bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Water in Serpentine Geoecosystems
Authors: Alexander Earl B. , Coleman Roger G. , Keeler-Wolfe Todd , Harrison Susan P.
Published: November 2020

Water is continuously cycled from the atmosphere through geoecosystems to water bodies and, by evaporation and evapotranspiration, back to the atmosphere. Water is commonly transported long distances in the atmosphere. Eventually, it forms clouds that drop rain, snow, or dew on plants or the ground. The contributions of fog and dew to geoecosystems are generally minor, but they can be important factors along some coastlines. Water from most of the precipitation that falls to the ground infiltrates soils. Some is intercepted by plants and evaporates before it can reach soils, and some runs overland to streams without entering soils. Soils are important stores of water for plants. Excess water in soils and permeable substrata drains gradually. This gradual draining of infiltrated water diminishes flooding from storms and supplies water to streams between rainfall events, helping maintain more constant stream levels. The study of meteoric water, or water that is cycled through the atmosphere, is called “hydrology.” Watersheds are basic units of hydrological investigations. A watershed is a drainage basin—an area from which water drains to a common point. All water falling on a watershed (and not lost by evapotranspiration) leaves through a single, joint location that can be monitored with a stream gauge. There are exceptions, however, in which water drains from watersheds through permeable substrata, rather than at the lowest point in the ground surface topography. These “leaky” watersheds are common in basalt, poorly consolidated sandstone, and limestone terrains. We can examine some of the data from watersheds that are not known to be leaky to learn about the runoff characteristics of serpentine streams and their chemistry. Watersheds range in size from less than a hectare to large portions of continents (e.g., the Amazon River drains 6,475,000km2, about 35% of the South American continent). The smaller watersheds are drained by headwater streams with no tributaries, and the larger ones are drained by streams with many tributaries. Some of the most useful information can be gained from small watersheds because they have more uniform lithology, topography, soils, climate, and vegetation than larger ones.
Serpentine Plant Assemblages: A Global Overview
Authors: Alexander Earl B. , Coleman Roger G. , Keeler-Wolfe Todd , Harrison Susan P.
Published: November 2020

Serpentine substrates are found in many parts of the world, but there is considerable variation in the structure, composition, and diversity of the flora they support. To place western North America in a worldwide context, this chapter provides a brief sketch of global patterns in serpentine plant life, drawing on the reviews by Brooks (1987), Baker et al. (1992), and Roberts and Proctor (1992), as well as other sources. Following this is an overview of some of the main physical factors known to cause variation in the vegetation on serpentine both at the regional and local levels. Finally, we discuss what is known about the roles of competition, fire, herbivory, and other ecological processes in shaping plant assemblages on serpentine. The availability of botanical information varies considerably around the world. In most countries where serpentine occurs, it is possible to name at least some of the plant species and vegetation types found on it. But in countries where surveys are incomplete, or where information has not been synthesized at a national or larger level, it is generally not possible to estimate the number of serpentine-endemic taxa or to describe patterns of variation within the serpentine vegetation. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillippines, and Brazil are particularly notable as countries with serpentine floras that are potentially rich but in need of more study. With this caveat, however, some of the major global trends can be described based on available knowledge. Flora and vegetation of selected parts of the world are summarized in table 10-1, and global contrasts between the vegetation of serpentine and other soils are summarized in table 10-2. New Caledonia and Cuba lead the world in known serpentine endemic diversity with 900+ species each, >90% of which are also endemics to these islands. Depending on elevation, rainfall, and fire history, the serpentine vegetation on both islands varies from sclerophyllous scrubland that contrasts visibly with the neighboring vegetation, to medium-stature rainforest that is not strikingly different in appearance from the vegetation growing in other soils.
Serpentine Plant Life of Western North America
Authors: Alexander Earl B. , Coleman Roger G. , Keeler-Wolfe Todd , Harrison Susan P.
Published: November 2020

