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Scientists have been aware that soils can accumulate mercury for a while, but according to Schuster, nobody had systemically tried to estimate the amount naturally-occurring mercury locked in permafrost. His new study, which included collaborators at roughly a dozen institutions and was partially funded by both NOAA an...
The scientists picked 13 locations in Alaska along a north-south transect spanning about 500 km (310 miles) and representing a range of different permafrost types. At each site, they drilled cores down to about a meter’s depth and analyzed the carbon and mercury content in the frozen soil. Extrapolating these numbers o...
What’s more, the authors estimate that the total mercury trapped in permafrost regions—in both frozen and non-frozen soils—is 1,656 gigagrams, making these regions the largest such reservoir on Earth.
There’s much more work to be done—the error bars on the authors’ estimates are pretty big, which isn’t surprising given they were attempting to estimate a global number based on measurements from 13 different sites in Alaska. To reduce that uncertainty, they need a lot more samples from different parts of the world. Sc...
The other next step is figuring out how much mercury is actually released, into both atmosphere and local waterways, as permafrost thaws—which it is most definitely doing. In thawed soils and water, certain microorganisms will transform elemental mercury into methyl mercury, a potent neurotoxin that can bio-accumulate ...
As Schuster pointed out, additional mercury release from permafrost soils could pose a serious problem for subsistence communities, including Alaskan Natives, who get most of their calories through hunting, fishing, and foraging. He says he’s been approached by elders from Native villages about mercury in fish, and tha...
“Mercury is already an issue in the food supply [of people living in the Arctic], because it accumulates in the meat of certain fish that people depend on for food,” and in mushrooms that people like to gather, Griffith said.
There are still a lot of unknowns, but if this paper is any indication, mercury in permafrost is an issue that deserves more attention. Griffith noted that based on the new study’s estimates, if even a small fraction of the mercury locked away in permafrost were to thaw, “that’s on order with what humans have mobilized...
Why Is Greenland's Ice Sheet Covered in Industrial Waste-Chowing Bacteria?
Nobel Prize laureate says Israel must learn it will never get security through fences, walls and guns.
"The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns," Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa told Haaretz Thursday.
Commenting on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's statement in Germany Thursday that the lesson of the Holocaust is that Israel should always defend itself, Tutu noted that "in South Africa, they tried to get security from the barrel of a gun. They never got it. They got security when the human rights of all were recog...
The Nobel Prize laureate spoke to Haaretz in Jerusalem as the organization The Elders concluded its tour of Israel and the West Bank. He said the West was consumed with guilt and regret toward Israel because of the Holocaust, "as it should be."
"But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians."
He also slammed Jewish organizations in the United States, saying they intimidate anyone who criticizes the occupation and rush to accuse these critics of anti-Semitism. Tutu recalled how such organizations pressured U.S. universities to cancel his appearances on their campuses.
"That is unfortunate, because my own positions are actually derived from the Torah. You know God created you in God's image. And we have a God who is always biased in favor of the oppressed."
Tutu also commented on the call by Ben-Gurion University professor Neve Gordon to apply selective sanctions on Israel.
"I always say to people that sanctions were important in the South African case for several reasons. We had a sports boycott, and since we are a sports-mad country, it hit ordinary people. It was one of the most psychologically powerful instruments.
"Secondly, it actually did hit the pocket of the South African government. I mean, when we had the arms embargo and the economic boycott."
He said that when F.W. de Klerk became president he telephoned congratulations. "The very first thing he said to me was 'well now will you call off sanctions?' Although they kept saying, oh well, these things don't affect us at all. That was not true.
"And another important reason was that it gave hope to our people that the world cared. You know. That this was a form of identification."
Earlier in the day, Tutu and the rest of the delegation visited the village of Bil'in, where protests against the separation fence, built in part on the village's land, take place every week.
"We used to take our children in Swaziland and had to go through border checkpoints in South Africa and face almost the same conduct, where you're at the mercy of a police officer. They can decide when they're going to process you and they can turn you back for something inconsequential. But on the other hand, we didn'...
He said the activists in Bil'in reminded him of Ghandi, who managed to overthrow British rule in India by nonviolent means, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who took up the struggle of a black woman who was too tired to go to the back of a segregated bus.
He stressed his belief that no situation was hopeless, praising the success of the Northern Irish peace process. The process was mediated by Senator George Mitchell, who now serves as the special U.S. envoy to the Middle East.
Asked about the controversy in Petah Tikva, where several elementary schools have refused to receive Ethiopian school children, Tutu said that "I hope that your society will evolve."
