Archaeologies of Disease and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century New York: The View from Spring and Varick

The authors situate evidence of disease among the burial population of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church within evolving attitudes towards public health and civic order in 19th-century Manhattan. Two personal vignettes illustrate how individuals interacted with the physical space of the church’s vicinity at different moments in the history of municipal reform. The first, a 16-year-old girl named Louisa, was virtually absent from the historical record until the recovery and analysis of her skeletal remains from the church burial vaults. Her skeletal biography conveys the cosmopolitan nature of Manhattan social relations in the early 19th century and the complex ways that they interacted with contemporary debates on disease and moral improvement. The second individual, the author of a Harper’s Magazine article set at a fire watchtower across the street from the church, experiences a transformed infrastructure of the city by the last quarter of the 19th century. This writer’s impressions reflect coalescing middle-class attitudes towards civic order and their manifestation in the physical framework of the city. This public discourse emerged from a half-century of catastrophes in public health and security often pinned on distinct socioeconomic segments of the urban populace. Contrasting these two individuals’ experiences of life at Spring and Varick streets thus helps outline the trajectory of civic governance over the course of the 19th century and fosters critical awareness of the power of social representation in the emergence of modern civic authority

Lower bounds on the entanglement needed to play XOR non-local games

We give an explicit family of XOR games with O(n)-bit questions requiring 2^n ebits to play near-optimally. More generally we introduce a new technique for proving lower bounds on the amount of entanglement required by an XOR game: we show that near-optimal strategies for an XOR game G correspond to approximate representations of a certain C^*-algebra associated to G. Our results extend an earlier theorem of Tsirelson characterising the set of quantum strategies which implement extremal quantum correlations.Comment: 20 pages, no figures. Corrected abstract, body of paper unchange

Horned lark damage to pre-emerged canola seedlings

Winter canola (Brassica napus L.) is considered the most promising domestically-produced oilseed feed-stock for biodiesel production and for diversifying wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)-based cropping systems in the Inland Pacific Northwest, USA. Winter canola field experiments conducted in east-central Washington were completely destroyed, and commercial fields were damaged or destroyed, over several years by large flocks of horned larks (Eremophilia alperestis L.) that ate the cotyledon leaves of pre-emerged and newly-emerged seedlings. Numerous control methods were attempted in field experiments, including laying bird netting over the entire experiment, placement of a life-size predator decoy in a field experiment, loud propane-powered cannon blasts, and mixing garlic with canola seed before planting followed by spraying garlic water on the soil surface. None of the attempted control methods were successful. This is the first report in the literature of horned lark damage to pre-emerged and newly-emerged canola seedlings. We discuss questions relevant to our novel account as well as potential abatement using falcons and non-toxic chemical repellents for the protection of industrial canola crops associated with horned lark depredation

Fixed Points of a Generalized Discrete Baker's Transformation

In this note we investigate the fixed point sets for the iterations of a generalization of the two-dimensional discrete baker's transformation. In particular, we will derive explicit formulas for the fixed points, and the number of fixed points. Moreover, we will show that the set of all fixed points is a closed set. This generalizes the some of known results for the classical baker's transformation