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The Vaigat Iceberg-Microbial Oil Degradation and Archaeological Heritage Investigation (VIMOA) project records the results of archaeological survey of five sites in Greenland that are threatened by extreme weather conditions related to climate change. The project demonstrates the advantages of collaboration between archaeologists and natural scientists, and provides a repository of data to help preserve the archaeological record.

Udgivelsesdato: 2006-null The incidence of youth suicides has increased dramatically among the Inuit in Greenland since the modernization started in the 1950s. Suicides currently peak at age 15-24 Men: 400-500, Women: 100-150 per 100,000 person-years. The methods are drastic: shooting or hanging. An early peak was seen in the capital, a later peak in the rest of West Greenland, and high and increasing rates in remote East Greenland. Suicidal thoughts occur more often in young people who grew up in homes with a poor emotional environment, alcohol problems and violence. There is a definite correlation with several aspects of the modernization process but it is hard to pinpoint causal relationships. It is rather the "modernization package" that should be regarded as risk factors for suicides.

Abstract: The 7th amendment to the EU Cosmetics Directive prohibits to put animal-tested cosmetics on the market in Europe after 2013. In that context, the European Commission invited stakeholder bodies (industry, non-governmental organisations, EU Member States, and the Commissions Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety) to identify scientific experts in five toxicological areas, i.e. toxicokinetics, repeated dose toxicity, carcinogenicity, skin sensitisation, and reproductive toxicity for which the Directive foresees that the 2013 deadline could be further extended in case alternative and validated methods would not be available in time. The selected experts were asked to analyse the status and prospects of alternative methods and to provide a scientifically sound estimate of the time necessary to achieve full replacement of animal testing. In summary, the experts confirmed that it will take at least another 79 years for the replacement of the current in vivo animal tests used for the safety assessment of cosmetic ingredients for skin sensitisation. However, the experts were also of the opinion that alternative methods may be able to give hazard information, i.e. to differentiate between sensitisers and non-sensitisers, ahead of 2017. This would, however, not provide the complete picture of what is a safe exposure because the relative potency of a sensitiser would not be known. For toxicokinetics, the timeframe was 57 years to develop the models still lacking to predict lung absorption and renal/biliary excretion, and even longer to integrate the methods to fully replace the animal toxicokinetic models. For the systemic toxicological endpoints of repeated dose toxicity, carcinogenicity and reproductive toxicity, the time horizon for full replacement could not be estimated.

This article examines the myth of the supposed superiority of the desert noble savage over civilized man. With the Bedouin of Arabia and the Aborigines of Australia as its two prime examples, the article argues that two versions of this myth can be traced: one in which the desert noble savage is valorized due to his valour, physical prowess and martial skill (Bedouin); and another, later version, where the desert noble savage is valorized as a pacifist, an ecologist and a mythmaker/storyteller (Aborigines). The article concludes by examining the way in which this turn from one type of desert noble savage to another reflects the manner in which western modernity has shifted its values from Cartesian dualities and Enlightenment rationalism to that of networks, potentialities, ecology and myth.

In archaeology, the reconstruction of the relative chronology of objects (e.g. graves) is often based on absence/presence of information about finds (e.g. grave goods). Traditionally, this task is known as seriation. In this article the task is tackled by formulating a stochastic model for the relationship between the underlying grave order and the observed incidences and by analysing the data using the Bayesian method. In selecting a prior distribution the attempt has been to reflect the archaeological context, especially a potential preselection of specific types of finds suitable for the seriation task. In contrast to established methods for seriation, such as correspondence analysis, it is possible directly to describe the variability of the estimated order by analysing the posterior distribution of the order. Because the order of the graves is a non-numerical and high-dimensional parameter, special techniques for the analysis of the posterior distribution are required. Construction of a Markov chain Monte Carlo method to approximate the posterior distribution is also partially non-standard, since the distribution can be multi-modal and because a huge number of nuisance parameters are introduced to avoid parametric assumptions on the shape of the distribution of the types through time. An example illustrates the techniques and demonstrates the need for a sensitivity analysis in this setting. The framework of our approach can easily be extended either to adjust for known factors which influence the absence/presence or in order to incorporate prior information on the grave order.

In the literature on European history, World War I and the interwar years are often portrayed as the end of the age of liberalism. The crisis of liberalism dates back to the nineteenth century, but a er the Great War, criticism of liberalism intensified. But the interwar period also saw a number of attempts to redefine the concept. This article focuses on the Danish case of this European phenomenon. It shows how a profound crisis of bourgeois liberalism in the late nineteenth century le the concept of liberalism almost deserted in the first decades of the twentieth century, and how strong state regulation of the Danish economy during World War I was crucial for an ideologization of the rural population and their subsequent orientation toward the concept of liberalism.

The 2001 Convention benefits underwater cultural heritage in various ways: it takes into account the interests of sites and those of the parties concerned and shows that heritage, while fragile, is...

Yoko Tawada's recent writings about the disasters in Japan of 2011 engage with the translatability of catastrophes. How can one translate disasters in ways that prevent “othering” and “isolating” them? How can one interpret disasters as products of cultural translation and knowledge exchange? Tawada's texts frame disasters as islands, as closed areas, which obstruct communication. As a result of translation and the islands' historical and geopolitical interconnections, Tawada's “disaster islands” remain, however, only partly isolated. They are constantly disturbed by outsiders' attempts to observe, to understand; by appeals for aid; and by the surrounding waters that link the island with the world. This article unfolds Tawada's poetic model for translating disasters and its epistemological dimensions in relation to futurity, theology, and geopolitics.

Abstract In 1976, 2 major molecular imaging events coincidentally took place: Clinical Nuclear Medicine was first published in June, and in August researchers at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania created the first images in humans with F-FDG. FDG was initially developed as part of an evolution set in motion by fundamental research studies with positron-emitting tracers in the 1950s by Michel Ter-Pegossian and coworkers at the Washington University. Today, Clinical Nuclear Medicine is a valued scientific contributor to the molecular imaging community, and FDG PET is considered the backbone of this evolving and exciting discipline.