Extreme empiricism: John Howard, poetry, and the thermometrics of reform

This essay examines an outpouring of printed poems and biographical publications in the 1780s and 1790s that sought to shape the public image of the celebrated prison reformer John Howard. These materials, we argue, reveal the ways in which reform, empiricism, and Christian charity reinforced each other in late eighteenth-century popular imagination, and how this conjunction provoked a new vision of Britain’s empire and a backlash against mixing the scientific and the miraculous. As we show, Howard used the language of temperature to turn empirical data into evidence for the necessity of prison reform. This same thermometric language underwrote panegyric poems that represented Howard as global emissary of British benevolence—the icon of a new kind of empire whose power was symbolized by nearly miraculous capacity to temper inhospitable climates. This body of exuberant poetry transmuted data-based reform and technological advances in ventilation into proselytical triumph, a conjunction that was met, after Howard’s dramatic, self-inflicted death, with charges of overheated religious enthusiasm. As a result, Howard’s medical acquaintance and collaborators posthumously defended the temperateness of Howard’s empirical methods while also labeling him an amateur data collector, the lowly helpmeet of the professional man of science. By tracing Howard’s appearance in printed poetry and periodical writing, this essay illuminates the uneasy yet potent imbrication of reform culture, colonialism, medicine, and discipline formation in the final decades of the eighteenth century

The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on Child Welfare

While children of immigrants have a lot at stake in the discussions surrounding U.S. immigration policy, their interests remain largely ignored in the debate. For instance, little consideration is given to the impact of immigration enforcement on the 5.5 million children, the vast majority of whom are native-born U.S. citizens, living with at least one undocumented parent.Similarly overlooked are the significant challenges experienced by public child welfare agencies that encounter children separated from their parents due to immigration enforcement measures.The U.S. child welfare system is based on the notion of ensuring the safety and best interest of the child; however, this principle is often compromised in the face of conflicting federal immigration policies and practices. This policy brief examines the intersection of immigration enforcement and child welfare and the difficulties facing immigrant families caught between the two systems. Recommendations are provided to prioritize keeping children with their families and out of the public child welfare system whenever possible and to ensure that separated children who do encounter the child welfare system receive appropriate care and parents receive due process

MHD Remote Numerical Simulations: Evolution of Coronal Mass Ejections

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are solar eruptions into interplanetary space of as much as a few billion tons of plasma, with embedded magnetic fields from the Sun's corona. These perturbations play a very important role in solar--terrestrial relations, in particular in the spaceweather. In this work we present some preliminary results of the software development at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico to perform Remote MHD Numerical Simulations. This is done to study the evolution of the CMEs in the interplanetary medium through a Web-based interface and the results are store into a database. The new astrophysical computational tool is called the Mexican Virtual Solar Observatory (MVSO) and is aimed to create theoretical models that may be helpful in the interpretation of observational solar data.Comment: 2 pages, 1 color figure. To appear in Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 259. Cosmic Magnetic Fields: From Planets, to Stars and Galaxies. In pres

A Dimensional study of Disk Galaxies

We present a highly simplified model of the dynamical structure of a disk galaxy where only two parameters fully determine the solution, mass and angular momentum. We show through simple physical scalings that once the mass has been fixed, the angular momentum parameter $\lambda$ is expected to regulate such critical galactic disk properties as colour, thickness of the disk and disk to bulge ratio. It is hence expected to be the determinant physical ingredient resulting in a given Hubble type. A simple analytic estimate of $\lambda$ for an observed system is provided. An explicit comparison of the distribution of several galactic parameters against both Hubble type and $\lambda$ is performed using observed galaxies. Both such distributions exhibit highly similar characteristics for all galactic properties studied, suggesting $\lambda$ as a physically motivated classification parameter for disk galaxies.Comment: 10 pages including 11 figures, Final version, MNRAS in pres