ecological benefits for human beings) and institutions (i.e., organisations, policy rules) is essential for coastal spatial planning. Adopting an integrated perspective on ecosystem services (ESs) both helps understand a wide range of possible services and, at the same time, attune institution to local resource patterns. The objective of this paper is to identify the extent to which ESs are integrated in a specific coastal strategic planning case. A subsequent objective is to understand whether institutions are capable of managing ESs in terms of uncovering institutional strengths and weaknesses that may exist in taking ESs into account in existing institutional practices. These two questions are addressed through the application of a content analysis method and a multi-level analysis framework on formal institutions. Jiaozhou Bay in China is used as an illustrative case. The results show that some ESs have been implicitly acknowledged, but by no means the whole range. This partial ES implementation could result from any of four institutional weaknesses in the strategic plans of Jiaozhou Bay, namely a dominant market oriented interest, fragmented institutional structures for managing ESs, limited ES assessment, and a lack of integrated reflection of the social value of ESs in decision-making. Finally, generalizations of multi-level institutional settings on ES integration, such as an inter-organisational fragmentation and a limited use of ES assessment in operation, are made together with other international case studies. Meanwhile, the comparison highlights the influences of extensive market-oriented incentives and governments' exclusive responsibilities on ES governance in the Chinese context