Upset over Air Pollution: Analyzing Upset Event Emissions at Petroleum Refineries

The Clean Air Act (CAA) controls routine emissions at petroleum refineries, by creating limits and penalties for excess emissions. The CAA offers provisions for upset events, air emissions released because of unforeseen or unavoidable circumstances, if companies report the emissions and take corrective action. States enforce upset event rules and many states provide exemptions for a variety of circumstances, which may allow upset emissions to become a substantial, yet mostly unregulated source of emissions. We catalog the quantity and type of emissions generated during upset events at 18 Texas petroleum refineries from 2003 to 2008. We find that upset events occur frequently at these facilities and are collectively large in magnitude, emitting a combined total of 75 million lbs of emissions. In a select number of cases, single upset events exceeded annual emissions reported to the Toxics Release Inventory. Future research should assess the accuracy of upset event reporting and impact of upset events on environmental health.     

思想.制度.工具

各国国家安全体系建设的相关经验,可以为总体国家安全观指导下的中国国家安全体系建设提供参考和借鉴。国家安全体系一般都有一些必不可少的基本构成要素,但由于各国历史文化、内外环境和发展需求等方面的差异,这些要素的演变历程、具体内容和实际作用可能大不相同。作为超级大国,美国拥有最为庞大、完备且富于自身特色的国家安全体系。这个体系主要由指导思想、法律制度和保障工具三类要素构成。其指导思想是维护全球性主导地位,并带有绝对安全倾向;决策机制既遵循一套完整的跨部门分级流程,也涉及各种非正式决策模式;法律制度与监管机制系统完备;保障工具与手段多样有力,包括超强的军事能力与联盟体系、强大的经济实力与情报体系以及广泛的社会基础。然而,作为一个在冷战中形成的“安全化国家”,美国的安全目标与手段、资源之间存在持续张力;空前庞大的国家安全体系也会受到内外条件的制约,经常陷入能力捉襟见肘、行为进退失据的境地;尽管在国际体系中拥有显著的“权力优势”,美国同样面临发展利益与安全利益之间的矛盾。     

井冈山斗争时期历史人物研究述评

井冈山斗争史的研究离不开历史人物,据不完全统计,井冈山斗争时期比较重要的历史人物有近450人。经过检索,相关论文共有560余篇,集中出现在1987、1997、2007年。研究成果主要集中在以下几个方面:主要历史人物的研究,人物群体的研究,特殊人物的研究,人物的其他相关问题。研究不足及有待深化的内容有:对主要人物的研究、人物的拓展、各类人物群体的研究、国民党重要人物的研究,此外,研究者还应注意研究方法的创新,比如引入交叉学科的理论方法等。     

Creating other options: negotiating the meanings of citizenships

In this article, I explore the ways in which citizenship is reinvented and reinterpreted through local understandings and experiences. I show how Israeli citizens who had applied for another citizenship create a distinction between their Israeli citizenship, which they conceptualize in terms of identity and belonging, and their ‘European passport’, which they depict as a technical non-obliging document, thus neutralizing the challenge it poses on questions of national loyalty. However, the other sought after citizenship, which represents a legally binding attachment to a nation-state, paradoxically becomes a powerful symbol of freedom, embodying other life possibilities and allowing for an active negotiation of belonging.     

On seduction (and flirting) in the twenty-first century: A communication-theoretical perspective

Abstract

This paper draws on a mathematics audit of a South African newspaper to make a quantitative assessment of numerical accuracy in that local paper. It attempts to answer three research questions: how often do news reports in a daily newspaper include a quantitative element? How often do mathematical errors occur in those reports? What types of mathematical errors occur in those reports? Twelve consecutive weekday editions of the Cape Times, a daily newspaper based in Cape Town, South Africa, were examined to measure the frequency of quantitative elements in news reports, the frequency of mathematical errors in those reports containing quantitative elements, and the types of errors that occur. The data revealed that a large proportion of news reports include a quantitative element, supporting the hypothesis that journalists need to be mathematically literate. News reports with a quantitative element had a high rate of numerical errors, mostly due to a lack of ability in or attention to basic arithmetic. The findings raise questions about the numerical competency of South African journalists and concerns about the ability of the South African media to perform their normative role within a developing democracy.     