Serpentine plant life varies dramatically across western North America from north to south and, to a lesser extent, from the coast inland. At the latitudinal extremes in Alaska and Baja California, it follows patterns seen in other climatically harsh parts of the world (as discussed in chapter 10), but the species composition is not very distinctive and there are few endemics. In between, in Washington, Oregon, and especially in the California Floristic Province, lies a great diversity of distinctive serpentine vegetation types and endemic species. This chapter outlines the coarse patterns of variation in vegetation structure and endemic species richness across this region, as a prelude to chapter 12, which describes specific serpentine vegetation types in detail. Little has been published about the serpentine vegetation of Alaska and the Yukon. The Serpentine Slide Research Natural Area in central Alaska was described by Juday (1992) as having a mixture of white spruce (Picea glauca) and paper birch (Betula papyrifera) with Rosa acicularis, Juniperus communis, and Vaccinium uliginosum in the understory. Several herbs are shared with Swedish serpentines (e.g., Campanula rotundifolia, Minuartia rubella, Rumex acetosa, Saxifraga oppositifolia, Silene acaulis); several others showed northern range extensions on serpentine (see chapter 9). The ultramafic vegetation of Golden Mountain in southeast Alaska was described by Alexander et al. (1989) as alpine meadow containing forbs, graminoids, and low shrubs, with a transition through low shrubs and stunted lodgepole pines (Pinus contorta) down to spruce (Picea sitchensis)–hemlock (mainly Tsuga mertensiana) forest, with shrubs and some cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis). The forest to alpine transition was lower on serpentine than on other soils. No serpentine endemic species are known from this region. From south–central British Columbia to central Oregon, serpentine has been described by Kruckeberg (1969, 1992) as supporting open stands of various conifers, which are either a subset of the species occurring in adjacent denser forests on other soils or represent elevational or geographic range shifts. Understories are sparse and may include graminoids, perennial forbs, and shrubs. On rocky ridgetops and at higher elevations and latitudes, these conifer plant communities give way gradually to alpine tundra.
Denali-Yukon, Domain 9
Authors: Alexander Earl B. , Coleman Roger G. , Keeler-Wolfe Todd , Harrison Susan P.
Published: November 2020

The Denali-Yukon domain occupies a broad arc that, in general, follows the path of the Denali Fault along the Alaska Range and southwestward into the Yukon Territory. An ophiolite in the northwestern corner of British Columbia that is northeast of the projected Denali fault is included in this locality. A projection of the Denali fault system southwestward from the Alaska Range passes through the southwestern part of the Ahklun Mountains physiographic province, as the province was defined by Wahrhaftig (1965), to Kuskokwim Bay between the mouth of the Kuskowim River and Cape Newenham. Three mafic–ultramafic complexes on the southwestern edge of the Ahklun Mountains province are included in this domain. Glaciers covered this entire domain during the Pleistocene, and mountain glaciers and ice caps are still present at the higher elevations. Permafrost is currently discontinuous. The highest mountain in North America (Mt. McKinley, 6194 m) is in the Alaska Range, but the ultramafic rocks are all at much lower elevations. The climate is very cold throughout the domain, with severe winters and short summers. The mean annual precipitation ranges from 45 to150 cm in the Ahklun Mountains, from 30 to 60 cm in the Alaska Range, and from 30 to 75 cm, or more, in the Atlin area of northwestern British Columbia, which is in the rain shadow of the Coast Mountains. The greatest precipitation is during summers, from June or July to September or October. The frostfree period is on the order of 60–90 days, or shorter, but it may be longer in some of the Atlin area of British Columbia. Localities 9-1 through 9-3 are from Cape Newenham northeastward in the Ahklun Mountains. The ultramafic rocks in the Cape Newenham area were accreted to North America by north directed thrust faults during the Late Triassic and Middle Jurassic time. Localities 9-4 through 9-7 are in the Alaska Range. Locality 9-8 is along a projection of the Denali fault to the eastern edge of the Coast Ranges in British Columbia.
The Development of Agriculture: Maintaining Soil Fertility
Authors: Leigh G. J.
Published: November 2020

The reason why nitrogen is necessary for all living things was established in chapter 1. We also saw the kind of intellectual and theoretical basis upon which the scientific understanding of that necessity had to be established. We now consider the other side of the nitrogen coin: the kinds of agriculture that were actually practised in various selected parts of the world at different times. It is generally accepted that from the earliest times when human beings first lived in groups, they gathered their food wherever they happened to find it, or else they hunted it. The development of agriculture presumably implied that people became rather less peripatetic because they had to return to their crops, at the least to harvest them. At about the same time, they began to domesticate animals, and this must also have considerably restricted their mobility. Whether they noticed that land became less productive as they repeated cultivation on the same plots year after year can only be surmised. All this occurred about 8000 years ago. There is perhaps one caveat. If people lived in an area where food was plentiful and easy to gather, they would not have needed to wander so far to find their nourishment, but the idea of widespread, static settlements of sedentary hunter-gatherers is not a popular one among the experts. Once people started to live in cities, there must have been significant changes in agricultural practice, for at least two reasons. First, it is not simple to dismantle a city of permanent buildings every few years and to move it to a more convenient spot for growing crops, so people no longer did that. They tended to stay put. Second, the mere fact that there were people in the cities such as artisans, artists, and priests, who were not productive agriculturally but who needed to be fed, meant that those who continued to raise crops had to produce more food than subsistence farmers who fed only their immediate dependants. The new farmers had to supply food not only to themselves and to their families but also to all the non-agriculturalists living in the cities.
The Ten Worst E-mail Mistakes
Authors: Pournelle Jerry
Published: November 2020

