Explore the vast range of titles available.

This groundbreaking study explores the recent dramatic changes brought about in Japan by the influx of a non-Japanese population, Filipina brides. Lieba Faier investigates how Filipina women who emigrated to rural Japan to work in hostess bars-where initially they were widely disparaged as prostitutes and foreigners-came to be identified by the local residents as \"ideal, traditional Japanese brides.\"Intimate Encounters, an ethnography of cultural encounters, unravels this paradox by examining the everyday relational dynamics that drive these interactions. Faier remaps Japan, the Philippines, and the United States into what she terms a \"zone of encounters,\" showing how the meanings of Filipino and Japanese culture and identity are transformed and how these changes are accomplished through ordinary interpersonal exchanges. Intimate Encounters provides an insightful new perspective from which to reconsider national subjectivities amid the increasing pressures of globalization, thereby broadening and deepening our understanding of the larger issues of migration and disapora.

This chapter contains sections titled: Origins of the Linguistic Situation in the Imperial Period Which Greek? Greek in Asia Minor in the First Centuries CE : General Tendencies Morphology and Morphosyntax A Heterogeneous Linguistic Area Onomastics Conclusions Further Reading

Ship routeing systems (e.g., traffic separation schemes) have been established worldwide to ensure ship traffic safety. There are no specific measures to establish an effective ship route. We have previously proposed a method to design and assess the route comparison with the present traffic flow in the interest to establish an effective ship routeing system, particularly for recommended routes. The method consists mainly of the following procedures: understanding the existing phenomena and the issues in the target area by analyzing target traffic flow; designing safety measures; assessing the safety measures; and determining the optimal safety measure. This method was used to design and assess the recommended route off the western coast of Izu O Shima Island. This route has been in service since January 2018. The purpose of this study is to validate the proposed method. First, the technical details of the method are described. An automatic identification system (AIS) observation was conducted before and after the implementation to validate the effectiveness of the recommended route for reducing collisions. The results show that the recommended route effectively reduces the risk of collisions. More specifically, the proposed method was found to be useful when establishing an effective recommended route.

The habitability of a planet is influenced by both its parent star and the properties of its local stellar neighborhood. Potential threats to habitability from the local stellar environment mainly arise from two factors: cataclysmic events such as powerful stellar explosions and orbital perturbations induced by close stellar encounters. Among the 4500+ exoplanet-hosting stars, about 140+ are known to host planets in their habitable zones (HZs). In this study, we use Gaia Data Release 3 data to investigate the 10 pc stellar neighborhood of the 84 habitable zone systems (HZSs) closest to the Sun. We assess the possible risks that the local stellar environments of these HZSs pose to their habitability. In particular, we find that HD 165155 has a high stellar density around it, making it likely to experience at least one flyby encounter within a span of 5 Gyr. We also identified two high-mass stars (M ≥ 8 M ⊙) as potential progenitors of supernovae, which could threaten the long-term survivability of HZSs HD 48265 and TOI-1227. Further, to quantify the similarity between HZ stars and the Sun, as well as their respective 10 pc stellar environments, we employ various astrophysical parameters to define a solar similarity index and a neighborhood similarity index. Our analysis suggests that HD 40307 exhibits the closest resemblance to the solar system, while HD 165155 shows the least resemblance.

Despite appearing featureless to our eyes, the open ocean is a highly variable environment for polarization-sensitive viewers. Dynamic visual backgrounds coupled with predator encounters from all possible directions make this habitat one of the most challenging for camouflage. We tested open-ocean crypsis in nature by collecting more than 1500 videopolarimetry measurements from live fish from distinct habitats under a variety of viewing conditions. Open-ocean fish species exhibited camouflage that was superior to that of both nearshore fish and mirrorlike surfaces, with significantly higher crypsis at angles associated with predator detection and pursuit. Histological measurements revealed that specific arrangements of reflective guanine platelets in the fish's skin produce angle-dependent polarization modifications for polarocrypsis in the open ocean, suggesting a mechanism for natural selection to shape reflectance properties in this complex environment.

Due to the increasing number of transportation vessels, marine traffic has become more congested. According to the statistics, 89% to 95% of maritime accidents are related to human factors. In order to reduce marine incidents, ship automatic collision avoidance has become one of the most important research issues in the field of ocean engineering. A generalized behavior decision-making (GBDM) model, trained via a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, is proposed in this paper, and it can be used for ship autonomous driving in multi-ship encounter situations. Firstly, the obstacle zone by target (OZT) is used to calculate the area of future collisions based on the dynamic information of ships. Meanwhile, a virtual sensor called a grid sensor is taken as the input of the observation state. Then, International Regulations for Preventing Collision at Sea (COLREGs) is introduced into the reward function to make the decision-making fully comply with COLREGs. Different from the previous RL-based collision avoidance model, the interaction between the ship and the environment only works in the collision avoidance decision-making stage. Finally, 60 complex multi-ship encounter scenarios clustered by the COLREGs are taken as the ship’s GBDM model training environments. The simulation results show that the proposed GBDM model and training method has flexible scalability in solving the multi-ship collision avoidance problem complying with COLREGs in different scenarios.

