42 resultados para Extraordinary republics


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International agencies and programmes introduced sustainable land management (SLM) to Central Asia after the former Soviet Republics became independent in 1991. An aim of early SLM initiatives was to address challenges linked to the transformation of the agricultural sector from a centrally planned economy to a decentralized market economy. This article analyses the knowledge–action interface in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as it relates to SLM. The analysis focuses on the influence of underlying land management concepts by means of a literature review. Contemporary barriers at the research–action interface were identified using participatory appraisal. And a historically contextualized understanding of the effectiveness of interactions between researchers, policy makers and practitioners is based on an analysis of purposefully selected cases. The study concludes that knowledge of different stakeholder groups is often highly disconnected. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies are rare, and academic research on SLM has subsequently been ineffective at contributing to substantial benefits for society. Further, researchers, policy makers and practitioners in this context must recognize the differences between SLM and what is often referred to as the equivalent Soviet-era concept—rational use of land resources—and the resulting implications of these differences. The authors recommend the following: creating an enabling environment for SLM research through academic institutional reform removing structural constraints, making research outcomes more effective by applying systems approaches that produce evidence for policy makers on the multiple benefits of SLM, helping land users evaluate SLM strategies and investing in the establishment and maintenance of a multi-stakeholder SLM platform that allows dynamic exchange.

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The extraordinary species richness of freshwater fishes has attracted much research on mechanisms and modes of speciation. We here review research on speciation in freshwater fishes in light of speciation theory, and place this in a context of broad-scale diversity patterns in freshwater fishes. We discuss several major repeated themes in freshwater fish speciation and the speciation mechanisms they are frequently associated with. These include transitions between marine and freshwater habitats, transitions between discrete freshwater habitats, and ecological transitions within habitats, as well as speciation without distinct niche shifts. Major research directions in the years to come include understanding the transition from extrinsic environment-dependent to intrinsic reproductive isolation and its influences on species persistence and understanding the extrinsic and intrinsic constraints to speciation and how these relate to broad-scale diversification patterns through time.

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In the Lower Mekon Basin the extraordinary pace of economic development and growth contradicts with environmental protection. On base of the Watershed Classification Project (WSCP) and the inclusion of a DTM for the entire LMB the potential degradation risk was derived for each land unit. The risks were grouped into five classes, where classes one and two are considered critical with regard to soil erosion when the land is cleared of natural resources. For practical use the database has an enormous potential for further spatial analysis in combination with other datasets, as for example the NCCR North-South uses the WSCP within two research projects.

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Neolithic wetland sites in the Swiss Plateau provide an extraordinary database for the study of mobilities, entanglements and transformations in material culture. Based on dendrochronologically dated settlements between 3900 and 3500 BC, two regional pottery styles and their local variations are well known, Pfyn and Cortaillod. The vessels share the same habitus and were made of local raw materials. However, some vessels specific to other pottery styles are also present in the sites. By focusing on itineraries of vessels and shifts in pottery knowledge, their appropriation in different contexts and the resulting material entanglements, we want to approach the multiple regimes of mobility: At Lake Constance - known for Pfyn pottery - specific Michelsberg vessels like tulip beakers and lugged jars occur in small numbers. These travelling objects were produced with exogenous raw materials and transported to the sites from Southern Germany. At Concise (Lake Neuchâtel) besides the local Cortaillod pottery the whole repertoire of NMB pottery, characteristic for Eastern France, was also produced. Further cases from the same space-time frame point to other regimes of mobility. In our two PhD-projects we compare pottery practices - styles, techniques, raw materials - from over 20 key sites in the region. Based on Bourdieu’s reflexive anthropology, we apply different qualitative and quantitative archaeological and archaeometrical methods, thus striving for a deeper understanding of habitus and the transformative potential of moving people, objects and ideas on local and regional scales and related social contexts.

