Journal articles on the topic 'Central Brazil Mission'

This article outlines mission theologies and practices of women trainees for mission in Brazil. The women are from the usa, Central America, and Brazil and assigned to mission work in Brazil with the us-based “Mission Society”. Nine interviews from a missionary training session in July 2008 are analyzed in order to: (1) articulate the spoken mission theology of women trainees; (2) identify everyday practices that women mission trainees engage in related to their mission calling and work; (3) relate the dislocation experienced by the women to sustaining practices and character traits they developed by utilizing the lived experience of their everyday practices; (4) describe the fuller theology of mission that results and make suggestions for incorporating women’s mission theologies based on practices into stated mission theologies, showing how everyday practices of women doing mission can enhance missiological understandings.

The conclusions of the Fifth Conference of Bishops of Latin America meeting in Aparecida in 2007 are entitled ‘Disciples and Missionaries of Jesus Christ.’ When analyzed in the light of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the traditional doctrines of soteriology, the sacraments, ecclesiology, and authority in the Church are missing; they are also missing in the conclusions of the previous conferences of Latin American bishops and in the Second African Synod. The conference of Medellin of 1968 had inaugurated the see-judge-act methodology, but it is missing in Aparecida. Also missing is a strong emphasis on social justice and structural sin, which are central to liberation theology. However, missionary discipleship is not just an ideal in Latin America; it is practiced through the Holy Popular Mission of Brazil and small communities in Guatemala. Hence the Catholic Church of Latin America is heading in a new direction. In this way, it is an example of a Church-type structure with some features of the sect type.

The present work aims to provide a comparative analysis of the workings of the Companhia de Jesus in Brazil and Japan in the second half of the sixteenth century, before considering the activities of Portuguese Jesuit priest Luís Fróis (1532-1597) on the Japanese mission and his central importance to the written output and publication of the mission among European and Ignatian circles. In writing on the Japanese mission, Fróis introduces into his discourse the foreign voice of the native Japanese, giving them a voice in the texts and describing their rituals, customs, and way of life. A comparative analysis with the written output of Manuel de Nóbrega, who wrote on the Brazilian mission, indicates that the symbolic aspect of the written representation of difference, which may be located in Luis Fróis, is less pronounced or even absent from Nóbrega’s work, giving rise to the appearance of the other not as difference, but as similarity, diluted in the fifteenth-century European imaginative and rhetoric frameworks. To conclude, a general reading is carried out between the work of Luis Fróis and Antoine Galland, the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights.

This study assesses the convenience and timeliness of making changes to the Central Bank of Brazil’s mission. We undertake this analysis from the normative and practical approaches and consider the perspective of inclusive development and the National Financial System’s role to be the main determinants of the selected strategic solution. The insertion of justice into the institutional mission of the Central Bank of Brazil not only signals a new normative proposal for public policies in this arena but also publicly compromises all agents, suggesting an agreement that engenders the expectations of reciprocity and increased legitimacy. The analysis is conducted through the political philosophy lens, based on the works of Rawls (1971, 2001) and Sen (1992, 2000, 2009). This approach focuses on neutralizing pre-existing views, as the purpose of this study is not to expand current results, but to question the governance structure of the National Financial System to select priorities and implement them. The advent of technology innovations emphasizes the opportunity for improvement, highlighting its risks and benefits. Therefore, the potential contribution of this study is to provide a policy-making alternative to promote publicly agreed objectives through governance structures.

This article reports on the World Council of Churches 'Commission on World Mission and Evangelism conference held 24 November–3 December 1996 in Salvador, Brazil. A brief history is outlined of developments leading up to this conference focusing on issues of gospel and culture. The conference format was divided into four sections: I authentic witness within each culture; II gospel and identity in community; III local congregations in pluralist societies; IV one gospel, diverse expressions. The central theme emerging from the conference was unity in diversity. The article concludes by noting some strengths, shortcomings, and polarities of opinions found at the Salvador conference.

Abstract From the mid-nineteenth century, central statistics agencies contributed to nation-state building through their dual mission of producing statistical description and policy prescription in the name of national progress. This article examines how one such agency, Brazil’s Directoria Geral de Estatística, worked to simultaneously measure and promote national progress from 1870 to 1920. The article documents a fundamental shift in this period in the DGE’s vision of the qualities of the population essential for Brazil’s progress as a nation. In the 1870s, the DGE saw educational statistics as the key measures of national progress and lobbied for government investment in primary schools to ensure the advancement of the nation. By the 1920s, the DGE looked instead to immigration and racial statistics to measure progress and advocated cultural and biological “whitening” of the population to improve the Brazilian nation. Analysis of a broad range of archival and published primary sources reveals the gradual racialization of the DGE’s institutional definition of “progress.” The study contributes to a growing body of research that examines how racial thought influenced the development and official practices of state agencies in Latin America.

The armed forces have reconstructed authentic democracy. They have once again definitively carried out their mission…. I love this country more than Life itself.Captain General Augusto Pinochet11 September 1989The Constitution of 1980 does not meet, in its elaboration of the manner in which it was ratified, the essential conditions required by constitutional doctrine for the existence of a legitimate political order based on the rule of law.Francisco Cumplido C. (1983)Minister of Justice (1990)On 11 March 1990, Patricio Aylwin took office as Chile's first elected president since 1970. Chile thus joined the list of Latin American nations making a transition from military to civilian government. Like the civilian governments in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, El Salvador and Guatemala, Chile's new government faced the challenge of returning the armed forces to a less central role in politics and reducing their institutional prerogatives.

The defence and foreign policy communities in the Global South should learn from the lessons of security governance that followed the 13-year United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). To better inform the academic and policy debate, this article extrapolates ideas from the case study of Chile, one of the ‘big four’ Latin American peacekeeping providers in Haiti, along with Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. The article examines Chile’s finished compromise with the MINUSTAH in order to shed light on conflict intervention strategies and its peace operations in Colombia and the Central African Republic. It argues that military policies for peace intervention purposes should undergo a critical reassessment in light of the state steering away from the past use of long-term brute force. Today’s changing security environment favours a set of different human security policies that have become more prevalent for peacekeeping policymaking. Engaging in scenarios of war and peace thus demands a more focused, experienced and tactical use of military and diplomatic resources than governments in the developing countries currently possess.

The first mention of Gonneville’s land occurs in Abbé Jean Paulmier’s Mémoires of 1664 petitioning the Pope to approve a Christian mission to the as yet undiscovered Terres australes. Central to Paulmier’s argument was the extract from a document purporting to be the travel account of a sixteenth-century navigator, Gonneville. The extract details how the unknown land was discovered after the navigator’s ship L’Espoir had lost its way and landed in the fabled Terres australes, south-east of the Cape of Good Hope. His utopian account of the unknown land played an important role in French voyages of discovery during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After Cook’s refutation of the existence of a Great South Land, Gonneville’s land was identified in the nineteenth century as being in Brazil. Recent scholarship, however, has revealed that Gonneville and his story were probably invented by Paulmier. This article examines how and why the Gonneville story became part of the history of French exploration, then details the elements which led to its being discredited.

The interaction between companies and universities is a central theme in discussions on technology transfer. In Brazil, there is an urgent need to raise awareness of the importance of this cooperative relationship for local and regional development. In this sense, it is observed that the innovation process is strategic so that an institution is strengthened and can fulfill its social mission in economic and regional development. Piauí, according to the IBGE census, has a population estimate of 3,273,227 in 2019. Piaui's per capita income is R$ 817.00 and ranks 24th in Brazil in this regard. With these data, the need arises to intervene scientifically in this reality. The objective of this study is to investigate the partnership relationships between companies and public research institutions in Piauí, in the development and transfer of technologies. Research Institutions are the main promoters of technological development in the state, however, for these technologies to reach productive arrangements, strategic alignment in the management of these technologies is necessary. Documentary research was used, with a quantitative approach. In the exploratory search, INPI's databases (National Institute of Industrial Property) and of Espacenet ( European Patent Office ) was used. We sought to select the companies with relevant economic representativeness in the state scenario and investigated the patent information. In the analysis of the data obtained, the Competitiveness Ranking of the CLP States (Public Leadership) was used to compare Piauí with well positioned states. According to the results found, it is observed that the transfer of technology between research institutions and companies is not evident. However, we can see that there are partnership initiatives with small companies in conducting research that can project a change in this scenario. The low number of patents and public/private partnerships in driving innovation in the state of Piauí, may be related to the low index evidenced by the Competitiveness Ranking of States - CLP.

AbstractLarge hail is a primary contributor to damages and loss around the world, in both agriculture and infrastructure. The sensitivity of passive microwave radiometer measurements to scattering by hail led to the development of proxies for severe hail, most of which use brightness temperature thresholds from 37-GHz and higher-frequency microwave channels on board weather satellites in low-Earth orbit. Using 16+ years of data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM; 36°S–36°N), we pair TRMM brightness temperature–derived precipitation features with surface hail reports in the United States to train a hail retrieval on passive microwave data from the 10-, 19-, 37-, and 85-GHz channels based on probability curves fit to the microwave data. We then apply this hail retrieval to features in the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) domain (from 69°S to 69°N) to develop a nearly global passive microwave–based climatology of hail. The extended domain of the GPM satellite into higher latitudes requires filtering out features that we believe are over icy and snowy surface regimes. We also normalize brightness temperature depression by tropopause height in an effort to account for differences in storm depth between the tropics and higher latitudes. Our results show the highest hail frequencies in the region of northern Argentina through Paraguay, Uruguay, and southern Brazil; the central United States; and a swath of Africa just south of the Sahel. Smaller hot spots include Pakistan, eastern India, and Bangladesh. A notable difference between these results and many prior satellite-based studies is that central Africa, while still active in our climatology, does not rival the aforementioned regions in retrieved hailstorm frequency.

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é traçar um perfil identitário das maiores empresas brasileiras, a partir da análise de suas declarações de missão (DM). A estratégia de pesquisa foi qualitativa, com uso de técnicas de análise de discurso. O referencial teórico central provém do campo de gestão estratégica. Os resultados indicam que a maioria das empresas ostenta uma DM em seus sites na internet. Estas refletem uma adequação em termos dos componentes previstos para uma boa DM - 71,7% apresentam os elementos “metas”, “políticas/valores” e “escopos competitivos”, previstos na literatura. Predomina o foco externo (clientes). Os resultados demonstram que a técnica de elaboração e uso de DM são bem difundidas e aceitas no Brasil, havendo espaço, contudo, para aperfeiçoamentos em termos do conteúdo delas. O artigo identifica lacunas que sugerem futuros estudos, como a análise comparada de desempenho entre empresas com diferentes perfis identitários, explicitados em suas DM.

The poorly known Leporinus jamesiis redescribed. The species was originally described based on a single specimen collected in the rio Solimões at Manacapuru, in the central Amazon, Brazil. The holotype went missing before the species description was finished and published, and remained lost for more than a hundred years. Leporinus jamesi is distinguished from its congeners by having pectoral and pelvic fins dark, 42 to 45 scales on the lateral line, 16 scale series around the caudal peduncle, a body with two conspicuous dark midlateral blotches (the blotch on the caudal peduncle absent or inconspicuous), and four teeth on the premaxilla and dentary, including a bicuspid symphyseal tooth on the premaxilla. A principal component analysis on morphometric traits between combined samples of L. jamesi and L. amazonicus was performed showing significant morphometric differences between these species. In addition, inaccuracies in Borodin's descriptions of various species of the genus Leporinus are discussed.

