Showing 1181 - 1190 of 2039 Items
Subversive, mother, killjoy: Sexism against dilma rousseff and the social imaginary of Brazil’s rightward turn
Date: 2019-03-01
Creator: Joseph Jay Sosa
Access: Open access
- From resistance fighter against Brazil’s military dictatorship to its first female president, Dilma Rousseff’s biography follows the historic arc of democratization in Brazil. Her 2016 impeachment was also the culminating event of numerous crises that polarized Brazilian society. To supporters, Rousseff’s removal without evidence constitutes an abrogation of democracy. To critics, Rousseff had to answer for an economic recession and widespread corruption (though she was not implicated in any investigation). This article examines the social imaginaries of the rightward turn that made Rousseff’s removal possible. Moving across diverse sets of public culture-street protests, journalistic accounts, political observations, and Rousseff’s speeches-the article uses sexism against Rousseff as an analytic to deconstruct the cultural narratives of Brazil’s rightward turn. A first section considers conservative efforts to paint Rousseff as a political subversive. These accusations drew on long-standing, right-wing Brazilian tropes around people who don’t “act right” in the moral, sexual, and ideological fields. A second section reads the maternal metaphors of Rousseff’s governance strategies against conflicting political renderings of the family-pitting left-wing versions of family rooted in economic development against Evangelical Christian accounts of the family as a gender-normative unit. A third section argues that Rousseff’s response to the charges against her turned her (and those who argued her case) into what Sara Ahmed calls “feminist killjoys.” Ultimately, the question of sexism in Rousseff’s impeachment shows how deep-seated cultural conservatisms can be activated in a new era of democratic uncertainty.
A critical, analytical framework for the digital machine
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Crystal Hall
Eric Chown
Fernando Nascimento
Access: Open access
- The Faculty of Digital and Computational Studies (DCS) at Bowdoin College proposes a critical, analytical framework, referred to as the ‘4As,’ as an interdisciplinary means to interpret, evaluate, and create the data, operations, and devices of computing across all domains of knowledge production. Following other disciplines that have developed in symbiotic relationships to one another, DCS puts computation in conversation with fields from across the arts, humanities, physical, and social sciences. Our foundational premise is the bidirectional influence between these disciplines and digital artifacts and computation. The 4As (artifact, architecture, abstraction, and agency) benefit from both the scepticism of the liberal arts in the face of ubiquitous digital processes and the analytical opening for examining questions pertaining to creative and imaginative alternatives to the digital and computational status quo. We provide an ultra-contemporary case study to demonstrate the framework in use.
Using 'big data' to explain visits to lakes in 17 US states
Date: 2020-07-01
Creator: Erik Nelson
Maggie Rogers
Spencer Wood
Jesse Chung
Bonnie, Keeler
Access: Open access
- We use large dataset on US lakes from 17 states to estimate the relationship between summertime visits to lakes as proxied by social media use and the lakes' water quality, amenities, and surrounding landscape features and socioeconomic conditions. Prior to estimating these relationships we worked on 1) selecting a parsimonious set of explanatory variables from a roster of more than 100 lake attributes and 2) accounting for the non-random pattern of missing water quality data. These steps 1) improved the interpretability of the estimated visit models and 2) widened our estimated models' scope of statistical inference. We used Machine Learning techniques to select parsimonious sets of explanatory variables and multiple imputation to estimate water quality at lakes missing this data. We found the following relationships between summertime visits to lake and their attributes across the 17-state region. First, we estimated that every additional meter of average summer-time Secchi depth between 1995 and 2014 was associated with at least 7.0% more summer-time visits to a lake between 2005 to 2014, all else equal. Second, we consistently found that lake amenities, such as beaches, boat launches, and public toilets, were more powerful predictors of visits than water quality. Third, we also found that visits to a lake were strongly influenced by the lake's accessibility and its distance to nearby lakes and the amenities the nearby lakes offered. Finally, our results highlight the biased results that "big data"-based research on recreation can generate if non-random missing observation patterns in the data are not corrected.
