‘There’s no future here’: The time and place of children’s migration aspirations in Peru

This article examines young Peruvians’ aspirations and the role of migration in their imagined futures, from a generational perspective. The data come from Young Lives, a long-term study of childhood poverty combining survey and qualitative approaches with children and their parents. The paper uses a biographical approach that sees migration as part of individual biographies as well as social structures and life course processes. The aim is to deepen understanding of the social contexts in which aspirations for and by children are generated, paying close attention to family migration histories, dynamic household contexts, and children’s migration networks. The analysis focuses on the time-spaces of migration aspirations, showing the way past, present and future are interconnected. It also emplaces aspirations by focusing on the way aspirations by and for children are constituted in and through particular places. The conclusion reflects on the role of poverty and argues that ‘aspirations’ are about much more than abstract ‘futures’; they orient actions in the present and say a great deal about young people’s current realities and relationships.     

‘Got my shoes,got my Pokémon’: Everyday geographies of children’s popular culture

This paper considers a particular popular-cultural phenomenon: ‘Pokémon’. Specifically, it concerns a social–historical juncture – a so-called ‘Pokémania’ – wherein Pokémon toys, games, collectables and merchandising were ‘must-have’ items for many children in South-East Asia, Europe, North America, and Australasia. Drawing upon research with Pokémon fans aged 5–8 in the UK, the paper explores some ways in which global cultural phenomena become intimately, complexly and constitutively co-implicated with/in everyday geographies. In so doing, I argue that the quotidian social and spatial import of Pokémon – and other analogous phenomena – should sensitise accounts of children’s everyday spatial practices to the ever-presence of contemporary popular cultural forms, and sensitise accounts of global popular culture to the importance of multifarious, contingent spatial practices.     

Improving school children’s understanding of water scarcity with a co-produced book on groundwater in Central Chile

Water scarcity is a critical issue worldwide, and Chile is no exception. Since 2010, Central Chile has been enduring an ongoing water crisis due to the coupled effects of a severe drought and the overuse of water resources, especially groundwater. Rural communities have been strongly impacted, mainly because wells from which drinking water is supplied show a dramatic drop in water levels, and some have even dried up. The water scarcity scenario requires the integration of actors and disciplines to increase awareness of groundwater; however, how to make this valuable element visible in society is an issue that remains open to debate. This paper describes and reflects on the process of making educational material about groundwater and water scarcity for children to promote public awareness. Based on transdisciplinary and co-designing processes, this work describes the social perceptions of groundwater among children and community leaders, as well as how scientific information and local knowledge of water scarcity could be integrated into a book for the young population. This research finds that educational projects on groundwater resources increase people’s awareness of the role of this hidden resource in the water cycle. Such projects encourage the creation of grounded and contextualised materials that incorporate the knowledge and experience already present in the communities, increasing public awareness of the role of groundwater and associated water scarcity issues, thereby integrating academia and society. This approach could be a tool to lay the foundations for successfully addressing the water crisis in Chile over generations.

     

A geologist’s shining path

Chronicle

A geologist’s shining path     

Genesis of volatile components at Saturn’s regular satellites. Origin of Titan’s atmosphere

Jupiter’s and Saturn’s regular satellites, which posses much ice, are currently thought to have been formed during the early evolution of the Solar System in circumplanetary protosatellite disks. Two of Saturn’s regular satellites—Titan and Enceladus—were experimentally proved to contain, along with water, other volatile components: molecular nitrogen, and methane (which are the major components of Titan’s atmosphere) and various nitrogen and carbon compounds in water plumes of Enceladus. The protomaterial of these rocky–icy satellites was formed in the outer regions of the gas–dust circumsolar nebula, and its closest analogue currently accessible to study is cometary material. The paper presents a review of experimental data on the chemical and isotopic composition of cometary material as possible sources of volatile components on Titan and Enceladus and model evaluations of temperatures in the circumsolar gas–dust protoplanetary disk and Jupiter’s and Saturn’s protosatellite disks during various evolutionary episodes of the solar system. The P–T parameters of the origin of the protomaterial of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s regular satellites were proved to have been remarkably different, and hence, the material of Europa, a Jupiter’s regular satellite, cannot contain any volatile components other than water, in contrast to Titan and Enceladus. This conclusion is supported by experimental data. Cometary material is likely genetically related to the material of Saturn’s regular satellites Titan and Enceladus. The paper presents results of thermodynamic simulation of the evolution of the chemical and phase composition of Saturn’s satellites and suggests a model for the origin of Titan’s nitrogen–methane atmosphere.     

