'Sexercise': Working out heterosexuality in Jane Fonda’s fitness books

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Leisure Studies, 30(2), 237 - 255, 2011, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02614367.2010.523837.This paper explores the connection between the promotion of heterosexual norms in women’s fitness books written by or in the name of Jane Fonda during the 1980s and the commodification of women’s fitness space in both the public and private spheres. The paper is set in the absence of overt discussions of normative heterosexuality in leisure studies and draws on critical heterosexual scholarship as well as the growing body of work theorising geographies of corporeality and heterosexuality. Using the principles of media discourse analysis, the paper identifies three overlapping characteristics of heterosexuality represented in Jane Fonda’s fitness books, and embodied through the exercise regimes: respectable heterosexual desire, monogamous procreation and domesticity. The paper concludes that the promotion and prescription of exercise for women in the Jane Fonda workout books centred on the reproduction and embodiment of heterosexual corporeality. Set within an emerging commercial landscape of women’s fitness in the 1980s, such exercise practices were significant in the legitimation and institutionalisation of heteronormativity

Mining Big Data for Tourist Hot Spots: Geographical Patterns of Online Footprints

Understanding the complex, and often unequal, spatiality of tourist demand in urban contexts requires other methodologies, among which the information base available online and in social networks has gained prominence. Innovation supported by Information and Communication Technologies in terms of data access and data exchange has emerged as a complementary supporting tool for the more traditional data collection techniques currently in use, particularly, in urban destinations where there is the need to more (near)real-time monitoring. The capacity to collect and analise massive amounts of data on individual and group behaviour is leading to new data-rich research approaches. This chapter addresses the potential for discovering geographical insights regarding tourists’ spatial patterns within a destination, based on the analysis of geotagged data available from two social networks. ·info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Land use and management effects on soil carbon in U.S. Lake States, with emphasis on forestry, fire, and reforestation

There is growing need to quantify and communicate how land use and management activities influence soil organic carbon (SOC) at scales relevant to, and in the tangible control of landowners and forest managers. The continued proliferation of publications and growth of data sets, data synthesis and meta-analysis approaches allows the application of powerful tools to such questions at ever finer scales. In this analysis, we combined a literature review and effect-size meta-analysis with two large, independent, observational databases to assess how land use and management impact SOC stocks, primarily with regards to forest land uses. We performed this work for the (Great Lakes) U.S. Lake States, which comprise 6% of the land area, but 7% of the forest and 9% of the forest SOC in the United States, as the second in a series of ecoregional SOC assessments. Most importantly, our analysis indicates that natural factors, such as soil texture and parent material, exert more control over SOC stocks than land use or management. With that for context, our analysis also indicates which natural factors most influence management impacts on SOC storage. We report an overall trend of significantly diminished topsoil SOC stocks with harvesting, consistent across all three data sets, while also demonstrating how certain sites and soils diverge from this pattern, including some that show opposite trends. Impacts of fire grossly mirror those of harvesting, with declines near the top of the profile, but potential gains at depth and no net change when considering the whole profile. Land use changes showing significant SOC impacts are limited to reforestation on barren mining substrates (large and variable gains) and conversion of native forest to cultivation (losses). We describe patterns within the observational data that reveal the physical basis for preferential land use, e.g., cultivation of soils with the most favorable physical properties, and forest plantation establishment on the most marginal soils, and use these patterns to identify management opportunities and considerations. We also qualify our results with ratings of confidence, based on their degree of support across approaches, and offer concise, defensible tactics for adapting management operations to site-specific criteria and SOC vulnerability

BOCS: Bottom-up Open-source Coarse-graining Software

We present the BOCS toolkit as a suite of open source software tools for parametrizing bottom-up coarse-grained (CG) models to accurately reproduce structural and thermodynamic properties of high-resolution models. The BOCS toolkit complements available software packages by providing robust implementations of both the multiscale coarse-graining (MS-CG) force-matching method and also the generalized-Yvon–Born–Green (g-YBG) method. The g-YBG method allows one to analyze and to calculate MS-CG potentials in terms of structural correlations. Additionally, the BOCS toolkit implements an extended ensemble framework for optimizing the transferability of bottom-up potentials, as well as a self-consistent pressure-matching method for accurately modeling the pressure equation of state for homogeneous systems. We illustrate these capabilities by parametrizing transferable potentials for CG models that accurately model the structure, pressure, and compressibility of liquid alkane systems and by quantifying the role of many-body correlations in determining the calculated pair potential for a one-site CG model of liquid methanol

Soil carbon in the South Atlantic United States: Land use change, forest management, and physiographic context

Evidence-based forest carbon (C) management requires identifying baseline patterns and drivers of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks, and their responses to land use change and management, at scales relevant to landowners and resource professionals. The growth of datasets related to SOC, which is the largest terrestrial C pool, facilitates use of synthesis techniques to assess SOC stocks and changes at management-relevant scales. We report results from a synthesis using meta-analysis of published studies, as well as two large databases, in which we identify baseline patterns and drivers, quantify influences of land use change and forest management, and provide ecological context for distinct management regimes and their SOC impacts. We conducted this, the fourth in a series of ecoregional SOC assessments, for the South Atlantic States, which are disproportionately important to the national-scale forest C sink and forest products industry in the U.S. At the ecoregional level, baseline SOC stocks vary with climatic, topographic, and soil physical factors such as temperature and precipitation, slope gradient and aspect, and soil texture. Land use change and forest management modestly influence SOC stocks. Reforestation on previously cultivated lands increases SOC stocks, while deforestation for cultivation has the opposite effect; for continuously forested lands, harvesting is associated with SOC increases and prescribed fire with SOC declines. Effects of reforestation are large and positive for upper mineral soils (+30%) but not detectable in lower mineral soils. Negative effects of prescribed fire are due to significant C losses from organic horizons (-46%); fire and harvest have no impacts on upper mineral soils but both increase SOC in lower mineral soils (+8.2 and +46%, respectively, with high uncertainty in the latter). Inceptisols are generally more negatively impacted by prescribed fire or harvest than Ultisols, and covariance between inherent factors (including soil taxonomy) and management impacts indicates how interior vs. coastal physiographic sections differ in their management regimes and SOC trends. In the cooler, wetter, topographically rugged interior hardwood forests, which have larger baseline SOC stocks, prescribed fire and even light harvesting generally decrease SOC; in contrast, intensively managed coastal plain pine plantations begin with small initial SOC stocks, but exhibit rapid gains over even a single rotation. This covariance between place (physiography) and practice (management regime) suggests that distinct approaches to forest C management may be complementary to other ecological or production goals, when implemented as part of wider (e.g., state-level) forest C or climate policy