Projected land-use change impacts on ecosystem services in the United States
Date: 2014-05-20
Creator: Joshua J. Lawler
David J. Lewis
Erik Nelson
Andrew J. Plantinga
Stephen, Polasky
John C. Withey
David P. Helmers
Sebastián Martinuzzi
Derric Penningtonh
Access: Open access
- Providing food, timber, energy, housing, and other goods and services, while maintaining ecosystem functions and biodiversity that underpin their sustainable supply, is one of the great challenges of our time. Understanding the drivers of land-use change and how policies can alter land-use change will be critical to meeting this challenge. Here we project land-use change in the contiguous United States to 2051 under two plausible baseline trajectories of economic conditions to illustrate how differences in underlying market forces can have large impacts on land-use with cascading effects on ecosystem services and wildlife habitat. We project a large increase in croplands (28.2 million ha) under a scenario with high crop demand mirroring conditions starting in 2007, compared with a loss of cropland (11.2 million ha) mirroring conditions in the 1990s. Projected land-use changes result in increases in carbon storage, timber production, food production from increased yields, and >10% decreases in habitat for 25% of modeled species. We also analyze policy alternatives designed to encourage forest cover and natural landscapes and reduce urban expansion. Although these policy scenarios modify baseline land-use patterns, they do not reverse powerful underlying trends. Policy interventions need to be aggressive to significantly alter underlying land-use change trends and shift the trajectory of ecosystem service provision.
Accelerating change: The power of faculty change agents to promote diversity and inclusive teaching practices
Date: 2019-10-02
Creator: R. Heather Macdonald
Rachel J. Beane
Eric M.D. Baer
Pamela L. Eddy
Norlene R., Emerson
Jan Hodder
Ellen R. Iverson
John R. McDaris
Kristin O’Connell
Carol J. Ormand
Access: Open access
- Faculty play an important role in attracting students to the geosciences, helping them to thrive in geoscience programs, and preparing them for careers. Thus, faculty have the responsibility to work toward broadening participation in the geosciences by implementing equitable and inclusive practices in their teaching and their programs. Faculty professional development that promotes diversity and inclusion is one way to move evidence-based practices into wider use. The adoption of these practices may be accelerated through a professional development diffusion model that amplifies the impacts through the work of faculty change agents. An example of this approach is the SAGE 2YC professional development program, in which faculty change agents learn and practice strategies during workshop sessions, implement changes in their own teaching, and then work in teams to lead workshops in their region under the auspices of the national program. Although this example focuses on two-year colleges, the model is applicable to faculty professional development more broadly. The success of the model is due in large part to a suite of leader-developed workshop sessions and curated resources that change agent teams may select and adapt for the regional workshops they lead. Furthermore, change agents are trusted colleagues, which makes adoption of the evidence-based practices by regional workshop participants more likely. Increased adoption of a change agent approach to faculty development will support the creation and sharing of additional resources, leading to wider diffusion and implementation of inclusive teaching practices.
Making predictions in an uncertain world: Environmental structure and cognitive maps
Date: 1999-01-01
Creator: Eric Chown
Access: Open access
- This article examines the relationship between environmental and cognitive structure. One of the key tasks for any agent interacting in the real world is the management of uncertainty; because of this the cognitive structures which interact with real environments, such as would be used in navigation, must effectively cope with the uncertainty inherent in a constantly changing world. Despite this uncertainty, however, real environments usually afford structure that can be effectively exploited by organisms. The article examines environmental characteristics and structures that enable humans to survive and thrive in a wide range of real environments. The relationship between these characteristics and structures, uncertainty, and cognitive structure is explored in the context of PLAN, a proposed model of human cognitive mapping, and R-PLAN, a version of PLAN that has been instantiated on an actual mobile robot. An examination of these models helps to provide insight into environmental characteristics which impact human performance on tasks which require interaction with the world. Copyright 1999 International Society for Adaptive Behavior.
Green Icebergs Revisited
Date: 2019-02-01
Creator: Stephen G. Warren
Collin S. Roesler
Richard E. Brandt
Mark Curran
Access: Open access
- Ice crystals form in supercooled seawater beneath several Antarctic ice shelves; as they rise to the ice-shelf base they scavenge particles from the water and incorporate them into the growing basal ice. The resulting marine ice can be ~100 m thick; it differs from sea ice in that it is clear, desalinated, and bubble-free. Icebergs of marine ice vary in color from blue to green, depending on the nature and abundance of foreign constituents in the seawater that became trapped in the ice as it grew. A red or yellow material (i.e., one that absorbs blue light), in combination with the blue of ice, can shift the wavelength of minimum absorption to green. Previously, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) had been proposed to be responsible for the green color. Subsequent measurements of low DOC values in green icebergs, together with the recent finding of large concentrations of iron in marine ice from the Amery Ice Shelf, suggest that the color of green icebergs is caused more by iron-oxide minerals than by DOC. These icebergs travel great distances from their origin; when they melt they can deliver iron as a nutrient to the Southern Ocean.
