scholarly journals XPolaris: an R-package to retrieve United States soil data at 30-meter resolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luiz H. Moro Rosso ◽  
Andre F. de Borja Reis ◽  
Adrian A. Correndo ◽  
Ignacio A. Ciampitti

Abstract Objectives This data article aims to introduce the “XPolaris” R-package, designed to facilitate access to detailed soil data at any geographical location within the contiguous United States (CONUS). Without the need of advanced R-programming skills, XPolaris enables users to convert raster data from the POLARIS database into traditional spreadsheet format [i.e., Comma-Separated Values (CSV)] for further data analyses. Data description The core of this publication is a code-tutorial envisioned to assist users in retrieving soil raster data within the CONUS. All data is sourced from the POLARIS database, a 30-m probabilistic map of soil series and different soil properties [Chaney et al. Geoderma 274:54, 2016, Chaney et al. Water Resour Res 55:2916, 2019]. POLARIS represents an optimization of the Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database, circumventing issues of spatial disaggregation, harmonizing, and filling spatial gaps. POLARIS was constructed using a machine learning algorithm, the Disaggregation and Harmonisation of Soil Map Units Through Resampled Classification Trees (DSMART-HPC) [Odgers et al. Geoderma 214:91, 2014]. Although the data is easily accessible in a raster format, retrieving large amounts of data can be time-consuming or require advanced programming skills.

Author(s):  
Andrea Harris

The introduction presents the core historiographical problem that Making BalletAmerican aims to correct: the idea that George Balanchine’s neoclassical choreography represents the first successful manifestation of an “American” ballet. While this idea is pervasive in dance history, little scholarly attention has been paid to its construction. The introduction brings to light an alternative, more complex historical context for American neoclassical ballet than has been previously considered. It places Lincoln Kirstein’s 1933 trip to Paris, famous for bringing Balanchine to the United States, within a transnational and interdisciplinary backdrop of modernism, during a time when the global art world was shifting significantly in response to the international rise of fascism. This context reverberates throughout to the book’s examination of American ballet as a form that was embedded in and responsive to a changing set of social, cultural, and political conditions over the period covered, 1933–1963.


Author(s):  
Norman Schofield

A key concept of social choice is the idea of the Condorcet point or core. For example, consider a voting game with four participants so any three will win. If voters have Euclidean preferences, then the point at the center will be unbeaten. Earlier spatial models of social choice focused on deterministic voter choice. However, it is clear that voter choice is intrinsically stochastic. This chapter employs a stochastic model based on multinomial logit to examine whether parties in electoral competition tend to converge toward the electoral center or respond to activist pressure to adopt more polarized policies. The chapter discusses experimental results of the idea of the core explores empirical analyses of elections in Israel and the United States.


2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (Suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 1405.1-1406
Author(s):  
F. Morton ◽  
J. Nijjar ◽  
C. Goodyear ◽  
D. Porter

Background:The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) individually and collaboratively have produced/recommended diagnostic classification, response and functional status criteria for a range of different rheumatic diseases. While there are a number of different resources available for performing these calculations individually, currently there are no tools available that we are aware of to easily calculate these values for whole patient cohorts.Objectives:To develop a new software tool, which will enable both data analysts and also researchers and clinicians without programming skills to calculate ACR/EULAR related measures for a number of different rheumatic diseases.Methods:Criteria that had been developed by ACR and/or EULAR that had been approved for the diagnostic classification, measurement of treatment response and functional status in patients with rheumatoid arthritis were identified. Methods were created using the R programming language to allow the calculation of these criteria, which were incorporated into an R package. Additionally, an R/Shiny web application was developed to enable the calculations to be performed via a web browser using data presented as CSV or Microsoft Excel files.Results:acreular is a freely available, open source R package (downloadable fromhttps://github.com/fragla/acreular) that facilitates the calculation of ACR/EULAR related RA measures for whole patient cohorts. Measures, such as the ACR/EULAR (2010) RA classification criteria, can be determined using precalculated values for each component (small/large joint counts, duration in days, normal/abnormal acute-phase reactants, negative/low/high serology classification) or by providing “raw” data (small/large joint counts, onset/assessment dates, ESR/CRP and CCP/RF laboratory values). Other measures, including EULAR response and ACR20/50/70 response, can also be calculated by providing the required information. The accompanying web application is included as part of the R package but is also externally hosted athttps://fragla.shinyapps.io/shiny-acreular. This enables researchers and clinicians without any programming skills to easily calculate these measures by uploading either a Microsoft Excel or CSV file containing their data. Furthermore, the web application allows the incorporation of additional study covariates, enabling the automatic calculation of multigroup comparative statistics and the visualisation of the data through a number of different plots, both of which can be downloaded.Figure 1.The Data tab following the upload of data. Criteria are calculated by the selecting the appropriate checkbox.Figure 2.A density plot of DAS28 scores grouped by ACR/EULAR 2010 RA classification. Statistical analysis has been performed and shows a significant difference in DAS28 score between the two groups.Conclusion:The acreular R package facilitates the easy calculation of ACR/EULAR RA related disease measures for whole patient cohorts. Calculations can be performed either from within R or by using the accompanying web application, which also enables the graphical visualisation of data and the calculation of comparative statistics. We plan to further develop the package by adding additional RA related criteria and by adding ACR/EULAR related measures for other rheumatic disorders.Disclosure of Interests:Fraser Morton: None declared, Jagtar Nijjar Shareholder of: GlaxoSmithKline plc, Consultant of: Janssen Pharmaceuticals UK, Employee of: GlaxoSmithKline plc, Paid instructor for: Janssen Pharmaceuticals UK, Speakers bureau: Janssen Pharmaceuticals UK, AbbVie, Carl Goodyear: None declared, Duncan Porter: None declared


