Hamilton College

When I chose the term “eco-cinema” for my essay, “Toward an Eco-cinema”, published in the Summer 2004 issue of ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment), I don’t believe I meant to invent a term. “Eco” seemed everywhere in the early 2000s; and it is in the nature of language to respond to the interweaving of cultural developments. “Eco-cinema” seemed a good way of referencing the intersection of the continuing evolution of cinema with a cultures-wide recognition that many ecosystems on our planet, and the planet itself, are in a process of transition, if not entropy.

The Gulf of Maine holds significant ecological and economic value for fisheries and communities in north-eastern North America. However, there is apprehension regarding its vulnerability to the effects of increasing atmospheric CO2. Substantial recent warming and the inflow of low alkalinity waters into the Gulf of Maine have raised concerns about the impact of ocean acidification on resident marine calcifiers (e.g. oysters, clams, mussels). With limited seawater pH records, the natural variability and drivers of pH in this region remain unclear. To address this, we present coastal water pH proxy records using boron isotope (δ¹¹B) measurements in long-lived, annually banded, crustose coralline algae (1920–2018 CE). These records indicate seawater pH was low (~ 7.9) for much of the last century. Contrary to expectation, we also find that pH has increased (+ 0.2 pH units) over the past 40 years, despite concurrent rising atmospheric CO2. This increase is attributed to an increased input of high alkalinity waters derived from the Gulf Stream. This delayed onset of ocean acidification is cause for concern. Once ocean circulation-driven buffering effects reach their limit, seawater pH decline may occur swiftly. This would profoundly harm shellfisheries and the broader Gulf of Maine ecosystem. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-024-84537-3.

In 2023, New Zealand experienced two consecutive weather-related events that exceeded previous insured losses by more than a factor of ten: the Auckland Anniversary Day floods and ex-Tropical Cyclone Gabrielle. Further, climate reporting for financial services becomes mandatory in this jurisdiction in 2024, yet established catastrophe models are not available for a range of perils in New Zealand. Insurers hence need to better understand weather-related catastrophes in New Zealand and the impact of climate change in this island nation exposed to strong marine influences and weather events of both tropical and temperate origin. This comprehensive review seeks to integrate and interpret the findings from a wide range of scientific literature into a cohesive summary useful for insurers evaluating climate risk in New Zealand. This review summarises the climate risk facing New Zealand, focussing on extreme events including heavy rainfall, floods, coastal hazards driven by weather systems on a range of spatiotemporal scales: atmospheric rivers, ex- and extra-tropical cyclones and severe convective storms, as well as wildfire weather. Potential changes to natural climate variability are also considered. The review shows that extreme rainfall over a range of durations, but particularly shorter durations, is projected to increase, and riverine and coastal flooding will also increase, although potential impacts are less well understood. Extreme weather systems such as ex-tropical and extra-tropical cyclones may be supported by warmer sea surface temperatures and the poleward shift in subtropical weather systems, although quantitative studies on their changing frequency and severity are not yet available. Key knowledge gaps in understanding sources of extreme rainfall, ex-tropical cyclones and other low-pressure systems and severe convective storms are identified. Further, focus areas for climate-related risk reduction that insurers could seek to promote to help protect the New Zealand community are discussed.

Sharing data with collaborators is a complicated task that is nonetheless fundamental to academic research. We present the results of two studies investigating data sharing within academic scientific collaborations, as well as a system called DriveGroups designed to facilitate data sharing. First, we observed and interviewed 38 academic researchers engaged in collaborative research about their data sharing practices. We found that these researchers struggle to manage access to data, especially when different types of collaborators (e.g., students, co-principal investigators) require different access settings. In response, we built DriveGroups, a Google add-on designed to alleviate participant challenges with access control, and compared its usability to unmodified Google Drive. DriveGroups allows users to manage file access from two separate perspectives: 1) the traditional file perspective and 2) a role-based group perspective, which simplifies the data sharing process. DriveGroups matched or outperformed unmodified Google Drive in terms of usability, access control, and transparency, and will help scientists advance high-impact academic research.

How can Wittgenstein best be taken up and used in science pedagogy? This article engages with Renia Gasparatou’s 2019 CSSE forum response as a way to enrich ongoing discussion connecting Wittgenstein’s thought to science education. With reference to Gasparatou’s “quasi-Wittgensteinian” analysis, we reflect on some key Wittgensteinian notions: grammatical investigation, family resemblance, language-games, and rules. Our intent is to bring out more fully the radical nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. Our position is that accounts of science education more firmly attached to serious readings of Wittgenstein’s texts invites science educators to develop richer perspectives which center language and grammatical investigation.

