Instrument Response Removal and the 2020 MLg 3.1 Marlboro, New Jersey, Earthquake

To better understand earthquakes as a hazard and to better understand the interior structure of the Earth, we often want to measure the physical displacement, velocity, or acceleration at locations on the Earth’s surface. To this end, a routine step in an observational seismology workflow is the removal of the instrument response, required to convert the digital counts recorded by a seismometer to physical displacement, velocity, or acceleration. The conceptual framework, which we briefly review for students and researchers of seismology, is that of the seismometer as a linear time-invariant system, which records a convolution of ground motion via a transfer function that gain scales and phase shifts the incoming signal. In practice, numerous software packages are widely used to undo this convolution via deconvolution of the instrument’s transfer function. Here, to allow the reader to understand this process, we start by taking a step back to fully explore the choices made during this routine step and the reasons for making them. In addition, we introduce open-source routines in Python and MATLAB as part of our rflexa package, which identically reproduce the results of the Seismic Analysis Code, a ubiquitous and trusted reference. The entire workflow is illustrated on data recorded by several instruments on Princeton University campus in Princeton, New Jersey, of the 9 September 2020 magnitude 3.1 earthquake in Marlboro, New Jersey.

Is Dante a pilgrim? Pilgrimage, material culture, and modern Dante criticism

The phrase “Dante the pilgrim” has become commonplace within scholarship on the Commedia as a way to refer to the character within the text who travels the Christian afterlife, as distinct from “Dante the poet,” the voice which narrates the poem. Yet, despite such prevalence, the validity of the term “pilgrim” goes rather unquestioned by scholars. This study aims to challenge the label through Dante’s own definition of a peregrino in the Vita nuova as “chiunque è fuori de la sua patria” (XL.6), a definition that shows a more nuanced understanding of the term than modern scholarship acknowledges. Instead, by tracing out the legacy of the term “Dante the pilgrim” as emerging from late 19th-century criticism such as Francesco de Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana, this article will show that the typical understanding of pilgrim ignores a central dimension of Dante’s own definition: a sense of physical displacement. For Dante, pilgrimage becomes constitutive of the virtual world in the poem, drawing off of material practices of travel to inform the physical experiences of the protagonist. This literal level, signified by an embodied protagonist in similar ways as pilgrims to holy sites interacted with those places, is fundamental for interpreting the larger theological truths Dante conveys, even in minute details such as kicking rocks in Inferno 12.

Whitest City in America: A Smaller Black Community’s Experience of Gentrification, Displacement, and Aging in Place

Background and Objectives The influx of people with higher socioeconomic status into large Black communities is well documented; less is known regarding smaller, aging Black communities. Older Black adults in Portland, Oregon, among America’s fastest gentrifying cities with the smallest metropolitan Black population, discussed barriers to healthy aging. Perspectives centered on the experience of gentrification, displacement, and its impact on social microsystems, place security, and aging in place. Research Design and Methods One-time focus groups engaged 41 Black adults aged ≥45. A demographic survey included residence area/duration. Discussions were thematically coded. Ecological Systems Theory guided interpretation. Results The majority of participants resided within gentrifying historically Black neighborhoods (89.2%), were aged ≥65 (54.6%), and lived in their neighborhood ≥21 years (24.3%). Emergent discussion themes were: Rise and fall of Black ownership; Displacement; Race-related stress; and Financial burden. Gentrification contributed to the dismantling of Black property ownership curated over generations, increased financial burden, and threatened place security. Physical displacement strained social networks, diminishing intergenerational neighborhood ties that supported aging in place. Cultural and physical displacement weakened sense of social cohesion and belonging, and induced race-related stressful interactions with new residents within original and relocation neighborhoods. Discussion and Implications Gentrification in the Pacific Northwest echoes national trends, uprooting critical close-proximity social networks and deteriorating motivation to engage in neighborhood-based social activity. Smaller, aging Black communities may be particularly vulnerable to these effects which critically impact aging in place. Data inform researchers and policymakers to better understand how gentrification affects smaller, aging Black communities.