Anyone who uses e-mail should avoid the following mistakes: Giving confidential information in an unsecured e-mail. Your credit card number, for instance, can easily be sent throughout the world. It’s best to send credit-card information only through secure Web sites. See “How to Shop Safely Online” on p.143. Opening attachments from strangers. Never open an e-mail that has an attachment that is vague or says “Check this out!” A virus may spread by invading the contact list on a computer and sending itself to every e-mail address on the list. Opening unsolicited e-mail without first scanning for viruses. There are several free anti-virus programs available, and they should be updated regularly. Hitting “reply” to an unsolicited e-mail when asking to be taken off the sender’s list. By hitting “reply” you may be opening up your account to a deluge of spam. Hitting “reply all” when only the sender needs a response. Does everyone really need to know your reply? Think before you reply, especially if the e-mail was sent to a very large group. Forwarding hoaxes or jokes. Most people get too much e-mail, and they would prefer a real note from you, not a hoary joke or, worse, a scaremongering urban legend or false charity scam. If something sounds too good (or too shocking) to be true, it probably is. Check the web for information before you send something on; www.snopes.com is a great site for checking stories. Sending an e-mail without a signature. It’s helpful to include at least your name and e-mail address at the bottom of your message, especially if you are e-mailing someone for the first time. Don’t use a vCard (virtual business card). It may be mistaken for a virus. Sending an e-mail without spell-checking it. Most e-mail systems spell-check as you type or have a “spell-check before sending” setting. Sending large files or pictures. Don’t clog up your recipient’s mailbox—ask before sending big files. Sending e-mail without a “subject” line or with a vague subject line. Be specific.A subject that reads “Looking forward to dinner Saturday!” will get more attention than one that reads “hi” or “see you soon?” A blank subject line may get no attention at all.
Ten Great Computer Games You Should (or Maybe Shouldn’t) Know
Authors: Pournelle Jerry
Published: November 2020

Computers aren’t just for writing letters, calculating how much money you’ve lost in the stock market, or e-mailing the entire family about the cancer-stricken boy who is collecting business cards (or is it get-well cards?). No, computers also have a more useful purpose—gaming. Here are ten games that you can waste many hours of your life playing. Tetris (http://www.tetris.com)—Polygons fall from the sky. Make rows of bricks out of the polygons. Repeat. Simple. . .until the polygons are dropping so fast you have less than second to find a place for the current piece and the incomplete rows start building up. . .game over. So you play again. . .you’re addicted. Simple enough for a three year old to play, yet so baffling that the kid will probably outscore you. University students have turned high-rise buildings into giant Tetris games, the record holder being a 15 story academic tower in the Netherlands. Solitaire (probably on your computer right now)—Along with Minesweeper and Hearts, this is how we wasted time at work in the days before we had Internet access at our desks and could check scores on ESPN’s Web site all day. Civilization I/II/III (http://www.civ3.com/)—A sandbox for your Napoleon complex. Start from the Iron Age and lead your people into the nuclear age by investing in scientific research and exploring new terrain. Make friends with other civilizations, or roll your tanks right up to their doorsteps. Deus Ex (http://www.deusex.com/)—Like other first-person shooter games (such as Doom and Quake), this game is gory and not for kids. Unlike Doom and Quake, you don’t have to shoot everything that moves to win. Stealth, non-lethal methods of neutralizing the enemy, and an open mind will get you through this game of near-future intrigue. Everquest (http://everquest.station.sony.com/)—The most well known MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). Dungeons and Dragons players no longer have to leave their house and interact with real people. This is probably the only game on this list given as a reason for divorce.
Community Schools from a Lead Agency Administrator’s Perspective
Authors: Negrón Richard
Published: November 2020