This article proposes a new approach for testing the equality of nonparametric quantile regression functions based on marked empirical processes. We develop test statistics that posses better Type I and power properties in comparison to all available procedures in the literature. Simulation results also indicate that our tests have superior local power properties over existing tests. A data analysis is given which highlights the usefulness of the proposed methodology.

This article proposes a new approach for variable selection in the single index quantile regression model. Compared to existing methods, the new approach produce sparse solutions for the index vector. Performance of the new method is enhanced by a fully adaptive penalty function. Finite sample performance is studied through a simulation study that compares the proposed method with existing work under several criteria. A data analysis is given which highlights the usefulness of the proposed methodology.

A growing literature examines anticipatory stressors or the worries people have about the future that may or may never occur. Drawing on data collected as part of two national surveys (N = 3,834), this study formalizes a scale of anticipatory stress tapping into future-oriented worries about economic security, traumatic events, and discrimination. Results indicate that both personal and vicarious stress exposure predict greater anticipatory stress and, replicating past work, that such worries are concentrated among historically marginalized groups. Anticipatory stressors explain an appreciable amount of the variation in distress, and suggestive of their insidious effects, these associations persist after adjustment for other sources of adversity. Whereas mastery and self-esteem buffer mental health, the protective effects of social support are compromised at higher levels of anticipatory stress. Findings signal the importance of incorporating anticipatory stressors into the stress process to more sufficiently capture how the social world imprints on mental health.

Zea mays (maize) is both an agronomically important crop and a powerful genetic model system with an extensive molecular toolkit and genomic resources. With these tools, maize is an optimal system for cytogenetic study, particularly in the investigation of chromosome segregation. Here, we review the advances made in maize chromosome segregation, specifically in the regulation and dynamic assembly of the mitotic and meiotic spindle, the inheritance and mechanisms of the abnormal chromosome variant Ab10, the regulation of chromosome–spindle interactions via the spindle assembly checkpoint, and the function of kinetochore proteins that bridge chromosomes and spindles. In this review, we discuss these processes in a species-specific context including features that are both conserved and unique to Z. mays. Additionally, we highlight new protein structure prediction tools and make use of these tools to identify several novel kinetochore and spindle assembly checkpoint proteins in Z. mays.

This article uncovers the multilingual worlds hidden in al-Ḥarīrī’s (d.516 AH/1112 CE) monolingual, Arabo-centric maqāmāt, a collection of fifty short tales of rhymed prose narrating the exploits of a trickster figure. Focusing on space and language, it seeks to identify where in the maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī signals his attention to the Islamic world’s multilingual composition in a monolingual project that centres Arabic eloquence (balāgha), a poetic category that was deemed untranslatable by medieval poetic theorists. Drawing on the theory of geopoetics to analyse materials from medieval dictionaries of lands, lexicons, and maqāmāt commentaries, the article argues that in three maqāmāt set in the eastern frontiers of the Islamic world, al-Ḥarīrī deployed forms of ineloquent ‘constrained writing’ as a way of translating the trickster’s linguistic genius in non-Arab cities. The article uses as a case study The Spotted Maqāma (al-Maqāma ar-raqṭāʾ), set in the cities of Ahwaz (Ahwāz) and Shush (Sūs) in the Persian province of Khuzestan, in addition to Tus (Ṭūs), a district in remote Khorasan (Khurāsān). Ultimately, the article reappraises al-Ḥarīrī’s use of ‘constrained writing’ by showing how it serves as the trickster’s alternative stratagem to circumvent his poetic estrangement and lack of linguistic control, and thus overcome his inability to weaponize Arabic eloquence to deceive the audience in heterolingual regions.

“On Listening” is a video essay on what listening entails and what it makes possible. Focusing on the physical, tangible aspects of listening as well as its more imaginative dimensions, it makes a case for listening as an embodied orientation that forges relationships across time and space.

Genetic Programming (GP) often uses large training sets and requires all individuals to be evaluated on all training cases during selection. Random down-sampled lexicase selection evaluates individuals on only a random subset of the training cases, allowing for more individuals to be explored with the same number of program executions. However, sampling randomly can exclude important cases from the down-sample for a number of generations, while cases that measure the same behavior (synonymous cases) may be overused. In this work, we introduce Informed Down-Sampled Lexicase Selection. This method leverages population statistics to build down-samples that contain more distinct and therefore informative training cases. Through an empirical investigation across two different GP systems (PushGP and Grammar-Guided GP), we find that informed down-sampling significantly outperforms random down-sampling on a set of contemporary program synthesis benchmark problems. Through an analysis of the created down-samples, we find that important training cases are included in the down-sample consistently across independent evolutionary runs and systems. We hypothesize that this improvement can be attributed to the ability of Informed Down-Sampled Lexicase Selection to maintain more specialist individuals over the course of evolution, while still benefiting from reduced per-evaluation costs.

