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From the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, the production and consumption of German things played critical roles in delineating and connecting a wide variety of German places in Latin America. Such places became ubiquitous in Chile and Argentina. They flourished because there was ample room in the German imagination for the multiplicity of German places and the cultural hybridity that accompanied them to extend beyond Imperial Germany's national boundaries and colonial possessions. They also flourished because host societies found virtue in having those German places in their states. This essay uses German schools in Argentina and Chile as a window into the emergence of such German places and the soft power that accompanied them. Scholars often overlook that power when they focus on colonial questions or formal and informal imperialism in Latin America. More than any other institution, German schools became sites where the production and consumption of German things were concentrated and multilayered, and where the consistencies and great varieties of Germanness that arrived and evolved in Latin America gained their clearest articulation. Because those schools were both centers of communities and nodes in a global pedagogical network that thrived during the interwar period, they provide us with great insight into a nexus of motivations that created German places in Latin America. Life around these schools also underscores the importance of studying immigrants and their things together.

This essay provides an interpretation of parallel attempts to represent ruination in the cities of Warsaw and Berlin after the Holocaust—the architectural projects of Bohdan Lachert and Daniel Libeskind. Lachert strove to represent the ruination of Jewish life in Warsaw through a modernist housing project, whereas Libeskind sought to represent Jewish ruination in a museum. While these two projects might seem different, they come together around a shared aspiration: to represent absence and ruination. Both projects endeavored to create a new kind of memorial that moved away from the conventional form. Rather than turning away from ruination and suffering as the conventional monument has done, Libeskind and Lachert sought to develop a new, non-salvific kind of monument that would reflect on death, suffering, and emptiness. This essay emphasizes the novelty of their attempts to create a different relationship to the absence that is the past, while it also explores some of the central challenges—both historical and theoretical—that both architects faced in implementing their artistic visions.

This paper, which is part of the fruit of the Ph.D The Artwork Is Not Present – an investigation into the durational engagement with temporary artworks, the fundamental role that material plays in experience-driven ephemeral artworks, specifically temporary artworks. A temporary artwork, as defined in this research, is a physical work of an intentionally temporary duration that is created only once. A temporary artwork can be seen as more than a physical and stable object. Rather, it is an experience-driven artwork. Through deconstructing how the material shapes the artwork, we might understand when an artwork is indeed temporary and how the experience of a work is impacted when the work is physically unmade. The process of mapping out the role of material within experience-driven artworks shapes our understanding of the overall significance of material and the manner in which it constructs how a temporary artwork is experienced as present or absent.

In this paper I build on my previous case-study focused research on memorialization to develop a thesis for absence-presence evidenced in vernacular memorial artefacts, spaces and performances at a variety of scales and locations across the British Isles. I make three key arguments: i) for bringing the universally significant experience of absence through bereavement to the fore in cultural geographies of absence; ii) for moving beyond representational and phenomenological analysis of memorial artefacts and spaces to focus critical attention on the contextualized interface between the representational and more-than-representational, embodied and affective practices that surround them, for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the living and the absent deceased; and iii) that this interface of form and practice at a variety of vernacular memorials and locations evidences dynamic negotiations of absence-presence. I explore the ways in which the emotions, memory and materiality of absence through death is expressed and negotiated in different memorial forms and landscape settings in the British Isles. Analysis is based on a range of empirical examples drawn from contemporary practices of memorialization and remembrance, and explores how living with absence as a result of bereavement is mediated through different material forms and practices including expressions of 'continuing bonds'. The discussion is contextualized in relation to wider dialogue on absent presence, but argues that expressions of continuing bonds with the deceased evidence a relational and dynamic absence-presence. Practices associated with absence-presence intersect with growing trends to mark private grief and remembrance of individuals in public space, through the creation of a range of informal memorials that frame a 'Third Emotional Space' for the bereaved. The material memorialscape is indicative of the interwoven narrative journeys in and through particular place-temporalities for the living, for whom bereavement is a confluence of emotional-spiritual-practical way-finding.

