Comparisons: colonial or cosmopolitan?

Editors' Note: The following is the ninth in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography Lecture Series. It is based on the plenary presentation of 3 September at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geography Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) held in London in 2010. In the search for a more international approach to theorizing cities, comparative methods hold considerable promise, although one concern might be that in their theoretical ambitions they foster a universalising approach rather than one appreciative of diverse and sometimes divergent urban experiences. The potentially universalizing ambitions of comparative methods lead some postcolonial theorists to question the extent to which comparativism carries the marks of colonial histories. Critics argue that some aspects of formal comparative methods can be traced to ambitious and geographically encompassing intellectual projects from the colonial era, when the interest and capacity to bring different parts of the world together within the same intellectual frame advanced significantly. This paper explores the complexities of these colonial lineages of comparative research with a view to assessing their implications for postcolonial comparative urbanism. It concludes by assessing the potential for more modest comparative experiments in a postcolonial vein through attending to the diverse vernacular cosmopolitanisms of cities. Following the spatialities of cities themselves has the potential to offer non‐universalizing but variously internationalizing theoretical engagements with different places.     

High-temperature elasticity of magnesioferrite spinel

The elastic moduli of magnesioferrite spinel, MgFe₂O₄, and their temperature dependence have been determined for the first time by ultrasonic measurements on a polycrystalline specimen. The measurements were carried out at 300 MPa and to 700°C in a gas-medium high-pressure apparatus. On heating, both the elastic bulk (K _S) and shear (G) moduli decrease linearly to 350°C. By combining with extant thermal-expansion data, the values for the room-temperature K _S and G, and their temperature derivatives are as follows: K ₀ = 176.3(7) GPa, G ₀ = 80.1(2) GPa, (∂K _S/∂T) _P = −0.032(3) GPa K⁻¹ and (∂G/∂T) _P = −0.012(1) GPa K⁻¹. Between 350 and 400°C, there are abrupt increases of 1.4% in both of the elastic moduli; these closely coincide with the magnetic Curie transition that was observed by thermal analyses at about 360°C.     

On-the-fly GPS-based attitude determination using single- and double-differenced carrier phase measurements

Carrier phase measurements are primary observations for GPS attitude determination. Although the satellite-related errors can be virtually eliminated by forming single differences, the baseline-related errors such as line biases are still present in the single-differenced carrier phase measurements. It is, therefore, difficult to resolve the single-differenced integer ambiguities due to the line biases. By forming double differences, the line biases of the single-differenced carrier phase measurements can be effectively removed. However, the main disadvantages of this method lie in the fact that the double-differenced measurements are mathematically correlated and consequently the attitude obtained from the double differences is noisy. This paper presents a new algorithm through which both single and double differences are used simultaneously to resolve these problems in real-time. The solution of the integer ambiguities can be obtained by searching for the most likely grid point in the attitude domain that is independent of the correlation with the double differences. Next, the line biases and corresponding single difference integer ambiguities can be resolved on the fly by using the noisy attitude solution obtained from the previous double difference procedure. In addition, the relationship between the physical signal path difference and the line bias is formed. A new method is also applied to derive the attitude angles through finding the optimal solution of the attitude matrix element. The proposed new procedure is validated using ground and flight tests. Results have demonstrated that the new algorithm is effective and can satisfy the requirement of real-time applications.     

Surge in sulphur and halogen degassing from Ambrym volcano,Vanuatu

Volcanoes provide important contributions to atmospheric budgets of SO₂ and reactive halogens, which play significant roles in atmospheric oxidative capacity and radiation. However, the global source strengths of volcanic emissions remain poorly constrained. These uncertainties are highlighted here by the first measurements of gas emission rates from Ambrym volcano, Vanuatu. Our initial airborne ultraviolet spectroscopic measurements made in January 2005 indicate fluxes of 18–270 kg s^-1 of SO₂, and 62–110 g s^-1 of BrO, into the atmosphere, placing Ambrym amongst the largest known contemporary point sources of both these species on Earth. We also estimate high Cl and F fluxes of ~8–14 and ~27–50 kg s^-1, respectively, for this period. Further observations using both airborne and spaceborne remote sensing reveal a fluctuating SO₂ output between 2004 and 2008, with a surge in the first half of 2005, and underline the substantial contribution that a single passively degassing volcano can make to the atmospheric budget of sulfur and halogens.     

