scholarly journals Irrigation in the Ili River Basin of Central Asia: From Ditches to Dams and Diversion

Water ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Pueppke ◽  
Qingling Zhang ◽  
Sabir Nurtazin
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Irrigated Agriculture ◽  
Ili River Basin ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Made In

Central Asia’s Ili River is fed by mountain streams that flow down into an isolated and arid basin that today is shared by Kazakhstan and China. Agriculture in the basin is dependent upon irrigation, which was practiced as long ago as the Iron Age, when early pastoralists constructed ditches to channel water from streams onto nearby fields. Irrigation had become much more common by the 18th century, when the region was controlled by the Dzungarian Khanate. The khanate was toppled by the Qing Chinese in the 1750s in the first of a series of confrontations that destroyed and then rebuilt the basin’s agricultural economy. The region has since been dominated by a succession of Chinese and Russian (and later Soviet and independent Kazakh) governments, each of which recognized the essential role of irrigated agriculture in maintaining control. Thus every cycle of destruction led to reclamation of new lands, resettlement of farmers and upgrading of infrastructure to expand irrigation. This allowed an impressive diversity of fruits, vegetables and field crops to be grown, especially on loess soils of the more fertile upper basin, where tributaries could be easily tapped by gravity flow. Many of these tributaries were entirely diverted by the 19th century, so that they no longer reached the Ili. Large scale irrigation commenced in the 1960s, when the Soviets built Kapchagai dam and reservoir in the lower part of the basin and installed pumps to raise water from the Ili River onto nearby reclaimed sierozem soils, mostly for cultivation of rice. China later constructed a cluster of small- and medium-sized dams that enabled expansion of agriculture in the upper part of the basin. Many irrigated areas along the lower reaches of the Ili in Kazakhstan have been abandoned, but irrigation in the upper basin continues to expand. Declining soil fertility, salinization, pollution, insufficient inflows and adverse economic conditions currently challenge irrigation across the entire basin. Investments are being made in new technologies as a means to sustain irrigated agriculture in the basin, but it remains to be seen if these strategies will be successful.

Material worlds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fraser Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Experimental Work ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Single Region ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The Everyday

This chapter considers material culture themes beyond any single region or country in order to look at recurring problems and possibilities across the European Iron Age. Often these are analogies (such as problems of taphonomic bias) rather than direct linkages, but large-scale issues in European prehistory are also considered, such as the development, selective adoption, and adaptation of new technologies, linkages to the Mediterranean world, and the role of art. Major areas of untapped research in the archaeology of the everyday are highlighted: the tools and other items which are often ignored beyond specialist reports can provide great insights into the changing lives of people in Iron Age Europe. Here, best practice in other areas and periods, along with experimental work, could cast fresh light on these fascinating material worlds.

scholarly journals Ontological Foundations of Conceptualization of Art Institutions

2021 ◽  
pp. 171-176
Author(s):  
Anna Luhovska
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article describes the stages of formation and the main reasons for the transformation of the current art institutional system. Its characteristics, conventional to Europe at the end of the 18th century, became common to most countries by the second half of the 19th century. Globalization processes that accompany the entire history of the previous century are the key factor of the rapid changes in society, including the art sphere. The role of global economic changes with the orientation on the society of consumption, on the growing importance of art market, commercialization of culture in general, emergence of new technologies and changes in attitudes to contemporary art in all its manifestations were observed. The reasons for shifting the emphasis and rethinking the role of artist, curator and spectator in the modern mode of existence of art institutions were analyzed. The conditions for updating existing and new forms of art representation, as well as expanding the concept of an artwork and the difference in understanding its value in historical and commercial terms that do not always coincide, were described.

Agricultural Transformations in Sugarcane and Labor in Brazil

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas D. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Work Force ◽  
Production Model ◽  
Steam Power ◽  
Production Methods ◽  
Sugarcane Farming ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The 19Th Century

The Portuguese took sugarcane from their Atlantic island holdings to Brazil in the first decades of the 16th century, using their model of extensive agriculture and coerced labor to turn their new colony into the world’s largest producer of sugar. From the middle of the 17th century through the 20th century, Brazil faced increasing competition from Caribbean producers. With access to abundant land and forest resources, Brazilian producers generally pursued an extensive production model that made sugarcane’s footprint a large one. Compared to competitors elsewhere, Brazilian farmers were often late in adopting innovations (such as manuring in the 18th century, steam power in the 19th, and synthetic fertilizers in the 20th). With coffee’s growth in the center-south of the country during the middle of the 19th century, sugarcane farming shifted gradually away from enslaved African labor. Labor and production methods shifted at the end of the century with slavery’s abolition and the rise of large new mills, called usinas. The model of steam-powered production, both for railroads carrying cane and for mills grinding it, and a work force largely resident on plantations persisted into the mid-20th century. Rural worker unions were legalized in the 1960s, at the same time that sugar production increased as a result of the Cuban Revolution. A large-scale sugarcane ethanol program in the 1970s also brought upheaval, and growth, to the industry.