Recent declines in wild bee populations have led to increases in conservation actions and monitoring of bee communities. Pan traps are a commonly used sampling method for monitoring bee populations due to their efficiency and low cost. However, potential biases inherent in different sampling techniques may result in misleading characterizations of bee communities across space and time. In this paper, we examined how bee communities sampled using pan traps and aerial nets changed seasonally, and if they were affected by the availability of floral resources. We found strong seasonal changes in the abundance, but not the richness, of bees captured in pan traps. Notably, we captured the fewest bees during weeks in spring when most flowering plant species were in bloom, suggesting that floral resource availability influences pan trap captures. We also compared patterns of bee abundance in pan traps to those captured by aerial netting. Bee richness in pans and nets was positively correlated, but relative abundances in pan and net samples were dominated by different bee genera. Furthermore, most genera decreased in pans with increasing floral richness, but patterns were mixed for nets. When using presence/absence data, rather than abundance, community composition was more similar between netted and pan‐trapped bee communities and changed less substantially across the floral richness gradient. Overall, these differences led to sampling substantially different bee community compositions in pan traps versus nets, especially when using abundance‐based methods to characterize the bee community. By examining multiple years of intensive seasonal sampling of plant and bee communities, we document potential pitfalls with methods commonly used to sample bee communities. We suggest that pan trapping and aerial netting provide similar estimates of bee species richness and community composition when using presence/absence data, but that practitioners should interpret pan‐trapped bee abundance data with caution especially when comparing bee communities between sites where plant communities may differ. We found that relative abundances of bees differed with capture method, and that some bee genera responded strongly to either pans traps or nets. We also found a strong overall inverse relationship between bee abundance in pan traps and flowering richness in early season, suggesting that floral richness can influence the traps’ reliability in predicting true bee abundance. However, bee community composition, measured as the relative presence/absence among genera, was more consistent both between nets and pans as well as across a floral richness gradient.

Staphylococcal enterotoxins (SEs) account for a substantial number of food-poisoning outbreaks. European legislation (Commission Regulation 1441/2007) stipulates the reference procedure for SE analysis in milk and dairy products, which is based on extraction, dialysis concentration and immunochemical detection using one of two approved assays (VIDAS ® SET2, Ridascreen ® SET Total). However, certified reference materials (CRMs) are lacking to support laboratories in performing reliable detection of Staphylococcus aureus enterotoxin A (SEA) in relevant matrices at sub-nanogram per gram levels. The certification of a set of three reference materials (blank and two SEA-containing materials) for testing of the presence/absence of SEA in cheese is described. The reference procedure was applied in an intercomparison with 15 laboratories, and results were reported in a qualitative manner (presence or absence of SEA in the sample). No false-negative or false-positive results were obtained. The certified values were stated as diagnostic specificity (blank material) or diagnostic sensitivity (SEA-containing materials) and were 100 % in all cases. Stability studies demonstrated suitable material stability when stored cooled or frozen. An in-house study on the recovery of SEA in the cheese materials using a double-sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) revealed comparable recovery values of around 45 % at the two spiking levels and in both the SEA-containing CRMs as well as blank CRM freshly spiked prior to analysis. The values were also comparable over time and among different analysts. The materials provide valuable support to laboratories for method validation and method performance verification and will increase the reliability of measuring SEA in cheese.

This special issue asks about archival absences, about the missing and that which has been silenced or ignored, and the critical responses possible in face of these sites of numbing, censorship or erasure. Featuring essays that cross institutional as well as disciplinary boundaries, \"Beyond Recovery\" brings into conversation a range of interlocutors across and beyond early American studies. In so doing, they consider pressing epistemological questions about how we might respond to critical reorientations to \"the archive\" and archives for early American literature writ large. The essays gathered give shape to absence not as something beyond discursive exploration, but as a structuring condition for new forms of knowledge production.

Beta diversity, species replacement and nestedness are often examined through pairwise comparisons of sites based on presence-absence data, and the relative importance of these ecological phenomena is evaluated by operations with dissimilarity coefficients. An example is the nestedness resultant dissimilarity (NRD) procedure recently proposed by Baselga (2010, Global Ecology andBiogeography 19: 134–143) to disentangle the nestedness fraction of beta diversity from species replacement. In our view, the component terms in this measure are not scaled uniformly and the nestedness fraction cannot be quantified properly without giving clear definitions for its measurement. We suggest to distinguish among three additive fractions of the species set of two sites: number of species shared (overlap), species replacement (=spatial turnover) and richness difference. Then, absolute beta diversity is obtained as a composite of the second two fractions (known as βWB), while nestedness is derived from the first and the third. To express beta diversity and nestedness in a relativized form, the respective sums are divided by the total number of species. These allow defining a new index to measure the fraction of beta diversity which is shared by nestedness as well, and is calculated as relativized richness difference with the condition that the two sites being compared have at least one species in common. It is called diversity-nestedness intersection coefficient (F). Baselga’s nestedness resultant dissimilarity and the diversity-nestedness intersection coefficient are compared graphically using artificial and actual examples. These functions follow a mathematical relationship for perfectly nested data, otherwise their results are divergent. Discrepancy increases when beta diversity is large, especially if richness differences override species replacement effects in shaping presence-absence data structures. An advantage of F is its compatibility with a general theoretical and methodological framework for revealing pattern in presence-absence data matrices.

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading