Search Results (8)

The ferry from Havana to Regla, Cuba, transports visitors from today’s cruise ship docks across a brief stretch of water in about 20 min. Despite its brevity, this watery passage symbolically foregrounds the Marian devotion on the southern rim of the grand harbor. In this way, water conjoins African diasporic histories of enslavement, labor, survival, resistance, daily life, and religiosity within Havana Bay, into which two urban geographies project. Regla historically served as a municipality for dockworkers and shipwrights and became an enclave for identity creation, civil association, and religious worship for people of African descent. The church and sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de Regla (“Our Lady of Regla”) has nurtured this connection as it houses effigies of the venerated Virgin, adorned in blue. The Virgin of Regla represents one of two, along with El Cobre, of the most important Marian devotions on the island of Cuba and is the focus of insular and diasporic pilgrimage. In Regla, the Virgin’s nautical iconography decorates the sanctuary and historically connects her to the working populations who sustained this devotion as they serviced Havana Harbor with their labor. Adjacent to the church is a waterfront park that looks out on the water and the city of Havana beyond. Bordered on one side by a low wall, the park incorporates a large ceiba tree, ceiba pentandra, also known as the silk cotton or kapok tree, a tropical species with a large trunk and spreading tree canopy native to Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, northern South America, and West Africa (with a similar variety found in South and Southeast Asia). This article considers landscape as a methodology for examining the interplay of this tree and the adjacent church as interwoven and mutually reinforcing sites of devotion for the worship of the Virgin Mary and the oricha Yemayá in Regla, Cuba, with a view toward a broader set of local and global spaces. Full article

This paper examines the structure, message, and content of biblical genealogies in light of literary analysis and social anthropology. In particular, the focus is on the so-called “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10. My basic assumption is that most biblical genealogies are a literary genre employing various devices that carry a message using symbolic numbers, chiastic structure, and anticipation. These lists interact and supplement the narrative, sometimes as a foil to the story line. They are inserted at relevant points of change in the story of mankind from Adam and Eve to Joseph and his brothers. I even propose that these insertions are the earliest form of dividing the book of Genesis into installments, a precursor to weekly Torah readings and to the later division into chapters as in the printed text. The underlying message of this chapter is the value concept of the brotherhood of mankind stemming from one father—Noah. This innovative idea of universal kinship breaks with the common pagan view prevalent in antiquity that man’s place is to serve the gods and to have little or no personal identity. Note that the great urban cultures of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia have left us no real records of family lineage other than the long king lists that reflect dynastic power. No doubt the importance of oral and written lineage stems from a tribal culture like that of the ancient Hebrews and their kindred. This overriding view even shaped the Nimrud pericope, describing his founding the urban centers of Babylon and Assyria. Genealogy became the natural medium expressing this message of universal kinship. Basic to understanding biblical genealogies is discerning two patterns of kinship, one, linear, stretching up to ten generations, and two, segmented genealogies, noting an eponymous “father” and his segmented offspring or wives. Our understanding of these structures in the Bible is shaped by the research of social anthropologists who studied oral genealogy among analphabetic tribes in Africa and the Middle East. I apply these observations and methodology in a detailed commentary on the Table of Nations. Full article

The main tool for biodiversity conservation at the European level is the Natura 2000 network. The identification of Natura 2000 as an “ecological network spread over the entire European Union territory” is the symbolic image launched by the Habitat Directive (92/43/EEC) even though many considerations focused on the contradiction between the shared model of the ecological network—based on spatial continuity—and the fragmented geographical configuration of the Natura 2000 sites. Currently, it stretches across all 28 European countries, both on land and at sea, and it is made up of over 27,000 sites for a total extension of approximately 1,150,000 km². The land area covered by N2000 corresponds to approximately 18% of the total EU, with the national coverage ratio ranging from a minimum of 9% to a maximum of 38% in the various European countries. The aim of this study was to determine the degree of landscape fragmentation caused by the urban areas towards the Natura 2000 network, with the aim of analyzing how the current urban settlements’ geography could compromise their functionality. The proximity analysis carried out provides the necessary information to achieve full efficiency in the connections between the different habitats. In addition, these results give indications on which planning scale is most appropriate to intervene to reduce environmental fragmentation. Full article