A brief overview of the ACEP project: Ecosystem Processes in the KwaZulu-Natal Bight§

This introductory paper lays the basis for this supplementary issue by briefly presenting the state of knowledge on the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Bight at the start of this multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, ship-based research project that ran from 2009 to 2013. The rationale and aims of the project are also described. The project was a major component of the South African Department of Science and Technology’s African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme (ACEP), which has been prominent in supporting research on the east coast of South Africa and the wider South-West Indian Ocean. Pivotal to this was the RS Algoa, which was made available for two 30-day surveys (winter and summer) in the KZN Bight by the Department of Environmental Affairs. Although some aspects of the bight ecology are known, much of the research is dated and fragmented, and required refreshing and consolidation in order to produce a platform upon which the understanding of the region’s ecosystem functioning could be established. Much of the oceanographic knowledge is also dated, with no dedicated surveys and significant measurements undertaken since 1989. The overarching theme of the KZN Bight project was to examine the relative importance of sources of nutrients to the central KZN coast and how these are taken up and recycled in the ecosystem, and to describe aspects of the benthic biodiversity, which is poorly described in much of this region. An ambitious project, its accessibility to a ship-based research platform and the diverse scientific skills of the participating scientists allowed considerable success, as reflected in the papers that follow.     

Episodic volcanism on Enceladus: Application of the Ojakangas-Stevenson model

The main equations in the paper “Episodic volcanism of tidally heated satellites with application to Io” by Ojakangas and Stevenson [Icarus 66, 341-358] are presented; numerical integration of these equations confirms the results of Ojakangas and Stevenson [Icarus 66, 341-358] for Io. Application to Enceladus is considered. It is shown that Enceladus does not oscillate about the tidal equilibrium in this model by both new nonlinear stability analysis and numerical integration of the model equations.     

Satellite selection with an end-to-end deep learning network

Benefiting from multi-constellation Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), more and more visible satellites can be used to improve user positioning performance. However, due to limited tracking receiver channels and power consumption, and other issues, it may be not possible, or desirable, to use all satellites in view for positioning. The optimal subset is generally selected from all possible satellite combinations to minimize either Geometric Dilution of Precision (GDOP) or weighted GDOP (WGDOP). However, this brute force approach is difficult to implement in real-time applications due to the time- and power-consuming calculation of the DOP values. As an alternative to a brute force satellite selection procedure, the authors propose an end-to-end deep learning network for satellite selection based on the PointNet and VoxelNet networks. The satellite selection is converted to a satellite segmentation problem, with specified input channel for each satellite and two class labels, one for selected satellites and the other for those not selected. The aim of the satellite segmentation is that a fixed number of satellites with the minimum GDOP/WGDOP value can be segmented from any feeding order of input satellites. To validate the proposed satellite segmentation network, training and test data from 220 IGS stations tracking GPS and GLONASS satellites were used. The segmentation performance using different architectures and representations of input channels, including receiver-to-satellite unit vector and elevation and azimuth, were compared. It was found that the input channel with elevation and azimuth can achieve better performance than using the receiver-to-satellite unit vector, and an architecture with stacked feature encoding (FE) layers has better satellite segmentation performance than one without stacked FE layers. In addition, the models with GDOP and WGDOP criteria for selecting 9 and 12 satellites were trained. It was demonstrated that the satellite segmentation network was about 90 times faster than using the brute force approach. Furthermore, all the trained models can effectively select the satellites making the most contribution to the desired GDOP/WGDOP value. Approximately 99% of the tests had GDOP and WGDOP value differences smaller than 0.03 and 0.2, respectively, between the predicted subset and the optimal subset.     

Gut contents of common mummichogs,Fundulus heteroclitus L., in a restored impounded marsh and in natural reference marshes

We examined the gut contents of mummichogs, Fundulus heteroclitus L., entering and leaving ditches in three marsh regions within the Barn Island Wildlife Management Area in Connecticut: a restored impounded valley marsh, a marsh below the impoundment dike (Headquarters Marsh), and an unimpounded valley marsh (Davis Marsh). On the Headquarters Marsh and at certain times on the other two marshes, fish entered the ditches on the flooding tide with relatively little food in their guts and left them on the following ebbing tide with considerably more food in their guts. Since the high tides did not flood the surface of the high marsh, it appears that the ditches are important foraging areas. Major components of the gut contents were detritus, algae, amphipods, tanaids, copepods, and insects. During the summer, fish in the restored impounded marsh consumed less food per unit body weight than did fish inhabiting the other marsh regions.     

Climatic pacing of Mediterranean fire histories from lake sedimentary microcharcoal

The microcharcoal content (particles < 180 µm) of overlapping sedimentary sequences from two crater lake basins in central Turkey are used to reconstruct the regional fire history of the East Mediterranean oak–grass parkland zone from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present-day. These results are correlated with stable isotope and pollen data from the same cores in order to assess the changing role of climate, vegetation and human activity in landscape burning. This indicates that climatically-induced variation in biomass availability was the main factor controlling the timing of regional fire activity during the Last Glacial–Interglacial climatic transition, and again during Mid-Holocene times, with fire frequency and magnitude increasing during wetter climatic phases. Spectral analysis of the Holocene part of the record from Eski Acıgöl indicates significant cyclicity with a periodicity of ~ 1500 years that may be linked with large-scale climate forcing. Although proto-agricultural societies were established in this region as early as 10,000 years ago, it is only during the last two to three millennia that the pacing of wildfire cycles appears to have become decoupled from climate and linked instead to human-induced changes in land cover and fuel load availability.