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This paper provides an editorial to the Collection of MCSS Papers dedicated to Eduardo D. Sontag on the occasion of his 70th birthday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This white paper was developed to provide leukapheresis guidance for the collection of mononuclear cells from adult and pediatric patients who are destined for immune effector cell (IEC) therapies for commercial and research applications. Currently, there is considerable variability in leukapheresis processes and limited published information regarding best practices relevant to new cellular therapies, especially IECs. Herein the authors address critical leukapheresis questions in five domains to help guide consistent collection processes and ensure high-quality products. The first four domains are onboarding, pre-collection, collection and post-collection, with protocol feasibility, preparation, care and follow-up of the patient/donor at each step, respectively, and technical considerations during collection. The fifth domain of quality assurance focuses on ensuring product potency, purity, safety and auditing. The American Society for Apheresis (ASFA) Clinical Applications Committee (IEC Therapy Subcommittee) was charged by the society's board of directors with working collaboratively with other ASFA committees and organizations, including the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy, Association for the Advancement of Blood and Biotherapies, American Society for Transplantation and Cellular Therapy, National Marrow Donor Program and International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy, to develop guidelines regarding leukapheresis collection of cells destined for the manufacture of IEC therapies. After a review of the literature and discussion with members of the involved committees and various institutions, a draft guidance was created and circulated for comment and revision. Critical aspects of apheresis that could affect the quality and quantity of the leukapheresis product were identified. These areas were then discussed and reviewed. After consensus, the best practice guidelines were proposed and accepted. In the current era of rapid growth of IEC therapies, it is important to address critical leukapheresis steps to provide high-quality products and more consistent practices and to eliminate redundant efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines early modern alba amicorum as collections of social and intellectual networks, personal memories, and other textual and visual materials. In what way are these 'paper worlds' related to collections of objects, and to networks of connections? How do they interact with other book and manuscript genres, such as the emblem and the costume book? Taking the album of the Dutch collector Bernardus Paludanus (1550-1633) as a case study, an argument will be made regarding the conceptual and material kinship of alba with other forms of manuscript and print collections. The intermediality and materiality of friendship books will be shown to be crucial aspects for understanding how this medium functioned within early modern cultures of collecting and the communal production of memory and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a particular case study of the formal verification of state-of-the-art, real software, we discuss the specification and verification of a corrected version of the implementation of a linked list as provided by the Java Collection Framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal papers such as diaries or memoirs are established sources for historical, cultural and literary research. Special archival collections have been built up over the past decades. Depending on the focus of the content, these collections are composed very differently. With an intersectional approach, some of these differences are presented in this article: Are women and men documented differently in collections of personal papers from artists, scientists or politicians? How is the gender comparison in collections with an everyday history approach? Are women and men possibly represented here with different auto/biographical formats? And what about members of different social classes? Are there also diaries of workers or servants in the archives? The systematic comparison exposes structural inequalities in archival collections and thus shows the direct effects of documentation policies that have a lasting influence on which sources are ultimately available to research – and which are not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the research was to analyze the role of machine data learning in systematic literature reviews. The Natural Language Processing technique called topic modeling was applied to a set of titles and abstracts collected from the Scopus database. Specifically, the Latent Dirichlet Assignment (LDA) technique was used, from which it was possible to discover and understand the underlying themes in the collection of documents. The results showed the usefulness of the technique used in the exploratory literature review, by allowing the results to be grouped by theme. Likewise, it was possible to identify the specific areas and activities where machine learning has been applied the most, in relation to literature reviews. It is concluded that the LDA technique is an easy-to-use strategy and whose results allow a wide collection of documents to be approached in a systematic and coherent manner, notably reducing the review time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth century books from the collection of the old digital library of the Library University Seville are analyzed to locate the parts made with decorated papers, in order to classify and describe them according to the proposals of specialized literature. For this, the records included in the repository of the digital collection are recovered, the digital reproductions of the books are visualized, the parts with decorated papers are identified and described following the decorated papers