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This paper presents a method for attributing regional trends in the frequency of extremely hot days (EHDs) to changes in the frequency of the atmospheric patterns that characterize such extraordinary events. The study is applied to mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands for the extended summers of the period 1958–2008, where significant and positive trends in maximum temperature (Tx) have been reported during the second half of the past century. First, the study area was split into eight regions attending to their different temporal variability of the daily Tx series obtained from the Spain02 gridded data set using a clustering procedure. Second, the large-scale atmospheric situations causing EHDs are defined by circulation types (CTs). The obtainment of the CTs differs from the majority of CT classifications proposed in the literature. It is based on regional series and on a previous characterization of the main atmospheric situations obtained using only some days classified as extremes in the different regions. Three different atmospheric fields (SLP, T850, and Z500) from ECMWF reanalysis and analysis data and combinations of them (SLP–T850, SLP–Z500, and T850–Z500) are used to produce six different CT classifications. Subsequently, links between EHD occurrence in the different regions and CT for all days have been established. Finally, a simple model to relate the trends in EHDsfor each region to the changes in the CT frequency appearance has been formulated. Most regions present positive and significant trends in the occurrence of EHDs. The CT classifications using two variables perform better. In particular, SLP–T850 is the best for characterizing the atmospheric situations leading to EHD occurrences for most of the regions. Only a small number of CTs have significant trends in their frequency and are associated with high efficiency causing EHD occurrences in most regions simultaneously, especially in the northern and central regions. Attribution results show that changes in circulation can only explain some part of the regional EHD trends. The percentage of the trend attributable to changes in atmospheric dynamics varies from 15 to 50 %, depends on the region and is sensitive to the selected large-scale variables.

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Any image processing object detection algorithm somehow tries to integrate the object light (Recognition Step) and applies statistical criteria to distinguish objects of interest from other objects or from pure background (Decision Step). There are various possibilities how these two basic steps can be realized, as can be seen in the different proposed detection methods in the literature. An ideal detection algorithm should provide high recognition sensitiv ity with high decision accuracy and require a reasonable computation effort . In reality, a gain in sensitivity is usually only possible with a loss in decision accuracy and with a higher computational effort. So, automatic detection of faint streaks is still a challenge. This paper presents a detection algorithm using spatial filters simulating the geometrical form of possible streaks on a CCD image. This is realized by image convolution. The goal of this method is to generate a more or less perfect match between a streak and a filter by varying the length and orientation of the filters. The convolution answers are accepted or rejected according to an overall threshold given by the ackground statistics. This approach yields as a first result a huge amount of accepted answers due to filters partially covering streaks or remaining stars. To avoid this, a set of additional acceptance criteria has been included in the detection method. All criteria parameters are justified by background and streak statistics and they affect the detection sensitivity only marginally. Tests on images containing simulated streaks and on real images containing satellite streaks show a very promising sensitivity, reliability and running speed for this detection method. Since all method parameters are based on statistics, the true alarm, as well as the false alarm probability, are well controllable. Moreover, the proposed method does not pose any extraordinary demands on the computer hardware and on the image acquisition process.

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Due to its extraordinary biodiversity and rapid deforestation, north-eastern Madagascar is a conservation hotspot of global importance. Reducing shifting cultivation is a high priority for policy-makers and conservationists; however, spatially explicit evidence of shifting cultivation is lacking due to the difficulty of mapping it with common remote sensing methods. To overcome this challenge, we adopted a landscape mosaic approach to assess the changes between natural forests, shifting cultivation and permanent cultivation systems at the regional level from 1995 to 2011. Our study confirmed that shifting cultivation is still being used to produce subsistence rice throughout the region, but there is a trend of intensification away from shifting cultivation towards permanent rice production, especially near protected areas. While large continuous forest exists today only in the core zones of protected areas, the agricultural matrix is still dominated by a dense cover of tree crops and smaller forest fragments. We believe that this evidence makes a crucial contribution to the development of interventions to prevent further conversion of forest to agricultural land while improving local land users' well-being.

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In the annals of cognitive neuroscience there are examples of fantastic memory abilities (e.g., Luria, 1968) that befuddle the vast majority of us with normal mnemonic skills. Although such feats have yet to be demonstrated in other species, extraordinary memory may not be unique to humans. One possible example comes from a study by Inoue and Matsuzawa (2007), which showed that following extensive training, a chimpanzee, Ayumu, displayed superior working memory than human volunteers. Recently, Humphrey (2012) hypothesized that Ayumu outperformed the human participants because he had synaesthesia, a condition in which a stimulus (an inducer) will involuntarily elicit an atypical ancillary experience (a concurrent) (e.g., graphemes eliciting color photisms) (Ward, 2013). Specifically, Humphrey posits that Ayumu spontaneously developed grapheme-colour synaesthesia through “cross-cortical leakage” (p. 354) between the parietal cortex, which may support the storage of overlearned sequences, and adjacent colour-coding regions, during working memory training. Humphrey speculates that the synaesthetic associations elicited colour after-images during training with numerals, and, in turn, facilitated superior performance. Here we challenge this hypothesis and argue that it makes a number of assumptions that are not supported by current research.