Projecting global land-use change and its effect on ecosystem service provision and biodiversity with simple models
Date: 2010-12-01
Creator: Erik Nelson
Heather Sander
Peter Hawthorne
Marc Conte
Driss, Ennaanay
Stacie Wolny
Steven Manson
Stephen Polasky
Access: Open access
- Background: As the global human population grows and its consumption patterns change, additional land will be needed for living space and agricultural production. A critical question facing global society is how to meet growing human demands for living space, food, fuel, and other materials while sustaining ecosystem services and biodiversity [1]. Methodology/Principal Findings: We spatially allocate two scenarios of 2000 to 2015 global areal change in urban land and cropland at the grid cell-level and measure the impact of this change on the provision of ecosystem services and biodiversity. The models and techniques used to spatially allocate land-use/land-cover (LULC) change and evaluate its impact on ecosystems are relatively simple and transparent [2]. The difference in the magnitude and pattern of cropland expansion across the two scenarios engenders different tradeoffs among crop production, provision of species habitat, and other important ecosystem services such as biomass carbon storage. For example, in one scenario, 5.2 grams of carbon stored in biomass is released for every additional calorie of crop produced across the globe; under the other scenario this tradeoff rate is 13.7. By comparing scenarios and their impacts we can begin to identify the global pattern of cropland and irrigation development that is significant enough to meet future food needs but has less of an impact on ecosystem service and habitat provision. Conclusions/Significance: Urban area and croplands will expand in the future to meet human needs for living space, livelihoods, and food. In order to jointly provide desired levels of urban land, food production, and ecosystem service and species habitat provision the global society will have to become much more strategic in its allocation of intensively managed land uses. Here we illustrate a method for quickly and transparently evaluating the performance of potential global futures.
Exchange Rate Regimes and Nominal Wage Comovements in a Dynamic Ricardian Model
Date: 2013-10-28
Creator: Yao Tang
Yoshinori Kurokawa
Jiaren Pang
Access: Open access
- We construct a dynamic Ricardian model of trade with money and nominal exchange rate. The model implies that the nominal wages of the trading countries are more likely to exhibit stronger positive comovements when the countries fix their bilateral exchange rates. Panel regression results based on data from OECD countries from 1973 to 2012 suggest that countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU) experienced stronger positive wage comovements with their main trade partners. When we restrict the regression to the subsample of the EMU countries, we find a significant increase in wage comovements after these countries joined the EMU in 1999 compared to the pre-euro era. In comparison, when the sample is restricted to the non-EMU countries, we find no evidence that non-currency union pegs affected the wage comovements.
Reproducibility of Ba/Ca variations recorded by northeast Pacific bamboo corals
Date: 2017-09-01
Creator: G. Serrato Marks
M. LaVigne
T. M. Hill
W. Sauthoff
T. P., Guilderson
E. B. Roark
R. B. Dunbar
T. J. Horner
Access: Open access
- Trace elemental ratios preserved in the calcitic skeleton of bamboo corals have been shown to serve as archives of past ocean conditions. The concentration of dissolved barium (Ba ), a bioactive nutrientlike element, is linked to biogeochemical processes such as the cycling and export of nutrients. Recent work has calibrated bamboo coral Ba/Ca, a new Ba proxy, using corals spanning the oxygen minimum zone beneath the California Current System. However, it was previously unclear whether Ba/Ca records were internally reproducible. Here we investigate the accuracy of using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry for Ba/Ca analyses and test the internal reproducibility of Ba/Ca among replicate radial transects in the calcite of nine bamboo corals collected from the Gulf of Alaska (643–720 m) and the California margin (870–2054 m). Data from replicate Ba/Ca transects were aligned using visible growth bands to account for nonconcentric growth; smoothed data were reproducible within ~4% for eight corals (n = 3 radii/coral). This intracoral reproducibility further validates using bamboo coral Ba/Ca for Ba reconstructions. Sections of the Ba/Ca records that were potentially influenced by noncarbonate bound Ba phases occurred in regions where elevated Mg/Ca or Pb/Ca and coincided with anomalous regions on photomicrographs. After removing these regions of the records, increased Ba/Ca variability was evident in corals between ~800 and 1500 m. These findings support additional proxy validation to understand Ba variability on interannual timescales, which could lead to new insights into deep sea biogeochemistry over the past several centuries. SW SW coral coral SW coral SW