classification model, previously elaborated, based on the research of Professor Carpallo Bautista. The model is made up of 6 techniques and their variants. Of the more than 6.700 records from the 18th century in the collection of the digital ancient collection, 511 include decorated papers in their bindings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce the collection of papers from the first workshop on the habitability of the venusian cloud layer organized by the Roscosmos/IKI-NASA Joint Science Definition Team (JSDT) for Russia's Venera-D mission and hosted by the Space Research Institute in Moscow, Russia, during October 2–5, 2019. The collection also includes three papers that were developed independently of the workshop but are relevant to venusian cloud habitability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an introduction to a special collection of papers in honor of Robert Deschenaux, a chemist who made significant contributions to the field of soft materials. Deschenaux was born in Switzerland in 1957 and obtained his PhD in chemistry in 1983. Throughout his career, he conducted research on various topics including metal complexes, liquid-crystalline materials, and dendrimers. Deschenaux also played a role in teaching and promoting chemistry. The special collection of papers was organized to celebrate his retirement and his outstanding contributions to the field. [Extracted from the article]

This paper proposes the use of simulation modelling to explore the effect of conservation strategies on the preservation of paper collections. Agent-based simulation was chosen as the simulation approach in order to capture the individual characteristics of the collections, their size, and the values of pH and degree of polymerisation (DP) for individual items. This approach enabled the simulation of the chemical degradation of different types of collections during their lifetime and under different preservation scenarios. We conducted a series of computational experiments on three types of collections, acidic, modern, and mixed, to explore the effect of slightly lowering the temperature and relative humidity in the repositories, the deacidification of part of the collection at different rates, and the delay in making the decision to start a deacidification treatment. The results indicated that a small change, lowering the storage conditions from 18°C to 16°C and from 50% to 40% RH, can protect up to 30% of the collection from reaching the critical DP of 300 within a time horizon of 500 years. On the other hand, to obtain similar results through deacidification, 45% of the mixed collection and 70% of the acidic collection should be deacidified within a period of 100 years. The experiments also indicated that better results are obtained when the priorities for deacidification are acidic records with a pH value below 5. This study shows that modelling the heterogeneity of the collections can support preservation management, particularly if the concern is not the preservation of a part of the collection but the collection as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection: By Jason M. Gibson. The collection in question in Gibson's study is that assembled by linguist and ethnographer T.G.H. ("Ted") Strehlow, now housed at the purpose-built Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. This brings me to the second innovation that Gibson makes in approaching Strehlow's archive: his decision to focus on the work that Strehlow did with the Anmatyerr. [Extracted from the article]

Given the need in Scientometrics to get beyond merely classifying scientific production based on the classification of the journals in which it is published, there have been many attempts to classify papers directly. Little has been done, however, to check how reliable the results are. In this work, a collection of publications was generated which we call an Author's Assignation Collection (AAC) comprising 13449 papers referenced in the Scopus database and classified by their research guarantor with fractional weighting in terms of Scopus's own ASJC scheme. The methodological approach taken is described, and the collection's representativeness is evaluated and compared with the journal-based classification. There stand out both the great number of papers assigned by their research guarantors to more than one category (at times with even the same weight) and how frequently authors assigned categories which were not assigned to the journals in which their paper was published. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses in detail the content of the collection The Zygmunt Haupt Papers, 1907–1976, held in Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries. In particular, it describes the Voice of America broadcasts prepared by the writer, as well as his life and writings, and provides a summary of the research conducted on Haupt. It briefly discusses The Zdzisław Ruszkowski Papers, the supplemental collection linked recently to Haupt's archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Themed Intervention consists of short papers written by nine plenary speakers at the 2024 Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers plus a paper by the Society's Cartographic Collections Manager. In this introduction, I explain why I chose mapping as the conference Chair's theme. I give a sense of how the relationship between geography and mapping has been addressed through previous conference addresses and themes. I then explore three types of cartographic genealogies. The first shows how histories of cartography traditionally took the form of family trees. The second explores disjunctures between previous phases of cartography and brings us to current definitions of mapping. The third genealogy is that of previously subjugated forms of mapping knowledge and practice which are now defining features of the field (critical quantitative; empire, race, and Indigenous; counter‐; representational and more‐than‐representational). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how "Rivera's chair" and the "working room" became the melancholic and strangely literary objects that today make up the José Eustasio Rivera’s archive at the Universidad de Caldas in Manizales, Colombia. It examines the connection between some objects and four final moments in the writer's life: his relocation to the office-apartment of Editorial Andes; two speeches delivered in New York days before his death (one in the homage organized by Federico de Onís and another for aviator Méndez), and the repatriation of his body to Bogotá. The role of José A. Velasco, Rivera's friend, and John McDermott, his lawyer in New York, are highlighted. Finally, this paper shows how Velasco's melancholic love for collecting achieved to compile the papers and things in this collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the re-animation of a geography departmental collection through a study of the archives and map collection of the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. The discussion is situated within parallel examples of work on geographical archives and map collections, and wider debates on engagement with archival sources. The paper considers how a previously dormant collection has been re-animated in recent years, conveys the range of source material involved, and discusses the possibilities of digitisation. The paper thereby raises questions which could be asked of the holdings of any academic department, from whatever time period. • The first detailed study of the re-animation of a geography departmental archival and map collection. • Shows a variety of original source material including photographic slides, plans, maps and posters. • Connects the study of a specific archive and map collection to wider debates on engagement with archival sources. • Examines the possibilities and implications of digitising analogue archival material. • Raises questions which could be asked of any archives and collections held by academic departments, from whatever period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Swiggers (Hg.), Language, Grammar, and Erudition: From Antiquity to Modern Times. A collection of papers in honour of Alfons Wouters (Orbis Supplementa, Tome 44). [Extracted from the article]

The research has been focusing on some connection between the chemical composition of the papers obtained by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and the nature of the fillers, determined by energy dispersion X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) spectroscopy. The present paper corroborates the FTIR and EDXRF results obtained for some historical papers from books of the XIX-th and XX-th centuries, from private collections. These analytical results allowed a first approximation of technological paper composition and of the age determination of the samples. This analytical method can elaborate some properly methods for paper documents preservation, taking into account the aging and degradation processes of the historical paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the obstacles to studying and using displaced radio archives, taking as a case study a collection of historic recordings from Nazi Germany that is held at the Czech Radio archive in Prague. This so-called 'Loot Collection' (Kořistní fond) occupies an awkward position between established categories and is confronted simultaneously by the challenges common to historic sound archives, and those specific to collections which have been displaced from their point of origin. The paper shares some early analysis of the history and content of this collection, and argues for a transnational approach to 'activate' other overlooked archival collections whose history and relevance spreads across contemporary national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HAL is the national open repository for documents and data from French scientists. The deposits are organized in institutional portals and collections from research laboratories and projects. The paper analyses how grey literature is represented in the collections of French research laboratories on HAL. We assess the grey literature deposits on HAL from the 66 research laboratories affiliated to the University of Lille, covering all STM and SSH fields. The focus is on conference papers, reports, working papers, theses and dissertations. The study distinguishes between deposits of documents and records without documents, compares deposits from different disciplines, different laboratory collections and different document types. Typical strategies (or lack of strategies) on the local level of research laboratories are identified. Conditions and variables that may explain these differences are discussed, together with potential effects on the visibility, impact and evaluation of the laboratories' research output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the concept of μF-subgroup is introduced. It is proved that in finite cyclic groups 풞n, the collection LμF(풞n) of all μF-subgroups of 풞n is a sublattice of L(풞n). It is also proved that LμF(풞m ×풞n) is not a sublattice of L(풞m ×풞n) in general. Further, a characterization is obtained for LμF(풞m ×풞n) to be a sublattice of L(풞m ×풞n). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation of the influence of electrode configuration on corona discharge and particle collection under ambient climatic conditions in Blade-to-Plane Electrostatic Precipitator (BP-ESP). In an experimental-scale electrostatic precipitator (BP-ESP), electrodes of different shapes (blade, saw blade with small tooth, and saw blade with large tooth) were tested. The experiments were performed with three types of dust particles having a mean size of about 5 µm, 10 µm, and 45 µm. An aerosol spectrometer was used to characterize the chemical composition of these dust particles injected into the ESP. Different DC-applied voltages have been taken into account for both positive and negative polarities. Results showed that a high current was generated with a saw blade electrode with large teeth which increased the particle collection efficiency, for both polarities. The negative corona discharge is overall more effective than the positive one for the different configurations of electrodes and dust particles used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a stability condition |$\sigma $| on a triangulated category, Dimitrov–Katzarkov introduced the notion of a |$\sigma $| -exceptional collection. In this paper, we study full |$\sigma $| -exceptional collections in the derived category of an acyclic quiver. In particular, we prove that any stability condition |$\sigma $| on the derived category of a Dynkin quiver admits a full |$\sigma $| -exceptional collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation In recent years, the focus of bioinformatics research has moved from individual sequences to collections of sequences. Given the fundamental role of the Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT) in string processing, a number of dedicated tools have been developed for computing the BWT of string collections. While the focus has been on improving efficiency, both in space and time, the exact definition of the BWT used has not been at the center of attention. As we show in this paper, the different tools in use often compute non-equivalent BWT variants: the resulting transforms can differ from each other significantly, including the number r of runs, a central parameter of the BWT. Moreover, with many tools, the transform depends on the input order of the collection. In other words, on the same dataset, the same tool may output different transforms if the dataset is given in a different order. Results We studied 18 dedicated tools for computing the BWT of string collections and were able to identify 6 different BWT variants computed by these tools. We review the differences between these BWT variants, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view, comparing them on eight real-life biological datasets with different characteristics. We find that the differences can be extensive, depending on the datasets, and are largest on collections of many similar short sequences. The parameter r , the number of runs of the BWT, also shows notable variation between the different BWT variants; on our datasets, it varied by a multiplicative factor of up to 4.2. Availability and implementation Source code and scripts to replicate the results and download the data used in the article are available at https://github.com/davidecenzato/BWT-variants-for-string-collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions surrounding digital libraries and their metadata have become less robust than before, given that creating and hosting digital collections have become the norm for most cultural heritage institutions over the last 20 years. Consequently, there are fewer discussions of how the characteristics of digital collections and their metadata have changed over time. This article showcases the evolution of digital collections and their metadata at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library in the last 20 years. It discusses the growth of its collections and their characteristics, examines historical changes in the use of metadata elements, and explores responses to the changing nature of digitized and born-digital materials. Based on a large-scale data analysis of the digital collections and their metadata housed in UIUC Digital Library, the paper also examines the challenges and opportunities of the curation and management of digital collections and digital libraries in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of the sea route around the Cape by Vasco da Gama in 1498 opened the maritime trade between Europe, East Africa and India. At this time, Mozambique Island played a significant role mediating this maritime network. As a result, an impressive amount of underwater cultural heritage was created, but it was heavily impacted over the last decade by commercial salvage activities. In the aftermath of the impacts from treasure hunting, this paper presents an on-going (re-)interpretation and assessment of indicative archaeological artefacts recovered from the Nossa Senhora da Consolação wreck (1608). The on-going (re-)interpretation is based on comparative analysis with artefact assemblages recovered in other contemporary shipwrecks and terrestrial sites around the world. Results suggest that Nossa Senhora da Consolação was a ship integrated in global trading networks, which met its fate at Mozambique Island due to commercial competition and access to the strategic coastal position between the Portuguese and the Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study the sufficient conditions for the existence of attractor of a generalized cyclic iterated function system composed of a complete metric space and a finite collection of generalized cyclic Γ-contraction mappings. Some examples are presented to support our main results and concepts defined herein. The results proved in the paper extend and generalize various well known results in the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an editorial introducing a topical collection on "Explainable and Augmented Machine Learning for Biosignals and Biomedical Images." It discusses the challenges of machine learning (ML) algorithms in the biomedical field due to their lack of transparency and the emergence of explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) techniques to address this issue. The collection includes ten papers that explore the latest advancements in xAI applied to various medical applications, such as brain function analysis, cancer biomarker identification, stress detection, emotion classification, and disease diagnosis. The papers present innovative computational methods that have the potential to be deployed in clinical contexts. