Spatial characterization of salt accumulation in early stage limestone weathering using probe permeametry

This research characterizes the weathering of natural building stone using an unsteady-state portable probe permeameter. Variations between the permeability properties of fresh rock and the same rocks after the early stages of a salt weathering simulation are used to examine the effects of salt accumulation on spatial variations in surface rock permeability properties in two limestones from Spain. The Fraga and Tudela limestones are from the Ebro basin and are of Miocene age. Both stone types figure largely in the architectural heritage of Spain and, in common with many other building limestones, they are prone to physical damage from salt crystallization in pore spaces. To examine feedbacks associated with salt accumulation during the early stages of this weathering process, samples of the two stone types were subjected to simulated salt weathering under laboratory conditions using magnesium sulphate and sodium chloride at concentrations of 5% and 15%. Permeability mapping and statistical analysis (aspatial statistics and spatial prediction) before and after salt accumulation are used to assess changes in the spatial variability of permeability and to correlate these changes with salt movement, porosity change, potential rock deterioration and textural characteristics. Statistical analyses of small-scale permeability measurements are used to evaluate the drivers for decay and hence aid the prediction of the weathering behaviour of the two limestones.

Anthropology, Socialist Prediction and William Morris’s Commonweal

In the late nineteenth century, a number of writers turned to anthropology to predict a socialist future. They included prominent revolutionary socialists: Friedrich Engels, William Morris and members of the Socialist League. Contextualising the appropriation of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan by such readers, this article also pays particular attention to socialist popularisations of anthropology, particularly those by Morris and his fellow writers in his penny weekly, the Commonweal. Focusing on Morris’s articles on ancient society helps to illuminate his own understanding of history, art and socialism. It also sheds new light on his predictive fiction News from Nowhere, which was originally read alongside Commonweal non-fiction. Both, I will argue, encouraged readers to see the future in the struggles of the ancient past.

Eclectic Dialectics: William Klein's Documentary Method

This article examines the relations between documentary aesthetics and the political sensibility of William Klein. Structured around the cultural phenomena that have remained integral to his career as a photographer and filmmaker - fashion, sport, and music - it discusses his enduring attachment to notions of freedom and creativity still associated with 1960s counter-culture, and the Vietnam War. In particular, it examines how how his films disrupt conventional categories, and subvert the familiar rhetoric of mainstream documentary film, especially that associated with cinéma vérité. A erstwhile protege of Dada, Klein has always valued the expressive potential of improbable juxtapositions, of intercutting between times and places, and subverting mainstream journalistic modes and intentions. The article argues that this attitude is increasingly rare among contemporary documentary filmmakers, and yet it is the very thing that gives his work a distinctive aesthetic texture, and relevance to any history of cinema.