I first heard of the concept of community schools in 1987 while attending a briefing on a community assessment of the Washington Heights/Inwood neighborhood. The survey had been conducted to help The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) determine what levels of services were needed in the community and whether it made sense for the agency to provide them. At this presentation I was immediately struck by the idea of working in a deep partnership with a public school to improve outcomes for children and their families; this concept of community schools seemed so simple, so fundamental, yet at the same time so powerful that I thought, How could anyone be against this? Armed with this belief, I arrived at Intermediate School (IS) 218 in the summer of 1992 as the community school director of CAS’s first community school. Little did I know that my first full year as director would prove to be the most difficult, overwhelming, and at times downright humbling experience in my career. Having survived those first few years, I now have the luxury of looking back and pinpointing some of the challenges—and there were many. First and foremost, CAS and the school knew that we needed somehow to put into practice the concept of collaboration and partnership, but no one understood what that involved. We all soon realized that we were defining what it meant to be a community school as we went along. Another issue I faced was my relationship with the principal. How was I supposed to interact with him? Was he my boss? Did he have a final say on matters? Who was in charge? And what would happen when we disagreed? Still another challenge was posed by the multiple constituents in the school, from the custodian to the school safety officers, from kitchen personnel to the teachers, students, and their parents. What was my role with respect to them, and what credibility and authority did I have in dealing with all these different groups? In other words, who was I, and why should any of them listen to me? While trying to cope with these questions, I also had to ensure the successful delivery of services to virtually the entire student population (approximately 1,400 students), their families, and neighborhood residents.
Reaching Out to Create a Movement
Authors: Blank Martin J.
Published: November 2020

In 1997, after their community school concepts received a cold shoulder at a school reform conference, Joy Dryfoos, C. Warren “Pete” Moses, and Ira Harkavy knew it was time for action. All three had been deeply involved in creating new school-community relationships. Joy Dryfoos had helped call national attention to the overlapping needs that put one of every four children at risk; her 1994 book Full-Service Schools outlined a community school approach to help meet those needs. As chief operating officer of The Children’s Aid Society (CAS), Pete Moses, together with CAS’s chief executive officer, Philip Coltoff, had helped bring the resources of one of New York City’s oldest child welfare agencies directly into neighborhood schools as part of a comprehensive educational approach. Ira Harkavy, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Community Partnerships, was creating opportunities for University of Pennsylvania students and faculty to work with, and learn from, students and residents in Philadelphia schools, using the community as a resource. All three knew from experience that community schools offered an effective strategy for building strong schools, strong families, and strong communities and that these were essential for learning. The group began thinking about how to jump-start a community school movement. After a second meeting a few weeks later, they were convinced that more like-minded people needed to be involved. They decided to hold a Community Schools Forum at Fordham University and invited about 30 people they thought would be interested. When 125 participants showed up, they knew they were on to something. This chapter tells how that experience helped launch the Coalition for Community Schools and its drive to put community schools at the center of a twenty-first-century education-reform agenda. In 1997 a “coalition for community schools” was a new idea, but community schools were not. Part of what drew so many to the Fordham summit was the opportunity to give new voice to time-tested approaches to connecting school and community and, participants hoped, to use them more broadly to address current concerns. John Dewey, whose ideas helped create community schools, observed that “the true starting point of history is always some present situation with its problems.”
The Global Green Bean and Other Tales of Madness
Authors: Freidberg Susanne
Published: November 2020

The last years of the 20th century were tough times for selling food to Europeans. The competition was fierce, the rules uncertain, and the retail markets picky. It was not just that huge supermarket chains had come to dominate food retailing, and to demand products conforming to ever-higher standards of convenience and aesthetic quality; these trends were common across the industrialized world. In addition, they demanded that the suppliers of those products— farmers and manufacturers, but also a range of intermediaries—meet standards of hygiene and accountability that were unimaginable twenty, even ten years earlier. The supermarkets wanted assurances that none of their products would set off another food scare; too many had already shaken European consumers’ faith in the supermarkets’ increasingly globalized offerings. On the supermarket shelves, these assurances might appear as new labels or packaging, if they appeared at all. What consumers largely did not see was the work that went into providing them with food as certifiably pure as it was pretty. This work took place on farms and in packhouses; in consultants’ offices and corporate boardrooms; in activists’ meetings and chemical analysts’ laboratories. It demanded long flights, short deadlines, and nonstop vigilance. Above all, the work of assuring the overall goodness of globalized food required all kinds of people and things to deal with each other in new ways, and often across great distances. In this sense, it transformed the social relationships of food provisioning on both an interpersonal and transcontinental scale. This book explores how these changes took shape within two fresh vegetable trades, or commodity networks, linking two Sub-Saharan African countries to their former European colonial powers. The francophone network brings Burkina Faso’s green beans to France, while the anglophone network brings an assortment of prepackaged fresh vegetables from Zambia to the United Kingdom. Broadly similar in some ways, they differ radically in others, including the ways that they experienced Europe’s late twentieth-century food scares. By exploring the history of these differences and how they are sustained and transformed in specific places, practices, and social institutions, I hope to illuminate the relationship between culture and power in globalized food provisioning.
My Life in School
Authors: Parini Jay
Published: November 2020

