Macroseismology as a Component of Seismicity Assessments in an Intraplate Region: Studies of Northern Europe with Emphasis on Finland

This work focuses on the role of macroseismology in the assessment of seismicity and probabilistic seismic hazard in Northern Europe. The main type of data under consideration is a set of macroseismic observations available for a given earthquake. The macroseismic questionnaires used to collect earthquake observations from local residents since the late 1800s constitute a special part of the seismological heritage in the region. Information of the earthquakes felt on the coasts of the Gulf of Bothnia between 31 March and 2 April 1883 and on 28 July 1888 was retrieved from the contemporary Finnish and Swedish newspapers, while the earthquake of 4 November 1898 GMT is an example of an early systematic macroseismic survey in the region. A data set of more than 1200 macroseismic questionnaires is available for the earthquake in Central Finland on 16 November 1931. Basic macroseismic investigations including preparation of new intensity data point (IDP) maps were conducted for these earthquakes. Previously disregarded usable observations were found in the press. The improved collection of IDPs of the 1888 earthquake shows that this event was a rare occurrence in the area. In contrast to earlier notions it was felt on both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia. The data on the earthquake of 4 November 1898 GMT were augmented with historical background information discovered in various archives and libraries. This earthquake was of some concern to the authorities, because extra fire inspections were conducted in three towns at least, i.e. Tornio, Haparanda and Piteå, located in the centre of the area of perceptibility. This event posed the indirect hazard of fire, although its magnitude around 4.6 was minor on the global scale. The distribution of slightly damaging intensities was larger than previously outlined. This may have resulted from the amplification of the ground shaking in the soft soil of the coast and river valleys where most of the population was found. The large data set of the 1931 earthquake provided an opportunity to apply statistical methods and assess methodologies that can be used when dealing with macroseismic intensity. It was evaluated using correspondence analysis. Different approaches such as gridding were tested to estimate the macroseismic field from the intensity values distributed irregularly in space. In general, the characteristics of intensity warrant careful consideration. A more pervasive perception of intensity as an ordinal quantity affected by uncertainties is advocated. A parametric earthquake catalogue comprising entries from both the macroseismic and instrumental era was used for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment. The parametric-historic methodology was applied to estimate seismic hazard at a given site in Finland and to prepare a seismic hazard map for Northern Europe. The interpretation of these results is an important issue, because the recurrence times of damaging earthquakes may well exceed thousands of years in an intraplate setting such as Northern Europe. This application may therefore be seen as an example of short-term hazard assessment.

Consumption in Rural Bangladesh : Households, Lifestyles, and Identities

Bangladesh, often better known to the outside world as a country of natural calamities, is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Despite rapid urbanization, more than 75% of the people still live in rural areas. The density of the rural population is also one of the highest in the world. Being a poor and low-income country, its main challenge is to eradicate poverty through increasing equitable income. Since its independence in 1971, Bangladesh has experienced many ups and downs, but over the past three decades, its gross domestic product (GDP) has grown at an impressive rate. Consequently, the country s economy is developing and the country has outperformed many low-income countries in terms of several social indicators. Bangladesh has achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary school enrollment. A sharp decline in child and infant mortality rates, increased per capita income, and improved food security have placed Bangladesh on the track to achieving in the near future the status of a middle-income country. All these developments have influenced the consumption pattern of the country. This study explores the consumption scenario of rural Bangladesh, its changing consumption patterns, the relationship between technology and consumption in rural Bangladesh, cultural consumption in rural Bangladesh, and the myriad reasons why consumers nevertheless feel compelled to consume chemically treated foods. Data were collected in two phases in the summers of 2006 and 2008. In 2006, the empirical data were collected from the following three sources: interviews with consumers, producers/sellers, and doctors and pharmacists; observations of sellers/producers; and reviews of articles published in the national English and Bengali (the national language of Bangladesh) daily newspapers. A total of 110 consumers, 25 sellers/producers, 7 doctors, and 7 pharmacists were interviewed and observed. In 2008, data were collected through semi-structured in-depth qualitative interviews, ethnography, and unstructured conversations substantiated by secondary sources and photographs; the total number of persons interviewed was 22. -- Data were also collected on the consumption of food, clothing, housing, education, medical facilities, marriage and dowry, the division of labor, household decision making, different festivals such as Eid (for Muslims), the Bengali New Year, and Durga puja (for Hindus), and leisure. Qualitative methods were applied to the data analysis and were supported by secondary quantitative data. The findings of this study suggest that the consumption patterns of rural Bangladeshis are changing over time along with economic and social development, and that technology has rendered aspects of daily life more convenient. This study identified the perceptions and experiences of rural people regarding technologies in use and explored how culture is associated with consumption. This study identified the reasons behind the use of hazardous chemicals (e.g. calcium carbide, sodium cyclamate, cyanide and formalin, etc.) in foods as well as the extent to which food producers/sellers used such chemicals. In addition, this study assessed consumer perceptions of and attitudes toward these contaminated food items and explored how adulterated foods and food stuffs affect consumer health. This study also showed that consumers were aware that various foods and food stuffs contained hazardous chemicals, and that these adulterated foods and food stuffs were harmful to their health.

