We developed automated ablation stakes to measure colocated in situ changes in relative glacier-surface elevation and climatological drivers of ablation. The designs, refined over 10 years of development and deployments, implement open-source hardware and common building materials. The ablation stakes record distance to the snow/ice surface, air temperature and relative humidity every 1–15 min. Using these high-frequency data, we demonstrate that melt factors calculated using standard melt-rate vs temperature regressions converge over averaging windows of approximately 12 h or greater. Furthermore, we evaluate an integral approach to estimating temperature-index melt factors for ablation. In a test case on Glaciar Perito Moreno, Argentina, this integral approach reveals an overall positive-degree-day melt factor of 7.5 mm w.e. $^\circ$C−1 d−1. We describe four deployments with iteratively improved designs and provide a list of materials required to construct an automated ablation stake.

We recently reported on the radio-frequency attenuation length of cold polar ice at Summit Station, Greenland, based on bi-static radar measurements of radio-frequency bedrock echo strengths taken during the summer of 2021. Those data also allow studies of (a) the relative contributions of coherent (such as discrete internal conducting layers with sub-centimeter transverse scale) vs incoherent (e.g. bulk volumetric) scattering, (b) the magnitude of internal layer reflection coefficients, (c) limits on signal propagation velocity asymmetries (‘birefringence’) and (d) limits on signal dispersion in-ice over a bandwidth of ~100 MHz. We find that (1) attenuation lengths approach 1 km in our band, (2) after averaging 10 000 echo triggers, reflected signals observable over the thermal floor (to depths of ~1500 m) are consistent with being entirely coherent, (3) internal layer reflectivities are ≈–60$\to$–70 dB, (4) birefringent effects for vertically propagating signals are smaller by an order of magnitude relative to South Pole and (5) within our experimental limits, glacial ice is non-dispersive over the frequency band relevant for neutrino detection experiments.

COVID-19 had the potential to dramatically increase public support for welfare. It was a time of apparent increased solidarity, of apparently deserving claimants, and of increasingly widespread exposure to the benefits system. However, there are also reasons to expect the opposite effect: an increase in financial strain fostering austerity and self-interest, and thermostatic responses to increasing welfare generosity. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the pandemic on attitudes towards working-age unemployment benefits in the UK using a unique combination of data sources: (i) temporally fine-grained data on attitudinal change over the course of the pandemic; and (ii) a novel nationally representative survey contrasting attitudes towards pandemic-era and pre-pandemic claimants (including analysis of free-text responses). Our results show that the pandemic prompted little change in UK welfare attitudes. However, we also find that COVID-era unemployment claimants were perceived as substantially more deserving than those claiming prior to the pandemic. This contrast suggests a strong degree of ‘COVID exceptionalism’ – with COVID claimants seen as categorically different from conventional claimants, muting the effect of the pandemic on welfare attitudes overall.

Mass loss from iceberg calving at marine-terminating glaciers is one of the largest and most poorly constrained contributors to sea-level rise. However, our understanding of the processes controlling ice fracturing and crevasse evolution is incomplete. Here, we use Gabor filter banks to automatically map crevasse density and orientation through time on a ~150 km2 terminus region of Narsap Sermia, an outlet glacier of the southwest Greenland ice sheet. We find that Narsap Sermia is dominated by transverse (flow-perpendicular) crevasses near the ice front and longitudinal (flow-aligned) crevasses across its central region. Measured crevasse orientation varies on sub-annual timescales by more than 45$^\circ$ in response to seasonal velocity changes, and also on multi-annual timescales in response to broader dynamic changes and glacier retreat. Our results show a gradual up-glacier propagation of the zone of flow-transverse crevassing coincident with frontal retreat and acceleration occurring in 2020/21, in addition to sub-annual crevasse changes primarily in transition zones between longitudinal to transverse crevasse orientation. This provides new insight into the dynamics of crevassing at large marine-terminating glaciers and a potential approach for the rapid identification of glacier dynamic change from a single pair of satellite images.

Fluctuations in the volume and the value of financial remittances received from abroad affect the livelihood of households in developing economies across the world. Yet, political scientists have little to say about how changes in remittances, as opposed to the receipt of remittance payments alone, affect recipients’ political attitudes. Relying on a unique four-wave panel study of Kyrgyz citizens between 2010–2013 and a cross-sectional sample of 28 countries in Central Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, we show that when people experience a decrease (increase) in remittances, they become less (more) satisfied about their household economic situation and misattribute responsibility to the incumbent at home. Our findings advance the literature on the political consequences of remittance payments and suggest that far from exclusively being an international risk-sharing mechanism for developing countries, remittances can also drive fluctuations in incumbent approval and compromise rudimentary accountability mechanisms in the developing world.

Although business historiography has demonstrated a variety of impediments placed on women’s entry to entrepreneurship and business, the negotiated mechanisms that constructed the gendered selection has been understudied. Based on an analysis of loan applications by Jewish women in British-ruled Palestine before 1948, this article shows how material considerations to approve the loans and facilitate entry to business activity were based not merely on gender-oriented perceptions on the legitimacy of doing business, but also on a mosaic of normative constructions of family, community, and nation building.

This essay addresses the relationship between white-collar workers and nationalism by introducing a cultural-symbolic approach to examine how national discourse became an essential “point of production” of white-collar identities, particularly those of clerks and clerical work. Based on an analysis of the imagery that clerks use to describe their work experience, this discussion attempts to document and explain how and why nationalism, as a cultural system with an internal logic and specific stylistic devices, was employed by the clerks “from below” to construct their occupational identity.

The association between white-collar workers and nationalism, particularly in the context of state building, has long attracted the attention of sociologists and historians. First, the emergence of non-manual workers as the social basis of bureaucratic organizations was linked to state formation. Second, the role of white-collar workers in the evolution of national-capitalist economies and urban consumer communities was regarded as essential in linking state building and economic change. Third, political and social histories of the nationalist Right centered on bureaucrats and clerical employees as standard-bearers of conservative politics.

Jewish clerks during the Zionist state-building period were intensively engaged in the social construction of productivity, and in turning the latter into a mechanism of social restraint. The clerks' productivism and concern with social utility was manifested in the reproduction of accepted Zionist physiocratic and constructivist notions of productivity, as a strategy in the politics of status; in the modernist transformation of the understanding of productivity to suit their own occupational terminology; in the prescription of the necessary qualities of the productive clerk; and in realization of these discursive campaigns in the practice of labor relations. These manifestations challenge a simplistic approach to the dissemination of the language of productivity as either a one-sided nationalist socialization, or a straightforward managerial strategy of control. Based on primary archival sources of the clerks and their union this paper argues instead that they reflected the intertwining of national attitudes with from-below advancement of group interests.

Historians have long recognized post-war Palestine as a society in a state of destabilization. Increasing tension between the population and the Palestine Mandatory government was reflected in political opposition and violence. This was accompanied by the growing role of the United States in the intensive debate on the future of relations between Arabs and Jews, as reflected in the decision in late 1945 to convene the Anglo-American Committee. The transition from a war economy to a period of reconstruction produced immense economic and social problems that added to increasing British debts, which was partly reflected in difficulties in absorbing former servicemen in to Palestine's economy and increasing unemployment of both Arabs and Jews. Destabilization was also made evident by increasing industrial unrest, focusing significantly on the state sector of the economy—the government bureaucracy, the railways, and the military camps. This post-war militancy was part of the economic and social impact of the war, the associated cycle of wartime labor strikes, and the increasing cooperation between Arab and Jewish workers in labor protest against the government.