scholarly journals From San Francisco to Tōhoku – 111 yr of continuous earthquake recording in Göttingen

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
H. Steffen ◽  
W. Brunk ◽  
M. Leven ◽  
U. Wedeken

Abstract. In 1902, the so-called Erdbebenhaus (earthquake house) was built in the garden of the Institute of Geophysics of the University of Göttingen to host and protect the very sensitive and fragile seismographs designed by Emil Wiechert. These instruments were the standard at their time, and they are still in operation today, documenting 111 yr of almost continuous seismological observations. Since 2005, the observatory is owned by the Wiechert'sche Erdbebenwarte Göttingen e.V. (Wiechert's earthquake observatory in Göttingen, registered society). This society aims at extending the observational record and protecting the observatory as a cultural heritage. In this paper we review the history of the observatory in the last 111 yr. Special attention is given to the developments in the last decade, when the observatory and further historic buildings and instruments changed ownership. Due to the efforts by the society, the observatory is still running now and open to the public. In addition, it is a part of the German Regional Seismic Network and, thus, observations can be used for scientific investigations.

Heritage ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 699-732
Author(s):  
Julie A. Hoggarth ◽  
Jaime J. Awe ◽  
Claire E. Ebert ◽  
Rafael A. Guerra ◽  
Antonio Beardall ◽  
...  

Since its inception in 1988, the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) Project has had two major foci, that of cultural heritage management and archaeological research. While research has concentrated on excavation and survey, the heritage management focus of the project has included the preservation of ancient monuments, the integration of archaeology and tourism development, and cultural heritage education. In this paper, we provide a brief overview on the history of scientific investigations by the BVAR Project, highlighting the project’s dual heritage management and research goals. This background offers the basis in which to discuss the successes and challenges of the project’s efforts in cultural heritage management and public engagement, particularly in early conservation efforts, in its training and educational efforts, and its ongoing outreach activity. We emphasize the need to train Belizeans as professional archaeologists and conservators, to serve as the next generation of advocates for Belize’s heritage management. We offer some ideas on how research projects can make significant contributions to heritage education and preservation in the developing world.


Author(s):  
Eva Eglāja Kristsone ◽  
Signe Raudive

Keywords: children’s poetry, public engagement, reading aloud, recording of poetry, Veidenbaums The development of public engagement technologies has provided new ways of ensuring societal participation. Public engagement events developed by various institutions provide ways to combine learning about cultural heritage with individual participants. Poetry readings serve as one of the ways the sound of Latvian literature and particularly Latvian classical poetry can be updated. The authors of this article analyse the first two public engagement actions (“Skandē Veidenbaumu” and “Lasīsim dzejiņas” of the series “Lasi skaļi” (Read Aloud) launched by the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art of the University of Latvia. During these events, participants were given the opportunity to record thematically-selected poems in the audio recording booth of the Latvian National Library or, as an alternative, to record a poem on their computer or mobile device and upload them to the action site. The events combined the creation of a recorded body of poetry readings with related educational content and represent one of the newer educational methods for reaching the general public and some of its subgroups (children, pupils, students, etc.). Through these events, the public was given the opportunity to become acquainted with Latvian cultural heritage while simultaneously creating new cultural artifacts. The participants creatively used different approaches of performance, recording the poems in a variety of voices, singing, or even incorporating digital sound processing programmes. They actively seized on the opportunity to create new versions of poems that had already been set to music. The main reasons for rejecting any particular recording were buffoonery or cursing during the recording process, or having left the recording unfinished. Both events resulted in more than 4,500 audio recordings which were then stored in the digital archive of the Institute. The set of recordings could be of interest to researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics and computer linguistics, as it provides a unique representation of pronunciation during a specific period of time performed by people of different ages, genders, and nationalities.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Zozaya-Montes ◽  
Nicola Schiavottiello

The UNESCO World Heritage city of Évora (Portugal) hosted the second Heritales – International Heritage Film Festival in September 2017. In this edition the festival focused on current and past sustainable communities, selecting works that explored and problematized the relationship and coexistence of modernity and sustainability when applied to human groups and societies. The films presented the everyday life, knowledge, crafts and know-how of ordinary people highlighting the changes and challenges that the expansion of consumer-based economies, globalization and world politics have brought. As organizers, by focusing on sustainability in heritage context, we wanted to go beyond current preservation strategies of the tangible and intangible heritage, to promote a reflection on the “culture of sustainability” itself, looking at how sustainable ways-of-existence have characterized various communities and cultural practices worldwide. Since its first edition, the festival has been a space for the promotion of a critical understanding of cultural heritage, aimed to the broader public. By using emblematic historical places as stage, Heritales has challenged the mainstream cultural heritage scientific communication. Its proposal is to approach heritage’s issues through multiple types of media and artistic work such as films and documentaries but also cultural heritage’s games, exhibitions, theatre and performance, with talks and several communication strategies to facilitate the encounter between the authors and the public. Although the festival has received many positive feedbacks and the support of various entities such as the UNESCO Chair of the University of Évora (Portugal) and the FCT (Science and Technology Foundation, Portugal) it is still at its early stage of action. In this paper we would like to present the results of our experiment and analyse its concept and results, so that more collaborative and sustainable methodologies can also become a part of our plan of actionfor the organization of future events.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory W. Bartow