For over 30 years I’ve made a life of teaching. Now that I’m within sight of the end of this occupation, or preoccupation, I find it alluring to think about what I did or didn’t accomplish, what I might have done better, what I might like to do in the years left to me in the classroom. I find myself thinking, too, about my early teachers, wondering what they taught me, and what I found useful—or definitely unhelpful—in their examples. Having become aware of how little decent writing exists on the art of teaching, I’ve got some hope that my reflections will help those at the beginning of their work in the profession. It still seems odd to me that I wound up in teaching. As a student in high school and college, I often felt that a teacher was someone who got between me and my reading. I used to believe that teachers unfairly attempted to control the nature and pace of my work, my rate and quality of retention, the ultimate direction of my thoughts. I considered these things private matters, and still do. (If a book was listed on a syllabus, I naturally veered away from it, not toward it.) Fortunately for me, a few teachers seemed different from the rest. They were genuinely and deeply interested in what they taught, and I knew they would be focused on the material before them even if the class suddenly dissolved before their eyes. This material, this subject, was their life. And they never tried to control my thinking; rather, they led me with considerable subtlety in directions I found challenging, if not always congenial. In short, for reasons too difficult to explain, or impossible to explain, I needed a light touch, and they provided it. I was always suspicious of the classroom as a testing ground for intelligence, a place for sorting the “good” from the “bad” students. The idea of the academic world as a place of competition repelled me. To be frank, it still does, and I never feel happy with students or colleagues who seem excessively interested in grading, in putting up barriers to jump across.
The Teaching Life
Authors: Parini Jay
Published: November 2020

Nobody just walks into a classroom and begins to teach without some consideration of self-presentation, much as nobody sits down to write a poem, an essay, or a novel without considering the voice behind the words, its tone and texture, and the traditions of writing within a particular genre. Voice is everything in literature, playing in the mind of the writer, the ear of the reader; the search for authenticity in that voice is the writer’s work of a lifetime. What I want to suggest here is that teachers, like writers, also need to invent and cultivate a voice, one that serves their personal needs as well as the material at hand, one that feels authentic. It should also take into account the nature of the students who are being addressed, their background in the subject and their disposition as a class, which is not always easy to gauge. It takes a good deal of time, as well as experimentation, to find this voice, in teaching as in writing. For the most part, the invention of a teaching persona is a fairly conscious act. Teachers who are unconscious of their teaching self might get lucky; that is, they might adopt or adapt something familiar—a manner, a voice—that actually works in the classroom from the beginning. Dumb luck happens. But most of the successful teachers I have known have been deeply aware that their selfpresentation involves, or has involved at some point, the donning of a mask. This taking on of a mask, or persona (from the Latin word implying that a voice is something discovered by “sounding through” a mask, as in per/sona), is no simple process. It involves artifice, and the art of teaching is no less complicated than any other art form. It is not something “natural,” i.e., “found in nature.” A beginning teacher will have to try on countless masks before finding one that fits, that seems appropriate, that works to organize and embody a teaching voice. In most cases, a teacher will have a whole closet full of masks to try on for size.
A Goodness-of-Fit Ethic for Informed Consent to Pediatric Cancer Research
Authors: Fisher Celia B. , Masty Jessica K.
Published: November 2020

The ethics of informed consent in pediatric cancer research are unique. First, unlike medical care for most other diseases of childhood, the majority of children with cancer receive treatment through participation in pediatric oncology research or in hospital settings in which such research is actively conducted (Ablett & Pinkerton, 2003; Aleksa & Koren, 2002; Bleyer, 2002; Ross, Severson, Pollock, & Robison, 1996). Second, for children with newly diagnosed cancers, decisions regarding entry into a clinical protocol typically occur soon after the family is informed about the initial diagnosis. Thus, in many instances consent to research participation occurs during one of the most stressful periods in a family’s life. Third, because treatment decisions must be made very quickly after the initial diagnosis, there may be little opportunity for patients or parents to understand or accept the nature of the disease at the time their consent to research participation is sought. Like other diseases of childhood for which treatments found efficacious for adults may be ineffective or toxic, the absence of pediatric research can deprive pediatric cancer patients of empirically valid therapies. Patient advocates and pediatric oncologists view the imperative of conducting pediatric cancer research with particular urgency because of the life-threatening nature of the disease and the adverse, and sometimes permanent, side effects of many current treatments. Thus, because the cancer patient’s immediate treatment needs are so entwined with the research imperative, a fourth unique aspect of informed consent to pediatric oncology research is that treatment and research goals may be blurred not only by patients and parents but also by investigators, clinicians, and other care providers (Kodish et al., 1998). Interpreting broadly worded federal regulations governing research involving children also provides challenges for developing patient- and family-appropriate consent procedures for pediatric oncology research. In most instances, federal regulations require that adequate provisions be made for soliciting the permission of parents/guardians and the child’s assent (the child’s affirmative agreement to participate in research) prior to conducting research involving children (Department of Health and Human Services, 2001, 45 CFR 46.408; Food and Drug Administration [FDA] 2001, 21 CFR 50.55).
A Flash of Blue Light
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

