3,965 research outputs found
Trumpism and being in worlds that fall between worlds
In response to Kyle McGee’s Heathen Earth, this paper says something about the place of toxic legacies in the rise and sustenance of ‘Trumpism’. It takes an interest in rusting factories, melting ice, etc., but as assemblages that are tricky because they concern a build up of externalities and relational factors for which there is a deficit of known co-ordinates. The term ‘sludge’ is sometimes affixed to these unexplained accumulations, which attend the (productive) neglect of externalities in overlapping schemas of relationality. The paper relates this ‘sludge’ to the emergence of a void, somewhere below the legal thresholds of accountability, into which words and actions can be thrown ‘at will’. This void is muddy, and makes politics unbearable to watch; and, yet, we are caught in a loop of reproducing the void through our own charting and supervision of action and, then, being shocked by the filth that comes out. The comment ends with a brief reflection on attending to the situation of forgotten existences and living with the ruins of past and present worlds
A comparison of opioid prescription trends in England and the United States from 2008 to 2020
BACKGROUND: The prescription opioid epidemic in the United States (US) is well documented, and recent measures have reduced prescribing rates in that country. Evidence suggests opioid prescriptions have been rising recently in other countries too. OBJECTIVE: The current paper aimed to compare trends in opioid prescribing in England and the US. METHODS: Trends in rates of prescriptions per 100 members of the population were calculated for England and the US using publicly available government data on prescriptions and population statistics. RESULTS: Rates of prescribing are converging. At the peak of the US epidemic in 2012, there were 81.3 prescriptions per 100 people, but this had fallen to 43.3 by 2020. Prescribing peaked in England in 2016 at 43.2 prescriptions per 100 people, but has fallen only slightly, so that in 2020 there were 40.9 prescriptions per 100 people. CONCLUSION: The data indicate that levels of opioid prescribing in England are now similar to those in the US. They remain high in both countries, despite recent falls. This suggests the need for further measures to prevent over-prescribing and to support people who would benefit from withdrawing from these drugs
Can seasonal and interannual variation in landscape CO2 fluxes be detected by atmospheric observations of CO2 concentrations made at a tall tower?
The coupled numerical weather model WRF-SPA (Weather Research and Forecasting
model and Soil-Plant-Atmosphere model) has been used to investigate a 3 yr
time series of observed atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> concentrations from a tall tower
in Scotland, UK. Ecosystem-specific tracers of net CO<sub>2</sub> uptake and net
CO<sub>2</sub> release were used to investigate the contributions to the tower signal
of key land covers within its footprint, and how contributions varied at
seasonal and interannual timescales. In addition, WRF-SPA simulated
atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> concentrations were compared with two coarse global
inversion models, CarbonTrackerEurope and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration's CarbonTracker (CTE-CT). WRF-SPA realistically
modelled both seasonal (except post harvest) and daily cycles seen in
observed atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> at the tall tower (<i>R</i><sup>2</sup> = 0.67,
rmse = 3.5 ppm, bias = 0.58 ppm). Atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> concentrations
from the tall tower were well simulated by CTE-CT, but the inverse model
showed a poorer representation of diurnal variation and simulated a larger
bias from observations (up to 1.9 ppm) at seasonal timescales, compared to
the forward modelling of WRF-SPA. However, we have highlighted a consistent
post-harvest increase in the seasonal bias between WRF-SPA and observations.
Ecosystem-specific tracers of CO<sub>2</sub> exchange indicate that the increased
bias is potentially due to the representation of agricultural processes
within SPA and/or biases in land cover maps. The ecosystem-specific tracers
also indicate that the majority of seasonal variation in CO<sub>2</sub> uptake for
Scotland's dominant ecosystems (forests, cropland and managed grassland) is
detectable in observations within the footprint of the tall tower; however,
the amount of variation explained varies between years. The between years
variation in detectability of Scotland's ecosystems is potentially due to
seasonal and interannual variation in the simulated prevailing wind
direction. This result highlights the importance of accurately representing
atmospheric transport used within atmospheric inversion models used to
estimate terrestrial source/sink distribution and magnitude
Do antidepressants cure or create abnormal brain states?
Moncrieff and Cohen argue that psychotropic drugs create abnormal states that may co-incidentally relieve symptoms of mental illness
'Freedom is more important than health': Thomas Szasz and the problem of paternalism
When Thomas Szasz summed up his
philosophical principles at the Royal College
of Psychiatrists’ annual meeting in Edinburgh
in 2010, he declared that ‘freedom is more
important than health’. Psychiatry is the arena
in which the conflict between freedom and
health comes most sharply into focus, according
to Szasz. This paper proposes some parallels
with medicine in low-income countries for
pointers towards a resolution of this conflict
Scaling properties of velocity and temperature spectra above the surface friction layer in a convective atmospheric boundary layer
International audienceWe report velocity and temperature spectra measured at nine levels from 1.42 meters up to 25.7 m over a smooth playa in Western Utah. Data are from highly convective conditions when the magnitude of the Obukhov length (our proxy for the depth of the surface friction layer) was less than 2 m. Our results are somewhat similar to the results reported from the Minnesota experiment of Kaimal et al. (1976), but show significant differences in detail. Our velocity spectra show no evidence of buoyant production of kinetic energy at at the scale of the thermal structures. We interpret our velocity spectra to be the result of outer eddies interacting with the ground, not "local free convection". We observe that velocity spectra represent the spectral distribution of the kinetic energy of the turbulence, so we use energy scales based on total turbulence energy in the convective boundary layer (CBL) to collapse our spectra. For the horizontal velocity spectra this scale is (zi ?o)2/3, where zi is inversion height and ?o is the dissipation rate in the bulk CBL. This scale functionally replaces the Deardorff convective velocity scale. Vertical motions are blocked by the ground, so the outer eddies most effective in creating vertical motions come from the inertial subrange of the outer turbulence. We deduce that the appropriate scale for the peak region of the vertical velocity spectra is (z ?o)2/3 where z is height above ground. Deviations from perfect spectral collapse under these scalings at large and small wavenumbers are explained in terms of the energy transport and the eddy structures of the flow. We find that the peaks of the temperature spectra collapse when wavenumbers are scaled using (z1/2 zi1/2). That is, the lengths of the thermal structures depend on both the lengths of the transporting eddies, ~9z, and the progressive aggregation of the plumes with height into the larger-scale structures of the CBL. This aggregation depends, in top-down fashion, on zi. The whole system is therefore highly organized, with even the smallest structures conforming to the overall requirements of the whole flow
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