On the Emotional Appeal of the Inorganic

What the Surrealists admired in commodity culture was its tendency to confuse the natural with the artificial, the animate with the in-animate - as in Walter Benjamin's notorious concept of the 'sex-appeal of the inorganic'. A futher corollary of this view - the shock value of kitsch - has been the potential for regarding kitsch as somehow morbid or anxiety-inducing; Mike Kelley proposed such a reading in his curatorial project on 'The Uncanny'. This paper will address Disney's cartoon films of the 1930s both in their immediate historical context (specifically in relation to the Surrealists' flirtation with commodity culture) and from the vantage-point of a contemporary epoch informed by post-modern convulsions of taste. The willfully eccentric proposition - Disney as anti-aesthetic- will provide the basis to interrogate the sublime dimension of a morbidly sentimental commodity form

Strengthening the global system of protected areas post-2020: A perspective from the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas

Protected areas are the cornerstones of biodiversity conservation and have never been more relevant than at the present time when the world is facing both a biodiversity and a climate change crisis. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) has been helping to set global standards and best practice guidelines in protected area planning and management for 60 years. Following this guidance, many countries have made significant progress toward their Aichi Target 11 commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The global community will be coming together at the 15th Conference of the Parties of the CBD to set new biodiversity conservation targets for the next decade, as milestones to 2050 and a vision of “a world living in harmony with nature.” This paper lays out the WCPA perspective on priorities for supporting effective protected and conserved areas for the post-2020 era

Pressure-induced insulator-to-metal transition in low-dimensional TiOCl

We studied the transmittance and reflectance of the low-dimensional Mott-Hubbard insulator TiOCl in the infrared and visible frequency range as a function of pressure. The strong suppression of the transmittance and the abrupt increase of the near-infrared reflectance above 12 GPa suggest a pressure-induced insulator-to-metal transition. The pressure-dependent frequency shifts of the orbital excitations, as well as the pressure dependences of the charge gap and the spectral weight of the optical conductivity above the phase transition are presented.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Modelling trade offs between public and private conservation policies

To reduce global biodiversity loss, there is an urgent need to determine the most efficient allocation of conservation resources. Recently, there has been a growing trend for many governments to supplement public ownership and management of reserves with incentive programs for conservation on private land. At the same time, policies to promote conservation on private land are rarely evaluated in terms of their ecological consequences. This raises important questions, such as the extent to which private land conservation can improve conservation outcomes, and how it should be mixed with more traditional public land conservation. We address these questions, using a general framework for modelling environmental policies and a case study examining the conservation of endangered native grasslands to the west of Melbourne, Australia. Specifically, we examine three policies that involve: i) spending all resources on creating public conservation areas; ii) spending all resources on an ongoing incentive program where private landholders are paid to manage vegetation on their property with 5-year contracts; and iii) splitting resources between these two approaches. The performance of each strategy is quantified with a vegetation condition change model that predicts future changes in grassland quality. Of the policies tested, no one policy was always best and policy performance depended on the objectives of those enacting the policy. This work demonstrates a general method for evaluating environmental policies and highlights the utility of a model which combines ecological and socioeconomic processes.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

Lattice-Imposed Geometry in Metal-Organic Frameworks: Lacunary Zn4O Clusters in MOF-5 Serve as Tripodal Chelating Ligands for Ni2+

The inorganic clusters in metal–organic frameworks can be used to trap metal ions in coordination geometries that are difficult to achieve in molecular chemistry. We illustrate this concept by using the well-known basic carboxylate clusters in Zn[subscript 4]O(1,4-benzenedicarboxylate)3 (MOF-5) as tripodal chelating ligands that enforce an unusual pseudo-tetrahedral oxygen ligand field around Ni[superscript 2+]. The new Ni-based MOF-5 analogue is characterized by porosity measurements and a suite of electronic structure spectroscopies. Classical ligand field analysis of the Ni[superscript 2+] ion isolated in MOF-5 classifies the Zn3O(carboxylate)6 “tripodal ligand” as an unusual, stronger field ligand than halides and other oxygen donor ligands. These results may inspire the widespread usage of MOFs as chelating ligands for stabilizing site-isolated metal ions in future reactivity and electronic structure studies.United States. Dept. of Energy. Office of Science (Award DE-SC0006937