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper we look at the families of random walks arising from FI-graphs. One may think of these objects as families of nested graphs, each equipped with a natural action by a symmetric group S n , such that these actions are compatible and transitive. Families of graphs of this form were introduced by the authors in [9] , while a systematic study of random walks on these families were considered in [10]. In the present work, we illustrate that these random walks never exhibit the so-called product condition, and therefore also never display total variation cutoff as defined by Aldous and Diaconis [1]. In particular, we provide a large family of algebro-combinatorially motivated examples of collections of Markov chains which satisfy some well-known algebraic heuristics for cutoff, while not actually having the property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let R [ [ X ] ] be the collection of power series with coefficients in a commutative ring R with identity. For a suitable function λ from ℕ 0 to ℕ , one can define a multiplication ∗ λ in R [ [ X ] ] such that together with the usual addition, R [ [ X ] ] becomes a ring that contains R as a subring. Denote this ring by R λ [ [ X ] ]. By this observation, the usual power series ring and the well-known Hurwitz series ring are the special cases of R λ [ [ X ] ] when λ (i) = 1 for all i and λ (i) = i ! for all i , respectively. In this paper, we study the Krull dimension of R λ [ [ X ] ]. We first introduce the concept of almost strong finite type (ASFT) rings and study basic properties of this type of rings. We then show that for any function λ , the Krull dimension of R λ [ [ X ] ] is at least 2 ℵ 1 if R is a non-ASFT ring, which is an analogue of the result about the Krull dimension of the usual power series ring that dim R [ [ X ] ] ≥ 2 ℵ 1 if R is a non-SFT ring. In particular, we have the Krull dimension of the Hurwitz series ring is at least 2 ℵ 1 if R is a non-ASFT ring, which gives an answer to a question of Benhissi and Koja about the infiniteness of the Krull dimension of the Hurwitz series ring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: One typical document retrieval method is to use to co-citation. The method is based on the premise that the degree of similarity among co-cited papers is equal in a particular paper. The degree is calculated with binary values: "co-cited" or "not-cited". To improve upon this method, the author proposes a multivalued co-citation measure based on semantic distance between co-cited papers. Methods: To determine the distance between citations, the author measured two machine parseable relationships (location and citing words) between places where papers are cited. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we identified two categories of co-citation: a group with strong relationships indicating "enumerated co-citation" (papers cited within one statement) and a group with weak relationships showing "non enumerated co-citation". Similarities within each group were calculated and compared using the CiteSeer dataset and 6 major similarity indicators. Results: All of the similarity indicators showed that degree of "enumerated co-citation" is higher than "non enumerated co-citation". Consequently, it became clear that the proposed co-citation measure can be used to distinguish the strength of co-citation more precisely and the it can be applied to large-scale document collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For any real α ∈ [ 0 , 1 ] , define the matrix A α (G) as A α (G) = α D (G) + (1 − α) A (G). The collection of eigenvalues of A α (G) together with multiplicities is called the A α -spectrum of G. A graph G is said to be determined by its A α -spectrum if any graph that is A α -cospectral with G is isomorphic to G. Lin et al. (2019) proposed characterizing graphs G determined by their A α -spectra such that G ∨ K m (m ≥ 1) are also determined by their A α -spectra for α ∈ (1 2 , 1). In this paper, we get that if G ∈ { K 2 , ... , 2 ︸ ⌊ n 2 ⌋ − 1 ∨ (K 1 ∪ K 2) , K 2 , ... , 2 ︸ n 2 , ⋃ i = 1 t C s i , ⋃ i = 1 t C s i ¯ , ⋃ i = 1 t P s i , F n , n K 1 } , then G and G ∨ K m (m ≥ 2) are both determined by their A α -spectra for α ∈ (1 2 , 1) , which generalizes some results of Lin, Liu and Xue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, the genus Mimomyagrus Breuning, 1970 is synonymized with Combe Thomson, 1864, and Mimomyagrus pfanneri Breuning, 1970 is considered a junior synonym of Combe brianus (White, 1858). The female of Arctolamia sinica Bi & Chen, 2022 is described for the first time and this species is reported as new to Myanmar. Type material of Lamia punctator Fabricius, 1776 [= Anoplophora chinensis (Forster, 1771)], Cerambyx galloprovincialis Olivier, 1800 [= Monochamus galloprovincialis (Olivier, 1800)] and Melanauster granulipennis Breuning, 1938 [= Monochamus guerryi Pic, 1903] are confirmed to be preserved in Natural History Museum, London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given graphs F and G, a perfect F-tiling in G is a collection of vertex-disjoint copies of F in G that together cover all the vertices in G. The study of the minimum degree threshold forcing a perfect F-tiling in a graph G has a long history, culminating in the Kühn--Osthus theorem [D. Kühn and D. Osthus, Combinatorica, 29 (2009), pp. 65-107] which resolves this problem, up to an additive constant, for all graphs F. In this paper we initiate the study of the analogous question for edge-ordered graphs. In particular, we characterize for which edge-ordered graphs F this problem is well-defined. We also apply the absorbing method to asymptotically determine the minimum degree threshold for forcing a perfect P-tiling in an edge-ordered graph, where P is any fixed monotone path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Warwick Shaffron, held in the collections of the Royal Armouries (VI.446) is the earliest extant example of a European medieval shaffron on public display anywhere in the world. In addition to its early date, the shaffron is also considered exceptional because of its seemingly formidable size, coupled with apparent physical evidence of battle damage. This study sheds new light on the Warwick Shaffron through the application of an original measurement methodology developed through the