Michel Foucault and Western Medicine

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-81
Keyword(s):  
Western Medicine ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Social Medicine ◽  
Western Society ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article analyzes Michel Foucault’s philosophical ideas on Western medicine and delves into three main insights that the French philosopher developed to expose the presence of power behind the veil of the conventional experience of medicine. These insights probe the power-disciplining function of psychiatry, the administrative function of medical institutions, and the role of social medicine in the administrative and political system of Western society. Foucault arrived at theses insights by way of his intense interest in three elements of the medical system that arose almost simultaneously at the end of the 18th century - psychiatry as “medicine for mental illness”, the hospital as the First and most well-known type of medical institution, and social medicine as a type of medical knowledge focused more on the protection of society and far less on caring for the individual. All the issues Foucault wrote about stemmed from his personal and professional sensitivity to the problems of power and were a part of the “medical turn” in the social and human sciences that occurred in the West in the 1960s and 1970s and led to the emergence of medical humanities. The article argues that Foucault’s stories about the power of medical knowledge were philosophical stories about Western medicine. Foucault always used facts, dates, and names in an attempt to identify some of the general tendencies and patterns in the development of Western medicine and to reveal usually undisclosed mechanisms for managing individuals and populations. Those mechanisms underlie the practice of providing assistance, be it the “moral treatment” practiced by psychiatrists before the advent of effective medication, or treating patients as “clinical cases” in hospitals, or hospitalization campaigns that were considered an effective “technological safe-guard ” in the 18th and most of the 19th century.

scholarly journals PEREDARAN OPIUM DI MINANGKABAU ABAD KE-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Nasir
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
Islamic Reform ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Made In

This article discusses the history of Minangkabau in the 19th century AD. One of the themes of 19th century Minangkabau history is the Islamic reform movement promoted by religious groups commonly called the Padri movement. One of the central issues of the Padri movement was eradicating the habit of drinking alcoholism that occurred in Minangkabau society. The habit of smoking the drug that comes from boiling opium certainly indicates the existence of the drug on a large scale. Therefore, this article will present a picture of the opium trade in Minangkabau in the 19th century from upstream (providers) to downstream (dealers). It is hoped that this article will be useful as an explanation for the habit of smoking made in the Minangkabau community at that time.

scholarly journals A Protocol for Extraction of Infective Viromes Suitable for Metagenomics Sequencing from Low Volume Fecal Samples

Viruses ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ling Deng ◽  
Ronalds Silins ◽  
Josué L. Castro-Mejía ◽  
Witold Kot ◽  
Leon Jessen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Genome Sequencing ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Metagenomic Sequencing ◽  
High Input ◽  
Human Gut ◽  
Specific Host ◽  
Substantial Progress ◽  
Low Volume ◽  
Made In

The human gut microbiome (GM) plays an important role in human health and diseases. However, while substantial progress has been made in understanding the role of bacterial inhabitants of the gut, much less is known regarding the viral component of the GM. Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses attacking specific host bacteria and likely play important roles in shaping the GM. Although metagenomic approaches have led to the discoveries of many new viruses, they remain largely uncultured as their hosts have not been identified, which hampers our understanding of their biological roles. Existing protocols for isolation of viromes generally require relatively high input volumes and are generally more focused on extracting nucleic acids of good quality and purity for down-stream analysis, and less on purifying viruses with infective capacity. In this study, we report the development of an efficient protocol requiring low sample input yielding purified viromes containing phages that are still infective, which also are of sufficient purity for genome sequencing. We validated the method through spiking known phages followed by plaque assays, qPCR, and metagenomic sequencing. The protocol should facilitate the process of culturing novel viruses from the gut as well as large scale studies on gut viromes.

Tumoral Drug Metabolism: Overview and Its Implications for Cancer Therapy

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Michael ◽  
M.M. Doherty
Keyword(s):  
Cancer Therapy ◽  
Drug Metabolism ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Drug Efficacy ◽  
Metabolizing Enzymes ◽  
Therapeutic Implications ◽  
Firm Data ◽  
The Individual

Drug-metabolizing enzymes (DME) in tumors are capable of biotransforming a variety of xenobiotics, including antineoplastics, resulting in either their activation or detoxification. Many studies have reported the presence of DME in tumors; however, heterogenous detection methodology and patient cohorts have not generated consistent, firm data. Nevertheless, various gene therapy approaches and oral prodrugs have been devised, taking advantage of tumoral DME. With the need to target and individualize anticancer therapies, tumoral processes such as drug metabolism must be considered as both a potential mechanism of resistance to therapy and a potential means of achieving optimal therapy. This review discusses cytotoxic drug metabolism by tumors, through addressing the classes of the individual DME, their relevant substrates, and their distribution in specific malignancies. The limitations of preclinical models relative to the clinical setting and lack of data on the changes of DME with disease progression and host response will be discussed. The therapeutic implications of tumoral drug metabolism will be addressed—in particular, the role of DME in predicting therapeutic response, the activation of prodrugs, and the potential for modulation of their activity for gain are considered, with relevant clinical examples. The contribution of tumoral drug metabolism to cancer therapy can only be truly ascertained through large-scale prospective studies and supported by new technologies for tumor sampling and genetic analysis such as microarrays. Only then can efforts be concentrated in the design of better prodrugs or combination therapy to improve drug efficacy and individualize therapy.