This article deals with the becoming of place in relation to tourism. The agency of non-human actors, such as earthly substances or matters underlying any given destination, has rarely been addressed empirically. Our argument is based on the view that a place is an entanglement of ever-moving substances. Hence, our objective is to trace how materialities of cultural landscape contribute to the continuous production of places through tourist encounters. By approaching destination development from the angle of relational materialism, the article aims at providing insights into the formation of tourism places, describing it as ‘poetics of making’. The article provides an account of the creation of the Strandir region, a sparsely populated coastal area in the north-west of Iceland, as a tourist destination. We will focus on the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, established in 2000, which has played a central role in framing the area as a tourism destination. The Museum brings together, and re-awakens, the period of witchcraft in the 17th century during which Strandir was one of the most notorious regions in Iceland for witch-hunts and burning. We will illustrate how magic, understood as a blank figure narrating human encounters with earthly substances, affects the ordering of Strandir both as a place and as a tourism destination. The power of the blank figure of magic rests in its ability to overturn stable orders or mobilise new or latent connections. Importantly, it also rests on personal narratives with the support of imagination, emotions and play. The Museum has been instrumental in creating and enhancing the image of the region as a place of magic, emphasising how culture and nature, as conventionally defined, mesh through human and non-human practices in the continuous forming of Strandir.

Breeding in most species is timed to coincide with the greatest availability of food resources to support the increased energetic needs of reproduction. Correspondingly, the majority (76%) of seabird species in temperate and polar regions breed in spring/summer, matching the peak in ocean productivity. The Fiordland penguin Eudyptes pachyrhynchus is one of only 34 seabird species worldwide that have part of their breeding cycle during the winter, and its chicks fledge when the eggs of congeneric Eudyptes species in the same region are only starting to hatch. Little is known of the foraging ecology of this species and the factors that may influence its timing of breeding. In the present study, the foraging behaviour of breeding individuals from Taumaka/Open Bay Island, New Zealand, was investigated using GPS, dive recorder and tri-axis accelerometer data loggers. In total, 35 individuals (4 males, 31 females) were tracked at sea, revealing extensive use of continental shelf slope (200-1000 m) habitat within 42 ± 5 km of the colony. Individuals foraged mostly during daylight in the epi-pelagic zone (mean modal depth 22 ± 2 m) and prey encounter events occurred in 50% of dives. Blood isotopic signatures suggest a trophic level indicative of squid consumption, supporting previous findings that winter-spawning squid are the most important prey type. The results of the present study suggest that a winter-breeding strategy by seabirds can reflect locally abundant prey resources and suitable conditions at the time for breeding.

Better understanding human–wildlife interactions and their links with management can help improve the design of wildlife protection zones. One example is the problem of wildlife collisions with vehicles or human-built structures (e.g., power lines, wind farms). In fact, collisions between marine wildlife and watercraft are among the major threats faced by several endangered species of marine mammals. Natural resource managers are therefore interested in finding cost-effective solutions to mitigate these threats. We combined abundance estimators with encounter rate theory to estimate relative lethal collision risk of the Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris) from watercraft. We first modelled seasonal abundance of watercraft and manatees using a Bayesian analysis of aerial survey count data. We then modelled relative lethal collision risk in space and across seasons. Finally, we applied decision analysis and Linear Integer Programming to determine the optimal design of speed zones in terms of relative risk to manatees and costs to waterway users. We used a Pareto efficient frontier approach to evaluate the performance of alternative zones, which included additional practical considerations (e.g., spatial aggregation of speed zones) in relation to the optimal zone configurations. Under the various relationships for probability of death given strike speed that we considered, the current speed zones reduced the relative lethal collision risk by an average of 51.5% to 70.0% compared to the scenario in which all speed regulations were removed (i.e., the no-protection scenario). We identified optimal zones and near-optimal zones with additional management considerations that improved upon the current zones in terms of cost or relative risk. Policy implications. Our analytical framework combines encounter rate theory and decision analysis to quantify the effectiveness of speed zones in protecting manatees while accounting for uncertainty. Our approach can be used to optimize the design of protection zones intended to reduce conflicts between human waterborne activity and marine mammals. This framework could be extended to address many other problems of human–wildlife interactions, such as the optimal placement of wind farms to minimize collisions with wildlife or the optimal allocation of ranger effort to mitigate poaching threats.

Situated in the unique historical context of Hong Kong—a contact zone between East and West—this study explores how Christianity’s introduction through British colonialism and missionary efforts has intertwined with and influenced Chinese cultural traditions. By examining selected works of Xu Dishan and Chen Zanyi, this study reveals the dynamic negotiations of identity and values between these two cultural and religious traditions. These literary works not only depict the complexities of cultural hybridity but also provide insights into the evolving nature of cultural identity in Hong Kong, illustrating how global religions and local traditions can merge and transform each other. This study contributes to understanding the intricate dance of religious exchange, conflict, and compromise in Hong Kong’s cross-culture setting, suggesting that such literary explorations can bridge Christianity with the socio-economic, cultural, and historical fabric of Chinese society.