For developing national maritime traffic routes through the coastal waters of Korea, the customary maritime traffic flow must be accurately identified and quantitatively evaluated. In this study, the occupancy time of ships in cells was calculated through a density analysis based on automatic identification system data. The density map was statistically created by logarithmically transforming the density values and adopting standard deviation-based stretch visualization to increase the normality of the distribution. Many types of traffic routes such as open-sea, coastal, inland, and coastal access routes were successfully identified; moreover, the stretch color ramp ratio was reduced to identify routes having relatively high density. Adopting a single standard deviation and demonstrating the top 25% of color ramps, the analysis afforded the main routes through which customary traffic flows. This novel density analysis method and statistical visualization method is expected to be used for developing national maritime traffic routes and should ultimately contribute to maritime safety. Moreover, it provides a scientific means and simulator for determining the navigation area and analyzing conflicts with other activities in marine spatial planning. Full article

Several mechanisms in industrial use have significant applications in thermal transportation. The inclusion of hybrid nanoparticles in different mixtures has been studied extensively by researchers due to their wide applications. This report discusses the flow of Powell–Eyring fluid mixed with hybrid nanoparticles over a melting parabolic stretched surface. Flow rheology expressions have been derived under boundary layer theory. Afterwards, similarity transformation has been applied to convert PDEs into associated ODEs. These transformed ODEs have been solved the using finite element procedure (FEP) in the symbolic computational package MAPLE 18.0. The applicability and effectiveness of FEM are presented by addressing grid independent analysis. The reliability of FEM is presented by computing the surface drag force and heat transportation coefficient. The used methodology is highly effective and it can be easily implemented in MAPLE 18.0 for other highly nonlinear problems. It is observed that the thermal profile varies directly with the magnetic parameter, and the opposite trend is recorded for the Prandtl number. Full article

Complex systems are usually affected by various sources of uncertainty, and it is essential to account for mechanisms that ensure the proper management of such disturbances. This paper introduces a novel approach to solve symbolic regression problems, which combines the potential of Grammatical Evolution to obtain solutions by describing the search space with context-free grammars, and the ability of Modal Interval Analysis (MIA) to handle quantified uncertainty. The presented methodology uses an MIA solver to evaluate the fitness function, which represents a novel method to manage uncertainty by means of interval-based prediction models. This paper first introduces the theory that establishes the basis of the proposed methodology, and follows with a description of the system architecture and implementation details. Then, we present an illustrative application example which consists of determining the outer and inner approximations of the mean velocity of the water current of a river stretch. Finally, the interpretation of the obtained results and the limitations of the proposed methodology are discussed. Full article

This paper studies the combined effects of viscous dissipation, first and second-order slip and variable transport properties on phase-change hydromagnetic bio-nanofluid convection flow from a stretching sheet. Nanoscale materials possess a much larger surface to volume ratio than bulk materials, significantly modifying their thermodynamic and thermal properties and substantially lowering the melting point. Gyrotactic non-magnetic micro-organisms are present in the nanofluid. The transport properties are assumed to be dependent on concentration and temperature. Via appropriate similarity variables, the governing equation with boundary conditions are converted to nonlinear ordinary differential equations and are solved using the BVP4C subroutine in the symbolic software MATLAB. The non-dimensional boundary value features a melting (phase change) parameter, temperature-dependent thermal conductive parameter, first as well as second-order slip parameters, mass diffusivity parameter, Schmidt number, microorganism diffusivity parameter, bioconvection Schmidt number, magnetic body force parameter, Brownian motion and thermophoresis parameters. Extensive computations are visualized for the influence of these parameters. The present simulation is of relevance in the fabrication of bio-nanomaterials for bio-inspired fuel cells. Full article

To improve the efficiency of mixing under laminar flow with a low Reynolds number (Re), a novel three-dimensional Horseshoe Transformation (3D HT) was proposed as the basis for the design of a micromixer. Compared with the classical HT, the Lyapunov exponent of the 3D HT, which was calculated based on a symbolic dynamic system, proved the chaotic enhancement. Based on the 3D HT, a micromixer with a mixing length of 12 mm containing six mixing units was obtained by sequentially applying “squeeze”, “stretch”, “twice fold”, “inverse transformation”, and “intersection” operations. Numerical simulation and Peclet Number (Pe) calculations indicated that when the squeeze amplitude 0 < α < 1/2, 0 < β < 1/2, the stretch amplitude γ > 4, and Re ≥ 1, the mass transfer in the mixer was dominated by convective diffusion induced by chaotic flow. When Re = 10, at the outlet of the mixing chamber, the simulated mixing index was 96.4%, which was far less than the value at Re = 0.1 (σ = 0.041). Microscope images of the mixing chamber and the curve trend of pH buffer solutions obtained from a mixing experiment were both consistent with the results of the simulation. When Re = 10, the average mixing index of the pH buffer solutions was 91.75%, which proved the excellent mixing efficiency of the mixer based on the 3D HT. Full article