Protected areas: providing natural solutions to 21st century challenges

Protected areas remain a cornerstone of global conservation efforts. The double impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss are major threats to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, especially those relating to environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation and food and water security. The growing awareness of the planet’s vulnerability to human driven changes also provides an opportunity to re-emphasize the multiple values of natural ecosystems and the services that they provide. Protected areas, when integrated into landuse plans as part of larger and connected conservation networks, offer practical, tangible solutions to the problems of both species loss and adaptation to climate change. Natural habitats make a significant contribution to mitigation by storing and sequestering carbon in vegetation and soils, and to adaptation by maintaining essential ecosystem services which help societies to respond to, and cope with climate change and other environmental challenges. Many protected areas could be justified on socioeconomic grounds alone yet their multiple goods and services are largely unrecognized in national accounting. This paper argues that there is a convincing case for greater investment in expanded and better-connected protected area systems, under a range of governance and management regimes that are specifically designed to counter the threats of climate change, increased demand and altered patterns of resource use. The new agenda for protected areas requires greater inclusivity of a broader spectrum of actors and rights holders, with growing attention to landscapes and seascapes protected by indigenous peoples, local communities, private owners and other actors which complement conservation areas managed by state agencies. Greater attention also needs to be focused on ways to integrate and mainstream protected areas into sustainable development, including promotion of “green” infrastructure as a strategic part of responses to climate change

Resonant soft X-ray Raman scattering of NiO

Resonant soft X-ray Raman scattering measurements on NiO have been made at photon energies across the Ni 2p absorption edges. The details of the spectral features are identified as Raman scattering due to d-d and charge-transfer excitations. The spectra are interpreted within the single impurity Anderson model, including multiplets, crystal-field and charge-transfer effects. At threshold excitation, the spectral features consists of triplet-triplet and triplet-singlet transitions of the 3d8 configuration. For excitation energies corresponding to the charge-transfer region in the Ni 2p X-ray absorption spectrum of NiO, the emission spectra are instead dominated by charge-transfer transitions to the 3d9L-1 final state. Comparisons of the final states with other spectroscopical techniques are also made.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-8984/14/13/32

Electronic structure of Fe- vs. Ru-based dye molecules

In order to explore whether Ru can be replaced by inexpensive Fe in dye molecules for solar cells, the differences in the electronic structure of Fe- and Ru-based dyes are investigated by X-ray absorption spectroscopy and first-principles calculations. Molecules with the metal in a sixfold, octahedral N cage, such as tris(bipyridines) and tris(phenanthrolines), exhibit a systematic downward shift of the N 1s-to-π* transition when Ru is replaced by Fe. This shift is explained by an extra transfer of negative charge from the metal to the N ligands in the case of Fe, which reduces the binding energy of the N 1s core level. The C 1s-to-π* transitions show the opposite trend, with an increase in the transition energy when replacing Ru by Fe. Molecules with the metal in a fourfold, planar N cage (porphyrins) exhibit a more complex behavior due to a subtle competition between the crystal field, axial ligands, and the 2+ vs. 3+ oxidation states.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award Nos. CHE-1026245, DMR-1121288 (MRSEC), DMR-0537588 (SRC), and by the (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract Nos. DE-FG02-01ER45917 (end station) and DE-AC02-05CH11231 (ALS). P. L. Cook acknowledges support from the University of Wisconsin System 2012-2013 Applied Research Grant. J. M. García-Lastra and A. Rubio acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council (ERC-2010-AdG-Proposal No. 267374), Spanish Grants (FIS2011-65702-C02-01 and PIB2010US-00652), Grupos Consolidados (IT-319-07), and European Commission project CRONOS (280879-2).Peer Reviewe