On the use of weather radar for mesoscale applications in northern conditions

Mesoscale weather phenomena, such as the sea breeze circulation or lake effect snow bands, are typically too large to be observed at one point, yet too small to be caught in a traditional network of weather stations. Hence, the weather radar is one of the best tools for observing, analyzing and understanding their behavior and development. A weather radar network is a complex system, which has many structural and technical features to be tuned, from the location of each radar to the number of pulses averaged in the signal processing. These design parameters have no universal optimal values, but their selection depends on the nature of the weather phenomena to be monitored as well as on the applications for which the data will be used. The priorities and critical values are different for forest fire forecasting, aviation weather service or the planning of snow ploughing, to name a few radar-based applications. The main objective of the work performed within this thesis has been to combine knowledge of technical properties of the radar systems and our understanding of weather conditions in order to produce better applications able to efficiently support decision making in service duties for modern society related to weather and safety in northern conditions. When a new application is developed, it must be tested against ground truth . Two new verification approaches for radar-based hail estimates are introduced in this thesis. For mesoscale applications, finding the representative reference can be challenging since these phenomena are by definition difficult to catch with surface observations. Hence, almost any valuable information, which can be distilled from unconventional data sources such as newspapers and holiday shots is welcome. However, as important as getting data is to obtain estimates of data quality, and to judge to what extent the two disparate information sources can be compared. The presented new applications do not rely on radar data alone, but ingest information from auxiliary sources such as temperature fields. The author concludes that in the future the radar will continue to be a key source of data and information especially when used together in an effective way with other meteorological data.

Legal dimensions of the Chinese experience in Los Angeles, 1860-1880

On October 24, 1871, a massacre of eighteen Chinese in Los Angeles brought the small southern California settlement into the national spotlight. Within a few days, news of this “night of horrors” was reported in newspapers across the country. This massacre has been cited in Asian American narratives as the first documented outbreak of ethnic violence against a Chinese community in the United States. This is ironic because Los Angeles’ small population has generally placed it on the periphery in historical studies of the California anti-Chinese movement. Because the massacre predated Los Angeles’ organized Chinese exclusion movements of the late 1870s, it has often been erroneously dismissed as an aberration in the history of the city.

The violence of 1871 was an outburst highlighting existing community tensions that would become part of public debate by decade’s close. The purpose of this study is to insert the massacre into a broader context of anti-Chinese sentiments, legal discrimination, and dehumanization in nineteenth century Los Angeles. While a second incident of widespread anti-Chinese violence never occurred, brutal attacks directed at Chinese small businessmen and others highlighted continued community conflict. Similarly, economic rivalries and concerns over Chinese prostitution that underlay the 1871 massacre were manifest in later campaigns of economic discrimination and vice suppression that sought to minimize Chinese influence within municipal limits. An analysis of the massacre in terms of anti-Chinese legal, social and economic strategies in nineteenth-century Los Angeles will elucidate these important continuities.

