Formaldehyde evolution in US wildfire plumes during the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality experiment (FIREX-AQ)

Formaldehyde (HCHO) is one of the most abundant non-methane volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by fires. HCHO also undergoes chemical production and loss as a fire plume ages, and it can be an important oxidant precursor. In this study, we disentangle the processes controlling HCHO by examining its evolution in wildfire plumes sampled by the NASA DC-8 during the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality experiment (FIREX-AQ) field campaign. In 9 of the 12 analyzed plumes, dilution-normalized HCHO increases with physical age (range 1–6 h). The balance of HCHO loss (mainly via photolysis) and production (via OH-initiated VOC oxidation) seems to control the sign and magnitude of this trend. Plume-average OH concentrations, calculated from VOC decays, range from −0.5 (± 0.5) × 106 to 5.3 (± 0.7) × 106 cm−3. The production and loss rates of dilution-normalized HCHO seem to decrease with plume age. Plume-to-plume variability in dilution-normalized secondary HCHO production correlates with OH abundance rather than normalized OH reactivity, suggesting that OH is the main driver of fire-to-fire variability in HCHO secondary production. Analysis suggests an effective HCHO yield of 0.33 (± 0.05) per VOC molecule oxidized for the 12 wildfire plumes. This finding can help connect space-based HCHO observations to the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere and to VOC emissions.

Formaldehyde evolution in U.S. wildfire plumes during FIREX-AQ

Formaldehyde (HCHO) is one of the most abundant non-methane volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by fires. HCHO also undergoes chemical production and loss as a fire plume ages, and it can be an important oxidant precursor. In this study, we disentangle the processes controlling HCHO by examining its evolution in wildfire plumes sampled by the NASA DC-8 during the FIREX-AQ field campaign. In nine of the twelve analyzed plumes, dilution-normalized HCHO increases with physical age (range 1–6 h). The balance of HCHO loss (mainly via photolysis) and production (via OH-initiated VOC oxidation) controls the sign and magnitude of this trend. Plume-average OH concentrations, calculated from VOC decays, range from −0.5 (±0.5) × 106 to 5.3 (±0.7) × 106 cm−3. Plume-to-plume variability in dilution-normalized secondary HCHO production correlates with OH abundance rather than normalized OH reactivity, suggesting that OH is the main driver of fire-to-fire variability in HCHO secondary production. Analysis suggests an effective HCHO yield of 0.33 (±0.05) per VOC molecule oxidized for the 12 wildfire plumes. This finding can help connect space-based HCHO observations to the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere.

Money and Borders

Money and finance are often thought of as forming a uniform, frictionless global space. While events in the last decades have certainly shown how monetary and financial practices and events have consequences that span the globe, this global reach of money and finance is far from evenly distributed. Rather, money flows and lumps unevenly across space, with the financial system connecting some places better than others, producing effects that are geoeconomic, sociocultural, and material in nature. One productive way of opening the black box of “global finance” is by exploring money’s manifold entailments with space and borders. Borders is here meant writ large. It means, of course, the geopolitical borders of the sovereign state and jurisdictional territory, showing how global finance is rooted in the contemporary architecture of states and international relations. But it also means attending to how lines in this cartographical space of geopolitical borders are rearranged, stretched, and inflected through cross-border networks of actors, notably financial institutions, concentrated in key places of international finance. This article seeks to bring to the broader academic debate on money and borders a reading whereby the “plumbing and wiring” of international finance is seen as entailed with practices of “b/ordering” that “dissolve” borderlands and connect space as much as they produce margins, edges, and fringes. Thinking money and finance in terms of borders and frontiers help us understand how money and financial markets (notably, credit–debt relations) materialize differently on either side of financial inclusion and exclusion lines, with implications for the bodies that inhabit them.