The WWL Sports Team gets ready for the game in the Mercedes Benz Super Dome against the Arizona Cardinals.
From a -- standpoint I just haven't that swagger. Everything that you need -- coach being talked about that and that's lightning -- so important. I can remember and -- 1991. We start out we know we want NFC west. When that -- eleven -- five. I actually believe you went today we should take care of business though Monda...
Canadian actor Hayden Christensen played Padawan Anakin Skywalker in episodes two and three of the Star Wars movie series by George Lucas. (The character of Skywalker goes on to become the villain Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of Sith and apprentice to the evil Emperor Palpatine). Christensen grew up in Toronto, Ontario a...
He is no relation to Traffic actress Erika Christensen.
All new Admire Swadesh comes with a 5-inch display screen and also comes equipped with multimedia services and features allowing users to access apps from Zen Mobiles Ultrastore.
Zen Mobile, the Indian Smartphone manufacturer, today introduced Admire Swadesh, with 5-inch Display screen and 5MP AF Rear camera with flash, a new addition to their Zeneration 4G Smartphone portfolio. The newly launched 4G Smartphone has 22 regional languages integrated into the device to cater to the consumers acros...
All new Admire Swadesh comes with a 5-inch display screen and also comes equipped with multimedia services and features allowing users to access apps from Zen Mobiles Ultrastore. Powered by 1.3 GHz quad core processor, the device comes with 1GB RAM and 8GB ROM, expandable up to 32GB MMC support. Zen Mobile has also add...
Admire Swadesh has the Swalekh Keyboard and connectivity options like 4G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It comes pre-installed with 22 different Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi to name a few. It allows the user to experience the multiple languages while typing, making it a pe...
The 2000 mAh power house battery gives users up to 30 hours standby.
The Admire Swadesh will be available in Champaign & Blue colors.
In stark contrast to other blockbuster films, a new study shows that much of Wonder Woman's success was due to female and older audience members. When it comes to superhero movies, audiences tend to skew young and male. Though older audiences, families, and female moviegoers come out in large amounts, men aged 18–25 te...
Though the DCEU has scored big at the box office with their previous three films, Wonder Woman has blown them out of the water in domestic tickets sales. Even more impressive, critics have showered the film in praise. Though it features some familiar beats, the movie's focus on hope, optimism, and a powerful female lea...
Variety published the results of a new study focusing on the demographics of Wonder Woman's audience and some interesting data has emerged. For one, the film has managed to become the only tentpole film to reach parity between male and female audiences, outshining even The Force Awakens. With the average superhero film...
Along with the increase in female audience members, the data also shows an above average amount of viewers over 50. As word of mouth spread for Wonder Woman, more and more older audience members came out. Likewise, there was an increase in families seeing the film and infrequent moviegoers (described as those who only ...
All told, this data not only highlights Wonder Woman's appeal to a variety of audiences, but the film's rare ability to gain new viewers over time. While each new week of the film's release naturally saw a drop off, the numbers show it was far less than a typical tentpole. Even then, it was mostly a decrease of young m...
With Hollywood executives continually making excuses for why women can't lead action films and tentpoles, this data is yet another nail in that coffin. Not only have most female-led blockbusters done well at the box office, but movies like Wonder Woman actively attract audiences that usually shun superhero and genre fi...
As Wonder Woman is still in theaters, we'll likely learn more about its continued success in the weeks to come so stay tuned.
Shortly after the Lab released my recent pamphlet on the structure of the literary canon, New York magazine ran an article about the 21st century canon, in which a panel of judges pick an early version of the literary canon from the century so far. The structure of their canon is a list, approximately 100 books publish...
The basic idea behind the pamphlet is that literature becomes canonical in a variety of ways, and a structure like a list can’t always capture the complexity of the canon as we actually encounter it. The two metrics I picked to remedy this are designed to show us an arrangement of the canon based on things that academi...
I think my version of popularity applies pretty smoothly to the New York list: I use the number of ratings each author has on Goodreads, basically an index of how many users have interacted with the author at all. Prestige is much trickier. In the pamphlet I use the number of academic articles that feature each writer ...
There’s one other major difference between the New York canon and the one I use in the pamphlet. They chose books; I worked with authors. Since I was trying to cover a wide variety of genres over a very long time span, authors made life a lot easier; Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Hurston struck me as somewhat more compar...
Joyce is extremely prestigious, albeit with most of the criticism about him allocated to one book. Austen is substantially less prestigious, but much more popular; modern Goodreads users still love Pride and Prejudice (even in comparison with today’s novels). Dickens as he appears here has achieved Austen-like canonici...
