The Geo-imaginaries of potential in Mexico's Burgos Basin

In this paper, we use the geo-imaginary analytic to show how actors utilized narratives of resource potential and speculative economic futures for the Burgos Basin in northeastern Mexico to affect a broader liberalization of the nation's hydrocarbon sector. Our research traces the history of the word “potential” as a discrete and repetitive rhetorical technique used variously to speculate on hydrocarbon production, economic development, regional energy development, and risks associated with the Burgos. We also identify an array of visualizations, what we refer to as ‘conjurings,’ used with narratives of potential to encourage investments in the Basin's development. These include: maps depicting Burgos geologic continuity with productive Texas fields, quantitative forecasts of growing production, visual depictions of private firms facilitating future production, and fracking as a necessary wedge to pry open the Burgos' unrealized potential. Finally, using governmentality, we link Burgos potentiality discourses to socio-political outcomes, including in the early 2000s, when the Basin was imagined as a way to counterbalance the skyrocketing costs of imported natural gas, continuing with the 2013–2014 Reforms, and into the post-Reform oil and gas conference spaces that facilitated financial investing opportunities. We also argue that the current administration leveraged anti-fracking discourse to reverse the liberalization of Mexico's hydrocarbon sector. By drawing together overlapping elements from scholarship into resources, speculation, and governmentality, and by parsing the ways that potential narratives and conjuring tools are deployed, this research contributes to ongoing debates in political geography around natural resources and the geopolitics of the subsurface.     

Confessional disputes in the republic of letters: Susan Du Verger and Margaret Cavendish

The starting point of this article is an understudied piece of critical exegesis from 1657 titled Humble Reflections Upon Some Passages of the Right Honorable the Lady Marchionesse of Newcastles Olio. An obscure Englishwoman named Susan Du Verger composed this 164-page tract to refute a three-page essay on “A Monastical life” by the prolific poet, playwright, and philosopher, Margaret Cavendish. While there is now a substantial body of work on nuns and convents, this research largely overlooks how early modern women engaged with these topics in a scholarly manner. Along with elucidating the gamut of relevant patristic and ecclesiastical histories that were available in the English and French vernaculars, Humble Reflections provides a prompt for investigating Cavendish’s ideas on ecclesiastical order, ceremonies, and toleration. I propose that Cavendish refused to grace Du Verger with a direct response because her polemic disregarded the unofficial codes of conduct — friendship, transnational community, and inter-confessional co-existence — that were supposed to maintain peace within the Republic of Letters. In conclusion, this essay displays that Cavendish was actually a great admirer of monasticism, though not so much for its role in the spread of Christianity as for its place in the development of natural philosophy.     

天然水硬性石灰在不同碳化条件下的水化反应

为了探究不同碳化条件对天然水硬性石灰水化过程的影响,继而认识到养护条件中的碳化作用对天然水硬性石灰早期强度和养护时间的影响,模拟制备了不同碳化条件下的样品,用X射线衍射(XRD)、热重分析(TG)、红外光谱(IR)、扫描电子显微镜和X-射线能谱分析(SEM-EDX)测试和比较养护前后天然水硬性石灰成分、结构、形貌的变化。研究表明,天然水硬性石灰水化生成水化硅酸钙(CSH)、氢氧化钙(Ca(OH)_2)的反应与CSH、Ca(OH)_2的碳化反应同时进行,并且Ca(OH)_2的碳化速率大于水化反应生成Ca(OH)_2的速率。随着养护龄期增加CSH逐渐由细小的针棒状结构生长为粗大的棒状结构,随后又逐渐变短并最终完全碳化为方解石晶型的碳酸钙(CaCO_3)形貌。天然水硬性石灰水化产物的碳化作用能促进其水化反应进程。     

张衡地动仪的发明、失传与历史继承

地动仪的发明和失传存在深厚的社会背景.悬挂物对地震的良好反应是诞生科学思想的物质基础.地动仪是对天然验震器的发展,张衡不仅在利用物体惯性测震上,也在检测和记录地震微弱信号上有技术创新,成功测到公元134年12月13日陇西地震.天诫观念把自然现象与社会问题混为一谈,导致张衡晚年和地动仪的悲剧.仪器可能失传于东汉末年,当时发生了洛阳大火、毁铜铸钱、京师搬迁、人口剧减和灵台被毁等极端严重的社会混乱.张衡的科学思想和实践对现代地震学的起步发挥过思想启迪作用.对地动仪的研究需要开展科学实验,学术观点的统一只能建立在科学实验的基础上.     