ABSTRACT Over the past 150 years, Mount Diablo has served as a window into the evolving understanding of California geology. In the 1800s, geologists mapped this easily accessible peak located less than 100 km (62 miles) from the rapidly growing city of San Francisco and the geology departments at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University. Later, the mountain served as a focal point for investigating San Francisco Bay area tectonics. The structural interpretation of the up-thrusting mechanisms has evolved from a simple compressional system involving a few local faults to a more complex multifault and multiphase mountain-building theory. The stratigraphic interpretation and understanding have been advanced from a general description of the lithologies and fossils to a detailed description using sequence stratigraphy to define paleogeographic settings and depositional regimes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-299
Author(s):  
Markus Wild

Abstract This letter focuses on both the recent history of academic philosophy in Switzerland and its present status. Historically, institutional self-consciousness of philosophy came to life during World War II as a reaction to the isolation of international academic life in Switzerland; moreover, the divide between philosophy in the French part and the German part of the country had to be bridged. One important instrument to achieve this end was the creation of the “Schweizerische Philosophische Gesellschaft” and its “Jahrbuch” (today: “Studia philosophica”) in 1940. At the same time the creation of the journal “Dialectica” (1947), the influence of Joseph Maria Bochensky at the University of Fribourg and Henri Lauener at the University of Berne prepared the ground for the flourishing of analytic philosophy in Switzerland. Today analytic philosophy has established a very successful academic enterprise in Switzerland without suppressing other philosophical traditions. Despite the fact that academic philosophy is somewhat present in the public, there is much more potential for actual philosophical research to enter into public consciousness. The outline sketched in this letter is, of course, a limited account of the recent history and present state of philosophy in Switzerland. There is only very little research on this topic.


2009 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Kelsall

Four years ago Peter Draper, as your recently retired president, described his lecture as valedictory and therefore self-indulgent in its choice of topic. What a useful precedent. I hope I am not over self-indulgent to the extent of being too autobiographical, but the subject does relate to my personal experience of the practice of architectural history in the conservation of historic buildings. The history of building conservation is now developing its own quite substantial literature to which this is a small contribution. To some extent this lecture is as much about bureaucracy as about architecture, for much of my life has been spent as an official in the public service. But, so that the lecture is properly historical, most of what I will talk about happened before I was involved.One major difference between the British and American Societies of Architectural Historians is that the American Society has always involved itself in building preservation issues, whereas the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain does not. This recognizes the different circumstances in each country. In Great Britain we have many amenity societies directed to conservation matters; most of us will belong to one or more of them and they are centres of quite extraordinary expertise. But in view of what I will say later, it is notable that in an account of a meeting in March 1941 in Washington, reported in the first volume of the American Society’s journal, Henry-Russell Hitchcock commented on the merits of the Historic American Buildings Survey, but added that selections by local groups often lacked historical perspective and ignored anything later than the Greek Revival; that there was excessive preservation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses in New England without regard to architectural merit; and that primary monuments of modern architectural history were wantonly destroyed. As concerns the latter, he cited, among others, Richardson’s Marshall Field Warehouse, and a threat to Wright’s Robie House. The representative of the National Parks Service said that 1870 was about the date limit for a building to be regarded as of interest, though the Vanderbilt House of 1895 had recently been acquired, and that attention was also being paid to groups of buildings.


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-562
Author(s):  
Karin Tybjerg

Abstract Surgical instrument collections have been used in a multitude of ways – as tools, taxonomies, teaching aids, representation, historical highlights and public displays – and they provide a key to understanding the shifting relations between surgery, medical museums and medical history. Tracing the uses of the surgical instrument collections from the Royal Danish Academy of Surgery and the Medical Historical Museum at the University of Copenhagen reveals a network of disciplinary and institutional changes from the late nineteenth to early twenty-first century. The history of the collections maps relations between scientific and cultural historical collections and between medicine and history. In the same way as surgical instruments have connected the surgeon’s hand to the patients’ body, the surgical instrument collections connect together the public, medical practice and history.


Author(s):  
Tara H. Abraham

Warren S. McCulloch (1898-1969) has become an icon of the American cybernetics movement and of current work in the cognitive neurosciences. Much of this legacy stems from his classic 1943 work with Walter Pitts on the logic of neural networks, and from his colourful role as chairman of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953). This biographical work looks beyond McCulloch’s iconic status by exploring the varied scientific, personal, and institutional contexts of McCulloch’s life. By doing so, the book presents McCulloch as a transdisciplinary investigator who took on many scientific identities beyond that of a cybernetician: scientific philosopher, neurophysiologist, psychiatrist, poet, mentor-collaborator, and engineer, and finally, his public persona towards the end of his life, the rebel genius. The book argues that these identities were neither products of McCulloch’s own will nor were they simply shaped by his institutional contexts. In integrating context and agency, the book as provides a more nuanced and rich understanding of McCulloch’s role in the history of American science as well as the institutional contexts of scientific investigations of the brain and mind: in particular at Yale University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The book argues that one of McCulloch’s most important contributions was opening up new ways of understanding the brain: no longer simply an object of medical investigation, the brain became the centre of the multidisciplinary neurosciences.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-94
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Pieńczak

Abstract In 1998, the source materials of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas - collected over many decades with the participation of the Institute of History of Material Culture (a unit of the Polish Academy of Sciences) and several leading ethnological centres - were moved to the Cieszyn Branch of the University of Silesia (currently the Faculty of Ethnology and Education). It was then that Z. Kłodnicki, the editor of the PEA, came up with the idea to continue and finish the atlas studies. However, the work on fulfilling the PEA, the biggest project in the history of Polish ethnology, is still going on. Nowadays, the materials of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas constitute a precious, unique in the national scale, documentary base. For several years, a lively cooperation has taken place between the PEA staff (representing the Faculty of Ethnology and Education of the University of Silesia) and various cultural institutions, government and non-government organizations. The discussed projects are usually aimed at the preservation and protection of the cultural heritage of the Polish village as well as the broadly related promotion actions for activating local communities. The workers of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas since 2014 have been also implementing the Ministry grant entitled The Polish Ethnographic Atlas - scientific elaboration, electronic database, publication of the sources in the Internet, stage I (scientific supervision: Ph.D. Agnieszka Pieńczak). What is an integral assumption of the discussed project is the scientific elaboration of three electronic catalogues, presenting the PEA resources: 1) field photographs (1955-1971) 2) the questionnaires concerning folk collecting (1948-1952), 3. the published maps (1958-2013). These materials have been selected due to their documentary value. The undertaking has brought about some measurable effects, mostly the special digital platform www.archiwumpae.us.edu.pl. This material database of ethnographic data might become the basis for designing various non-material activities aimed at preserving the cultural heritage of the Polish village.


2016 ◽  
Vol 125 (5) ◽  
pp. 850-860 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie J. Roddy ◽  
Vicki Starnes ◽  
Sukumar P. Desai

Abstract Background Crawford Williamson Long (1815 to 1878) was the first to use ether as an inhaled anesthetic for surgical operations. By not publishing his discovery for 7 yr, his pioneering work was largely overshadowed by that of Horace Wells (1815 to 1848), Charles Thomas Jackson (1805 to 1880), and William Thomas Green Morton (1819 to 1868). As a result, sites commemorating Long’s discovery are not offered the same recognition as those affiliated with Wells or Morton. Methods We highlight sites in Athens, Danielsville, and Jefferson, Georgia, that honor the first man to regularly use ether as an anesthetic agent. Extensive site visits, examination of museum artifacts, and genealogical research were used to obtain information being presented. Results Historic Oconee Hill Cemetery in Athens is where Long and members of his family are buried. Established in 1856, it is closely linked to the history of Athens and the University of Georgia (Athens, Georgia). The main site we describe is the Crawford W. Long Museum, located in Jefferson, Georgia, which opened to the public in 1957. It has undergone extensive renovations and holds an expansive collection of Long’s family heirlooms and personal artifacts. In addition, it displays an impressive art collection, depicting Long, surgical procedures, members of Long’s family, and homes associated with him. Visitors to the museum may also enjoy a walking audio tour that highlights the life of Long and his contribution to medicine. Conclusions We provide information on sites and artifacts that honor Georgia’s most celebrated physician. Much of this has not been published before, and it is our hope that Crawford Williamson Long’s legacy receives the attention it richly deserves.


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