Studying Up: Four Modalities, Two Challenges

In her 1973 article “up the anthropologist” Laura Nader called on anthropologists to engage in critical studies of the relationship between powerful institutions and the broader society, using a “vertical slice” approach. But Nader worried that participant observation was hard in the context of studying up, and yet it has been presented as definitive of anthropology’s methodology. This article discusses four methodological strategies for studying up in the light of this concern: insider ethnography; covert ethnography; remote ethnography; and adapted participant observation. The first two have intellectual or ethical liabilities. The last is increasingly normalized. Going forward, anthropologists studying up face two obstacles: first, the increasingly totalizing hold of corporate and government workplaces over their employees, even when they are not at work; and, second, university institutional review boards (irb s) concerned to avoid conflictual or critical research.

How Others See Us: Anthropologists, WikiLeaks, and the Vertical Slice

Drawing on Laura Nader’s concept of the vertical slice, this article reviews the hundreds of instances where the work of anthropologists, or anthropologists themselves appear in the leaked US State Department documents known as the “Manning Cables” published by WikiLeaks. The analysis of these documents shows anthropologists engaging with the US government in various ways, including in advisory capacities or bringing cultural or political knowledge from peripheral geographical regions to the core. Ethical, political, and disciplinary dimensions of these interactions are discussed, and Nader’s conception of the vertical slice is used to distinguish political dimensions of these anthropological engagements with state power.

Antennas Up! Laura Nader’s Undergraduate Lecture Courses as Public Anthropology

While teaching lecture courses at the University of California, Berkeley, Laura Nader taught generations of students to raise their anthropological antennae. This article uses an autoethnographic approach to describe the author’s exposure to anthropology at Berkeley in the nineteen-nineties, gesturing towards the way undergraduate lecture courses play an important but largely underrecognized role in fostering public anthropology. Nader’s lecture courses were particularly effective at this because their focus on pushing students to question dogma and analyze controlling processes offered students a sense of how anthropology could foster critical public discourse. Nader stressed the importance of asking good questions designed to challenge assumptions, finding the right methods to answer those questions, and paying attention to pathways of power. While always questioning received wisdom, ideological assumptions, and Western categories of knowledge, Nader continued to stress the importance of developing straightforward, highly-accessible concepts that captured the attention of students—like Harmony Ideology, trustanoia, controlling processes, and the vertical slice.

Continuous Sensing of Water Temperature in a Reservoir with Grid Inversion Method Based on Acoustic Tomography System

The continuous sensing of water parameters is of great importance to the study of dynamic processes in the ocean, coastal areas, and inland waters. Conventional fixed-point and ship-based observing systems cannot provide sufficient sampling of rapidly varying processes, especially for small-scale phenomena. Acoustic tomography can achieve the sensing of water parameter variations over time by continuously using sound wave propagation information. A multi-station acoustic tomography experiment was carried out in a reservoir with three sound stations for water temperature observation. Specifically, multi-path propagation sound waves were identified with ray tracing using high-precision topography data obtained with ship-mounted ADCP. A new grid inverse method is proposed in this paper for water temperature profiling along a vertical slice. The progression of water temperature variation in three vertical slices between acoustic stations was mapped by solving an inverse problem. The reliability and adaptability of the grid method developed in this research are verified by comparison with layer-averaged water temperature results. The grid method can be further developed for the 3D mapping of water parameters over time, especially in small-scale water areas, where sufficient multi-path propagation sound waves can be obtained.

Searching for Critical Slip Surface of Slope Based on Flower Pollination Algorithm

In order to determine the critical sliding surface of the slope, the most dangerous sliding surface was searched by flower pollination algorithm. First, the method is applied to the traditional vertical slice method for slope stability analysis. The results are very close to those of the Autobank program, indicating that the method can search the critical sliding surface and find the optimal solution. Then, the method is applied to the new horizontal slice method, and the results of the calculation examples are better than those given in the references, indicating that the application of the flower pollination algorithm to the horizontal slice method is reasonable, reliable and superior. The successful application of this method provides a new method for determining the most dangerous sliding surface of slope.

Self-Organized Model Fitting Method for Railway Structures Monitoring Using LiDAR Point Cloud

Mobile laser scanning (MLS) has been successfully used for infrastructure monitoring apt to its fine accuracy and higher point density, which is favorable for object reconstruction. The massive data size, computational time, wider spatial distribution and feature extraction become a challenging task for 3D point data processing with MLS point cloud receives from terrestrial structures such as buildings, roads and railway tracks. In this paper, we propose a new approach to detect the structures in-line with railway track geometry such as railway crossings, turnouts and quantitatively estimate their dimensions and spatial location by iteratively applying a vertical slice to point cloud data for long distance laser measurement. The rectangular vertical slices were defined and their boundary coordinates were estimated based on a geometrical method. Estimated vertical slice boundaries were iteratively used to evaluate the point density of each vertical slice along with a cross-track direction of the railway line. Those point densities were further analyzed to detect the railway line track objects by their shape and spatial location along with the rail bed. Herein, the survey dataset is used as a dictionary to preidentify the spatial location of the object and then as an accurate estimation for the rail-track, by estimating the gauge corner (GC) from dense point cloud. The proposed method has shown a significant improvement in the rail-track extraction process, which becomes a challenge for existing remote sensing technologies. This adaptive object detection method can be used to identify the railway track structures prior to the railway track extraction, which allows in finding the GC position precisely. Further, it is based on the parallelism of the railway track, which is distinct from conventional railway track extraction methods. Therefore it does not require any inertial measurements along with the MLS survey and can be applied with less background information of the observed MLS point cloud. The proposed algorithm was tested for the MLS data set acquired during the pilot project collaborated with West Japan Railway Company. The results indicate 100% accuracy for railway structure detection and enhance the GC extraction for railway structure monitoring.

Short-Range Water Temperature Profiling in a Lake with Coastal Acoustic Tomography

Coastal acoustic tomography (CAT), as an innovative technology, can perform water temperature measurements both in horizontal and vertical slices. Investigations on vertical slice observations are significantly fewer in number than horizontal observations due to difficulties in multi-path arrival peak identification. In this study, a two-station sound transmission experiment is carried out in Thousand-Island Lake, Hangzhou, China, to acquire acoustic data for water temperature profiling. Time windows, determined by range-independent ray simulation, are used to identify multi-path arrival peaks and obtain corresponding sound wave travel times. Special attention is paid to travel time correction, whose errors are caused by position drifting by more than 2 m of moored stations. The sound speed and temperature profiling are divided into four layers and are calculated by regularized inversion. Results show a good consistency with conductivity–temperature–depth (CTD) measurements. The root mean square error (RMSE) of water temperature is 0.3494, 0.6838, 1.0236 and 1.0985 °C for layer 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively. The fluctuations of measurement are further smoothed by the moving average, which decreases the RMSE of water temperature to 0.2858, 0.4742, 0.7719 and 0.9945 °C, respectively. This study illustrates the feasibility and high accuracy of the coastal acoustic tomography method in short-range water temperature measurement. Furthermore, 3D water temperature field profiling can be performed with combined analyzing in horizontal and vertical slices.