Of all of France’s early modern colonial ventures, the least studied and most obscure are the French efforts to establish settlements, missions, and plantations in Guiana. Still, the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil, and their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the sixteenth-century ventures, the Guiana colonies were also prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Were they primarily missions to the Native peoples, plantations, or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? This paper examines the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana, in particular two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. I will the argue that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.

Abstract This paper summarizes the successful use of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-10 (GOES-10) and -12 (GOES-12), mainly beyond their retirement as operational satellites in the United States, in support of meteorological activities in South America (SA). These satellites were maneuvered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to approximately 60°W, enabling other countries in Central and South America to benefit from their ongoing measurements. The extended usefulness of GOES-10 and -12 was only possible as a result of a new image geolocalization system developed by NOAA for correcting image distortions and evaluated in collaboration with the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research. The extension allowed GOES-10 and -12 to monitor SA for an additional 7 years proving the efficiency of this navigation capability implemented for the first time in the GOES series well beyond the expected satellites’ lifetime. Such successful capability is incorporated in the new-generation GOES-R series. This practical and technological experience shows the importance of communication between scientists from the United States and SA for advancing Earth’s monitoring system through the development of novel software and derived products. For SA in particular, GOES-10 and -12 were employed operationally to monitor dry spells, relevant for agriculture and forest fire management and to nowcast severe weather for flash flood warnings. Additionally, GOES-12 detected the first registered tropical hurricane over the Brazilian coast. This paper describes some of the technical and operational challenges faced in extending the GOES-10 and -12 missions to provide coverage over South America and emphasizes the usefulness of their ongoing measurements benefiting Brazilian environmental monitoring.

The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of dental caries in the primary dentition and associated variables in low socioeconomic preschool children enrolled in public nursery schools in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Four public institutions were selected by geographic criteria (two in the central region and two in the peripheral region). The study population comprised 338 children (181 boys; 157 girls) aged 2-6 years old. Dental caries was recorded using the decayed, missing, and filled teeth (dmf-t) index. Among the examined children, 50.6% were caries-free. The mean dmf-t index was 2.03. It was higher in the peripheral nursery schools (p < 0.01). A trend towards a difference between sexes (p = 0.06) was observed. Logistic regression analysis selected a previous child's visit to dentist (p < 0.001), geographic location of the public nursery school (p < 0.01), and age (p < 0.01) as predictive variables for the dmf-t index. The study showed the need for an oral health program for this population, including both curative and preventive measures in order to achieve the WHO/FDI goals for the year 2000, namely 50% of children free of caries at age 5-6 years.

This work is a brief outline of the consumption and use of several insect taxa and products taking into account historical sources of the 18th century for the Gran Chaco region and more recent ethnographic data. The Meridional and Central Chaco subregion of Argentina is a vast semi-arid plain in the north-east of the country between the Pilcomayo river and the Salado river basin. The subregion forms part of the South American Gran Chaco area. During the 18th century, the linguistic families Guaycurú and Mataco-Mataguayan resided in the Central Chaco subregion. The Guaycurú linguistic family includes the current languages Toba-Qom, Pilagá, Toba-Pilagá, Mocoví, as well as the Caduveo language from Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. The report focuses on the Guaycurú groups to illustrate the diversity of insects significantly involved in their cultural practices, which have been sustained over time up to the present, and are presumably oldest. Jesuit chroniclers have provided abundant evidence about Guaycurú groups from the Argentine Chaco region. They fostered Catholic missions in the region and lived in reductions with the Guaycurú populations. The relationship of Chaco indigenous groups with insects and other species is a reflection of their deep identification with the environment. The relationship with the territory goes beyond the idea of a land where to settle. Rather, it refers to feeding and using the land conceived as an organic structure full of energy, the same energy that forms part of the entities of nature and, naturally, of insects as well.

Knowledge about the fate of fertilizer nitrogen in agricultural systems is essential for the improvement of management practices in order to maximize nitrogen (N) recovery by the crop and reduce N losses from the system to a minimum. This study involves fertilizer management practices using the 15N isotope label applied in a single rate to determine the fertilizer-N balance in a particular soil-coffee-atmosphere system and to deepen the understanding of N plant dynamics. Five replicates consisting of plots of about 120 plants each were randomly defined within a 0.2 ha coffee plantation planted in 2001, in Piracicaba, SP, Brazil. Nine plants of each plot were separated in sub-plots for the 15N balance studies and treated with N rates of 280 and 350 kg ha-1 during 2003/2004 and 2004/2005, respectively, both of them as ammonium sulfate enriched to a 15N abundance of 2.072 atom %. Plant shoots were considered as separate parts: the orthotropic central branch, productive branches, leaves of productive branches, vegetative branches, leaves of vegetative branches and fruit. Litter, consisting of dead leaves accumulated below the plant canopy, was measured by the difference between leaves at harvest and at the beginning of the following flowering. Roots and soil were sampled down to a depth of 1.0 at intervals of 0.2 m. Samples from the isotopic sub-plots were used to evaluate total N and 15N, and plants outside sub-plots were used to evaluate dry matter. Volatilization losses of NH3 were estimated using special collectors. Leaching of fertilizer-N was estimated from deep drainage water fluxes and 15N concentrations of the soil solution at 1 m soil depth. At the end of the 2-year evaluation, the recovery of 15N applied as ammonium sulfate was 19.1 % in aerial plant parts, 9.4 % in the roots, 23.8 % in the litter, 26.3 % in the fruit and 12.6 % remaining in the 0_1.0 m soil profile. Annual leaching and volatilization losses were very small (2.0 % and 0.9 %, respectively). After two years, only 6.2 % N were missing in the balance (100 %) which can be attributed to other non-estimated compartments and experimental errors. Results show that an enrichment of only 2 % atom 15N allows the study of the partition of fertilizer-N in a perennial crop such as coffee during a period of two years.

O presente trabalho teve como objetivo a determinação de classes do Topographic Position Index (TPI) na bacia hidrográfica do arroio Puitã. O arroio Puitã localiza-se no sul do Brasil, oeste do estado do Rio Grande do Sul. A base altimétrica para a definição do Topographic Position Index, foram os dados de radar do “Shuttle Radar Topography Mission” (SRTM). O TPI é a base do sistema de classificação e, é simplesmente a diferença entre um valor de elevação de células e a altitude média da vizinhança em torno dessas células. Valores positivos significam que a célula é mais elevada do que os seus arredores, enquanto valores negativos significa que é mais baixa. A escala utilizada para a definição das classes de TPI, foi de 10 pixeis, ou seja, foi utilizado um raio de 10 pixeis para a análise da vizinhança que compõem a média de altitude e estabelece o valor de TPI do pixel central. As classes de TPI determinadas foram assim denominadas: vales; áreas planas; encostas suaves; encostas onduladas; encostas íngremes e topo das encostas. A área de encostas suaves predomina na bacia com 38,06% da área total. As áreas de encostas onduladas e áreas planas são as segunda e terceira, em área, com 27,15% e 27,11%, respectivamente. A área de topo das encostas é a que ocupa a menor área, com apenas 0,44% da área total. A aplicação da metodologia de determinação do relevo através Topographic Position Index apresentou um resultado que responde bem as feições de relevo observadas em campo, o que o potencializa para a aplicação em outras áreas.

Melioidosis is an emerging infection in Brazil and neighbouring South American countries. The wide range of clinical presentations include severe community-acquired pneumonia, septicaemia, central nervous system infection and less severe soft tissue infection. Diagnosis depends heavily on the clinical microbiology laboratory for culture. Burkholderia pseudomallei, the bacterial cause of melioidosis, is easily cultured from blood, sputum and other clinical samples. However, B. pseudomallei can be difficult to identify reliably, and can be confused with closely related bacteria, some of which may be dismissed as insignificant culture contaminants. Serological tests can help to support a diagnosis of melioidosis, but by themselves do not provide a definitive diagnosis. The use of a laboratory discovery pathway can help reduce the risk of missing atypical B. pseudomallei isolates. Recommended antibiotic treatment for severe infection is either intravenous Ceftazidime or Meropenem for several weeks, followed by up to 20 weeks oral treatment with a combination of trimethoprim-sulphamethoxazole and doxycycline. Consistent use of diagnostic microbiology to confirm the diagnosis, and rigorous treatment of severe infection with the correct antibiotics in two stages; acute and eradication, will contribute to a reduction in mortality from melioidosis.

Trophic connections among habitats may be central to food-web dynamics in lakes. Lacustrine zooplankton can rely on basal carbon (C) sources from different origins and plays an important link between these and organisms in higher trophic levels. We investigated the basal C sources supporting the planktonic food web and the trophic relationships among zooplankton size fractions in a tropical lake (Carioca) in Brazil. To do so, we measured the C and nitrogen (N) stable-isotope ratios in basal C sources originated in terrestrial, littoral, and pelagic habitats and in zooplankton size fractions, and data were analysed through Bayesian mixing models. Mesozooplankton showed seasonal variation in resource use, specifically a smaller dependence on algae in the wet than in the dry season. In the wet season, mesozooplankton relied more on the detritivore food chain eating mostly microzooplankton (mode: 95.1%), which in turn consumed mostly terrestrial C in this season (mode: 74.7%). Zooplankton size fractions also occupied different relative trophic positions between seasons. These variations seem to follow the seasonal dynamics of in-lake primary production and of terrestrial C inputs. Also, all size fractions of zooplankton, and particularly Chaoboridae larvae, showed low C staple-isotope values, suggesting the consumption of a missing C source.

