Gender and voluntary work in late adulthood in rural communities in the Netherlands

This article discusses the involvement of older women and men in voluntary work in rural communities in the Netherlands. Gender, ageing and civil society form the core concepts in the article. Politicians and policy makers in the Netherlands are worried about the perceived decline of civil society and about the consequences of this decline for specific categories of older women in terms of well-being and social exclusion. The paper presents the results of two surveys of involvement of older women and men in civic organisations, voluntary work and local actions. The surveys indicate high levels of involvement of both women and men. No gender differences are found in activity level. However, the data demonstrate the gendered nature of civil society. Women are more engaged in informal voluntary work and informal local actions, while men are more active in formal organisations and functions. This gender segmentation is not absolute, however. Many older women and men transgress the traditional feminine–masculine boundaries. The surveys highlight the involvement of women and men in rural communities, but indicate lower activity levels in urban areas.     

Denudation and cooling of the Lake Teletskoye Region in the Altai Mountains (South Siberia) as revealed by apatite fission-track thermochronology

Lake Teletskoye occupies a narrow graben located in the northwestern sector of the Altai fold belt in South Siberia. The lake basin is thought to have formed during the Pleistocene as a distant result of the Cenozoic collision of India and Eurasia that caused a tectonic reactivation of the Palaeozoic Gorny–Altai (GA) and West Sayan (WS) blocks.The present work reports of a pilot fission-track study performed on 13 apatite separates collected from rocks that were sampled along two profiles in close proximity of the lake. The age–length data and AFT thermochronological modelling reveal two important phases of cooling in the Altai Mountains, a first one during the Late Jurassic–Early Cretaceous and a second one that started in the Miocene–Pliocene and that persists until today. The first event is interpreted to result from uplift-induced denudation probably related to the closure of the Mongol–Okhotsk Ocean; the second event can be linked to the young Cenozoic movements that lie at the origin of the formation of the Lake Teletskoye basin.     

Al hematites prepared by homogeneous precipitation of oxinates: material characterization and determination of the Morin transition

A novel method for synthesis of aluminium hematites, based upon the homogeneous precipitation of Fe and Al oxinates in various proportions, is presented. The precursor precipitates are heated in air at 700?°C. X-ray diffraction, thermal analyses, BET, FTIR, optical reflection analysis, TEM and Mössbauer spectroscopy at room temperature and 80?K of the resulting products indicate that single-phase hematites are formed with structural Al substitution of up to 10 at%. Interestingly, the particle size (>100?nm) is not substantially reduced by the Al content. Although it remains difficult to obtain a homogeneously distributed Al substitution in the final hematite, this processing line offers a unique opportunity to separate the effects of grain size and Al substitution on the Morin transition temperature (T _M) of Al hematite. From the comparison between the present hematites and a series of Al-substituted hematites with lepidocrocite as precursor, it could be shown that the effect on T _M, associated with a change of a factor 10 in grain size, is about 1/3 of the effect caused by a change of 10 in the degree of substitution. Finally, it is suggested that proper thermal treatments under different conditions of the same precursors are likely to produce spinel phases.     

Origin of fine-scale sheeted granites by incremental injection of magma into active shear zones: examples from the Pilbara Craton, NW Australia

In the Archaean Pilbara Craton of Western Australia, three zones of heterogeneous centimetre- to metre-scale sheeted granites are interpreted to represent high-level, syn-magmatic shear zones. Evidence for the syn-magmatic nature of the shear zones include imbricated and asymmetrically rotated metre-scale orthogneiss xenoliths that are enveloped by leucogranite sheets that show no significant internal strain. At another locality, granite sheets have a strong shape-preferred alignment of K-feldspar, suggesting magmatic flow, while the asymmetric recrystallisation of the grain boundaries indicates that non-coaxial deformation continued acting upon the sheets under sub-solidus conditions. Elsewhere, randomly oriented centimetre-wide leucogranite dykes are realigned at a shear zone boundary to form semi-continuous, layer-parallel sheets within a magma-dominated, dextral shear zone.