Aplicación de tecnologías inalámbricas al monitoreo climatológico en la cuenca del Río Paute

The program for the management of the water and soil (PROMAS) is a research department of the University of Cuenca. It focuses on the monitoring and conservation of the water sources and natural resources. Among others, such program mainly requires the monitoring of several variables by means of a set of hydro-meteorological stations. From its beginning, the program has deployed around 130 stations in an extensive geographic area of interest, ranging from the Cajas sector in the province of Azuay to the province of Cañar. Currently, the meteorological stations stores the variables of interest in their internal memory. Then, the analysis of the collected data requires the physical displacement of the Promas staff to the different sites. Due to the fact that most of the remote sites are of difficult access, the personal obtain the information with a periodicity of around 30 and 45 days. In this context, this paper describes the work on progress whose main objective is to provide to the meteorological stations with the wireless transmission capacity of the data collected by the sensors to the Promas data center in real time.

Reclaiming the chocolate city: Soundscapes of gentrification and resistance in Washington, DC

In Washington, DC, Black residents have experienced unprecedented levels of cultural and physical displacement since 2000. Because of gentrification, the first “chocolate city,” long been defined by its blackness, has experienced shifts in the economy and commitments by the local government, that privilege policies that facilitate the displacement of Black families. Everyday struggles against gentrification have been of wide-ranging theoretical concern and pose an ongoing challenge for scholars in geography to understand the ways people resist gentrification and displacement. In this article, I show through an analysis of the anti-gentrification movement, #DontMuteDC, how Black people challenge the processes of gentrification by reclaiming space and resisting capitalist dispossession through cultural production. I demonstrate the relationship between Black sound aesthetics, gentrification, and a spatial politics of reclamation. I analyze the movement’s emphasis on go-go music as part of a process to (re)claim their place in the city, which I argue disrupts structures governing and managing normative space. I propose reclamation aesthetics as an analytic through which we can understand Black cultural production and Black place- and space-making practices as responses to socio-spatial inequities.

On Writing and Return

This article situates the Palestinian right of return within the context of Palestinian-American literary reflections and the intersection of women’s and human rights. Providing a brief history of Palestinian dispossession and the struggle for return, it explores the multiple dimensions of “return” in the context of physical displacement, loss, cultural erasure, and diaspora negotiations of belonging and exile. Identifying return as both a right and as a metaphor, it looks at gendered realities of Palestinian and Palestinian-American experience, critiques the dichotomy of nationalism and feminism, and explores how Palestinian-American literature, emerging from personal and political displacement, narrates a literary claim to both reclamation and transformation, in which to return is to claim what was lost and to construct Palestinian reality anew. Drawing on the words of several Palestinian-American authors and the author’s own experiences, the article voices “return” as a claim to the past and a foundation for the future.

Bohemia growth machine: Street art as an urban development tool in Florida

Meanings and functions of street art have, in recent decades, diversified in the United States as well as globally. Today, we find street art initiatives and mural festivals in many cities, where they are applauded for fostering local development and tourism while also producing less tangible branding and marketing outcomes. Our research, based on ethnographic fieldwork and secondary data analysis in three Florida cities, suggests that street art initiatives can indeed become, in essence, handmaids to real estate development; however, the degree to which this is the case is variable, and it is by no means inevitable that the only long-term outcome will be the cultural obliteration and physical displacement of current residents. The article’s analysis describes and compares mural scenes in key redeveloping neighbourhoods in three Florida cities (Tampa, St. Petersburg and Miami) that, we argue, represent a diversity, and perhaps even a trajectory, of cities’ appropriation of street art as a development tool.

LIFE AFTER NATURAL DISASTER: THE CASE OF RESETTLEMENT POLICY IN PAGERJURANG, YOGYAKARTA

Public policy in managing natural disasters in Indonesia has not yet optimal. Nonetheless, there emerge programs to deal with natural disasters as the case of the 2010 Mount Merapi eruption. The government relocated the survivors using the Rekompak (Community-Based Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Society and Settlement) program. Researcher employs interpretative approaches to understanding the reality which experienced by local inhabitants. Rekompak finished in 2014 at Pagerjurang, but this study uncover the side of the survivors who have moved to the new residential area. As the final statement, this study presents that moving residents' residences is not only a matter of physical displacement, but other conditions might hinder the resilience of local inhabitants such as changes in economic and socio-cultural conditions.