More Theories, Good and Different: Reflections on the G. A. Dvoenosova’s Monograph on the Theory of Document in the Paradigm of Interdisciplinary Knowledge

G. A. Dvoenosova’s monograph is an attempt at theoretical rethinking of the phenomenon of document in the context of synergistic paradigm. It presents a full-scale structural and functional analysis of document. Based on the principle of causality, the laws of origin and evolution of document have been revealed, the role of document as a system-forming factor has been studied. These questions occupy several chapters in the monograph, where the phenomenon of document is examined in detail from different angles. Document is an interdisciplinary concept included in the dictionaries of many sciences: social, informational, humanitarian, technical, etc. This complicates its study and theoretical comprehension, since each scientific discipline forms its own view of the phenomenon, sets its own accents, and offers its own methods and approaches to its study. Being a classical document expert by education and vocation, G. A. Dvoenosova has made an attempt to integrate the existing knowledge on document into a unified theory based on synergetic toolkit and offered it to the scientific community. The author of the presented monograph is fluent in her material, using a variety of approaches to its interpretation (philosophical, informational, managerial, etc.). Her monograph is characterized by deep historiographic study of its main subjects and by its polemical orientation. Using different research optics, the author reveals the phenomenological nature of document, its systemic characteristics, allowing it to connect space and time, to organize society and structure its information flows. I would like to dwell on the definition of document as materialized memory of humanity. Evaluating the presented theory as an undoubted scientific achievement, it is important to emphasize that synergetic theory of document takes into account and integrates various achievements in the field of theoretical understanding of document as seen in classical document management, communication and information theories of document.

Foreigners, fakes and flycatchers: stereotypes, social encounters and the problem of discomfort on the street in Arusha, Tanzania

Purpose This paper aims to contribute to research on the interrelations between urban tourism, travelling and landscapes. It shows how young visitors to the tourism-reliant city of Arusha, northern Tanzania, experience and interpret discomfiting encounters with street sellers by drawing on stereotypes circulating in guidebooks, online forums and in the tourism industry. In turn, such re-interpreted encounters are increasingly seen as problematic for the city’s development of urban tourism. Design/methodology/approach The author draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with tourist-product street sellers in Arusha and Moshi, Tanzania in 2015–2017. With detail-oriented focus on social interaction and communication, the author has used participant observation and interviews to understand the perspectives and actions involved. Complementing this, the author draws on interviews with tour companies and local authorities to connect everyday occurrences with broader political, economic and urban transformations. Findings This paper explores the interrelation between changing urban landscapes, gentrification and burgeoning urban tourism by highlighting not only how streets are created and sought to be re-created but how also re-interpreted stories and stereotypes fundamentally influence how it is understood by local authorities. As the consumption of place, shopping and foreigners’ experiences take centre stage in Arusha’s urban development project, practices and people that are re-interpreted as causes of discomfort, become objects of ordering and discipline. Originality/value This paper emphasizes that the social encounters beyond dichotomies of host–guest relationships are a fruitful and important means of investigating how “encounters” connect space to power, the street to urban planning and mundane on-the-street interactions to processes of transformation and gentrification. This paper presents a reading of “landscapes” not as a text, but as a series of encounters that catch our attention when and where they break our norms, or the norms of others.

Analysis on Spatial 3D Modeling of Mechanical Technological Process Based on UG-NX Platform

In the design process of products, modern design technology pays more attention to the application of space art. As the rising of software design technology, using the computer to design process and optimize is widely used in the development of product and packaging. In this paper, we use the UG design software to do two-time development on software based on UG-NX platform, and use UG/API to connect space design system MySQL, which realizes the space art computer processing technology of modern design. Finally, using the design of casting products as an example, we use UG software to develop mechanical process flow, and design 3D model of product, and use MySQL database to optimize the model. It provides the technical reference for the study of art space in modern design.

Limits to ‘thinking space relationally’

This paper is written by a geographer and discusses the importance of ‘thinking space relationally’ in, and for, the social sciences. According to its advocates, relational thinking insists on an open-ended, mobile, networked and actor-centred geographic becoming. I position relational space within the lineage of philosophical approaches to space, drawing on examples taken mainly from human geography. Following this, the paper highlights some silences and limits, namely factors that constrain, structure and connect space. I acknowledge relationality but insist on the connected, sometimes inertial, and always context-specific nature of spatiality. The paper then considers the normative implications of this for politics, thinking first about regions, and then about policy.