Slaves, servants and wage earners: Free and unfree labour, from Grotius to Blackstone

This article provides an intellectual history of the status of wage earners as conceptualized within the natural law paradigm by European writers both on the Continent and in Britain. Historians of political discourse have mostly investigated the consequences of such a status for the political rights of labourers. This article shows that the crucial moves were made by different authors analysing the relation of servant to master either in the domestic sphere or in private contracts. The article further contends that that resulting deeply ambiguous analyses implied a far from complete personal freedom for wage earners. This had a decisive impact on different visions of commercial society in early modern times, and left a significant legacy for moderns.     

Towards the identification of dyestuffs in Early Iron Age Scandinavian peat bog textiles

A large systematic dye investigation of prehistoric Danish and Norwegian bog textiles was carried out using high performance liquid chromatography with photo diode array detection. After the selection of the most suitable protocol for dye extraction and HPLC analysis for this specific group of archaeological samples, the second part included the characterisation of the dyes detected in the whole series of the Early Iron Age textiles and the interpretation of the dyeing technology. Natural organic dyes were found from the three main categories of natural dyes, hence throwing new light on the use of biological dye sources in Early Iron Age Scandinavia. The results clearly indicate that most Scandinavian peat bog textiles originally were dyed and that already during the 1st millennium BC, the populations in Scandinavia were familiar with the dyeing technology.     

An ineluctable minimum of natural law: François Gény, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the limits of legal skepticism

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, legal theory on both sides of the Atlantic was characterized by a tremendous amount of skepticism toward the private law concepts of property and contract. In the United States and France, Oliver Wendell Holmes and François Gény led the charge with withering critiques of the abuse of deduction, exposing their forebears’ supposedly gapless system of private law rules for what it was, a house of cards built on the ideological foundations of laissez faire capitalism. The goal was to make the United States Constitution and the French civil code more responsive to the realities of industrialization. Unlike the other participants in this transatlantic critique, François Gény simultaneously insisted on the immutability of justice and social utility. His “ineluctable minimum of natural law” would guide judges and jurists toward the proper social ends, replacing deduction with teleology. The problem was that nearly all of Gény's contemporaries were perplexed by his conception of natural law, which lacked the substance of the natural rights tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the historicist impulse of the early twentieth. No one was more perplexed than Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose more thoroughgoing skepticism led him to see judicial restraint as the only solution to the abuse of deduction. The ultimate framework for this debate was World War I, in which both Holmes and Gény thought they had found vindication for their views. Events on the battlefield reaffirmed Gény's commitment to justice just as they reignited Holmes’ existential embrace of the unknown. In a sense, the limits of their skepticism would be forged in the trenches of the Great War.     

The Netherlands in the constellation of the eighteenth-century Western revolutions

In the constellation of the eighteenth-century revolutions, the French events have always occupied a dominant position. Consequently the other European upheavals have been considered as being provoked or strongly influenced by France. Yet, the Dutch revolutions in the 1780s and 1790s provide some important nuances to this interpretation. Before the French took over the Bastille, there was already a Dutch revolution with devoted Patriots, speaking about rights of man and constitutions. The Patriots had to flee abroad in 1787. In 1795, thanks to the French Army, they were able to return to their drawing boards, eager to think anew their government and society. This paper investigates how they did it and whether the American and French precedents were so influential after all in the construction of the Batavian Republic.     

Natural flood management: small-scale progress and larger-scale challenges

ABSTRACT

Management of fluvial flood risk in the UK is undergoing a paradigm shift, with a change in emphasis from solely working with structural defences to considering catchment-based measures which attenuate flood runoff. Natural Flood Management (NFM) is promoted as a method that can reduce flood risk through the alteration, restoration or use of landscape features. Here we highlight the potential to manage runoff locally in the rural landscape using NFM by targeting flow pathways and utilising floodplains and riparian zones. Using two case study examples from the UK, we show that by accumulating dispersed small-scale storage in small catchment areas (<10 km²) can assist in attenuating flood runoff. However, there is currently a lack of evidence of measure effectiveness at larger catchment scales and for managing extreme flood events. Nevertheless, there is a strong evidence base to suggest many of these measures deliver a range of different ecosystem services if installed in the correct location in the landscape.