<p>Earth Sciences Research Journal presents its latest issue, Volume 19, number 2, with a positive balance in the eve of 2016 and with the challenges for the future editions. During the last two decades, we have published more than 200 papers in all the spectrum of Earth Sciences. We expect we will be here for many years more. ESRJ is now part of international databases, and we hope to improve our numbers thanks to the tireless word we do every day for our readers. We have accomplished the principal objectives for an international publication -punctuality in our volumes, respect for the authors and the spotlight on the scientific quality. For a fair editorial process, we are part of the open access and its policies of pair blind-review. The time of the operations has been reduced, and the international participation increased.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">For the coming years, ESRJ would reach a better visibility thanks to the publication of top-quality scientific articles, which allows us to be part of the central positions in international databases and providing researchers with fundamental elements of their work.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">To make possible this goal, we want to call authors to put lights on scientific quality and editorial quality. Your help is essential for us. We want to encourage researchers to pick up ESRJ as a platform for their works, but also to check the authors' guidelines as a first step to saving efforts and time during processes. Needles to say the importance of manuscript parts, English level and images readability to the acceptation of submissions.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">As a complementary strategy, we would like to invite our authors to create profiles in one of the available platforms, not only as an introduction to the ESRJ editorial team but also as a promotion of your work.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Several challenges we have gripped during the work of the last years, for that reason we have adopted the principles of ethic and best practices in our procedure protocols. This decision would be a tool giving papers’ authors a warranty of complete respect for their work and to readers a quality signature that our contents have been verified for their use.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">In this adoption of best-practices procedures, many submitted papers have been rejected for having a not proper citation; this fault needs to be eradicated from all journals promoting scientific contents.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">A glimpse of the numbers of ESRJ points the international collaboration as one of the biggest challenges for the future issues. International Collaboration accounts for the articles that have been produced by researchers from several countries. It's not a call to improve the rates, but the scientific quality would be feed for the interaction of researchers facing different realities.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Early 2016, ESRJ will publish a special issue with the selected papers of the International Conference on Earth and Environmental Sciences by the University Malaya. This special issue on Frontiers in Earth Sciences will publish articles on the most outstanding discoveries across a broad research spectrum in the field. The mission of Frontiers in Earth Sciences is to provide an introduction to some of the current advanced concepts, problems, and controversies that are at the forefront of Earth Sciences and to obtain a view of how the different parts of the Earth behave and interact.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">As it has been a costume in this letter from the editor, the following paragraphs will introduce the works of the current issue. Our first paper deals with the problem of recovering Moho surface from satellite gradiometry data considering the non-isostatic corrections.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">The second manuscript presents a case study on the application of electromagnetic and GPR measurements to a suspicious metal-contaminated site. While subsurface pollution is very harmful to nature-beings and finally human, detection of its extent in surface and more in depth is considerably challenging.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">The following work analyzes the Earthquake light phenomenon based in the Christchurch earthquakes occurred in 2010 and 2011, with testimonies related from people who observed or recorded the lights.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">In the seismotectonic field is presented a paper showing the Strain rate in the North Anatolian Fault Zone (NAFZ), that is one of the most important fault zones of Turkey. Another Turkish submission tried to determine seismic specifications of the Bitlis province in Lake Van basin and used probabilistic seismic hazard analysis for the determination of local site-specific spectra.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Also from Turkey, a paper examines the performance of a single base RTK station compared with similar systems and presenting a complete exposure of values and challenges of the system.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">A contribution from Iran analyzes the magmatic evolution and compositional characteristics of tertiary volcanic rocks associated with the manganese mineralization in a mine located in Central Iran.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Also from in Iran, a paper assesses the stability of the rock slopes with various rock mass qualities. The manuscript discusses the combination of RMR and SMR systems to evaluate rock slope stability.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">From Latin America, a paper makes a contribution to the knowledge of the Tatui Formation, in Brazil, emphasized in Paleontology and Paleoenvironmental considerations.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">We hope you find useful these contents.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Carlos Vargas</p><p class="MsoNormal">Editor in Chief,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Earth Sciences Research Journal.</p>

Micropholis guyanensis (A.DC.) Pierre is a tree from the rainforests of tropical South America and includes two recognised and one informal subspecies. The species has a wide geographic distribution from Central America, northern and western South America to Amazonia and Bolivia, and is morphologically variable. All subspecies occur in the Reserva Florestal Adolpho Ducke just outside Manaus, Amazonas State in Brazil, and it can be questioned how they can grow in sympatry and retain their identity. We have studied vegetative variation, flower morphology and, to some degree, reproductive barriers. The species is dioecious, has five-merous, cream to greenish flowers that produce pollen, nectar and scent to attract pollinators. The flowering period is between June and October, and the plants set fruits, one seed in each, between November and April. There was no overlap in flowering period in the study area between two of the presumed subspecies, but both have similar floral morphology and are pollinated by the same species of butterflies and bees. We are not able to find any clear distributional or morphological discontinuities between the subspecies and we, therefore, suggest that M. guyanensis should be considered a variable species without formally recognised subspecies. Flowers of M. guyanensis are highly ephemeral and persist only for 1 day (~27 h) before falling to the ground. We predict that this is typical for many species of Sapotaceae, which can explain why the corolla is missing from the majority of herbarium specimens that at first sight have flowers.

Abstract Sustained deep molecular response (MR4.5) after imatinib treatment defines a subgroup of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) with better outcome and that probably would be able to stop treatment in the future, according to results of clinical TKI discontinuation trials. Most of these trials showed that patients with a long-term imatinib treatment and low Sokal risk have a higher probability of maintain a deep molecular remission after stopping treatment. OBJECTIVES The main objective is to review the molecular responses, overall survival and event free survival of CP CML patients that have been treated with imatinib in 14 hematology centers in South Brazil. Using our data basis we also would like to see how many of them present long-term imatinib treatment, sustained deep molecular remission and correlate these findings with the Sokal risk groups. These data would allow us to predict patient profile that could be able to discontinue the treatment in the future in a prospective clinical trial. PATIENTS AND METHODS This is a retrospective study in a cohort of pts with chronic myeloid leukemia chronic phase (CP) that have been treated in 14 hematology centers in South Brazil. All pts received imatinib 400mg as first or second-line therapy. Patient evaluation and response criteria followed the ELN recommendations. MR(4.5) was defined as ≥ 4.5 log reduction of BCR-ABL on the international scale (IS) and determined by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction. All tests were performed at a central standardized according to ELN. Event-free-survival (EFS) was measured from the start of imatinib to the date of any of the following events while on therapy: death from any cause, loss of complete hematologic response, loss of complete cytogenetic response, discontinuation of therapy for toxicity or lack of efficacy, or progression to accelerated phase or blastic phase. Overall survival (OS) was measured from the start of imatinib until death of any cause or to the date patient was last known to be alive. RESULTS Data from 474 patients was analyzed. After a median observation time of 46 months, 5-year overall survival (OS) was 86%, 5-year event-free-survival was 53%. Of the 474 patients, 258 had adequate PCR evaluations during treatment. 118 of 258 (45,7%) patients achieved MR(4.5) and 69 of 258 (27%) had sustained response for at least two years after a minimum time of treatment of 3 years. The cumulative incidence of MR(4.5) after 9 years was 76% (median, 3 years). In the group that achieved MR(4.5), there was only 1 (0,8%) death and 1 (1,1%) progression compared to 8 deaths (5,7%) and 8 progressions (7,5%) in the group without MR(4.5); these differences were significant with p=0,03 and 0,02 respectively. In the subgroup of 69 patients that had had been treated with imatinib for 3 year or more and sustained deep response (RM4,5) for at least two years, 21 pts had low Sokal risk, 7 pts intermediate Sokal risk and only 4 pts a high Sokal risk. Unfortunately, in 37 pts the Sokal risk could not be accessed due to missing information. CONCLUSION In our series MR(4.5) is reached in the majority of patients with long-term imatinib treatment. MR(4.5) is a predictor of outcome with only one disease progression and one death due to CML in this group of patients. Unfortunatly PCR are not available for all patients in our clinical practice, but this situation are improving. Regarding the 69 patients with TKI discontinuation trial criteria, we find out that 21 patients fulfill such criteria. In the future, according to the results of current stop trials it could be possible include this selected group of CP CML patients in a prospective clinical trial. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Abstract Acute leukemia (AL) of ambiguous lineage (AMBI-L) comprises up to 5% of AL cases in both children and adults. Although several definitions exist, a general treatment guideline has been missing. Single country studies usually report fewer than 50 cases of children or adults. Accordingly, the international iBFM AMBI2012 Study/Registry collected 275 AMBI-L cases in patients <18y from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Czechia, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, NOPHO (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Latvia and Lithuania), PINDA (Chile), Poland, SAHOP (Argentina), Slovakia, St. Jude's Children Research Hospital (USA), Texas Children's Cancer Center (USA), Ukraine and United Kingdom. Each center/country reported all consecutive patients with AMBI-L from a 2 to 13 year period ending May 31, 2015. Apart from the study itself, the central database served also as a basis for consulting individual patients during the diagnostic workup. Preliminary results of this study were first introduced in ASH 2015 and now the complete detailed analysis of updated findings including significance of immunophenotype, molecular genetics, blast clearance and transplant are shown. In total, 275 patients were included in the study. Of these, 240 fulfilled the definitions of biphenotypic/mixed phenotype AL, partially overlapping with cases in whom two clones had been identified (n=68) and 15 cases presented with undifferentiated AL. Most patients started their treatment with an ALL-type protocol (n=161), 79 with AML therapy, 27 with a combined regimen, including the Interfant protocols, 2 patients were not treated, 2 received other treatment, and in 4 patients such information was missing. The 5yEFS of the entire cohort was 56±3.7% and 5y overall survival was 67±3.3%. Patients treated by ALL-type protocols had superior 5 year event free survival (5yEFS) (70±4.6%, n=158) compared to those who started AML-type treatment (5yEFS: 40±6.4%, n=78) or hybrid ALL/AML treatment (5yEFS: 50±11%, n=27). Although protocol selection was likely biased, we recommend ALL treatment, when diagnostic findings, including molecular genetics, fail to indicate AML therapy. Although myeloperoxidase (MPO) has been used as the ultimate marker of myeloid lineage, patients who started with ALL-type treatment demonstrated a better prognosis even among cases classified as MPOpos/part pos (Fig. 1). These differences by initial choice of treatment are most prominent when CD19pos/part pos cases are analyzed regardless of the overall lineage (Fig. 2). This shows that at least for CD19pos/part pos cases in the absence of RUNX1/RUNX1T1 fusion, treatment should not start with current AML-type protocols. Until week 12, patients with higher leukemia burden were slightly overrepresented compared to non-AMBI ALL patients (data not shown). In addition, patients with higher residual disease had a much poorer prognosis. Thus, Prednisone poor and good responders (based on day 8 blood blast counts) had a 5yEFS of 50±9.7%, n=38 and 81±5.8%, n=82, respectively (p=0.005). By day 15 bone marrow (BM), only cutoffs of 10-4 and 10-3 were analyzed and neither showed significant associations with EFS. At the end of induction, patients with BM residual disease ≥10-3 had a 5yEFS of 51±10%, n=49 compared to 90±4.3% for those with lower levels, n=75 (p=0.0002). Especially higher residual disease at week 12 was associated with an extremely poor EFS (Fig. 3). Early identification of patients with inadequate response and designing alternative treatment for them is our important challenge. No overall benefit of transplantation was seen in patients who started on ALL treatment or hybrid ALL/AML treatment. Again, this may be caused by a biased selection of more severe cases for transplant. In patients who started with AML treatment, transplant appeared to improve prognosis (Fig. 4). This study provides the basis for improved treatment of future patients with AMBI-L, with more accurate diagnostics. OH, AL, IJ, EM and JS were supported by Czech Health Research Council 15-28525A. Disclosures Bleckmann: JazzPharma: Other: financial support of travel costs. Moricke:JazzPharma: Honoraria, Other: financial support of travel costs. Inaba:Arog: Research Funding. Kattamis:Novartis: Honoraria, Research Funding; ApoPharma: Honoraria. Reinhardt:Boehringer Ingelheim: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Celgene: Research Funding; Jazz Pharma: Other: Travel Accomodation; Celgene: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Pfizer: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees.

Abstract Up to 5% of patients with acute leukemia (AL) are diagnosed as AL of ambiguous lineage. The ambiguous lineage ALs consist of mixed phenotype AL (MPAL, or biphenotypic AL, BAL), bilineal AL, switching AL and rare, undifferentiated ALs. From a molecular genetic point of view, they overlap with several molecular genetic subsets such as AL with MLL rearrangements or early T precursor AL. As no general treatment strategy exists, these patients have been variably treated with lymphoblastic (ALL)- , myeloid (AML)- or combined (hybrid) therapy, with or without stem cell transplant. They are often unreported as they are excluded from standard protocols. So far, attempts to shed more light on these patients has largely focused on definitions of ambiguous lineage AL. Only limited therapeutic observations have been possible in studies on this AL subset, usually reporting 50 or fewer pediatric/adult patients. In order to facilitate more detailed analyses, we have created an international study "iBFM AMBI2012 Study/Registry". In this study, patients under 18 years at diagnosis are eligible. Each center/country was asked to report all consecutive patients with ambiguous lineage AL, from a 2- to 13-year period ending May 31, 2015. The definitions included those with WHO and EGIL criteria and remained unchanged throughout the study. Complete information on type of treatment, follow up and immunophenotype was requested. Where available (n=101 at the time of this abstract uploading), raw cytometric FCS data files were stored centrally for review. Apart from the study itself, the central database served also as a basis for consulting individual patients during the diagnostic workup. Furthermore, data on fusion genes, cytogenetics, treatment response and availability of specimens for collateral studies were also collected. In total, 247 patients from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Czechia, Germany, Greece, Israel, Netherlands, NOPHO (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Lithuania), PINDA (Chile), Poland, SAHOP (Argentina), Slovakia, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (USA), Ukraine and United Kingdom are reported. Among those, 222 fulfilled the definitions of MPAL/BAL, partially overlapping with cases in whom two clones had been identified (n=47) and 14 cases presented with undifferentiated AL. Most of them, consistent with our general treatment guideline (Figure 1), started their treatment with an ALL type of protocol (n=150), 60 patients started on AML therapy, 8 patients received a combined regimen including the Interfant protocols, 2 patients were not treated, 13 received other treatment, and this information is missing in 9 patients (additional 5 pts. started on ALL treatment but their follow up information is incomplete). The 5 year event free survival of the entire cohort was 55±4% and its separation by first type of treatment is shown in Figure 2. In a collateral study, we set up a qPCR array on 90 genes that are characteristic of the lymphoid or myeloid lineages and/or are thought to be involved in their regulation. Using this array, sorted cells of granulocytic, monocytic, T, and B lineages at various stages of development (17 stages total) were analyzed and compared to samples of AL including 6 samples of MPAL of precursor B/myeloid phenotype. Although this array did not show a general deregulation in the MPAL genome compared to that in AL or healthy cells, subtle changes were seen such as decrease of CEBPE and LILRA2 gene expression, in comparison to classical B precursor ALL. Overall, our data shows that the general treatment guideline (Figure 1), which favors ALL treatment is justified by the outcome. However, although this study is larger than those published, caution is needed during its interpretation due to variations in diagnostics and treatment among the participating countries. Therefore, our data should be viewed as a basis for non-ambiguous treatment guidelines that will direct each patient to either ALL or AML treatment. These guidelines will be tested prospectively. In addition, the framework of this study is being used as a basis of consulting new AL cases with diagnostic uncertainties. Furthermore, it serves as a data resource for biologic studies. Supported by AZV 15-28525A, UNCE 204012, NT/14534-3, NT/13462-4, P302/12/G101. Disclosures Kattamis: Novartis: Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; ApoPharma: Speakers Bureau.

Abstract Prophylactic replacement therapy with FVIII is considered the standard of care for patients with hemophilia although a protocol for administering the prophylaxis has yet to be defined by the World Federation of Hemophilia. Gaona in 2012 demonstrated a significant reduction in the number of hospitalizations due to bleeding episodes in patients with Hemophilia A treated with secondary prophylaxis at the Hematology Service of the Hospital Central del Instituto de Prevision Social (HCIPS) with a regimen of 25 IU/Kg per week in two infusions by reporting results from such regimen that had started at the HCIPS in 2010. This is a lower dose to those most frequently used in high resource countries like the Malmo or Utrecht protocols. The goal of this study was to assess the impact of our lower dose prophylaxis regimen on bleeding events, hospitalizations and quality of life as an alternative for low resource countries that cannot afford to provide their patients with higher dose treatments. The Dutch group Haemo-QoL designed the specific questionnaire for adult patients with hemophilia, the Haem-A-QoL with a Spanish version available for patients aged 17 and up. Results: The HCIPS currently has 36 patients receiving prophylactic treatment with FVIII. From these 18 patients consented to filling out the questionnaire. The mean age of the patients was 28. 3 of the patients were married, 2 were in a stable relationship and 13 were single. 62% of patients lived within 20 km of the Hospital and 38% lived further away going up to 200 km. 17 of the 18 patients had the highest level of education possible for their age. Only one patient, the oldest one, had stopped his education at primary school. All of them had severe disease with one or more affected joints. The average FVIII use per year was 68,000 IU ranging from 8,000 IU to 96,000 IU or 917 IU/kg/year. The strongest determinant for receiving less FVIII was missing appointments. Distance to the Hospital was not of significance. Bleeding episodes prior to prophylactic treatment was 2-3 minor traumatic bleeding episodes per week (after brushing their teeth, easy bruising from minor trauma), 2-3 joint bleeds per month at which point they would seek medical assistance and 1-2 major bleeding episodes per year requiring hospitalization. In the last year 5 patients were hospitalized once. One for pneumonia, one for phlebitis, one for dengue fever and two for hemathrosis. They reported a decrease in bleeding episodes at home from 2-3 joint bleeds per month to 1 every other month. Patients reported after traumatic events their bleeding was "normal" (i.e. when brushing their teeth if they started bleeding they would continue bleeding for days at a time whereas when in prophylaxis they would bleed right after the brushing and then it stopped which they took to be normal). Converting the results from the Haem-A-QoL questionnaire to a scoring system of 1-100 being 1 the best QoL and 100 the worst, the average QoL was 52. With scores of 60 for physical health, 50 for feelings, 52 for view of themselves, 48 for work/school, 53 for treatment, 56 for future, 47 for family planning and 45 for dating. Scores for sports and leisure though only amounting to 64, 33% of patients said that category did not apply to them since they did not practice any sports and the dealing category with a score of 37 was the lowest of all. When compared to results published by a Blood Center in Brazil with an on demand regimen patients with severe hemophilia in that study showed a physical health score of 55, 40 for feelings, 35 for self-perception, 60 for sports and leisure, 35 for work and school, 20 for coping, 45 for treatment, 45 for future and 25 for dating with an average overall score of 40. With an annual average usage of 63,683 IU on the severely affected patients. In summary, the proposed dosing of 25IU/kgs/week seems at first glance to reduce bleeding episodes among patients with severe hemophilia as well as hospitalizations. In general patients treated at the HCIPS have a regular to poor quality of life as measured by the Haem-A-QoL questionnaire which contrasts with results from the Brazilian study on quality of life from patients with on demand treatment and roughly same FVIII usage per year showing their patients with severe hemophilia had an overall quality of life from regular to good. Perhaps the psychological factor comes in to play? A follow up study after patients receive proper psychological evaluations may help clarify results. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Abstract Abstract 606FN2 Background: Recent studies have demonstrated that about 40% of very highly selected CML-CP pts treated with imatinib achieve durable CMR and may be able to cease therapy without disease recurrence. However, most CML pts don't achieve CMR on imatinib even with long-term therapy. Results from ENESTnd demonstrated that significantly more patients achieved MMR (≤ 0.1%IS), CMR4 (≤ 0.01%IS), and CMR4.5 (≤ 0.0032%IS) with nilotinib vs imatinib by 12, 18, and 24 months (mo). No pt in ENESTnd who achieved CMR4.5 has progressed to AP/BC. In this study we asked whether pts on long-term imatinib would be more likely to achieve undetectable BCR-ABL levels if they switched to nilotinib, allowing for participation in potential cessation studies in the future. Methods: This open label, 1:1 randomized, prospective, multi-center, phase 3 study enrolled 207 pts with CML-CP who had achieved a complete cytogenetic response (CCyR) but were still BCR-ABL positive by RQ-PCR after ≥ 24 mo on imatinib. CMR (primary endpoint) was defined as undetectable BCR-ABL by RQ-PCR where there was no detectable BCR-ABL with a sample sensitivity of ≥ 4.5-logs. CMR4 and CMR4.5 were defined as BCR-ABL levels of ≤ 0.01% and ≤ 0.0032% expressed on the International Scale (IS), respectively and included patients with undetectable BCR-ABL levels with high sample sensitivity (4 or 4.5 logs). Patients were randomized to nilotinib 400 mg BID vs continuing imatinib 400 or 600 mg daily (same dose as at study entry.) The randomization was stratified by prior use of IFN (none, ≤ 12 mo, > 12 mo) and prior duration of imatinib therapy (> 36 mo or ≤ 36 mo). The primary endpoint was the rate of confirmed best cumulative CMR by 12 mo of study therapy with nilotinib or imatinib. Secondary objectives included the kinetics of CMR at different timepoints, duration of CMR, progression-free survival, and overall survival in both arms. During the study, RQ-PCR for BCR-ABL was performed at baseline (BL) and every 3 mo and expressed on the IS in national reference laboratories in Australia, Brazil, and Canada. For this report: BL, 6 mo, and 12 mo results were analyzed in a central laboratory in Australia. Assessment of the primary efficacy endpoint has not been completed for 2% of the randomized pts; unblinded data will be available for all pts and will be presented by treatment arm. Results: BL results were available for 205/207 randomized pts. Overall, 56% of pts had no prior IFN exposure, while 21% and 23% had IFN exposure of ≤ 12 mo or > 12 mo, respectively; 81% of pts had been on imatinib > 36 mos. At BL, 153 pts (74%) were known to be in MMR and 54 pts (26%) had < MMR (including 2 pts with missing PCR samples); 53 pts (26%), and 20 pts (10%) had CMR4 or CMR4.5 (with detectable BCR-ABL) at BL, respectively. Overall, 67 pts (32%) had at least a half-log reduction in BCR-ABL levels from BL by 12 mo. Of the 52 pts (25%) known not to have MMR at BL, 24 pts (46%) achieved MMR or better by 12 mo in the study. To date, no pt experienced a loss of MMR or CCyR on study. By 12 mo, 50% of pts with a molecular assessment had CMR4 and 27% had CMR4.5. Of the 152 pts who did not have CMR4 at baseline, 30% had achieved CMR4 (unconfirmed) by 12 mo. Of the 185 pts who did not have CMR4.5 at baseline, 21% had achieved CMR4.5 (unconfirmed) by 12 mo. Undetectable levels of BCR-ABL transcripts (with a test sensitivity of ≥ 4.5 log), were achieved by 12 mo by 12% of pts who did not have undetectable BCR-ABL transcript levels at BL. By 12 mo, 20 (10%) pts discontinued study (none due to progression, 1 due to death). Grade 3/4 adverse events were uncommon. Conclusions: ENESTcmr is the first phase 3 randomized study in CML-CP pts to assess the achievement of CMR as the primary endpoint. Unblinded results from this ongoing study will be presented and will provide information on the ability of pts to achieve confirmed CMR on nilotinib vs imatinib following extended treatment with imatinib. These aggregate data demonstrate that 12% of pts achieved undetectable BCR-ABL levels by 12 months after study entry. This is in contrast to observations in previous trials where the increase in the proportion of pts with undetectable BCR-ABL levels over time is more gradual. Further follow-up will identify pts with sustained CMR over time, which may offer these pts an opportunity to discontinue therapy. Disclosures: Hughes: Novartis: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Bristol Myers Squibb: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Ariad: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Lipton:Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Leber:Novartis Pharmaceuticals: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau. Spector:Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Cervantes:Novartis: Speakers Bureau; BMS: Speakers Bureau. Pasquini:Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Bristol Myers Squibb: Speakers Bureau. Schwarer:Novartis: Honoraria; BMS: Honoraria. Mahon:Novartis: Honoraria, Research Funding. Rea:BMS: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Yeung:Novartis Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding; BMS Oncology: Research Funding. Kamel-Reid:Novartis: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; BMS: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding. Reynolds:Novartis: Employment, Equity Ownership. Williams:Novartis: Employment. Szczudlo:Novartis: Employment, Equity Ownership. Branford:Novartis: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; BMS: Honoraria, Research Funding; Ariad: Research Funding.