Extinction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark V. Barrow
Keyword(s):  
Endangered Species ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Captive Breeding ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Apex Predators ◽  
Biodiversity Crisis ◽  
Extinction Events ◽  
The 19Th Century

The prospect of extinction, the complete loss of a species or other group of organisms, has long provoked strong responses. Until the turn of the 18th century, deeply held and widely shared beliefs about the order of nature led to a firm rejection of the possibility that species could entirely vanish. During the 19th century, however, resistance to the idea of extinction gave way to widespread acceptance following the discovery of the fossil remains of numerous previously unknown forms and direct experience with contemporary human-driven decline and the destruction of several species. In an effort to stem continued loss, at the turn of the 19th century, naturalists, conservationists, and sportsmen developed arguments for preventing extinction, created wildlife conservation organizations, lobbied for early protective laws and treaties, pushed for the first government-sponsored parks and refuges, and experimented with captive breeding. In the first half of the 20th century, scientists began systematically gathering more data about the problem through global inventories of endangered species and the first life-history and ecological studies of those species. The second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries have been characterized both by accelerating threats to the world’s biota and greater attention to the problem of extinction. Powerful new laws, like the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973, have been enacted and numerous international agreements negotiated in an attempt to address the issue. Despite considerable effort, scientists remain fearful that the current rate of species loss is similar to that experienced during the five great mass extinction events identified in the fossil record, leading to declarations that the world is facing a biodiversity crisis. Responding to this crisis, often referred to as the sixth extinction, scientists have launched a new interdisciplinary, mission-oriented discipline, conservation biology, that seeks not just to understand but also to reverse biota loss. Scientists and conservationists have also developed controversial new approaches to the growing problem of extinction: rewilding, which involves establishing expansive core reserves that are connected with migratory corridors and that include populations of apex predators, and de-extinction, which uses genetic engineering techniques in a bid to resurrect lost species. Even with the development of new knowledge and new tools that seek to reverse large-scale species decline, a new and particularly imposing danger, climate change, looms on the horizon, threatening to undermine those efforts.

scholarly journals Preface

1994 ◽  
Vol 347 (1684) ◽  
pp. 449-449 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Stock Prices ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Telecommunication Networks ◽  
Financial Industry ◽  
Interacting Systems ◽  
Mathematical Sciences ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
The City ◽  
Made In

There is money to be made in the financial industry. Academics, under pressure to exhibit relevance, are happy to point to their consultancies in the City as evidence of their value in the market, and the industry has shown a notable ability to recruit the brightest and best from our Universities. These observations should not obscure the profound scientific challenges posed by the area of finance. The area has both stimulated and benefited from advances in a range of mathematical sciences, most obviously probability, differential equations, optimization, statistics and numerical analysis. One thinks, for example, of Bernoulli’s resolution, in the 18th century, of the St Petersburg Problem through his introduction of a logarithmic utility, of Bachelier’s description, at the turn of this century, of the stochastic process we now call brownian motion, of Kendall’s investigation, forty years ago, of the statistical unpredictability of stock prices, and of the current enormously fertile interaction between economics and mathematics centred around martingale representations. Looking to the future, some of the mathematical ideas originally motivated by statistical mechanics, and since used to model the large-scale telecommunication networks upon which the financial industry relies, may also provide insight into the very difficult problems that arise in economics concerning interacting systems of rational agents.

scholarly journals Cosmic Inflation, Quantum Information and the Pioneering Role of John S Bell in Cosmology

Universe ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérôme Martin
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Quantum Information ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Gravitational Instability ◽  
Cosmic Inflation ◽  
Large Scale Structures ◽  
Scale Structures ◽  
Accuracy Data ◽  
Made In

According to the theory of cosmic inflation, the large scale structures observed in our Universe (galaxies, clusters of galaxies, Cosmic Background Microwave—CMB—anisotropy...) are of quantum mechanical origin. They are nothing but vacuum fluctuations, stretched to cosmological scales by the cosmic expansion and amplified by gravitational instability. At the end of inflation, these perturbations are placed in a two-mode squeezed state with the strongest squeezing ever produced in Nature (much larger than anything that can be made in the laboratory on Earth). This article studies whether astrophysical observations could unambiguously reveal this quantum origin by borrowing ideas from quantum information theory. It is argued that some of the tools needed to carry out this task have been discussed long ago by J. Bell in a, so far, largely unrecognized contribution. A detailled study of his paper and of the criticisms that have been put forward against his work is presented. Although J. Bell could not have realized it when he wrote his letter since the quantum state of cosmological perturbations was not yet fully characterized at that time, it is also shown that Cosmology and cosmic inflation represent the most interesting frameworks to apply the concepts he investigated. This confirms that cosmic inflation is not only a successful paradigm to understand the early Universe. It is also the only situation in Physics where one crucially needs General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics to derive the predictions of a theory and, where, at the same time, we have high-accuracy data to test these predictions, making inflation a playground of utmost importance to discuss foundational issues in Quantum Mechanics.

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