This paper introduces a nonconvex approach for sparse signal recovery, proposing a novel model termed the $\tau _2$ τ 2 -model, which utilizes the squared $\ell _1/\ell _2$ ℓ 1 / ℓ 2 norms for this purpose. Our model offers an advancement over the $\ell _0$ ℓ 0 norm, which is often computationally intractable and less effective in practical scenarios. Grounded in the concept of effective sparsity, our approach robustly measures the number of significant coordinates in a signal, making it a powerful alternative for sparse signal estimation. The $\tau _2$ τ 2 -model is particularly advantageous due to its computational efficiency and practical applicability. We detail two accompanying algorithms based on Dinkelbach’s procedure and a difference of convex functions strategy. The first algorithm views the model as a linear-constrained quadratic programming problem in noiseless scenarios and as a quadratic-constrained quadratic programming problem in noisy scenarios. The second algorithm, capable of handling both noiseless and noisy cases, is based on the alternating direction linearized proximal method of multipliers. We also explore the model’s properties, including the existence of solutions under certain conditions, and discuss the convergence properties of the algorithms. Numerical experiments with various sensing matrices validate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Electron spin resonance (ESR) is a powerful tool for characterizing and manipulating spin systems, but commercial ESR spectrometers can be inflexible and designed to work in narrow frequency bands. This work presents a spectrometer built from off-the-shelf parts that, when coupled with easy-to-design resonators, enables ESR over a broad frequency range, including at frequencies outside the standard bands. It can operate at either a single frequency or at two frequencies simultaneously. The spectrometer is controlled by a field programmable gate array (FPGA), and new capabilities can be easily added by reconfiguring the FPGA and adding or swapping components. We demonstrate the capabilities of the spectrometer using the molecular nanomagnet Cr7Mn, including simultaneous ESR at frequencies separated by nearly 500 MHz.

Grazing from megaherbivores such as bison (Bison bison) and periodic fire are 2 important disturbance regimes in grassland ecosystems. In restored tallgrass prairies where these processes were previously removed, prescribed fire application and bison reintroduction are tools used by managers to recreate habitat heterogeneity formed by these disturbances. Tallgrass prairie bird communities may be indirectly affected by these disturbances, as bison and prescribed fire alter the structure of critical breeding habitat for grassland birds. The objectives of this research were to determine the effects of bison and prescribed fire on grassland breeding birds in 2 tallgrass prairie preserves in the Midwest region of the United States. We surveyed bird communities, vegetation structure, and bison activity at an Illinois preserve (n = 20 sites) and an Indiana preserve (n = 27 sites) in 2020 and 2021 and compiled a history of restoration activities (e.g., prescribed fire, planting year) at these sites. Grazing and fire disturbances affected grassland bird diversity and abundances, whereas we found little to no evidence that restoration planting age and spatiotemporal factors affected grassland bird populations. Disturbance effects often corresponded to species-specific responses to changes in vegetation structure. Grassland-obligate bird diversity was lower in recently burned and ungrazed management units, in comparison to unburned-ungrazed and unburned-grazed sites. Henslow's sparrow (Centronyx henslowii), a species known to be sensitive to recent prescribed fire, exhibited increased abundance with time since fire, an increase that was further amplified with bison presence. These results highlight the importance of applying varying levels of grazing and fire disturbance to provide variable vegetation structure to accommodate the habitat preferences of a diversity of grassland bird species. Moreover, our results indicate that bison may play a role in mediating the differing effects of variable prescribed fire frequencies on grassland bird species of concern.

Increasing wildfire activity at northern high latitudes has the potential to mobilize large amounts of terrestrial mercury (Hg). However, understanding implications for Hg cycling and ecosystems is hindered by sparse research on peatland wildfire Hg emissions. In this study, we used measurements of soil organic carbon (SOC) and Hg, burn depth, and environmental indices derived from satellite remote sensing to develop machine learning models for predicting Hg emissions from major wildfires in permafrost peatland of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (YKD) in southwestern Alaska. Wildfire Hg emissions during summer 2015 – estimated as the product of Hg:SOC (0.38 ± 0.17 ng Hg / g C), predicted SOC stores (mean [5th–95th] = 9.1 [5.3–11.2] kg C / m2), and burn depth (11.3 [8.2–13.9] cm) – were 556 [164–1138] kg Hg, or approximately 6% of Hg emissions from wildfire activity >60˚N. Modeling estimates suggest that wildfire nearly doubled summertime Hg deposition within 10 kilometers, despite advection of more than 75% of total emissions beyond Alaska. YKD areal emissions combined with remote sensing estimates of burned area suggest that wildfire Hg emissions from northern peatlands (25.4 [14.9–33.6] Mg/y) are an important component of the northern Hg budget. Additional research is needed to refine these estimates and understand implications for Arctic and global Hg cycling.