Rapid urbanization rates impact significantly on the nature of Land Cover patterns of the environment, which has been evident in the depletion of vegetal reserves and in general modifying the human climatic systems (Henderson, et al., 2017; Kumar, Masago, Mishra, & Fukushi, 2018; Luo and Lau, 2017). This study explores remote sensing classification technique and other auxiliary data to determine LULCC for a period of 50 years (1967-2016). The LULCC types identified were quantitatively evaluated using the change detection approach from results of maximum likelihood classification algorithm in GIS. Accuracy assessment results were evaluated and found to be between 56 to 98 percent of the LULC classification. The change detection analysis revealed change in the LULC types in Minna from 1976 to 2016. Built-up area increases from 74.82ha in 1976 to 116.58ha in 2016. Farmlands increased from 2.23 ha to 46.45ha and bared surface increases from 120.00ha to 161.31ha between 1976 to 2016 resulting to decline in vegetation, water body, and wetlands. The Decade of rapid urbanization was found to coincide with the period of increased Public Private Partnership Agreement (PPPA). Increase in farmlands was due to the adoption of urban agriculture which has influence on food security and the environmental sustainability. The observed increase in built up areas, farmlands and bare surfaces has substantially led to reduction in vegetation and water bodies. The oscillatory nature of water bodies LULCC which was not particularly consistent with the rates of urbanization also suggests that beyond the urbanization process, other factors may influence the LULCC of water bodies in urban settlements. Keywords: Minna, Niger State, Remote Sensing, Land Surface Characteristics References Akinrinmade, A., Ibrahim, K., & Abdurrahman, A. (2012). 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In this article, I will first show the historical development of this theological approach within the Brazilian and Latin American evangelical spheres through the work of the Latin American Theological Fraternity � a movement founded in 1970 that maintained historic evangelical values (i.e. a high view of Scripture, the necessity of conversion) whilst also taking Latin America�s great social needs into account. Nurtured by thinkers such as Ren� Padilla (Ecuador), Orlando Costas (Puerto Rico), Samuel Escobar (Peru), and later Valdir Steuernagel (Brazil), the movement has not only responded to the concerns raised by Liberation theologians, but it has also influenced the direction of the Lausanne Movement � an expression of global evangelicalism. Secondly, I will discuss how miss�o integral has found its way into the missional �bloodstream� and become a central value for some Brazilian and Latin American missions organisations, including Miss�o Antioquia (1975) and PM International (1984). Finally, based on 55 interviews conducted in 2009�2010 with Brazilian workers and mission leaders focusing on the Arab world, I will show how Brazilian workers are demonstrating miss�o integral through their ministries and also why this approach is relevant in the Arab-Muslim world.

This article focuses on four paradigmatic cases of travelers. The central part concerns Dina Lévi-Strauss who gave the first course on modern ethnography in Brazil. She transfered the very latest: her projects include the founding of an ethnographic museum modeled on the “Musée de l`Homme”. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel traveled to São Paulo as members of the French mission, which played an important role in the founding of the University of São Paulo. For political reasons Claude Lévi-Strauss’ contract at the University was not renewed in 1937. Blaise Cendrars was already a famous poet when he crossed the Atlantic in 1924. Fascism in Europe and World War II interrupted the careers of these four travelers as well as their interchanges with Brazil and their Brazilian friendships. But Brazilian experiences of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Braudel are crucial for their successful careers, after 1945.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Travessia transatlântica nos anos 1920 e 1930: as trajetórias da vanguarda poética e científica europeia no BrasilO artigo trata de quatro casos paradigmáticos de viajantes. A parte central está dedicada a Dina Lévi-Strauss, quem ministrou o primeiro curso de etnografia moderna no Brasil, apresentando nele o que havia de mais recente em sua época; seus projetos ainda incluíam a fundação de um museu etnográfico concebido a partir do modelo do “Musée de l’Homme”. Por sua vez, Claude Lévi-Strauss e Fernand Braudel viajaram a São Paulo como membros da Missão francesa, que teve um papel importante na fundação da Universidade de São Paulo, mesmo que, por razões políticas, o contrato de Claude Lévi-Strauss não tenha sido renovado pela Universidade em 1937. Antes deles, Blaise Cendrars era já um poeta famoso quando cruzou o Atlântico em 1924. O fascismo na Europa e a Segunda Guerra Mundial interromperam as carreiras destes quatro viajantes tanto quanto seus intercâmbios com o Brasil e com seus amigos brasileiros. Contudo, as experiências que Claude Lévi-Strauss e Braudel levaram a cabo no Brasil foram cruciais para o sucesso de suas respectivas carreiras após 1945.---Artigo em inglês.

Este trabalho procura recuperar aspectos do cotidiano da Província da Bahia e as relações familiares e de gênero em uma família proprietária de engenho, às vésperas da independência do Brasil. Tem como figura central a portuguesa Maria Bárbara Garcês Pinto de Madureira cujas cartas dirigidas ao marido ausente, em missão nas Cortes portuguesas, dão subsídios para que seja traçada uma vivência feminina e feita uma reflexão sobre as condições de determinadas mulheres naquele espaço e período. Abstract This work looks to recover some aspects of the day by day of Bahia Province and the family relations and gender in a family of sugar plantation and mill owners, on the turn of Brasil’s Independence. The central figure, a portuguese named Maria Bárbara Garcês Pinto de Madureira, whose letters to her absent husband, in a mission to the protuguese Assembly, subsidise the confection of a feminine profile and understanding the conditions of a group of womens at that time and space.

Objetivo do estudo: o objetivo deste estudo é compreender as atividades de promoção de marketing e o perfil do turista de um destino cultural na perspectiva dos stakeholders.Metodologia/Abordagem: por meio de uma abordagem mista, foram realizadas entrevistas em profundidade, em 2013 e 2019, com os stakeholders do município de Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brasil. Para se entender o perfil socioeconômico dos turistas, aplicou-se um survey a 396 turistas locais.Originalidade/Relevância: o argumento central é que, embora o destino tenha atrativos renomeados, os stakeholders precisam de trabalhar juntos para inovar, fornecendo novas experiências para excursionistas e viajantes internacionais, sem esquecer a população local. Além disso, investigar o repertório de seus stakeholders pode trazer insights sobre como o trade poderia surpreender os turistas, desenvolvendo também programas de hospitalidade.Principais resultados: os resultados mostram que existem pelo menos quatro tipos de turistas em Ouro Preto, os turistas histórico-culturais, os turistas de repúblicas, os visitantes regionais e os turistas internacionais, que não foram devidamente contemplados pelas organizações de marketing de destino, como restaurantes, hotéis, agências de viagem e governo. As principais conclusões do estudo podem ser agrupadas em 5 áreas: i) atividades de promoção de marketing, ii) novas tecnologias, iii) plano de marketing e branding, iv) desenvolvimento de produtos e, v) problemas novos e resolvidos.Contribuições teóricas/metodológicas: a principal contribuição é a análise longitudinal do destino, ainda incipiente nas pesquisas em turismo, mas que pode ajudar a compreender as mudanças no destino ao longo do tempo. Também são apontadas possíveis formas de promover destinos internacionalmente, não apenas Ouro Preto, mas também outros destinos brasileiros similares.