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In this book, leading historians of the French, Batavian, Helvetic, Cisalpine, and Neapolitan revolutions bridge the gap between the historiographies of the so-called Sister Republics and explore political culture as a set of discourses or political practices. Parliamentary practices, the comparability of "universal" political concepts, late-eighteenth-century Republicanism, the relationship between press and politics, and the interaction between the Sister Republics and France are all examined from a comparative, transnational perspective.

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Despite the many technological innovations that had for some time contributed to a significant reduction of global travel times, intercontinental ship passages in the late nineteenth century were no quick affair. Depending on the route, such journeys could last between a few weeks and several months. During this time, crew and passengers shared the narrow space of the ship—largely isolated from the rest of the world and basically suspended between origin and destination. On many long-distance steamers, the production and consumption of ship newspapers became one possible means of whiling away the time in transit for the passengers. In this article, we seek to demonstrate how these extraordinary publications can serve as lenses not only on shipboard life but actually on historical actors of globalisation in a more general context. First, we seek to highlight why and how ship newspapers played an important role in the shaping of the peculiar social space of the passenger ship. We will then give a brief overview of the context in which these newspapers were produced and what kind of news they contained. In a third step, we will introduce two brief examples of topics discussed in ship newspapers and outline possible fields of research on which ship newspapers will be able to shed new light.

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Switzerland has an extraordinarily rich archaeological heritage from the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, dating back nearly 7000 years. Since the mid-19th century, the first pile dwellings were discovered in the lakes of the Central Plateau. Since 2011 these sites are part of the UNESCO world heritage „Prehistoric pile-dwellings around the Alps“. Not only lakes, but also Swiss mountains preserve extraordinary archaeological remains: from an alpine pass in the Bernese Alps prehistoric objects are melting out from the ice. Perfect preservation conditions and modern archaeological methods allow exploring the development of early agrarian societies in this part of the world. We can reconstruct their settlements and follow their exchange with other communities. Archaeology under water and in alpine environments allows fascinating insights into the beginnings of our history.

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The Zr-in-rutile geothermometer is potentially a widely applicable tool to estimate peak metamorphic temperatures in rocks from diverse geological settings. In order to evaluate its usefulness and reliability to record and preserve high temperatures in granulite facies rocks, rutile from UHT rocks was investigated to assess different mechanisms of Zr (re-)distribution following cooling from high temperature. Granulite facies paragneisses from the lowermost part of the Ivrea Zone, Italy, incorporated as thin sheets into the extensive basaltic body of the Mafic Complex were selected for this study. The results show that Zr-in-rutile thermometry, if properly applied, is well suited to identify and study UHT terranes as it preserves a record of temperatures up to 1190 °C, although the thermometer is susceptible to partial post-peak metamorphic resetting by Zr diffusion. Texturally homogeneous rutile grains preserve Zr concentrations corresponding to temperatures of prograde rutile growth. Diverse rutile textures and relationships between some rutile host grains and included or adjacent Zr-bearing phases bear testimony to varying mechanisms of partial redistribution and resetting of Zr in rutile during cooling and link Zr-in-rutile temperatures to different steps of the metamorphic evolution. Rutile grains that equilibrated their Zr concentrations at temperatures above 1070 °C (i.e. 1.1 wt% Zr) could not retain all Zr in the rutile structure during cooling and exsolved baddeleyite (ZrO2). By subsequent reaction of baddeleyite exsolution lamellae with SiO2, zircon needles formed before the system finally closed at 650–700 °C without significant net loss of Zr from the whole host rutile grain. By reintegration of zircon exsolution needles, peak metamorphic temperatures of up to 1190 °C are derived for the studied rocks, which demonstrates the suitability of this solution thermometer to record UHT conditions and also confirms the extraordinary geological setting of the lowermost part of the Ivrea Zone.