MUES (Mid Wales - Users - Ethnic Services) Ethnic services provision 2007-08. Report for Libraries for Life: Delivering the entitlement agenda for library users in Wales 2007-09

Thomas, R., Urquhart, C., Crossan, S. & Hines, B. (2008). MUES (Mid Wales - Users - Ethnic Services) Ethnic services provision 2007-08. Report for Libraries for Life: Delivering the entitlement agenda for library users in Wales 2007-09. Aberystwyth: Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University. Related policy guidance published separately Sponsorship: CyMAL

A social history of sport in Cork, Tipperary and Waterford, c. 1880-1930

This thesis seeks to explore the development of sport in Munster in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing developments in three counties: Cork, Tipperary and Waterford. In particular this thesis considers the development of rugby and soccer in comparative perspective across these three counties, asking what local factors impacted on their uneven development in the region and considering the extent to which the traditional model of diffusion applies to the reception of these sports in the three counties. By giving consideration to these two particular non-indigenous sports, the thesis will, through answering that question, explore ideas of cultural reception, national identity and class as expressed at local level. These themes will be explored by placing the comparative analysis of these two sports into a wider context of sporting development regionally and nationally in the period, in particular the emerging commercialisation of sport, and also the diverse sporting culture of which these two sports were a part. Utilising a wide range of archival sources from local, national and sporting newspapers, to club records, official publications and ephemera this thesis builds a picture of sport in Munster that is deeply rooted in the community, and that forms an important facet of the social world of Cork, Tipperary and Waterford from 1880-1930.

Shifting Loyalties: World War I and the Conflicted Politics of Patriotism in the British Caribbean

This dissertation examines how the crisis of World War I impacted imperial policy and popular claims-making in the British Caribbean. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from every British colony in the region, served in the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). Rousing appeals to imperial patriotism and manly duty during the wartime recruitment campaigns and postwar commemoration movement linked the British Empire, civilization, and Christianity while simultaneously promoting new roles for women vis-à-vis the colonial state. In Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the two colonies that contributed over seventy-five percent of the British Caribbean troops, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, coloured, white, East Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, and imperial loyalty.

To explore these debates, this dissertation foregrounds the social, cultural, and political practices of BWIR soldiers, tracing their engagements with colonial authorities, military officials, and West Indian civilians throughout the war years. It begins by reassessing the origins of the BWIR, and then analyzes the regional campaign to recruit West Indian men for military service. Travelling with newly enlisted volunteers across the Atlantic, this study then chronicles soldiers' multi-sited campaign for equal status, pay, and standing in the British imperial armed forces. It closes by offering new perspectives on the dramatic postwar protests by BWIR soldiers in Italy in 1918 and British Honduras and Trinidad in 1919, and reflects on the trajectory of veterans' activism in the postwar era.

This study argues that the racism and discrimination soldiers experienced overseas fueled heightened claims-making in the postwar era. In the aftermath of the war, veterans mobilized collectively to garner financial support and social recognition from colonial officials. Rather than withdrawing their allegiance from the empire, ex-servicemen and civilians invoked notions of mutual obligation to argue that British officials owed a debt to West Indians for their wartime sacrifices. This study reveals the continued salience of imperial patriotism, even as veterans and their civilian allies invoked nested local, regional, and diasporic loyalties as well. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the origins of patriotism in the colonial Caribbean, while providing a historical case study for contemporary debates about "hegemonic dissolution" and popular mobilization in the region.

This dissertation draws upon a wide range of written and visual sources, including archival materials, war recruitment posters, newspapers, oral histories, photographs, and memoirs. In addition to Colonial Office records and military files, it incorporates previously untapped letters and petitions from the Jamaica Archives, National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados Department of Archives, and US National Archives.