What strikes me about the habits of the people who spend so much time on the Net—well, it’s so new that we don't know what will come next—is in fact precisely how niche in character it is. You ask people what nets they are on, and they’re all so specialised! The Argentines on the Argentine Net and so forth. And it’s particularly the Argentines who are not in Argentina. (Anderson, in Gower, par. 5) The preceding quotation, taken from his 1996 interview with Eric Gower, sees Benedict Anderson reflecting on the formation of imagined, transnational communities on the Internet. Anderson is, of course, famous for his work on how nationalism, as an “imagined community,” gets constructed through the shared consumption of print media (6-7, 26-27); although its readers will never all see each other face to face, people consuming a newspaper or novel in a shared language perceive themselves as members of a collective. In this more recent interview, Anderson recognised the specific groupings of people in online communities: Argentines who find themselves outside of Argentina link up online in an imagined diaspora community. Over the course of the last decade and a half since Anderson spoke about Argentinian migrants and diaspora communities, we have witnessed an exponential growth of new forms of digital communication, including social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), Weblogs, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), and video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube). Alongside these new means of communication, our current epoch of globalisation is also characterised by migration flows across, and between, all continents. In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai recognised that “the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation” have altered the ways the imagination operates. Furthermore, these two pillars, human motion and digital mediation, are in constant “flux” (44). The circulation of people and digitally mediatised content proceeds across and beyond boundaries of the nation-state and provides ground for alternative community and identity formations. Appadurai’s intervention has resulted in increasing awareness of local, transnational, and global networking flows of people, ideas, and culturally hybrid artefacts. In this article, we analyse the various innovative tactics taken up by migrant youth to imagine digital diasporas. Inspired by scholars such as Appadurai, Avtar Brah and Paul Gilroy, we tease out—from a postcolonial perspective—how digital diasporas have evolved over time from a more traditional understanding as constituted either by a vertical relationship to a distant homeland or a horizontal connection to the scattered transnational community (see Safran, Cohen) to move towards a notion of “hypertextual diaspora.” With hypertextual diaspora, these central axes which constitute the understanding of diaspora are reshuffled in favour of more rhizomatic formations where affiliations, locations, and spaces are constantly destabilised and renegotiated. Needless to say, diasporas are not homogeneous and resist generalisation, but in this article we highlight common ways in which young migrant Internet users renew the practices around diaspora connections. Drawing from research on various migrant populations around the globe, we distinguish three common strategies: (1) the forging of transnational public spheres, based on maintaining virtual social relations by people scattered across the globe; (2) new forms of digital diasporic youth branding; and (3) the cultural production of innovative hypertexts in the context of more rhizomatic digital diaspora formations. Before turning to discuss these three strategies, the potential of a postcolonial framework to recognise multiple intersections of diaspora and digital mediation is elaborated. Hypertext as a Postcolonial Figuration Postcolonial scholars, Appadurai, Gilroy, and Brah among others, have been attentive to diasporic experiences, but they have paid little attention to the specificity of digitally mediated diaspora experiences. As Maria Fernández observes, postcolonial studies have been “notoriously absent from electronic media practice, theory, and criticism” (59). Our exploration of what happens when diasporic youth go online is a first step towards addressing this gap. Conceptually, this is clearly an urgent need since diasporas and the digital inform each other in the most profound and dynamic of ways: “the Internet virtually recreates all those sites which have metaphorically been eroded by living in the diaspora” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 396). Writings on the Internet tend to favour either the “gold-rush” mentality, seeing the Web as a great equaliser and bringer of neoliberal progress for all, or the more pessimistic/technophobic approach, claiming that technologically determined spaces are exclusionary, white by default, masculine-oriented, and heteronormative (Everett 30, Van Doorn and Van Zoonen 261). For example, the recent study by Ito et al. shows that young people are not interested in merely performing a fiction in a parallel online world; rather, the Internet gets embedded in their everyday reality (Ito et al. 19-24). Real-life commercial incentives, power hierarchies, and hegemonies also get extended to the digital realm (Schäfer 167-74). Online interaction remains pre-structured, based on programmers’ decisions and value-laden algorithms: “people do not need a passport to travel in cyberspace but they certainly do need to play by the rules in order to function electronically” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 405). We began our article with a statement by Benedict Anderson, stressing how people in the Argentinian diaspora find their space on the Internet. Online avenues increasingly allow users to traverse and add hyperlinks to their personal websites in the forms of profile pages, the publishing of preferences, and possibilities of participating in and affiliating with interest-based communities. Online journals, social networking sites, streaming audio/video pages, and online forums are all dynamic hypertexts based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding. HTML is the protocol of documents that refer to each other, constituting the backbone of the Web; every text that you find on the Internet is connected to a web of other texts through hyperlinks. These links are in essence at equal distance from each other. As well as being a technological device, hypertext is also a metaphor to think with. Figuratively speaking, hypertext can be understood as a non-hierarchical and a-centred modality. Hypertext incorporates multiplicity; different pathways are possible simultaneously, as it has “multiple entryways and exits” and it “connects any point to any other point” (Landow 58-61). Feminist theorist Donna Haraway recognised the dynamic character of hypertext: “the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice.” However, she adds, “the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid.” We can begin to see the value of approaching the Internet from the perspective of hypertext to make an “inquiry into which connections matter, why, and for whom” (128-30). Postcolonial scholar Jaishree K. Odin theorised how hypertextual webs might benefit subjects “living at the borders.” She describes how subaltern subjects, by weaving their own hypertextual path, can express their multivocality and negotiate cultural differences. She connects the figure of hypertext with that of the postcolonial: The hypertextual and the postcolonial are thus part of the changing topology that maps the constantly shifting, interpenetrating, and folding relations that bodies and texts experience in information culture. Both discourses are characterised by multivocality, multilinearity, openendedness, active encounter, and traversal. (599) These conceptions of cyberspace and its hypertextual foundations coalesce with understandings of “in-between”, “third”, and “diaspora media space” as set out by postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha and Brah. Bhabha elaborates on diaspora as a space where different experiences can be articulated: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation (4). (Dis-)located between the local and the global, Brah adds: “diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ are contested” (205). As youths who were born in the diaspora have begun to manifest themselves online, digital diasporas have evolved from transnational public spheres to differential hypertexts. First, we describe how transnational public spheres form one dimension of the mediation of diasporic experiences. Subsequently, we focus on diasporic forms of youth branding and hypertext aesthetics to show how digitally mediated practices can go beyond and transgress traditional formations of diasporas as vertically connected to a homeland and horizontally distributed in the creation of transnational public spheres. Digital Diasporas as Diasporic Public Spheres Mass migration and digital mediation have led to a situation where relationships are maintained over large geographical distances, beyond national boundaries. The Internet is used to create transnational imagined audiences formed by dispersed people, which Appadurai describes as “diasporic public spheres”. He observes that, as digital media “increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres” (22). Media and communication researchers have paid a lot of attention to this transnational dimension of the networking of dispersed people (see Brinkerhoff, Alonso and Oiarzabal). We focus here on three examples from three different continents. Most famously, media ethnographers Daniel Miller and Don Slater focused on the Trinidadian diaspora. They describe how “de Rumshop Lime”, a collective online chat room, is used by young people at home and abroad to “lime”, meaning to chat and hang out. Describing the users of the chat, “the webmaster [a Trini living away] proudly proclaimed them to have come from 40 different countries” (though massively dominated by North America) (88). Writing about people in the Greek diaspora, communication researcher Myria Georgiou traced how its mediation evolved from letters, word of mouth, and bulletins to satellite television, telephone, and the Internet (147). From the introduction of the Web, globally dispersed people went online to get in contact with each other. Meanwhile, feminist film scholar Anna Everett draws on the case of Naijanet, the virtual community of “Nigerians Living Abroad”. She shows how Nigerians living in the diaspora from the 1990s onwards connected in global transnational communities, forging “new black public spheres” (35). These studies point at how diasporic people have turned to the Internet to establish and maintain social relations, give and receive support, and share general concerns. Establishing transnational communicative networks allows users to imagine shared audiences of fellow diasporians. Diasporic imagination, however, goes beyond singular notions of this more traditional idea of the transnational public sphere, as it “has nowadays acquired a great figurative flexibility which mostly refers to practices of transgression and hybridisation” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Subjects” 208). Below we recognise another dimension of digital diasporas: the articulation of diasporic attachment for branding oneself. Mocro and Nikkei: Diasporic Attachments as a Way to Brand Oneself In this section, we consider how hybrid cultural practices are carried out over geographical distances. Across spaces on the Web, young migrants express new forms of belonging in their dealing with the oppositional motivations of continuity and change. The generational specificity of this experience can be drawn out on the basis of the distinction between “roots” and “routes” made by Paul Gilroy. In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy writes about black populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The double consciousness of migrant subjects is reflected by affiliating roots and routes as part of a complex cultural identification (19 and 190). As two sides of the same coin, roots refer to the stable and continuing elements of identities, while routes refer to disruption and change. Gilroy criticises those who are “more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation which is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes” (19). He stresses the importance of not just focusing on one of either roots or routes but argues for an examination of their interplay. Forming a response to discrimination and exclusion, young migrants in online networks turn to more positive experiences such as identification with one’s heritage inspired by generational specific cultural affiliations. Here, we focus on two examples that cross two continents, showing routed online attachments to “be(com)ing Mocro”, and “be(coming) Nikkei”. Figure 1. “Leipe Mocro Flavour” music video (Ali B) The first example, being and becoming “Mocro”, refers to a local, bi-national consciousness. The term Mocro originated on the streets of the Netherlands during the late 1990s and is now commonly understood as a Dutch honorary nickname for youths with Moroccan roots living in the Netherlands and Belgium. A 2003 song, Leipe mocro flavour (“Crazy Mocro Flavour”) by Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, familiarised a larger group of people with the label (see Figure 1). Ali B’s song is exemplary for a wider community of youngsters who have come to identify themselves as Mocros. One example is the Marokkanen met Brainz – Hyves (Mo), a community page within the Dutch social networking site Hyves. On this page, 2,200 youths who identify as Mocro get together to push against common stereotypes of Moroccan-Dutch boys as troublemakers and thieves and Islamic Moroccan-Dutch girls as veiled carriers of backward traditions (Leurs, forthcoming). Its description reads, “I assume that this Hyves will be the largest [Mocro community]. Because logically Moroccans have brains” (our translation): What can you find here? Discussions about politics, religion, current affairs, history, love and relationships. News about Moroccan/Arabic Parties. And whatever you want to tell others. Use your brains. Second, “Nikkei” directs our attention to Japanese migrants and their descendants. The Discover Nikkei website, set up by the Japanese American National Museum, provides a revealing description of being and becoming Nikkei: As Nikkei communities form in Japan and throughout the world, the process of community formation reveals the ongoing fluidity of Nikkei populations, the evasive nature of Nikkei identity, and the transnational dimensions of their community formations and what it means to be Nikkei. (Japanese American National Museum) This site was set up by the Japanese American National Museum for Nikkei in the global diaspora to connect and share stories. Nikkei youths of course also connect elsewhere. In her ethnographic online study, Shana Aoyama found that the social networking site Hi5 is taken up in Peru by young people of Japanese heritage as an avenue for identity exploration. She found group confirmation based on the performance of Nikkei-ness, as well as expressions of individuality. She writes, “instead of heading in one specific direction, the Internet use of Nikkei creates a starburst shape of identity construction and negotiation” (119). Mocro-ness and Nikkei-ness are common collective identification markers that are not just straightforward nationalisms. They refer back to different homelands, while simultaneously they also clearly mark one’s situation of being routed outside of this homeland. Mocro stems from postcolonial migratory flows from the Global South to the West. Nikkei-ness relates to the interesting case of the Japanese diaspora, which