AHRC-funded 'Warhorse Project' and applied to shaffrons in the collections of the Royal Armouries. Drawing upon the Warhorse Project's wider findings on medieval horse stature, this paper critically discusses what shaffrons can tell us about the size of the mounts that wore them. A headline finding is that the dimensions of the Warwick Shaffron are entirely compatible with what we know about the size range of medieval horses at the time of its manufacture, albeit towards the upper end of the range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, convergences of a filter and a net have been characterized through ideal on topological spaces. Furthermore, we characterized the local function in an ideal topological space in terms of convergence of filter. Using Zorn's Lemma, we have found a maximal element in the collection of all proper ideals on a nonempty set which is called maximal ideal. We provide a convenient characterization of maximal ideals. We also consider simple properties of the image of an ideal, a net and various local functions under a homeomorphism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a novel collections-based outreach model for special collections, underscoring the vital role of outreach in linking unique and distinctive collections (UDCs) with existing interest groups. Drawing from a series of successful events, focused on knitting, held at the McGill University Library between 2021 and 2023, the model recommends the use of creative initiatives to engage pre-existing communities. These initiatives attracted a global audience, extending far beyond the university campus, and fostered connections between cultural heritage collections and specialized communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time poverty remains a critical issue for water access across the globe. However, research on the time spent for water collection and the factors associated with collection time inequalities and access heterogeneities is limited, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on the 2014 Ghana's Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data, and statistical and spatial analysis, we apply the concept of "everydayness" of water collection time poverty to examine the factors associated with water collection time inequalities and access heterogeneities of drinking water sources in Ghana. Our analysis shows that 8.6% of households face drinking water collection time poverty and this is prevalent and significant across different socio-economic groups and geographies. The observed geographical heterogeneity and collection time inequality in drinking water sources in this paper adds to the literature in terms of variation in household water insecurity across time and space. The water policy implications of these findings are discussed, and we highlight strategies to rethink drinking water security in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pezizales are a diverse and economically important order of fungi. They are common in the environment, having epigeous form, such as morels and hypogeous, forms called truffles. The mature ascospores of most epigeous Pezizales are forcibly discharged through an opening at the ascus apex created with the lifting of the operculum, a lid-like structure specific to Pezizales. The axenic cultures of Pezizales fungi isolated from single ascospores are important for understanding the life cycle, development, ecology, and evolution of these fungi. However, obtaining single-spore isolates can be challenging, particularly for collections obtained in locations where sterile work environments are not available. In this paper, we introduce an accessible method for harvesting ascospores from fresh ascomata in the field and laboratory for obtaining single-spore isolates. Ascospores are harvested on the inside cover of Petri plate lids in the field, air dried, and stored. At a later date, single-spore isolates are axenically cultured through serial dilution and plating on antibiotic media. With this approach, we were able to harvest ascospores and obtain single-spore isolates from 12 saprotrophic and 2 ectomycorrhizal species belonging to six Pezizales families: Discinaceae, Morchellaceae, Pezizaceae, Pyronemataceae, Sarcosomataceae, and Sarcoscyphaceae. This method worked well for saprotrophic taxa (12 out of 19 species, 63%) and was even effective for a few ectomycorrhizal taxa (2 out of 13 species, 15%). This process was used to study the initial stages of spore germination and colony development in species across several Pezizales families. We found germination often commenced with the swelling of the spore, followed by the emergence of 1–8 germ tubes. This method is sufficiently straightforward that, provided with sterile Petri dishes, citizen scientists from distant locations could use this approach to capture spores and subsequently mail them with voucher specimens to a research laboratory for further study. The generated single-spore Pezizales isolates obtained through this method were used to generate high-quality genomic data. Isolates generated in this fashion can be used in manipulative experiments to better understand the biology, evolution, and ecogenomics of Pezizales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a wind-speed-adaptive resonant piezoelectric energy harvester for offshore wind energy collection (A-PEH). The device incorporates a coil spring structure, which sets the maximum threshold of the output rotational frequency, allowing the A-PEH to maintain a stable output rotational frequency over a broader range of wind speeds. When the maximum output excitation frequency of the A-PEH falls within the sub-resonant range of the piezoelectric beam, the device becomes wind-speed-adaptive, enabling it to operate in a sub-resonant state over a wider range of wind speeds. Offshore winds exhibit an annual average speed exceeding 5.5 m/s with significant variability. Drawing from the characteristics of offshore winds, a prototype of the A-PEH was fabricated. The experimental findings reveal that in wind speed