Time-lag effects in Parker’s dynamo

The effects of a time lag in the magnetic quenching of the α effect is considered for an oscillating magnetic field in a Parker dynamo. The hypothesis of a parametric resonance in the system is justified, a modification of the solution is found, and the appearance of processes with periods much longer than the fundamental oscillation period is demonstrated.     

New Zealand’s National Landslide Database

A New Zealand Landslide Database has been developed to hold all of New Zealand’s landslide data and provide factual data for use in landslide hazard and risk assessment, including a probabilistic landslide hazard model for New Zealand, which is currently being developed by GNS Science. Design of a national Landslide Database for New Zealand required consideration of existing landslide data stored in a variety of digital formats and future data yet to be collected. Pre-existing landslide datasets were developed and populated with data reflecting the needs of the landslide or hazard project, and the database structures of the time. Bringing these data into a single database required a new structure capable of containing landslide information at a variety of scales and accuracy, with many different attributes. A unified data model was developed to enable the landslide database to be a repository for New Zealand landslides, irrespective of scale and method of capture. Along with landslide locations, the database may contain information on the timing of landslide events, the type of landslide, the triggering event, volume and area data, and impacts (consequences) for each landslide when this information is available. Information from contributing datasets include a variety of sources including aerial photograph interpretation, field reconnaissance and media accounts. There are currently 22,575 landslide records in the database that include point locations, polygons of landslide source and deposit areas, and linear landslide features. Access to all landslide data is provided with a web application accessible via the Internet. This web application has been developed in-house and is based on open-source software such as the underlying relational database (PostGIS) and the map generating Web Map Server (GeoServer). Future work is to develop automated data-upload routines and mobile applications to allow people to report landslides, adopting a consistent framework.     

Gender myth and the mind-city composite: from Plato’s Atlantis to Walter Benjamin’s philosophical urbanism

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of epochal and ongoing progression in interaction between mind and the built environment. Since early antiquity, the present study suggests, Benjamin’s notion has been manifest in metaphors of gender in city-form, whereby edifices and urban voids have represented masculinity and femininity, respectively. At the onset of interaction between mind and the built environment are prehistoric myths related to the human body and to the sky. During antiquity gender projection can be detected in western perceptions linking natural and built environments, commencing with Plato’s Atlantis and his Myth of Er, and later as a likely import of the Chinese yin-yang mythology. Culminating with the Age of Discovery, alongside advances in experiential awareness of the Earth’s sphericity, respective feminine and masculine earmarks can be detected in early modern perspicacity of the Earth’s southern and northern hemispheres. Our conceptions of natural and built environments inherently continue to contain gender traits. Yet urban voids, as the feminine face of city-form, have been severely understated in the built environment. Through design and configuration of urban voids, allegories of femininity in city-form ought to be celebrated, not discarded.     

Temperature Distribution in the Earth’s Mantle

Doklady Earth Sciences - The influence of the compressibility and sphericity of the mantle on the temperature distribution in various models of mantle convection is analyzed. A model providing a...     

Textural Characterization Using Gy’s Heterogeneity Functions

A solid can be regarded as a set of contiguous elementary units. The distribution within the solid of any properties, measurable within each elementary unit, can be characterized using two parameters. These parameters are built using the constitution and distribution heterogeneities of Gy. The former account for the granularity of the elementary units, whereas the latter assess the spatial distribution of the property. A texture which definition involves several properties can be described using a diagram where both parameters work as variables. Potential applications encompass (i) the textural classification of soils, ore, breccia, and concrete and (ii) the monitoring of textural transformation during process like dolomitization, metamorphism, weathering, deformation, or annealing.     

Simpson’s Paradox in Natural Resource Evaluation

Reversals of statistical relationships, when two or more groups of data in a cross tabulation are aggregated, were first revealed more than a century ago. The reversal was later named Simpson’s paradox after his reversal examples in a seminal paper drew the attention of the statistical community. However, almost all the published cases have been in sociology and biomedical statistics. Does Simpson’s reversal occur in geosciences? Various examples from petroleum geology and reservoir modeling will be shown in this paper. Boundary conditions for such a reversal will be discussed under a broader framework of sampling analysis. Ecological inference bias, change of support problem, modifiable areal unit problem, and reference class problem will be discussed in relation to the Simpson’s paradox in the framework of spatial statistics. It will be demonstrated that the traditional interpretation of the paradox as a result of disproportional sampling based on a contingency table is not always true in the framework of spatial statistics, and the reversal while theoretically benign is inferentially treacherous. Therefore, emphasis will be on the discussion of combining statistical and scientific inferences in geologic modeling and hydrocarbon resource evaluation under various sampling schemes or support effect with or without a Simpson’s reversal.