The Gothic Revival and the Victorian Church in New Brunswick: Toward a Strategy for Material Culture Research

This article probes the relationship between ideas and objects in the context of nineteenth century worship. The artifacts of the Victorian church serve to inform this discussion of New Brunswick's Gothic Revival. Written from the perspective of a practicing historian, the article outlines a particular approach to artifact studies and offers a series of personal reflections on the significance of artifacts as primary sources. An artifact-studies methodology involving two complementary levels of object analysis is described and illustrated. Finally, consideration is given to the implications of the historical method in relation to the emerging interdisciplinary field of material culture studies. Résumé Dans cet article, l'auteur étudie les rapports existant entre idées et objets dans le contexte du culte religieux au XIXe siècle. Les objets de l'église victorienne servent à illustrer cet examen du renouveau gothique au Nouveau-Brunswick. Écrit dans l'optique d'un historien de métier, cet article présente les grandes lignes d'une démarche particulière proposée pour l'étude d'objets ouvrés et une série de réflexions personnelles sur l'importance de ces objets et tant que sources primaires. L'auteur décrit et illustre une méthodologie des études d'objets ouvrés comportant deux niveaux complémentaires d'analyse. Il examine enfin les implications de la méthode historique pour le nouveau secteur interdisciplinaire que constituent les études de la culture matérielle

Assessing trends and uncertainties in satellite-era ocean chlorophyll using space-time modeling

The presence, magnitude, and even direction of long-term trends in phytoplankton abundance over the past few decades is still debated in the literature, primarily due to differences in the data sets and methodologies used. Recent work has suggested that the satellite chlorophyll record is not yet long enough to distinguish climate change trends from natural variability, despite the high density of coverage in both space and time. Previous work has typically focused on using linear models to determine the presence of trends, where each grid cell is considered independently from its neighbors. However, trends can be more thoroughly evaluated using a spatially resolved approach. Here a Bayesian hierarchical spatio-temporal model is fitted to quantify trends in ocean chlorophyll from September 1997 to December 2013. The approach used in this study explicitly accounts for the dependence between neighboring grid cells, which allows us to estimate trend by ‘borrowing strength’ from the spatial correlation. By way of comparison, a model without spatial correlation is also fitted. This results in a notable loss of accuracy in model fit. Additionally, we find an order of magnitude smaller global trend, and larger uncertainty, when using the spatio-temporal model: -0.023 ± 0.12 % yr-1 as opposed to -0.38 ± 0.045 % yr-1 when the spatial correlation is not taken into account. The improvement in accuracy of trend estimates, and the more complete account of their uncertainty emphasizes the solution that space-time modeling offers for studying global long-term change

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead