Vascular flora of the Outer Banks, North Carolina, U.S.A.

A complete catalogue of the vascular flora of the North Carolina Outer Banks is presented. Rarity, habitat, distribution within the Outer Banks, and earliest and latest specimens are given for each taxon. The flora contains 1020 species and infraspecific taxa, plus an additional 80 taxa that lack voucher specimens. Some 770 taxa are considered native; 250 non-native. Fifty-one taxa reach their northern range limit on the Outer Banks; 11 their southern limit. Fifty-five taxa are listed as rare in North Carolina; one of them also listed Threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Twenty-four natural communities are described and assessed for vulnerabil-ity to sea level rise. Prior botanical research is listed chronologically.

Revenue House - architectural typology to be valorised

This research was carried out on the state of degradation of the historic core of Annaba city, Algeria. This degradation is caused by multiple factors, the most important of which is the absence of shared responsibility of public actors. The number of collapses multiplied which became a source for the creation of large office buildings with modernist tendencies, but without any architectural identity. The real estate park in downtown Annaba brings together urban entities according to various principles and logics of composition, structuring the urban image of the city of Annaba. The objective of this study is to build a complete catalogue summarizing the structures and fundamental characteristics of old buildings. Initially, this study defines all the notions linked to urban morphology and the typologies of housing. Secondly, an architectural study will be carried out on the “income house”, which represents the basic unit for the development of this historic nucleus. The typological analysis was applied to 44 buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries located on the boulevard named “Revolution Square” in order to identify a set of common and specific criteria for the classification of “house income”.

A Reliable Large Distributed Object Store Based Platform for Collecting Event Metadata

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is about to enter its third run at unprecedented energies. The experiments at the LHC face computational challenges with enormous data volumes that need to be analysed by thousands of physics users. The ATLAS EventIndex project, currently running in production, builds a complete catalogue of particle collisions, or events, for the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The distributed nature of the experiment data model is exploited by running jobs at over one hundred Grid data centers worldwide. Millions of files with petabytes of data are indexed, extracting a small quantity of metadata per event, that is conveyed with a data collection system in real time to a central Hadoop instance at CERN. After a successful first implementation based on a messaging system, some issues suggested performance bottlenecks for the challenging higher rates in next runs of the experiment. In this work we characterize the weaknesses of the previous messaging system, regarding complexity, scalability, performance and resource consumption. A new approach based on an object-based storage method was designed and implemented, taking into account the lessons learned and leveraging the ATLAS experience with this kind of systems. We present the experiment that we run during three months in the real production scenario worldwide, in order to evaluate the messaging and object store approaches. The results of the experiment show that the new object-based storage method can efficiently support large-scale data collection for big data environments like the next runs of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC.

Taylor White's ‘paper museum’

For almost 40 years, the British jurist and Fellow of the Royal Society Taylor White (1701–1772) actively engaged in commissioning artists to paint plants and animals for his ‘paper museum’. White amassed a collection of almost 1000 drawings of birds, mammals, fish, amphibians and reptiles, acquired by McGill University in 1927. His first recorded purchase was a watercolour by George Edwards (1694–1773). He also acquired works from Eleazar Albin ( fl. 1690– ca 1742) and Jacob van Huysum ( ca 1687–1740), but the majority of the watercolours were painted by two artists, Charles Collins ( ca 1680–1744) and Peter Paillou ( ca 1712–1782). In 2018 a research group at McGill University Library received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the project ‘Undescrib'd: Taylor White's paper museum’. The project produced a complete catalogue of the White collection, including attribution of all unsigned works, and digitized all paintings and notes. This paper documents the process surrounding the original creation of the collection, reviewing the careers of the artists and White's relationship with them, the value of the commissions and the challenges of painting natural history subjects. It also describes the mechanics of painting, including pigments, papers used and artists' techniques.

Finding Oceania : organizing a collection of Oceanic photographs and albums at the Art Gallery of Ontario

The Oceanic Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is comprised of photographic objects that reflect the social history of the Oceanic nations during the period after European settlement up to the mid-20th century. The anthropologist C.P. Mountford is the greatest single contributor in the collection. Other makers include Reverend Hamilton Aikin, press photographer Sam Hood and studio photographers Henry King, John William Lindt and Thomas Andrew. This thesis is an applied project, done to re-house, catalogue and gain intellectual control over the collection. Part I outlines the re-housing and cataloguing process, as well as the considerations and decision making behind the organization of the finding aid. Part II is the finding aid, containing eight sections that address the historical and social context in which the collection material was made. Three appendices include biographical information, complete catalogue records and a summary of Oceanic art and artifacts at the AGO.

Finding Oceania : organizing a collection of Oceanic photographs and albums at the Art Gallery of Ontario

The Oceanic Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is comprised of photographic objects that reflect the social history of the Oceanic nations during the period after European settlement up to the mid-20th century. The anthropologist C.P. Mountford is the greatest single contributor in the collection. Other makers include Reverend Hamilton Aikin, press photographer Sam Hood and studio photographers Henry King, John William Lindt and Thomas Andrew. This thesis is an applied project, done to re-house, catalogue and gain intellectual control over the collection. Part I outlines the re-housing and cataloguing process, as well as the considerations and decision making behind the organization of the finding aid. Part II is the finding aid, containing eight sections that address the historical and social context in which the collection material was made. Three appendices include biographical information, complete catalogue records and a summary of Oceanic art and artifacts at the AGO.

The source parameters of earthquakes of Bishkek geodynamic proving ground (Northern Tien Shan)

Based on the method of polarity of signs of P-waves, the focal mechanisms of 1674 earthquakes with M ≥ 1.6, which occurred on the territory of the Bishkek geodynamic proving ground (BGPG) from 1994 to 2020, were determined. Some characteristics of the complete catalogue are presented. Quantitative distributions by the type of mechanisms and diagrams of azimuths of the main stress axes are constructed. A variety of focal mechanism of earthquake is observed, most of them are reverse fault, oblique reverse fault, and horizontal strike-slip fault. The compression axis for most of the events has a north-northwest direction and a sub-horizontal position. For 183, dynamic parameters (DP, source parameters) were obtained: spectral density Ω0, corner frequency f0, scalar seismic moment M0, source radius (Brune radius) r, and stress drop Δσ. The correlations between DP and energy characteristic (magnitude) and scalar seismic moment are investigated. The smallest correlation coefficient was obtained for stress drop.

Are stable cryptocurrencies exempted from impossible trinity?

PurposeWhile monetary autonomy is self-explanatory for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin with predetermined supply path, it is of great interest to probe into the monetary structures of Stablecoins. In these supply contracts and expands and capital restrictions apply due to the existence of reserves as the exchange rate arrangement adheres to a price rule.Design/methodology/approachEver since the launch of Bitcoin and its offspring, examination of cryptocurrencies' trading activity from the empirical finance viewpoint has received much attention and continues to do so. The particular monetary arrangements found in Stable cryptocurrencies (colloquially referred to as Stablecoins), however, have not been properly (1) classified and (2) studied within an empirical international finance and banking context. This paper provides an empirical framework analogous to Impossible Trinity for exploring monetary arrangements across Stablecoins wherein reserves are held as price stability is targeted.FindingsThe study findings of existence of the degree of achievement along the three dimensions of the Impossible Trinity hypothesis, namely monetary independence, exchange rate stability and financial openness for a representative sample able to cover all varieties of Stablecoins, provide fresh empirical insights and arguments to this growing literature with respect to the success of their embedded exchange rate stabilization mechanisms. While the hypothesis can be supported for all cryptocurrencies in question, the trade-off combination among exchange rate stability, capital openness and monetary independence varies with the categorical types of Stablecoins.Research limitations/implicationsIf Stable cryptocurrencies, therefore, claim the role of global monetary assets freed from sovereign limits and national boundaries, it is critical to explore whether they adhere to traditional monetary frameworks. It goes without saying that in this work the author does not use a complete catalogue of all the available Stablecoins, rather a complete catalogue of all the possible asset classes of Stablecoins. While there is a significant difficulty in finding Algorithmic Stablecoins and, so far, there is plethora of Stable Token initiatives, a broader sample to further examine these under this paper's empirical framework is suggested. Enrichment of the robustness analysis by constructing additional proxies, possibly building time series for the proposed cmo1 subindex and using additional estimation methods is encouraged.Practical implicationsStablecoins have been developed aiming to address the issue of excessive price variation in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Holders of Stablecoins enjoy the combined advantages of using a blockchain-based digital infrastructure in fulfilling the functions of store of value and media of exchange and of using a traditional currency, which merely plays the role of the unit of account (and in some circumstances the trusted reserve to which is convertible to). Understanding the varieties of Stablecoins and quantifying the components for success of their price stabilization may result in designing better Stablecoins.Social implicationsBlockchain and cryptocurrencies have introduced new challenges to money and banking. Cryptocurrencies, which independently float such as Bitcoin, have gained the interest so far due to price variation that allows for gains. But these should be by far not considered to be a substitute to traditional means of payment. Lately, Stablecoins have increasingly gained attention for that USD Tether/Bitcoin pair (a Stablecoin pegged to the US dollar at parity) has outrun the US dollar/Bitcoin pair as the most traded pair in digital exchanges marking the strong position and high demand for Stablecoins.Originality/valueThis approach uncovers the varieties of Stablecoins with respect to their monetary constraints compared to the rest of the cryptocurrencies, which independently float. In this paper, the author provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of the exchange rate mechanisms conditional on Stablecoin asset classes accompanied with an empirical study from the monetary viewpoint. This is the first work in this attempt. The empirical framework employed is analogous to the traditional theory of international monetary economics referred to as Impossible Trinityz.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/JES-06-2020-0279