Some places are just a place. Some places are a journey. Three days out of Vladivostok, the westbound Number One train lumbers across the Siberian outback like a team of driven oxen. The train’s nineteen hulking, crimson and blue cars creak and groan as they throw themselves forward at speeds not much different than when this track was hacked through half a continent of nearly impenetrable forest and bog in the days of the last tsars a hundred years ago. Three days aboard this beast-machine has gotten us deep into Russia, beyond a hundred ragged towns with names like Obluche, Zilovo, Spassk-Dalny, and Shimanovskaia, nearly every one of which, it seems, was established as a gateway to the mines and prisons of the tsars’ exile system or of the Soviet Gulag, and which generations later still seem more outposts than towns. Clusters of log homes and cabbage patches line the tracks, ashen concrete apartment blocks rise beyond, and doleful bands of kerchiefed women at each station peddle pirozhki and salted fish, unshelled pine nuts in newspaper cones, and hard-boiled eggs cradled in baby carriages. All are thinly tethered to Mother Russia by the lace curtains and flowers in every window, the stubbornly proud train stations, and these two thin steel rails. We’re three days deep into Siberia and, it seems, no place at all. Brown fields spread from the outskirts of the settlements, blotted at random intervals by abandoned and half-collapsed factories, and through the emptiness between passes an almost unchanging plain coursed by wandering rivers and deep thickets of dark pine and fir, wispy white birches, and larches glowing a brazen yellow. Dawn this morning revealed the regional capital of Ulan-Ude, the latest in a string of sullen cities of cinder blocks and smokestacks. This afternoon will bring us to the tarnished old imperial city of Irkutsk, first settled in the seventeenth century and later the destination of some of the luckier of the tsars’ exiles. We’re 3,700 kilometers west of the Pacific, 5,500 kilometers east of Moscow, 250 kilometers north of Mongolia, and south of nowhere.
Traveling and Staying Home
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

“I have not tested this—it is secret recipe!” Sergei Filippov says, as he tends to a pot of what look like meatballs simmering on his small stove, and his kitchen fills with their aroma. “I don’t know if it will be any good. If not, we will have fish!” There are seventeen kinds of fish in the Barguzin River, Sergei tells me, and he has three varieties on hand tonight, in case his secret beef recipe fails to please. “Omul, sig, and—how do you say in English?—carp? I cook often. My wife is a teacher, she works a lot. I like to cook, but not all the time!” Sergei may well be the only person in his town who speaks more than a few words of English, and he didn’t learn it in school. He’s taught himself. “I began to learn English from an American friend of mine,” Sergei says. “Patricia. She came to stay with us. She did not speak Russian. I did not speak English. We began writing to each other, in both languages, side by side, on one piece of paper.” Sergei’s round face and wavy, dark hair carry hints of both Buryat and Russian, but mostly they carry a warm smile and a soft and welcoming demeanor not immediately found in many of his countrymen. He’s the first Russian I’ve met whom I felt immediately drawn to. We’ve come fifty kilometers up the Barguzin River from Baikal to stay with Sergei and his wife, Tania, here in the town of Barguzin. Through Andrei, we’re paying them for dinner, breakfast, and a night’s lodging in their small apartment. But I get the feeling that if he could afford it, Sergei might pay us for the visit. Sergei’s world barely even reaches Baikal, much less far beyond. But in this tiny town, he is a traveler. A few times a year, Andrei arrives with people like us, from America, Europe, Japan. And with each visit, Sergei’s world expands as he learns a bit more about life beyond Barguzin, beyond Baikal, beyond Russia.
Concepts of null correlation
Authors: Pawlowsky-Glahn Vera , Olea Richardo A.
Published: November 2020