is little accounted for, although there are many Japanese communities present in North and South America from before the Second World War. The context of Peru is revealing, as it was the first South American country to accept Japanese migrants. It now hosts the second largest South American Japanese diaspora after Brazil (Lama), and Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimoro, is also of Japanese origin. We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets blurred as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties, initiates subcultures and offers resistance to mainstream western cultural forms. Digital spaces are used to exert youthful diaspora branding. Networked branding includes expressing cultural identities that are communal and individual but also both local and global, illustrative of how “by virtue of being global the Internet can gift people back their sense of themselves as special and particular” (Miller and Slater 115). In the next section, we set out how youthful diaspora branding is part of a larger, more rhizomatic formation of multivocal hypertext aesthetics. Hypertext Aesthetics In this section, we set out how an in-between, or “liminal”, position, in postcolonial theory terms, can be a source of differential and multivocal cultural production. Appadurai, Bhabha, and Gilroy recognise that liminal positions increasingly leave their mark on the global and local flows of cultural objects, such as food, cinema, music, and fashion. Here, our focus is on how migrant youths turn to hypertextual forms of cultural production for a differential expression of digital diasporas. Hypertexts are textual fields made up of hyperlinks. Odin states that travelling through cyberspace by clicking and forging hypertext links is a form of multivocal digital diaspora aesthetics: The perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic, which I term “hypertext” or “postcolonial,” represents the need to switch from the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters characterising the performance of the same to that of non-linear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference. (Cited in Landow 356-7) On their profile pages, migrant youth digitally author themselves in distinct ways by linking up to various sites. They craft their personal hypertext. These hypertexts display multivocal diaspora aesthetics which are personal and specific; they display personal intersections of affiliations that are not easily generalisable. In several Dutch-language online spaces, subjects from Dutch-Moroccan backgrounds have taken up the label Mocro as an identity marker. Across social networking sites such as Hyves and Facebook, the term gets included in nicknames and community pages. Think of nicknames such as “My own Mocro styly”, “Mocro-licious”, “Mocro-chick”. The term Mocro itself is often already multilayered, as it is often combined with age, gender, sexual preference, religion, sport, music, and generationally specific cultural affiliations. Furthermore, youths connect to a variety of groups ranging from feminist interests (“Women in Charge”), Dutch nationalism (“I Love Holland”), ethnic affiliations (“The Moroccan Kitchen”) to clothing (the brand H&M), and global junk food (McDonalds). These diverse affiliations—that are advertised online simultaneously—add nuance to the typical, one-dimensional stereotype about migrant youth, integration, and Islam in the context of Europe and Netherlands (Leurs, forthcoming). On the online social networking site Hi5, Nikkei youths in Peru, just like any other teenagers, express their individuality by decorating their personal profile page with texts, audio, photos, and videos. Besides personal information such as age, gender, and school information, Aoyama found that “a starburst” of diverse affiliations is published, including those that signal Japanese-ness such as the Hello Kitty brand, anime videos, Kanji writing, kimonos, and celebrities. Also Nikkei hyperlink to elements that can be identified as “Latino” and “Chino” (Chinese) (104-10). Furthermore, users can show their multiple affiliations by joining different “groups” (after which a hyperlink to the group community appears on the profile page). Aoyama writes “these groups stretch across a large and varied scope of topics, including that of national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identities” (2). These examples illustrate how digital diasporas encompass personalised multivocal hypertexts. With the widely accepted adagio “you are what you link” (Adamic and Adar), hypertextual webs can be understood as productions that reveal how diasporic youths choose to express themselves as individuals through complex sets of non-homogeneous identifications. Migrant youth connects to ethnic origin and global networks in eclectic and creative ways. The concept of “digital diaspora” therefore encapsulates both material and virtual (dis)connections that are identifiable through common traits, strategies, and aesthetics. Yet these hypertextual connections are also highly personalised and unique, offering a testimony to the fluid negotiations and intersections between the local and the global, the rooted and the diasporic. Conclusions In this article, we have argued that migrant youths render digital diasporas more complex by including branding and hypertextual aesthetics in transnational public spheres. Digital diasporas may no longer be understood simply in terms of their vertical relations to a homeland or place of origin or as horizontally connected to a clearly marked transnational community; rather, they must also be seen as engaging in rhizomatic digital practices, which reshuffle traditional understandings of origin and belonging. Contemporary youthful digital diasporas are therefore far more complex in their engagement with digital media than most existing theory allows: connections are hybridised, and affiliations are turned into practices of diasporic branding and becoming. There is a generational specificity to multivocal diaspora aesthetics; this specificity lies in the ways migrant youths show communal recognition and express their individuality through hypertext which combines affiliation to their national/ethnic “roots” with an embrace of other youth subcultures, many of them transnational. These two axes are constantly reshuffled and renegotiated online where, thanks to the technological possibilities of HTML hypertext, a whole range of identities and identifications may be brought together at any given time. We trust that these insights will be of interest in future discussion of online networks, transnational communities, identity formation, and hypertext aesthetics where much urgent and topical work remains to be done. References Adamic, Lada A., and Eytan Adar. “You Are What You Link.” 2001 Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong. 26 Apr. 2010. ‹http://www10.org/program/society/yawyl/YouAreWhatYouLink.htm›. Ali B. “Leipe Mocro Flavour.” ALIB.NL / SPEC Entertainment. 2007. 4 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www3.alib.nl/popupAlibtv.php?catId=42&contentId=544›. Alonso, Andoni, and Pedro J. Oiarzabal. Diasporas in the New Media Age. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. 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“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies What constitutes a computer, as we have come to expect it? Are they necessarily monolithic “beige boxes”, connected to computer monitors, sitting on computer desks, located in computer rooms or computer labs? In order for a device to be considered a true computer, does it need to have a keyboard and mouse? If this were 1991 or earlier, our collective perception of what computers are and are not would largely be framed by this “beige box” model: computers are stationary, slab-like, and heavy, and their natural habitats must be in rooms specifically designated for that purpose. In 1992, when Apple introduced the first PowerBook, our perception began to change. Certainly there had been other portable computers prior to that, such as the Osborne 1, but these were more luggable than portable, weighing just slightly less than a typical sewing machine. The PowerBook and subsequent waves of laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and so-called smart phones from numerous other companies have steadily forced us to rethink and redefine what a computer is and is not, how we interact with them, and the manner in which these tools might be used in the classroom. However, this reconceptualization of computers is far from over, and is in fact steadily evolving as new devices are introduced, adopted, and subsequently adapted for uses beyond of their original purpose. Pat Crowe’s Book Reader project, for example, has morphed Nintendo’s GameBoy and GameBoy Advance into a viable electronic book platform, complete with images, sound, and multi-language support. (Crowe, 2003) His goal was to take this existing technology previously framed only within the context of proprietary adolescent entertainment, and repurpose it for open, flexible uses typically associated with learning and literacy. Similar efforts are underway to repurpose Microsoft’s Xbox, perhaps the ultimate symbol of “closed” technology given Microsoft’s propensity for proprietary code, in order to make it a viable platform for Open Source Software (OSS). However, these efforts are not forgone conclusions, and are in fact typical of the ongoing battle over who controls the technology we own in our homes, and how open source solutions are often at odds with a largely proprietary world. In late 2001, Microsoft launched the Xbox with a multimillion dollar publicity drive featuring events, commercials, live models, and statements claiming this new console gaming platform would “change video games the way MTV changed music”. (Chan, 2001) The Xbox launched with the following technical specifications: 733mhz Pentium III 64mb RAM, 8 or 10gb internal hard disk drive CD/DVD ROM drive (speed unknown) Nvidia graphics processor, with HDTV support 4 USB 1.1 ports (adapter required), AC3 audio 10/100 ethernet port, Optional 56k modem (TechTV, 2001) While current computers dwarf these specifications in virtually all areas now, for 2001 these were roughly on par with many desktop systems. The retail price at the time was $299, but steadily dropped to nearly half that with additional price cuts anticipated. Based on these features, the preponderance of “off the shelf” parts and components used, and the relatively reasonable price, numerous programmers quickly became interested in seeing it if was possible to run Linux and additional OSS on the Xbox. In each case, the goal has been similar: exceed the original purpose of the Xbox, to determine if and how well it might be used for basic computing tasks. If these attempts prove to be successful, the Xbox could allow institutions to dramatically increase the student-to-computer ratio in select environments, or allow individuals who could not otherwise afford a computer to instead buy and Xbox, download and install Linux, and use this new device to write, create, and innovate . This drive to literally and metaphorically “open” the Xbox comes from many directions. Such efforts include Andrew Huang’s self-published “Hacking the Xbox” book in which, under the auspices of reverse engineering, Huang analyzes the architecture of the Xbox, detailing step-by-step instructions for flashing the ROM, upgrading the hard drive and/or RAM, and generally prepping the device for use as an information appliance. Additional initiatives include Lindows CEO Michael Robertson’s $200,000 prize to encourage Linux development on the Xbox, and the Xbox Linux Project at SourceForge. What is Linux? Linux is an alternative operating system initially developed in 1991 by Linus Benedict Torvalds. Linux was based off a derivative of the MINIX operating system, which in turn was a derivative of UNIX. (Hasan 2003) Linux is currently available for Intel-based systems that would normally run versions of Windows, PowerPC-based systems that would normally run Apple’s Mac OS, and a host of other handheld, cell phone, or so-called “embedded” systems. Linux distributions are based almost exclusively on open source software, graphic user interfaces, and middleware components. While there are commercial Linux distributions available, these mainly just package the freely available operating system with bundled technical support, manuals, some exclusive or proprietary commercial applications, and related services. Anyone can still download and install numerous Linux distributions at no cost, provided they do not need technical support beyond the community / enthusiast level. Typical Linux distributions come with open source web browsers, word processors and related productivity applications (such as those found in OpenOffice.org), and related tools for accessing email, organizing schedules and contacts, etc. Certain Linux distributions are more or less designed for network administrators, system engineers, and similar “power users” somewhat distanced from that of our students. However, several distributions including Lycoris, Mandrake, LindowsOS, and other are specifically tailored as regular, desktop operating systems, with regular, everyday computer users in mind. As Linux has no draconian “product activation key” method of authentication, or digital rights management-laden features associated with installation and implementation on typical desktop and laptop systems, Linux is becoming an ideal choice both individually and institutionally. It still faces an uphill battle in terms of achieving widespread acceptance as a desktop operating system. As Finnie points out in Desktop Linux Edges Into The Mainstream: “to attract users, you need ease of installation, ease of device configuration, and intuitive, full-featured desktop user controls. It’s all coming, but slowly. With each new version, desktop Linux comes closer to entering the mainstream. It’s anyone’s guess as to when critical mass will be reached, but you can feel the inevitability: There’s pent-up demand for something different.” (Finnie 2003) Linux is already spreading rapidly in numerous capacities, in numerous countries. Linux has “taken hold wherever computer users desire freedom, and wherever there is demand for inexpensive software.” Reports from technology research company IDG indicate that roughly a third of computers in Central and South America run Linux. Several countries, including Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, have all but mandated that state-owned institutions adopt open source software whenever possible to “give their people the tools and education to compete with the rest of the world.” (Hills 2001) The Goal Less than a year after Microsoft introduced the The Xbox, the Xbox Linux project formed. The Xbox Linux Project has a goal of developing and distributing Linux for the Xbox gaming console, “so that it can be used for many tasks that Microsoft don’t want you to be able to do. ...as a desktop computer, for email and browsing the web from your TV, as a (web) server” (Xbox Linux Project 2002). Since the Linux operating system is open source, meaning it can freely be tinkered with and distributed, those who opt to download and install Linux on their Xbox can do so with relatively little overhead in terms of cost or time. Additionally, Linux itself looks very “windows-like”, making for fairly low learning curve. To help increase overall awareness of this project and assist in diffusing it, the Xbox Linux Project offers step-by-step installation instructions, with the end result being a system capable of using common peripherals such as a keyboard and mouse, scanner, printer, a “webcam and a DVD burner, connected to a VGA monitor; 100% compatible with a standard Linux PC, all PC (USB) hardware and PC software that works with Linux.” (Xbox Linux Project 2002) Such a system could have tremendous potential for technology literacy. Pairing an Xbox with Linux and OpenOffice.org, for example, would provide our students essentially the same capability any of them would expect from a regular desktop computer. They could send and receive email, communicate using instant messaging IRC, or newsgroup clients, and browse Internet sites just as they normally would. In fact, the overall browsing experience for Linux users is substantially better than that for most Windows users. Internet Explorer, the default browser on all systems running Windows-base operating systems, lacks basic features standard in virtually all competing browsers. Native blocking of “pop-up” advertisements is still not yet possible in Internet Explorer without the aid of a third-party utility. Tabbed browsing, which involves the ability to easily open and sort through multiple Web pages in the same window, often with a single mouse click, is also missing from Internet Explorer. The same can be said for a robust download manager, “find as you type”, and a variety of additional features. Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox, Konqueror, and essentially all other OSS browsers for Linux have these features. Of course, most of these browsers are also available for Windows, but Internet Explorer is still considered the standard browser for the platform. If the Xbox Linux Project becomes widely diffused, our students could edit and save Microsoft Word files in OpenOffice.org’s Writer program, and do the same with PowerPoint and Excel files in similar OpenOffice.org components. They could access instructor comments originally created in Microsoft Word documents, and in turn could add their own comments and send the documents back to their instructors. They could even perform many functions not yet capable in Microsoft Office, including saving files in PDF or Flash format without needing Adobe’s Acrobat product or Macromedia’s Flash Studio MX. Additionally, by way of this project, the Xbox can also serve as “a Linux server for HTTP/FTP/SMB/NFS, serving data such as MP3/MPEG4/DivX, or a router, or both; without a monitor or keyboard or mouse connected.” (Xbox Linux Project 2003) In a very real sense, our students could use these inexpensive systems previously framed only within the context of entertainment, for educational purposes typically associated with computer-mediated learning. Problems: Control and Access The existing rhetoric of technological control surrounding current and emerging technologies appears to be stifling many of these efforts before they can even be brought to the public. This rhetoric of control is largely typified by overly-restrictive digital rights management (DRM) schemes antithetical to education, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Combined,both are currently being used as technical and legal clubs against these efforts. Microsoft, for example, has taken a dim view of any efforts to adapt the Xbox to Linux. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who has repeatedly referred to Linux as a cancer and has equated OSS as being un-American, stated, “Given the way the economic model works - and that is a subsidy followed, essentially, by fees for every piece of software sold - our license framework has to do that.” (Becker 2003) Since the Xbox is based on a subsidy model, meaning that Microsoft actually sells the hardware at a loss and instead generates revenue off software sales, Ballmer launched a series of concerted legal attacks against the Xbox Linux Project and similar efforts. In 2002, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft simultaneously sued Lik Sang, Inc., a Hong Kong-based company that produces programmable cartridges and “mod chips” for the PlayStation II, Xbox, and Game Cube. Nintendo states that its company alone loses over $650 million each year due to piracy of their console gaming titles, which typically originate in China, Paraguay, and Mexico. (GameIndustry.biz) Currently, many attempts to “mod” the Xbox required the use of such chips. As Lik Sang is one of the only suppliers, initial efforts to adapt the Xbox to Linux slowed considerably. Despite that fact that such chips can still be ordered and shipped here by less conventional means, it does not change that fact that the chips themselves would be illegal in the U.S. due to the anticircumvention clause in the DMCA itself, which is designed specifically to protect any DRM-wrapped content, regardless of context. The Xbox Linux Project then attempted to get Microsoft to officially sanction their efforts. They were not only rebuffed, but Microsoft then opted to hire programmers specifically to create technological countermeasures for the Xbox, to defeat additional attempts at installing OSS on it. Undeterred, the Xbox Linux Project eventually arrived at a method of installing and booting Linux without the use of mod chips, and have taken a more defiant tone now with Microsoft regarding their circumvention efforts. (Lettice 2002) They state that “Microsoft does not want you to use the Xbox as a Linux computer, therefore it has some anti-Linux-protection built in, but it can be circumvented easily, so that an Xbox can be used as what it is: an IBM PC.” (Xbox Linux Project 2003) Problems: Learning Curves and Usability In spite of the difficulties imposed by the combined technological and legal attacks on this project, it has succeeded at infiltrating this closed system with OSS. It has done so beyond the mere prototype level, too, as evidenced by the Xbox Linux Project now having both complete, step-by-step instructions available for users to modify their own Xbox systems, and an alternate plan catering to those who have the interest in modifying their systems, but not the time or technical inclinations. Specifically, this option involves users mailing their Xbox systems to community volunteers within the Xbox Linux Project, and basically having these volunteers perform the necessary software preparation or actually do the full Linux installation for them, free of charge (presumably not including shipping). This particular aspect of the project, dubbed “Users Help Users”, appears to be fairly new. Yet, it already lists over sixty volunteers capable and willing to perform this service, since “Many users don’t have the possibility, expertise or hardware” to perform these modifications. Amazingly enough, in some cases these volunteers are barely out of junior high school. One such volunteer stipulates that those seeking his assistance keep in mind that he is “just 14” and that when performing these modifications he “...will not always be finished by the next day”. (Steil 2003) In addition to this interesting if somewhat unusual level of community-driven support, there are currently several Linux-based options available for the Xbox. The two that are perhaps the most developed are GentooX, which is based of the popular Gentoo Linux distribution, and Ed’s Debian, based off the Debian GNU / Linux distribution. Both Gentoo and Debian are “seasoned” distributions that have been available for some time now, though Daniel Robbins, Chief Architect of Gentoo, refers to the product as actually being a “metadistribution” of Linux, due to its high degree of adaptability and configurability. (Gentoo 2004) Specifically, the Robbins asserts that Gentoo is capable of being “customized for just about any application or need. ...an ideal secure server, development workstation, professional desktop, gaming system, embedded solution or something else—whatever you need it to be.” (Robbins 2004) He further states that the whole point of Gentoo is to provide a better, more usable Linux experience than that found in many other distributions. Robbins states that: “The goal of Gentoo is to design tools and systems that allow a user to do their work pleasantly and efficiently as possible, as they see fit. Our tools should be a joy to use, and should help the user to appreciate the richness of the Linux and free software community, and the flexibility of free software. ...Put another way, the Gentoo philosophy is to create better tools. When a tool is doing its job perfectly, you might not even be very aware of its presence, because it does not interfere and make its presence known, nor does it force you to interact with it when you don’t want it to. The tool serves the user rather than the user serving the tool.” (Robbins 2004) There is also a so-called “live CD” Linux distribution suitable for the Xbox, called dyne:bolic, and an in-progress release of Slackware Linux, as well. According to the Xbox Linux Project, the only difference between the standard releases of these distributions and their Xbox counterparts is that “...the install process – and naturally the bootloader, the kernel and the kernel modules – are all customized for the Xbox.” (Xbox Linux Project, 2003) Of course, even if Gentoo is as user-friendly as Robbins purports, even if the Linux kernel itself has become significantly more robust and efficient, and even if Microsoft again drops the retail price of the Xbox, is this really a feasible solution in the classroom? Does the Xbox Linux Project have an army of 14 year olds willing to modify dozens, perhaps hundreds of these systems for use in secondary schools and higher education? Of course not. If such an institutional rollout were to be undertaken, it would require significant support from not only faculty, but Department Chairs, Deans, IT staff, and quite possible Chief Information Officers. Disk images would need to be customized for each institution to reflect their respective needs, ranging from setting specific home pages on web browsers, to bookmarks, to custom back-up and / or disk re-imaging scripts, to network authentication. This would be no small task. Yet, the steps mentioned above are essentially no different than what would be required of any IT staff when creating a new disk image for a computer lab, be it one for a Windows-based system or a Mac OS X-based one. The primary difference would be Linux itself—nothing more, nothing less. The institutional difficulties in undertaking such an effort would likely be encountered prior to even purchasing a single Xbox, in that they would involve the same difficulties associated with any new hardware or software initiative: staffing, budget, and support. If the institutional in question is either unwilling or unable to address these three factors, it would not matter if the Xbox itself was as free as Linux. An Open Future, or a Closed one? It is unclear how far the Xbox Linux Project will be allowed to go in their efforts to invade an essentially a proprietary system with OSS. Unlike Sony, which has made deliberate steps to commercialize similar efforts for their PlayStation 2 console, Microsoft appears resolute in fighting OSS on the Xbox by any means necessary. They will continue to crack down on any companies selling so-called mod chips, and will continue to employ technological protections to keep the Xbox “closed”. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, in all likelihood Microsoft continue to equate any OSS efforts directed at the Xbox with piracy-related motivations. Additionally, Microsoft’s successor to the Xbox would likely include additional anticircumvention technologies incorporated into it that could set the Xbox Linux Project back by months, years, or could stop it cold. Of course, it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty how this “Xbox 2” (perhaps a more appropriate name might be “Nextbox”) will impact this project. Regardless of how this device evolves, there can be little doubt of the value of Linux, OpenOffice.org, and other OSS to teaching and learning with technology. This value exists not only in terms of price, but in increased freedom from policies and technologies of control. New Linux distributions from Gentoo, Mandrake, Lycoris, Lindows, and other companies are just now starting to focus their efforts on Linux as user-friendly, easy to use desktop operating systems, rather than just server or “techno-geek” environments suitable for advanced programmers and computer operators. While metaphorically opening the Xbox may not be for everyone, and may not be a suitable computing solution for all, I believe we as educators must promote and encourage such efforts whenever possible. I suggest this because I believe we need to exercise our professional influence and ultimately shape the future of technology literacy, either individually as faculty and collectively as departments, colleges, or institutions. Moran and Fitzsimmons-Hunter argue this very point in Writing Teachers, Schools, Access, and Change. One of their fundamental provisions they use to define “access” asserts that there must be a willingness for teachers and students to “fight for the technologies that they need to pursue their goals for their own teaching and learning.” (Taylor / Ward 160) Regardless of whether or not this debate is grounded in the “beige boxes” of the past, or the Xboxes of the present, much is at stake. Private corporations should not be in a position to control the manner in which we use legally-purchased technologies, regardless of whether or not these technologies are then repurposed for literacy uses. I believe the exigency associated with this control, and the ongoing evolution of what is and is not a computer, dictates that we assert ourselves more actively into this discussion. We must take steps to provide our students with the best possible computer-mediated learning experience, however seemingly unorthodox the technological means might be, so that they may think critically, communicate effectively, and participate actively in society and in their future careers. About the Author Paul Cesarini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Communication & Technology Education, Bowling Green State University, Ohio Email: pcesari@bgnet.bgsu.edu Works Cited http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/debian.php>.Baron, Denis. “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies.” Passions Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies. Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe, Eds. Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999. 15 – 33. Becker, David. “Ballmer: Mod Chips Threaten Xbox”. News.com. 21 Oct 2002. http://news.com.com/2100-1040-962797.php>. http://news.com.com/2100-1040-978957.html?tag=nl>. http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/08/13/020813hnchina.xml>. http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/1062/>. http://www.bookreader.co.uk>.Finni, Scott. “Desktop Linux Edges Into The Mainstream”. TechWeb. 8 Apr 2003. http://www.techweb.com/tech/software/20030408_software. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/29439.html http://gentoox.shallax.com/. http://ragib.hypermart.net/linux/. http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2362/LWD010424latinlinux/pfindex.html. http://www.xbox-linux.sourceforge.net. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/27487.html. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/26078.html. http://www.us.playstation.com/peripherals.aspx?id=SCPH-97047. http://www.techtv.com/extendedplay/reviews/story/0,24330,3356862,00.html. http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,61984,00.html. http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/philosophy.xml http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2869075,00.html. http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/usershelpusers.html http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/fun.games/12/16/gamers.liksang/. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Cesarini, Paul. "“Opening” the Xbox" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/08_Cesarini.php>. APA Style Cesarini, P. (2004, Jul1). “Opening” the Xbox. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/08_Cesarini.php>