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Recent exploration of the moon: science from lunar missions since 2006
Get PDFExploration of the Moon has been a goal of humankind for millennia, and in recent decades enormous advances in lunar knowledge have resulted from orbital, landed, robotic, and human exploration and sample return. This chapter introduces the planetary community to the array of missions that have explored the Moon in the years since 2006. Because other chapters in this volume will address the discoveries and results of these missions, we focus here on a short summary of science goals for each mission and a description of instruments and their capabilities
From marvels to motels: imagined and infrastructural worlds of silk road travel
No full textIn this chapter I playfully juxtapose two fundamental features of our historical understanding of the medieval Silk Road: the marvels encountered by travelers, and the much-less remarked upon but nonetheless present motels, known in medieval Eurasia as caravanserais or hans. I explore what the concept of marvel has done for historical representations of the Silk Road world of Eurasia, and in particular in serving as a technique of delimiting space within imaginary geographies. Turning to caravan inns, and in particular the caravanserais which were central to Armenian politics of hospitality in the high Middle Ages (13-14th c), I consider how these infrastructures in their own way worked to make the movements of the Silk Road not just more comfortable, but (marvelously) possible
Ethical conference economies? Reimagining the costs of convening academic communities when moving online
Get PDFOnline conferences are widely thought to reduce many of the costs of convening academic communities. From lower carbon emissions, lower fees, less difficulty in attending (particularly for marginalised researchers), and greater accessibility, virtual events promise to address many of the issues that in-person events take for granted. In this article, we draw on a community economies framing from geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham to argue for centring the work of convening within efforts to explore reparative possibilities within the academy. Reflecting on the changing costs arising from moving an originally in-person conference series online, we argue for embracing the opportunities offered. We explore how organising teams might enact alternative values through allocating the material, financial and labour resources traditionally spent for these events differently. We look particularly at how our carbon and financial costs changed, and how, by retaining a fee, we were able to allocate our budgets in ways which redistributed the surplus to participants in need (rather than bolster conference centre profits). We then explore what these changing costs meant in terms of our attendance levels across career stages and geographical locations. Looking at whether our experiment resulted in increased support for online events, we examine the continued ambivalence felt for the virtual. Finally, while we largely explore the benefits of online options, our last section urges caution over assumptions that this move will result in a more sustainable academia, particularly given the intensifications surrounding high quality streaming video, and suggest that we treat current trends as ongoing experiments, rather than solutions
Citations and addressability
No full textWhat is the point of a citation? As Anthony Grafton puts it in his history of the footnote, “the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them” (233). So the point of a footnote/citation is to be able to lookup and check that epistemic claims are true? Sometimes. But not always, no
Creating a voice-activated AI responder in Python
No full textI’ve spent this weekend working on the technology for a forthcoming Artangel exhibition in Leeds that features an AI séance. The idea is that we want a voice-activated system that uses OpenAI’s GPT engine to respond to the user as though they were in a seance, conversing with the spirit of Alicia Boole Stott (1860-1940), an English mathematician known for her significant work in four-dimensional geometry. Spooky tech
Enactors or reactors? Work-life border management for women in law in Nigeria
Get PDFWork-family border theory casts individuals as protagonists who are enactive rather than reactive in shaping borders between work and personal life domains. To what extent is this the case in strongly patriarchal contexts that constrain women’s personal agency? This qualitative study conducted with 32 female lawyers, magistrates and justices in Nigeria shows how participants engage in new border management tactics in response to context-specific institutional and social factors. Faced with public harassment and physical assault in a country where violence against women is normalised, female legal professionals restructure family borders to extend no further than their homes and retain police attachés as border-keepers. When their families are reconfigured via nonconsensual polygamous marriages, women’s work borders are strengthened by co-wives performing domestic labour and family borders are strengthened by co-wives’ assistance with job tasks, thereby reducing participants’ work-family conflict. Rather than strategically enacting work-life borders within known situational constraints, Nigerian female legal professionals react to involuntary events that limit their agency to negotiate desired work and personal lives
Memory monitoring and control in Japanese and German Preschoolers
Get PDFPrior studies explored the early development of memory monitoring and control. However,
little work has examined cross-cultural similarities and differences in metacognitive
development in early childhood. In the present research, we investigated a total of 100
Japanese and German preschool-aged children’s memory monitoring and control in a visual
perception task. After seeing picture items, some of which were repeated, children were
presented with picture pairs, one of which had been presented earlier and the other was a
novel item. They then were asked to identify the previously presented picture. Children were
also asked to evaluate their confidence about their selection, and to sort the responses to be
used for being awarded with a prize at the end of the test. Both groups similarly expressed
more confidence in the accurately remembered items than in the inaccurately remembered
items, and their sorting decision was based on their subjective confidence. Japanese
children’s sorting more closely corresponded to memory accuracy than German children’s
sorting, however. These findings were further confirmed by a hierarchical Bayesian
estimation of metacognitive efficiency. The present findings therefore suggest that early
memory monitoring and control have both culturally similar and diverse aspects. The
findings are discussed in light of broader sociocultural influences on metacognition
Lunar resources
Get PDFIt has long been recognised that the Moon has the potential to play a pivotal role in the development of a future space-faring civilisation. Here, we present a geological and geographical inventory of potential lunar resources, together with a discussion of future work that will be required to improve our knowledge of this inventory, with emphasis on developments that have occurred in the last twenty years
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