Concepts of null correlation for r-compositions are discussed in this chapter, following the methodology developed by J. Aitchison for the statistical analysis of compositional data. This will be combined with G. Matheron’s theory of regionalized variables. These concepts are to be understood in the sense of absence de correlation différée (absence of deferred correlation), as defined by Matheron (1965). Concepts of null correlation are important not only for spatial-structure analysis of r-compositions, but also for simulation of phenomena that can be described by the use of r-compositions. The intrinsic analogue to the definitions of null correlation in the secondorder stationary case is carried out in parallel in this chapter because the relation between them is of special interest. All of the following concepts depend in general on the length of the vector h and also on its direction and sign, that is, they can be defined depending on the length, or set of lengths, and the direction, or set of directions, of h, or both. Therefore, as in Chapter 3, statements will be made for h Î H, where H stands for a set of vectors with specified range of directions and range of lengths. Here, for example, H may contain all possible directions and lengths for h, except h = 0; in this case, statements will be valid only in a spatial sense, but not in a standard nonspatial sense.
Introduction
Authors: Graham Patricia Albjerg
Published: November 2020

Schools in America have danced to different drummers during their long history. Sometimes the drumbeat demanded rigidity in all programs; sometimes it wanted academic learning for only a few. Sometimes it encouraged unleashing children’s creativity, not teaching them facts. Sometimes it wanted children to solve the social problems, such as racial segregation, adults could not handle. Sometimes it tacitly supported some schools as warehouses, not instructional facilities. Sometimes it sought schooling to be the equalizer in a society in which the gap between rich and poor was growing. Sometimes the principal purpose of schooling seemed to be teaching citizenship and developing habits of work appropriate for a democratic society, while at other times its purpose seemed to be preparation for employment, which needed the same habits of work but also some academic skills. Now, the drumbeat demands that all children achieve academically at a high level and the measure of that achievement is tests. The rhythm and tempo of the drumbeats have shifted relatively frequently, but the schools have not adjusted to the new musical scores with alacrity. They are typically just beginning to master the previous drummers’ music when new drummers appear. Many, though not all, of the new beats have been improvements both for the children and for the nation. All drummers have sought literacy in English for American children, though very modest literacy levels have been acceptable in the past. Drummers have always sought a few students who attained high levels of academic achievement, including children from disparate social, economic, and racial backgrounds. Beyond that consensus, however, what we have wanted from schooling has changed dramatically over time. These expectations for schools typically have been expressed through criticisms—often virulent—of current school practices, and the responses that followed inevitably were slower and less complete than the most ardent critics demanded. These are the shifting assignments given to schools. The following chapters of this book describe these shifting assignments given to schools and then to colleges during the last century: “Assimilation: 1900– 1920”; “Adjustment: 1920–1954”; “Access: 1954–1983”; and “Achievement: 1983–Present.”
Adjustment: 1920–1954
Authors: Graham Patricia Albjerg
Published: November 2020

World War I, according to President Woodrow Wilson and other sloganeers, made “the world safe for democracy.” Americans were largely spared the cataclysmic effects of the Great War endured by Europeans. Nonetheless, the national mood in the United States changed dramatically, and, as is so often the case, this shift in sentiments could be clearly discerned in new priorities for the school system, initially for children of welleducated and wealthy parents. Pundits proclaimed that assimilation had been achieved, although the practices associated with it faded only gradually over the next two decades and particularly persisted in schools serving immigrant and other low-income children. America in the 1920s experienced a period of growing wealth, considerable corporate and governmentally ignored greed, widespread racial and religious bigotry, and rapidly changing social mores, particularly for urbanites. In such a period, discussions about the national need for assimilation as a means of preserving the democracy seemed out of place. With so much change in the air, “adjustment” to the new times emerged as the new catchword. Many of the most salient events and practices of the post–World War I period (the Teapot Dome financial scandal, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the economic depression following the stock market crash of 1929) did not reflect well on the democracy Americans aspired to have. President Wilson might claim that the world was “safe for democracy,” but his piece of the world, the United States, did not admirably demonstrate it at the time. Nor, of course, did the new Soviet Russia, recently emerged both from incredible losses in World War I and from the yoke of the czars and now engaging in a different form of authoritarian rule. Germany, principal adversary of the Allies in World War I, entered the 1920s badly broken. The Germans attempted a new and ultimately unstable form of government before acquiescing to Hitler’s takeover in 1933, resulting in a devastating defeat of democracy. As the Roaring Twenties took off, American educators, always anxious to be au courant with what was expected of them, found their old priorities obsolete. Prescient school men recognized that the focus was shifting from schools serving a need defined by the nation (assimilation) to one defined by informed, ambitious, and often affluent parents seeking a more supportive school environment for their children and by newly articulate professors of education.
Conclusion
Authors: Graham Patricia Albjerg
Published: November 2020