A model for the translation of news agency texts (Sapa) for radio (OFM) news

Abstract

Radio news differs from news provided by other media. According to Oosthuizen (1996), radio is an alerting medium. Leiter, Harriss and Johnson (2000) refer to this attribute as immediacy. The time available to news is very limited and this is why radio news stories are condensed into only a few sentences. Furthermore, news for broadcast is written in a conversational style, because it is heard and not read. Simple, short sentences are used; adjectives and adverbs are kept to a minimum; and strong, active verbs are used rather than passives. In the case of news wires, such as the South African Press Association (known as Sapa), news reports are written for print media. Therefore, bulletin producers need to edit these texts according to the requirements for radio news. In a bilingual or multilingual newsroom a more problematic situation arises, namely that all these texts (originally intended for use in print) need to be translated for a radio news bulletin and the radio station's specific audience. This article aims to describe how translation is used in the operational functioning of a radio newsroom, with a specific focus on OFM – a bilingual commercial radio station broadcasting to the Free State, Northern Cape, North West and southern parts of Gauteng, in South Africa. OFM's bulletin producers therefore not only edit news texts, but also translate them from English into Afrikaans. Certain strategies are followed to edit the original texts, but as there are also translation processes involved and specific translation problems which need to be addressed, appropriate translation strategies need to be identified. This study uses Christiane Nord's functionalist model (specifically her looping model) to describe the broad methodological framework in which these translating and editing (or transediting) processes take place at OFM. The study and findings will also show how certain elements of the looping model need to be adjusted in the translation of Sapa texts for OFM News.     

Traumata on Screen: Cinematic Views from Southern Africa

ABSTRACT

This special themed issue of Communicatio explores the profound transformation of the political, cultural and intellectual contours of Africa from the vantage point of African film and grounded within the theoretical and epistemological discourses of trauma studies, memory studies, postcolonial studies, and decolonial studies. The contributors are particularly interested in exploring the relational flows between African cinematic works and the social and imaginary circumstances of their production, engagement and representation. Through an explication of the screen and viewing cultures from Africa, this themed issue wishes to make three contributions. The first is to the already established but on-going scholarly work of trauma studies, but specifically from an African, cinematic vantage point. The second contribution is to the theoretical body of work on African cinema (and in this context, “cinematic” includes both film/television). And the last contribution is to the emerging view that culture is a “two-way street,” to put it colloquially: a reversal of the dominant “Western” direction of culture, with an emphasis on different tones of social values and contexts, that have been marginalised in mainstream popular culture discourses.     

Terrorism,counter‐terrorism and democracy: The assessment of national security threats

The development of radical Islamist strategic thinking and the impact of post-modern, Western styles of thought upon the ideology that informs that strategy is often overlooked in conventional discussions of homegrown threats from jihadist militants. The propensity to discount the ideology informing both al-Qaeda and nominally non-violent Islamist movements with an analogous political philosophy like Hizb ut-Tahrir neglects the influence that critical Western modes of thought exercise upon their strategic thinking especially in the context of homegrown radicalization. Drawing selectively on non-liberal tendencies in the Western ideological canon has, in fact, endowed Khilaafaism (caliphism) with both a distinctive theoretical style and strategic practice. In particular, it derives intellectual sustenance from a post-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical thinking that in combination with an “English” School of international relations idealism holds that epistemological claims are socially determined, subjective, and serve the interests of dominant power relations. This critical, normative, and constructivist approach to international relations seeks not only to explain the historical emergence of the global order, but also to transcend it. This transformative agenda bears comparison with radical Islamist critiques of Western ontology and is of interest to Islamism's political and strategic thinking. In this regard, the relativist and critical approaches that have come to dominate the academic social sciences since the 1990s not only reflect a loss of faith in Western values in a way that undermines the prospects for a liberal and pluralist polity, but also, through a critical process facilitated by much international relations orthodoxy, promotes the strategic and ideological agenda of radical Islam. It is this curious strategic and ideological evolution that this paper explores.     

The Ethics of Waste in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town

Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue the lives of those categorized as “Black” and “Coloured,” while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-white South Africans into dangerous proximity to hazardous and unseemly waste. Waste, in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, becomes both metonymy and metaphor. Wicomb not only uses it to index the historical and material processes of abjection that obtained in twentieth-century South Africa; she also takes up garbage, feces, vomit, and other refuse as an ethical lens for the consideration of how individual and collective subjectivities are formed by what is thrown away. In its relationship to waste of all kinds, the individual body becomes a site in which social processes of acceptance and disavowal play out.     

论虚假诉讼的刑法规制——基于对虚假诉讼发生与司法实践状况的实证研究

近年来,虚假诉讼案件在我国频繁发生且呈现出逐年增多的趋势,但我国刑事立法中缺乏恰当的罪名对虚假诉讼行为进行定罪,无法对其进行全面评价。虽然各地出台了大量司法性文件以识别和预防虚假诉讼,但这些司法性文件并无法改变刑法存在漏洞的事实,相反,其对虚假诉讼的罪名设定存在争议,部分规定甚至存在侵犯当事人诉讼权利的嫌疑。因此,通过确立虚假诉讼罪来规制虚假诉讼至关重要。