environments, the device has a startup wind speed of 4 m/s, and operates in a sub-resonant state when the wind speed exceeds 6 m/s. At this point, the A-PEH achieves a maximum open-circuit voltage of 40 V and an average power of 0.64 mW. The wind-speed-adaptive capability of the A-PEH enhances its ability to harness offshore wind energy, showcasing its potential applications in offshore wind environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by homological mirror symmetry, this paper constructs explicit full exceptional collections for the canonical stacks associated with the series of log del Pezzo surfaces constructed by Johnson and Kollár in [ 33 ]. These surfaces have cyclic quotient, non-Gorenstein, singularities. The construction involves both the |$\operatorname {GL}(2,{\mathbb {C}})$| McKay correspondence, and the study of the minimal resolutions of the surfaces, which are birational to degree two del Pezzo surfaces. We show that a degree two del Pezzo surface arises in this way if and only if it admits a generalized Eckardt point, and in the course of the paper we classify the blow-ups of |${\mathbb {P}}^{2}$| giving rise to them. Our result on the adjoints of the functor of Ishii–Ueda [ 32 ] applies to any finite small subgroup of |$\operatorname {GL}(2,{\mathbb {C}})$|⁠. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a group of three articles that bring together object stories relating to observatory history and networks. The three articles ('Instrumental networks', 'Object itineraries' and 'Observatory audiences') each bring together three object stories by different authors that contribute to the article theme. Here the genesis of the collection at the workshops of the Observatory Sites and Networks project is discussed, along with the approaches taken and the kind of insights that studies of material culture can shed on histories of observatories and the observatory sciences. The arrangement of the stories into three themes is outlined while common threads and recurring motifs that create connections and synergies across the thematic sections are highlighted. Together the collected papers make an argument for the use of objects in research, demonstrating the fruitfulness of investigating their histories and showing how they can expand our understanding of the networks of people, organisations and objects that were interested in or essential to the successful functioning of observatories. They also demonstrate the breadth and variety of interests and resources that were drawn into these networks, offering new ways of understanding and interpreting both observatory sites and museum objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work in early modern English collecting and bookbinding has shown the extent to which readers viewed books as malleable collections rather than unified totalities. This essay expands our understanding of these practices by examining a series of volumes collected and bound during the second half of the seventeenth century. These volumes show texts transformed by their proximity to other, often incongruous imprints, as well as readers registering their own presence amidst the chaotic print world of Civd War England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vrolik ethnographical collection consisted of roughly 300 skulls, mummified heads, skeletons, pelvises, wet-preserved preparations, and plaster models, collected by Gerard Vrolik (1775–1859) and his son Willem (1801–1863). Most prominent in this collection were the skulls, of which 177 remain in the collection of present-day Museum Vrolik. These skulls—a troubling heritage of colonialism and scientific racism—are the central subjects of this paper, which considers the changing meanings and values of these skulls for racial science over approximately 160 years, between ± 1800 and 1960. These shifting meanings are analysed using the skulls themselves as primary sources, including the labels, numbers and handwriting present on them or their stands. Central topics addressed will be matters of classification, hierarchy, scientific bias, and disciplinary development of racial anthropology from the study and collection of idealized national types to a quantitative craniometry of populations. This paper demonstrates that during 160 years of study of this same set of crania, the skulls of white European origin gradually lost racial relevance and were increasingly normalized, whereas the skulls of dark-skinned people of African descent continued to be categorized in a typological racial scheme and as such were increasingly othered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research over the past three decades has demonstrated that certain plastics in cultural materials are inherently unstable, displaying short lifespans and accelerating the degradation of neighbouring collection materials. Knowledge of the conservation of plastics is increasingly common in museum settings. However, less information is available on conserving plastics found in paper-based collections, and even less guidance on the materials and deterioration of plastic components found in book and document bindings. As plastics have been present in popular bookbinding materials since the mid-twentieth century, collection care professions require knowledge and methods for preserving these materials entering book collections. The aim of this paper is to determine strategies for the care of post-1950s books containing plastic. Collection surveys were conducted to determine the materials, structures, and degradation patterns of non-published books found in archive and archive-like settings at the South Australian Museum, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation at the University of Melbourne. A methodology combining condition reporting and infrared spectroscopy identified six plastic polymers in 35 binding styles that are summarised as 10 binding types. Recommendations are made for the use of preventive storage strategies responding to four categories of damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]