265 research outputs found

    Sonic Apartheid: ecoracism, apartheid geographics and noise pollution in Cape Town's Blikkiesdorp

    Get PDF
    In Sonic Apartheid: Ecoracism, Apartheid Geographies, and Noise Pollution in Cape Town's Blikkiesdorp, Alexandra Downing Watkins begins a project of mapping geographies of dispossession and abandonment in Blikkiesdorp (Afrikaans for "Tin Can Town"), a Temporary Relocation Area on the margins of Cape Town created in 2007 following a wake of mass evictions for the 2010 World Cup. After being created as a "temporary" solution, Blikkiesdorp remained a site of abandonment where evicted peoples, refugees, and other "undesirables" were sent to live. Seven years later, the City of Cape Town and the Airports Company of South Africa signed a Memorandum of Understanding agreeing to realign one of the airport's runways, which would serve to relocate the community. Following the story of strategic organising by the Blikkiesdorp community to be included in the Environmental Impact Assessment that was being instrumentalized to further displace them, this work examines the community's struggle against conditions of abandonment through complicating the division of humans and the environment. This project engages with the mechanics of bio-, necro-, and geontopower, in contemporary South African environmental governance as an afterlife of apartheid spatial planning. The project features environmental research that was completed in cooperation with community members who shared their experiential environmental knowledge through interviews and diary entries as well as compiling decibel readings of excessive noise pollution. This data along with noise pollution diaries, photographs, and interviews has been compiled and placed in a digital archive in the form of an open-source ArchGIS Story Map. Combining theory and research contributed by the Blikkiesdorp community with the contemporary theoretical language of new materialism and critical race theory, this work engages with the porosity of bodies, the co-imbrication of bodies and landscape, how the creation of an "alternative social project" can serve to disturb and resist evidence-based technoscience and processes of ecoracist governance

    Radiation Induced Point and Cluster-Related Defects with Strong Impact to Damage Properties of Silicon Detectors

    Full text link
    This work focuses on the investigation of radiation induced defects responsible for the degradation of silicon detectors. Comparative studies of the defects induced by irradiation with 60Co- rays, 6 and 15 MeV electrons, 23 GeV protons and 1 MeV equivalent reactor neutrons revealed the existence of point defects and cluster related centers having a strong impact on damage properties of Si diodes. The detailed relation between the microscopic reasons as based on defect analysis and their macroscopic consequences for detector performance are presented. In particular, it is shown that the changes in the Si device properties after exposure to high levels of 60Co- doses can be completely understood by the formation of two point defects, both depending strongly on the Oxygen concentration in the silicon bulk. Specific for hadron irradiation are the annealing effects which decrease resp. increase the originally observed damage effects as seen by the changes of the depletion voltage. A group of three cluster related defects, revealed as deep hole traps, proved to be responsible specifically for the reverse annealing. Their formation is not affected by the Oxygen content or Si growth procedure suggesting that they are complexes of multi-vacancies located inside extended disordered regions.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figure

    Changes in creatine transporter function during cardiac maturation in the rat

    Get PDF
    <p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>It is well established that the immature myocardium preferentially utilises non-oxidative energy-generating pathways. It exhibits low energy-transfer capacity via the creatine kinase (CK) shuttle, reflected in phosphocreatine (PCr), total creatine and CK levels that are much lower than those of adult myocardium. The mechanisms leading to gradually increasing energy transfer capacity during maturation are poorly understood. Creatine is not synthesised in the heart, but taken up exclusively by the action of the creatine transporter protein (CrT). To determine whether this transporter is ontogenically regulated, the present study serially examined CrT gene expression pattern, together with creatine uptake kinetics and resulting myocardial creatine levels, in rats over the first 80 days of age.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Rats were studied during the late prenatal period (-2 days before birth) and 7, 13, 21, 33, 50 and 80 days after birth. Activity of cardiac citrate synthase, creatine kinase and its isoenzymes as well as lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and its isoenzymes demonstrated the well-described shift from anaerobic towards aerobic metabolism. mRNA levels of CrT in the foetal rat hearts, as determined by real-time PCR, were about 30% of the mRNA levels in the adult rat heart and gradually increased during development. Creatine uptake in isolated perfused rat hearts increased significantly from 3.0 nmol/min/gww at 13 days old to 4.9 nmol/min/gww in 80 day old rats. Accordingly, total creatine content in hearts, measured by HPLC, increased steadily during maturation (30 nmol/mg protein (-2 days) vs 87 nmol/mg protein (80 days)), and correlated closely with CrT gene expression.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The maturation-dependant alterations of CK and LDH isoenzyme activities and of mitochondrial oxidative capacity were paralleled by a progressive increase of CrT expression, creatine uptake kinetics and creatine content in the heart.</p

    Quantification and scales in change

    Get PDF
    This volume contains thematic papers on semantic change which emerged from the second edition of Formal Diachronic Semantics held at Saarland University. Its authorship ranges from established scholars in the field of language change to advanced PhD students whose contributions have equally qualified and have been selected after a two-step peer-review process. &nbsp; The key foci are variablity and diachronic trajectories in scale structures and quantification, but readers will also find a variety of further (and clearly non-disjoint) issues covered &nbsp;including reference, modality, givenness, presuppositions, alternatives in language change, temporality, epistemic indefiniteness, as well as - in more general terms - &nbsp;the interfaces of semantics with syntax, pragmatics and morphology.&nbsp; &nbsp; Given the nature of the field, the contributions are primarily based on original corpus studies (in one case also on synchronic experimental data) and present a series of new findings and theoretical analyses of several languages, first and foremost from &nbsp;the Germanic and Romance subbranches of Indo-European (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish) and from Semitic (with an analysis of universal quantification in Biblical Hebrew)
    • 

    corecore