Contracting Freedom: Governance and East Indian Indenture in the British Atlantic, 1838-1917

This is a dissertation about identity and governance, and how they are mutually constituted. Between 1838 and 1917, the British brought approximately half a million East Indian laborers to the Atlantic to work on sugar plantations. The dissertation argues that contrary to previous historiographical assumptions, indentured East Indians were an amorphous mass of people drawn from various regions of British India. They were brought together not by their innate "Indian-ness" upon their arrival in the Caribbean, but by the common experience of indenture recruitment, transportation and plantation life. Ideas of innate "Indian-ness" were products of an imperial discourse that emerged from and shaped official approaches to governing East Indians in the Atlantic. Government officials and planters promoted visions of East Indians as "primitive" subjects who engaged in child marriage and wife murder. Officials mobilized ideas about gender to sustain racialized stereotypes of East Indian subjects. East Indian women were thought to be promiscuous, and East Indian men were violent and depraved (especially in response to East Indian women's promiscuity). By pointing to these stereotypes about East Indians, government officials and planters could highlight the promise of indenture as a civilizing mechanism. This dissertation links the study of governance and subject formation to complicate ideas of colonial rule as static. It uncovers how colonial processes evolved to handle the challenges posed by migrant populations.

The primary architects of indenture, Caribbean governments, the British Colonial Office, and planters hoped that East Indian indentured laborers would form a stable and easily-governed labor force. They anticipated that the presence of these laborers would undermine the demands of Afro-Creole workers for higher wages and shorter working hours. Indenture, however, was controversial among British liberals who saw it as potentially hindering the creation of a free labor market, and abolitionists who also feared that indenture was a new form of slavery. Using court records, newspapers, legislative documents, bureaucratic correspondence, memoirs, novels, and travel accounts from archives and libraries in Britain, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, this dissertation explores how indenture was envisioned and constantly re-envisioned in response to its critics. It chronicles how the struggles between the planter class and the colonial state for authority over indentured laborers affected the way that indenture functioned in the British Atlantic. In addition to focusing on indenture's official origins, this dissertation examines the actions of East Indian indentured subjects as they are recorded in the imperial archive to explore how these people experienced indenture.

Indenture contracts were central to the justification of indenture and to the creation of a pliable labor force in the Atlantic. According to English common law, only free parties could enter into contracts. Indenture contracts limited the period of indenture and affirmed that laborers would be remunerated for their labor. While the architects of indenture pointed to contracts as evidence that indenture was not slavery, contracts in reality prevented laborers from participating in the free labor market and kept the wages of indentured laborers low. Further, in late nineteenth-century Britain, contracts were civil matters. In the British Atlantic, indentured laborers who violated the terms of their contracts faced criminal trials and their associated punishments such as imprisonment and hard labor. Officials used indenture contracts to exploit the labor and limit the mobility of indentured laborers in a manner that was reminiscent of slavery but that instead established indentured laborers as subjects with limited rights. The dissertation chronicles how indenture contracts spawned a complex inter-imperial bureaucracy in British India, Britain, and the Caribbean that was responsible for the transportation and governance of East Indian indentured laborers overseas.

Adaptation to the Environment: Changes in Initial Projects in Ottoman Shephardic Press

The origins of Sephardic press date back to the mid-20th century, when the influence of the Western world spread across the Sephardim communities of the East. The content of these newspapers was diverse: pieces of general interest, but also scientific, literary and humorous works, with various political orientations. These papers were published in different languages, writing styles and alphabets. Those to be analysed here, however, were published in aljamiado Judeo-Spanish: three papers from Smyrna and one from Salonica. Throughout this work we will focus on the different obstacles and difficulties the editors and publishers of this Ottoman Sephardic press had to face to bring their publications to light.

The Afroporteña press and Afro-Argentine’s thought in the late nineteenth century

The journalistic boom that occurred in Argentina from the second half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of an active afroporteña press that defend the interests of the black community. This paper, in addition to reviewing the history of the Afro-Argentines newspapers, emphasizes the role played by the elite of African descent in the promotion of modernity among his brothers, while exploring the possible bases for an identity in the ideas spread.

'Dare the boist'rous main': the role of the Belfast Newsletter in the process of emigration from Ulster to North America 1760-1800

Before the mass migrations from Ireland in the nineteenth century, earlier waves of migration in the eighteenth century saw significant numbers of people leave Ireland, predominantly from Ulster, to settle in North America. This article, using as its principal data source the Belfast News Letter ( BNL), its letters, advertisements and reports, focuses firstly on reconstructing the late eighteenth-century migration process and voyage, highlighting the barriers represented by the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to the challenges of the sea, there were problems with the ships, the ever-present danger of disease and also threats from other vessels, from privateers to press gangs. The voyage was recognized as a ‘universal dread’, and the risks taken to ‘dare the boist’rous main’ were perhaps not minimized in the pages of the BNL, whose editorial stance was antipathetic to the migration for the potential harm it caused to Ulster by removing so many of its industrious young. The second part of this article goes on to consider the newspaper’s and others’ vested interests in the emigration process, demonstrates how these were manifested in the press and sets the coverage of this very significant early emigration flow within the context of contemporary religious and colonial discourses at a period of very lively transatlantic interactions.

Space Science News: from archive to teaching resource, the secret life of newspapers

Worldwide, science education reform is aiming to promote 'scientific literacy' among young people. Typically, this is taken to include empowering them to engage critically with science in news media. This study explored the extent and nature of secondary science teachers' use of newspapers. It found that, though a great many use the resource, the majority do so incidentally and with the intention of showing the relevance of the subject rather than developing their students' criticality.

What the Papers Say: Trends in Sustainability

This paper presents an overview of the results of a longitudinal analysis of the coverage of sustainability-related concepts in 115 leading national newspapers worldwide between January 1990 and July 2008, covering approximately 20,500,000 articles in 340,000 newspaper issues in 39 countries. On a global level, sustainable development and corporate social responsibility seem to have reached the mainstream public arena, whereas the coverage of corporate citizenship and corporate sustainability remains marginal. The increase in sustainability related media coverage since 1990 largely seems to be of an incremental nature, rather than clearly associated with specific events. Only very few truly global events can be identified that triggered a substantial amount of media coverage globally. Furthermore, marked regional and national differences in the coverage of sustainability related concepts can be identified.

Peat multi-proxy data from Mannikjarve bog as indicators of late Holocene climate changes in Estonia

As part of a wider project on European climate change over the past 4500 years, a 4.5-m peat core was taken from a lawn microform on Mannikjarve bog, Estonia. Several methods were used to yield proxy-climate data: (i) a quadrat and leaf-count method for plant macrofossil data, (ii) testate amoebae analysis, and (iii) colorimetric determination of peat humification. These data are provided with an exceptionally high resolution and precise chronology. Changes in bog surface wetness were inferred using Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) and zonation of macrofossil data, particularly concerning the occurrence of Sphagnum balticum, and a transfer function for water-table depth for testate amoebae data. Based on the results, periods of high bog surface wetness appear to have occurred at c. 3100, 3010-2990, 2300, 1750-1610, 1510, 14 10, 1110, 540 and 3 10 cal. yr BP, during four longer periods between c. 3170 and 2850 cal. yr BP, 2450 and 2000 cal. yr BP, 1770 and 1530 cal. yr BP and in the period from 880 cal. yr BP until the present. In the period between 1770 and 1530 cal. yr BP. the extension or initiation of a hollow microtope occurred, which corresponds with other research results from Mannikjarve bog. This and other changes towards increasing bog surface wetness may be the responses to colder temperatures and the predominance of a more continental climate in the region, which favoured the development of bog microdepressions and a complex bog microtopography. Located in the border zone of oceanic and continental climatic sectors, in an area almost without land uplift, this study site may provide valuable information about changes in palaeohydrological and palaeoclimatological conditions in the northern parts of the eastern Baltic Sea region.