How Well Have American Educational Institutions fulfilled their shifting assignments: assimilation, adjustment, access, achievement, and accountability? On the whole schools and colleges have delivered what Americans wanted but never as promptly or as completely as they wished. Impatience is a national trait, one to which policy people are particularly prone. Typically educational practice changes slowly, finally achieving the new objective after it is decades old. Furthermore, the reforms are usually only a partial implementation of the new idea, which often changes substantially the value of the innovation. Such sluggishness, while annoying to the reformers who want immediate results for their new idea, nonetheless insulates us from the dramatic swings of enthusiasm, such as education for cognition only or for self-esteem only, both necessary and thus both to be sought, but in a balance. Schools and colleges today principally justify their existence by how well they are preparing their students to participate in the economy. Most of the evidence they are inclined to present (or to hide) is based on indicators of student academic learning, an important, though inevitably partial, influence on one’s capacity to be productive in the economy. Two important elements are missing here. The first is whether participation in the economy is a sufficient justification for tax-supported education in a democracy. The second is whether measures of academic learning, most commonly tests, are broad enough indicators of what students have gained from their schooling. Traditionally the goals of education and the more specific task of schooling have been much broader than preparing workers for employment. Both in the United States and elsewhere, education has been seen as the means by which the older generation prepares the younger one to assume responsibilities of adulthood, a much wider role than simple employment. Public schools, especially in a democracy such as ours, have the primary institutional obligation to provide children with the academic skills—particularly literacy, numeracy, and an acquaintance with other disciplines, such as history, science, and the arts—to learn about the world in which they live. In addition, schools typically have had an important role in shaping youngsters’ traits and attitudes, such as their ingenuity, integrity, and capacity for hard work both individually and collectively.
The End of the Brown Era
Authors: Bell Derrick
Published: November 2020

The Emancipation Proclamation remains a positive moment in American history despite its mainly symbolic character. Brown v. Board of Education has achieved and will probably retain similar status. The three decades of campaigning to desegregate school systems, though, came to a less-than-exultant end. Black parents recognized long before their civil rights lawyers that the effort to racially balance the schools was not working. Desegregation plans were designed to provide a semblance of compliance with court orders while minimizing the burden on whites. Judges, many more conservative than their predeces­sors, found ways to declare the schools desegregated even in districts where the percentage of black children rose in the wake of white flight. Finally, the statistics on resegregation of once-nominally desegregated schools painfully underscores the fact that many black and Hispanic chil­dren are enrolled in schools as separate and probably more unequal than those their parents and grandparents attended under the era of “sepa­rate but equal.” Because the value of integrated schooling proved elusive, black parents and educators began looking for a more viable vehicle for their educa­tional goals. The search was opposed by those civil rights leaders who maintained that Brown could only be read to require an end to intentional discrimination against black children through their assignment to integrated schools. With an advocate’s hindsight, Robert Carter suggested that while Brown was fashioned on the theory that equal education and inte­grated education were one and the same thing, the goal was not integration but equal educational opportunity. If equal educational opportunity can be achieved without integration, Carter reasoned, Brown has been satisfied. In this, he parted company with those claiming that the inescapable conclusion of the Court’s decision in Brown is that racial separation is itself an injury, regardless of parity in the facilities. By the time of his article, Carter had been out of the civil rights movement for a dozen years, but he now supported those who focused on quality of education and challenged proponents of racial-balance remedies in the courts. When groups not committed to racial balance obtained a court order for educationally oriented forms of relief, they were often opposed by civil rights organizations committed to inte­gration, who intervened with more expertise and resources. This sometimes resulted in open confrontations between the NAACP and local blacks who favored plans oriented toward improving educational quality.
The Phanerozoic Carbon Cycle
Authors: Berner Robert A.
Published: November 2020

The term "carbon cycle" is normally thought to mean those processes that govern the present-day transfer of carbon between life, the atmosphere, and the oceans. This book describes another carbon cycle, one which operates over millions of years and involves the transfer of carbon between rocks and the combination of life, the atmosphere, and the oceans. The weathering of silicate and carbonate rocks and ancient sedimentary organic matter (including recent, large-scale human-induced burning of fossil fuels), the burial of organic matter and carbonate minerals in sediments, and volcanic degassing of carbon dioxide contribute to this cycle. In The Phanerozoic Carbon Cycle, Robert Berner shows how carbon cycle models can be used to calculate levels of atmospheric CO2 and O2 over Phanerozoic time, the past 550 million years, and how results compare with independent methods. His analysis has implications for such disparate subjects as the evolution of land plants, the presence of giant ancient insects, the role of tectonics in paleoclimate, and the current debate over global warming and greenhouse gases