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Irus Braverman

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and disruptions among lives and matter in the West Bank, interpreting these through the lens of environmental justice. We finally ask what forms of ecological decolonization might emerge from this landscape of accumulating waste, concrete, and ruin. Such alternative visions that move beyond the single axis of settler-native enable the emergence of more nuanced, and even hopeful, ecological imaginaries that focus on sumud, dignity, and recognition.


Societies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Zeynep Correia

Airports are located at the core of the production process, but can they also be where the “revolutionary subject” is hidden? We know what airports stand for nowadays, but have we pushed for what they could possibly stand for? Can airports, as a form of urban technology, be reimagined beyond their current roles of a “space technology nexus” driving capital movement? Can we imagine, idealize, and locate them somewhere else in a period dominated by the economy of time, where speed and accessibility matter the most? In this framework, this provocative essay aims to frame airports as a protest and public expression venue. Drawing inspiration from recent examples, such as the Stansted Airport protests in the UK, the Occupy Airports protests that occurred all around the United States, and touching upon the divergent example of Turkey’s 15th of July night protests in 2016, I provide a glimpse of an alternative prospect for this key urban infrastructure.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julien Baerenzung ◽  
Matthias Holschneider

<p>We present a new high resolution model of the Geomagnetic field spanning the last 121 years. The model derives from a large set of data taken by low orbiting satellites, ground based observatories, marine vessels, airplane and during land surveys. It is obtained by combining a Kalman filter to a smoothing algorithm. Seven different magnetic sources are taken into account. Three of them are of internal origin. These are the core, the lithospheric  and the induced / residual ionospheric fields. The other four sources are of external origin. They are composed by a close, a remote and a fluctuating magnetospheric fields as well as a source associated with field aligned currents. The dynamical evolution of each source is prescribed by an auto regressive process of either first or second order, except for the lithospheric field which is assumed to be static. The parameters of the processes were estimated through a machine learning algorithm with a sample of data taken by the low orbiting satellites of the CHAMP and Swarm missions. In this presentation we will mostly focus on the rapid variations of the core field, and the small scale lithospheric field.  We will also discuss the nature of model uncertainties and the limitiations they imply.</p>


PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-47
Author(s):  
Mike Chasar

This essay uses the example of the long‐lived and popular Burma‐Shave advertising campaign to argue that literary critics should extend their attention to the vast amounts of poetry written for advertising purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Burma‐Shave campaign—which featured sequences of rhyming billboards erected along highways in the United States from 1926 to 1963—not only cultivated characteristics of literary and even avantgarde writing but effectively pressured that literariness into serving the commercial marketplace. At the same time, as the campaign's reception history shows, the spirit of linguistic play and innovation at the core of Burma‐Shave's poetry unintentionally distracted consumers' attention away from the commercial message and toward the creative forces of reading and writing poetry. A striking example of popular reading practices at work, this history shows how poetry created even in the most commercial contexts might resist the commodification that many twentieth‐century poets and critics feared. (MC)


Author(s):  
Eliyahu Stern

The idea of a Jewish body provides the background to understand the major Jewish migrations, the core features of modern Jewish politics, the transformation of Judaism as a religion and the role played by Jews in the Minority Rights Movement. Eastern European Jews’ immigration to the United States or Palestine as two sides of the same coin.


Dialogue IO ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald J. Deibert ◽  
Janice Gross Stein

That we in North America face a new kind of threat is beyond question. The attacks against the heartland of the United States, its corporate and military icons, and the killing of over 3,000 civilians, mark a watershed in thinking about security. It is almost two hundred years since civilians in North America have been the object of systematic attack, and even longer since the core of the hegemonic power was struck from the periphery. The important analytical and political questions are What kind of threat do we face? What is the appropriate response to that threat? In other words, what are the appropriate ways to think about dealing with a threat from a nonstate actor with no fixed location or permanently defined territorial assets?


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