After all of that preface, let’s get to the results for the New York canon. We can start with Figure 2, which uses non-logarithmic axes in order to make the outliers clear.
Readers are very familiar with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which is beating every other book depicted here by over one million ratings (none of the others even has one million ratings). Meanwhile, W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is, by a pretty sizable margin, the most prestigious book, having netted 258 academic articles. The...
Turning to a logarithmic depiction, in Figure 3, gives us a clearer picture of the overall structure of this canon.
The gray lines here reflect the median values for both prestige and popularity. It’s immediately clear that most of these books have received fairly little academic attention, even when we think of them as pretty prestigious. Leaving the Atocha Station, for instance, is highly regarded (it was widely praised and won so...
This is in part a function of time, for the reasons mentioned above. As Figure 4 shows us, the MLA number is highly contingent on the book’s publication date.
In fact, this effect is even more pronounced than I expected: The big drop-off starts ten years ago. This points to another major (and, I suppose, obvious) difference between academic thinking about literature and that of an institution like New York magazine. In an English department, most people work on old literatur...
There’s a conspicuous absence in the graphs so far, however, and addressing it helps to close that gap quite a bit. The New York editors included several book series in their list, like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels or N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. I didn’t include those in the images above, because I wasn’...
In prestige terms, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (part of her MaddAddam trilogy) is the big addition, coming in third overall. But an even more striking story is clearly Harry Potter. I’ll admit that when I first heard about the New York article, Harry Potter was my first thought—inspired, most likely, by J.K. Rowli...
Oddly enough, the New York panel almost didn’t include them. They divided their list into four tiers: Best Book of the Century (So far); 12 New Classics; The High Canon (books chosen by at least two panelists); and The Rest. The first tier only contained one book, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (no relation), which is...
Perhaps as a result of motivations like these, the Harry Potter series made the last tier, meaning, I suppose, that only one person picked it. Could this be a prestige problem? Perhaps; I recall presenting my earlier Pop/Pres data for a French audience, and most of them scoffed at the prospect that any French academic ...
Of course, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone came out in 1997, early for this canon; but there’s another factor to consider, too, the one that kept me from including series in the original images. The Potter titles sum to 137 MLA articles—respectable, but less than Austerlitz, The Road, or Oryx and Cr...
Nonetheless, in prestige as in popularity, Rowling is crushing it. Figure 6 is an attempt to depict each series as a single collective point; it receives the sum of the Goodreads ratings for each constituent book, plus whichever MLA score is higher between A) summing the individual volumes or B) looking up the series a...
If you’re like me, the fun part of all this is speculating about how this canon will age. What will the literary scholars of 2118 make of this period, or this list? I have my non-quantitative opinions, of course, often about things that didn’t make the New York list. I also don’t think this way of measuring canonicity ...
Still, I think we can take some positive signals from what we see here. Austerlitz is in great shape; this accords pretty well with my sense of Sebald’s uptake among academics. It may also be noteworthy that he made this list in spite of writing in another language; there are only a few such cases here. That could be a...
And of course there’s Harry Potter; I think those novels are already in, for the same reason Sherlock Holmes made it one hundred years earlier. At a certain point, you’re so popular that people can’t avoid talking about you, even if only to try and understand your popularity. If you look back at Figure 3, the New York ...
Note that the link is to Vulture rather than to New York per se (the two are connected in some corporate structure or another). It’s tempting to call this the “Vulture Canon”, but I first encountered it in the print version of New York magazine, and I like the way “New York” suggests the world of professional writers/...
It’s a little more difficult to look up books than authors, since titles often consist of common words (e.g., Ali Smith’s How to Be Both). Minor differences also matter more at this scale than they did in the pamphlet—being off by two articles is more significant for a book with 10, in comparison with an author who ha...
You can read Manshel’s article here.
The Corrections came out in 2001, and one of the Coetzee novels (Boyhood) is also from 1997, so Rowling doesn’t have that much of a head start over those two.
Readers of the pamphlet may notice that this is about 50% more articles than Rowling had as a whole in that data. That’s because that data was a few years old; the information in this post was collected in October 2018.
Here’s a self-indulgent footnote: I’d have included Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem trilogy.
In general, non-novel genres suffered here, probably because they don’t attain their peak audiences or critical attention through the book format. Frederick Seidel and Fred Moten are trapped in the least canonical quadrant, but that doesn’t mean much about their poems. And for my money Anne Carson seems destined for e...
A viscount has been jailed for 12 weeks after offering money on Facebook for someone to kill Brexit campaigner Gina Miller.
The 50-year-old wrote the comment just four days after Ms Miller won a landmark High Court challenge against the Government last year.