It is proposed that the granite sheets formed by the incremental injection of magmas into active shear zones. Magma was sheared during laminar flow to produce the sheets that are aligned sub-parallel to the shear zone boundary. Individual sheets are fed by individual dykes, with up to 1000s of discrete injections in an individual shear zone. The sheets often lack microstructural evidence for magmatic flow, either because the crystal content of the magma was too low to record internal strain, or because of later recrystallisation.     

Impact of suboxia on sinking particulate organic carbon: Enhanced carbon flux and preferential degradation of amino acids via denitrification

Fluxes of particulate organic carbon (POC) through the oxygen deficient waters in the eastern tropical North Pacific were found to be relatively less attenuated with depth than elsewhere in the eastern North Pacific. The attenuation coefficient (b) for the flux was found to be 0.40 versus the composite value of 0.86 determined by Martin et al. (1987). To examine this further, sinking POC was collected using sediment traps and allowed to degrade in oxic and suboxic experiments. Using a kinetic model, it was found that degradation proceeded at similar rates (roughly 0.8 day⁻¹) under oxic and suboxic conditions, but a greater fraction of bulk POC was resistant to degradation in the suboxic experiments (61% vs. 23%). Amino acids accounted for 37% of POC collected at 75m, but following degradation the value dropped to 17% and 16% in the oxic and suboxic experiments respectively. POC collected from 500m was 10% amino acids. The non-AA component of POC collected at 75m was not degraded under suboxic conditions, while under oxic conditions it was. These results suggest that microbes degrading OC under suboxic conditions via denitrification preferentially utilize nitrogen-rich amino acids. This preferential degradation of amino acids suggests that 9% more nitrogen may be lost via water column denitrification than is accounted for when a more “Redfieldian” stoichiometry for POC is assumed.     

Seismic buffer recognition using wavelet-based features and neural classification

One of the first operations in a seismic signal processing system applied to earthquake data is to distinguish between valid and invalid records. Since valid signals are characterized by a combination of their time and frequency properties, wavelets are natural candidates for describing seismic features in a compact way. This paper develops a seismic buffer pattern recognition technique, comprising wavelet-based feature extraction, feature selection based on the mutual information criterion, and neural classification based on feedforward networks. The ability of the wavelet transform to capture discriminating information from seismic data in a small number of features is compared with alternative feature reduction techniques, including statistical moments. Three different variations of the wavelet transform are used to extract features: the discrete wavelet transform, the single wavelet transform and the continuous wavelet transform. The mutual information criterion is employed to select a relatively small set of wavelets from the time–frequency grid. Firstly, it is determined whether wavelets can capture more informative data in an equal number of features compared with other features derived from raw data. Secondly, wavelet-based features are compared with features selected based on prior knowledge of class differences. Thirdly, a technique is developed to optimize wavelet features as part of the neural network training process, by using the wavelet neural network architecture. The automated classification techniques developed in this paper are shown to perform similarly to human operators trained for this function. Wavelet-based techniques are found to be useful, both for preprocessing of the raw data and for extracting features from the data. It is demonstrated that the definition of wavelet features can be optimized using the classification wavelet network architecture.     

Siberian river run-off and Late Quaternary glaciation in the southern Kara Sea, Arctic Ocean: preliminary results

The extent of the Barents-Kara Ice Sheet during the eastern Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) is not yet fully known. A detailed echo-sounding survey performed during the Boris Petrov Expedition 2001 permitted the detailed mapping of part of it. Based on the profiling results, a southern connection between the LGM Barents-Kara Ice Sheet and a local ice sheet on Taymyr Peninsula appears to be unlikely. Based on sediment core data and profiling results, most of the terrigenous river-derived material accumulated in the estuaries during late Holocene times, whereas during early Holocene times of lowered sea level major amounts were transported further offshore and accumulated on the shelf. During the post-glacial sea level rise, the main depocentre migrated southward, reaching its present position no earlier than about 6 cal. Ky BP (or 5.2 Kya). Future studies of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) ¹⁴C-dated sediment cores will allow a detailed reconstruction of the variability of fluvial sediment discharge and the history of glaciation in the Kara Sea during late Quaternary times.