He was convicted at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court of two counts of sending menacing messages on a public electronic communications network.
The other post Philipps was convicted for was in response to a news article about an immigrant and his children.
A five-year restraining order was also placed against Philipps in order to “protect” Ms Miller, along with Arnold Sube, the immigrant he abused online, and Matthew Steeples, who informed Ms Miller about the racist material.
Senior district judge Emma Arbuthnot ordered the recently bankrupt Philipps to pay £500 compensation, noting that he is of limited means.
She gave him six months to pay up and warned she would send the bailiffs to his home if he did not comply. A £115 surcharge was imposed and Philipps was ordered to pay costs of £250.
The judge told Philipps that he had “tried and failed to justify the racist abuse” by saying that Ms Miller plus Mr Sube and his family deserved the language because they were immigrants.
The judge told him: “You told me proudly in evidence that your family motto is ‘Love of Country’ and that is your motivation, but it seems to me on the evidence I have seen that you are not motivated by love of country, but by your hatred of anybody who has different views to yours and to any who have recently arrived ...
Christians; do us and Christendom a favor and avoid these arguments (part 8).
Christians, do us and Christendom a favor. Avoid these arguments (part 15).
The Modal Ontological Argument? It Needs a Good Thrashing.
The Burlington School District's leader is calling on the School Board to review one of their member's activities.
The Burlington School District's leader is calling on the School Board to review one of their member's activities following the revelation of "sexist, racist and ethnocentric" Facebook posts, according to a news release from the district.
School Board Commissioner David Kirk stirred up controversy this week when parents flagged content he had posted that they felt was racist, bigoted and xenophobic. He apologized on Wednesday for his posts and said they were not reflective of who he is.
"Although these were private communications and are not related to Burlington School District work, the role of school board commissioner holds a high responsibility in our Burlington community. This incident is a distraction to the vital work the Board is leading, and in particular its work and commitment to an equita...
Obeng invited Kirk to withdraw from board business so the board could have space to review Kirk's actions.
Kirk did not respond to a request for comment on Friday afternoon.
The images and comments posted on Facebook are sexist, racist and ethnocentric. To be clear, these messages are not congruent with the Equity and Inclusion principles of the District and undermine the District's work towards creating an accepting and inclusive climate for our schools and community.
Although these were private communications and are not related to Burlington School District work, the role of school board commissioner holds a high responsibility in our Burlington community.This incident is a distraction to the vital work the Board is leading, and in particular its work and commitment to an equitabl...
This story was first posted online on Oct. 21, 2016.
“Little John” dwarf bottlebrush (Callistemon citrinus “Little John”) originated in Australia and grows as an evergreen shrub in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 8 through 11. This dwarf bush grows slowly to 3 feet tall spreading 5 feet wide. Dens branches covered with blue-green needle-like leaves f...
Pour water in the top of the container until it runs out the bottom a couple of hours before planting the dwarf bottlebrush in the ground. Wet soil hangs onto the roots better than dry soil.
Remove the sod, weeds and debris from an area with good-draining soil located in full sun exposure. This shrub prefers sandy soil, but adapts to most soil types except heavy soil. If drainage is a problem, consider creating a raised bed 8 to 12 inches deep.
Dig a hole with a shovel twice as wide as the root ball and just as deep. Scrape the bottom and sides of the hole with the edge of the shovel to prevent soil compaction, which will trap the roots in the hole. Break up the large clumps of dirt in the pile of removed soil.
Remove the “Little John” dwarf bottlebrush plant from its container, keeping most of the soil packed around the roots. Untangle the roots around the edges of the root ball and set the root ball in the hole.
Pack soil around the root ball until half of the hole is filled. Check to make sure that the plant is straight and that the top of the root ball is set at ground level. Lightly tamp down the soil and finish filling the hole. Firm the soil around the plant so it stays in place.
Spread 2 to 3 inches of organic mulch around the base of the bush. Keep the mulch 2 to 3 inches away from the stem and rake it out beyond the drip line of the plant. Mulching retains soil moisture and adds slow-release nutrients to the soil. It also reduces the growth of weeds, which compete with the bush for moisture ...
Water the area directly over the root ball until the moisture reaches the roots. For the first summer, water the plant each week that it does not rain. Provide about 1 inch of water each time until the roots establish and new growth appears.
Carter, Karen. "How to Plant Little John Dwarf Bottlebrush Plants." Home Guides \| SF Gate, http://homeguides.sfgate.com/plant-little-john-dwarf-bottlebrush-plants-71522.html. Accessed 17 April 2019.

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