Showing 371 - 380 of 733 Items
A nuclear narrative: Robert Oppenheimer, autobiography, and public authority
Date: 2010-12-01
Creator: David K. Hecht
Access: Open access
Preparing for and managing change: Climate adaptation for biodiversity and ecosystems
Date: 2013-11-01
Creator: Bruce A. Stein, Amanda Staudt, Molly S. Cross, Natalie S. Dubois, Carolyn, Enquist, Roger Griffis, Lara J. Hansen, Jessica J. Hellmann, Joshua J. Lawler
Access: Open access
- The emerging field of climate-change adaptation has experienced a dramatic increase in attention as the impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystems have become more evident. Preparing for and addressing these changes are now prominent themes in conservation and natural resource policy and practice. Adaptation increasingly is viewed as a way of managing change, rather than just maintaining existing conditions. There is also increasing recognition of the need not only to adjust management strategies in light of climate shifts, but to reassess and, as needed, modify underlying conservation goals. Major advances in the development of climate-adaptation principles, strategies, and planning processes have occurred over the past few years, although implementation of adaptation plans continues to lag. With ecosystems expected to undergo continuing climate-mediated changes for years to come, adaptation can best be thought of as an ongoing process, rather than as a fixed endpoint. © The Ecological Society of America.
Modelling ecosystem services in terrestrial systems
Date: 2010-07-22
Creator: Erik J. Nelson, Gretchen C. Daily
Access: Open access
- Over the past few decades, a multi-disciplinary research community has documented the goods and services provided by ecosystems in specific sites scattered across the world. This research community has now begun to focus on creating methods and tools for mapping and valuing the ecosystem services produced on any landscape in the world. We describe some of these methods and tools and how they calculate and express ecosystem service provision and value on landscapes. We also describe methods for predicting landscape change. These predictions can be used by multi-ecosystem service models to assess potential changes and trade-offs in ecosystem service provision and values into the future. © 2010 Faculty of 1000 Ltd.
Wave mixing in coupled phononic crystals via a variable stiffness mechanism
Date: 2016-10-01
Creator: Gil Yong Lee, Christopher Chong, Panayotis G. Kevrekidis, Jinkyu Yang
Access: Open access
- We investigate wave mixing effects in a phononic crystal that couples the wave dynamics of two channels – primary and control ones – via a variable stiffness mechanism. We demonstrate analytically and numerically that the wave transmission in the primary channel can be manipulated by the control channel's signal. We show that the application of control waves allows the selection of a specific mode through the primary channel. We also demonstrate that the mixing of two wave modes is possible whereby a modulation effect is observed. A detailed study of the design parameters is also carried out to optimize the switching capabilities of the proposed system. Finally, we verify that the system can fulfill both switching and amplification functionalities, potentially enabling the realization of an acoustic transistor.
Survey on Italian Studies & Digital Humanities
Date: 2016-08-18
Creator: Crystal Hall
Access: Open access
- A survey distributed in English and Italian to collect information about the intersection of the fields of Italian Studies and Digital Humanities. The goals are to describe the kinds of work being done by scholars in this space of intersection, identify successful professional pathways that combine methods or content from the two fields, and inform next steps for organizations that support this work. Results will be discussed at the Wellesley "State of the Discipline" event on October 1, 2016 and the MLA Roundtable on the topic, January 5, 2017. The survey is provided here in case other fields are interested in conducting similar work.
Formation of oral and pharyngeal dentition in teleosts depends on differential recruitment of retinoic acid signaling
Date: 2010-09-01
Creator: Yann Gibert, Laure Bernard, Melanie Debiais-Thibaud, Franck Bourrat, Jean Stephane, Joly, Karen Pottin, Axel Meyer, Sylvie Retaux, David W. Stock, William R. Jackman, Pawat Seritrakul, Gerrit Begemann, Vincent Laudet
Access: Open access
- One of the goals of evolutionary developmental biology is to link specific adaptations to changes in developmental pathways. The dentition of cypriniform fishes, which in contrast to many other teleost fish species possess pharyngeal teeth but lack oral teeth, provides a suitable model to study the development of feeding adaptations. Here, we have examined the involvement of retinoic acid (RA) in tooth development and show that RA is specifically required to induce the pharyngeal tooth developmental program in zebrafish. Perturbation of RA signaling at this stage abolished tooth induction without affecting the development of tooth-associated ceratobranchial bones. We show that this inductive event is dependent on RA synthesis from aldh1a2 in the ventral posterior pharynx. Fibroblast growth factor (FGF) signaling has been shown to be critical for tooth induction in zebrafish, and its loss has been associated with oral tooth loss in cypriniform fishes. Pharmacological treatments targeting the RA and FGF pathways revealed that both pathways act independently during tooth induction. In contrast, we find that in Mexican tetra and medaka, species that also possess oral teeth, both oral and pharyngeal teeth are induced independently of RA. Our analyses suggest an evolutionary scenario in which the gene network controlling tooth development obtained RA dependency in the lineage leading to the cypriniforms. The loss of pharyngeal teeth in this group was cancelled out through a shift in aldh1a2 expression, while oral teeth might have been lost ultimately due to deficient RA signaling in the oral cavity. © FASEB.
Oakeshott, Berlin, and liberalism
Date: 2003-01-01
Creator: Paul Franco
Access: Open access
- This article compares the political philosophies of Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin, probably the two most important political philosophers in postwar Britain, who, strangely, had very little to do with one another during their illustrious careers. The article focuses on their respective critiques of rationalism and theories of liberal pluralism, arguing that Oakeshott provides the more consistent and philosophically satisfying account in both instances.
Who benefits? How interest-convergence shapes benefit-sharing and indigenous rights to sustainable livelihoods in Russia
Date: 2020-11-01
Creator: Maria S. Tysiachniouk, Laura A. Henry, Svetlana A. Tulaeva, Leah S. Horowitz
Access: Open access
- The paper examines interactions of oil companies and reindeer herders in the tundra of the Russian Arctic. We focus on governance arrangements that have an impact on the sustainability of oil production and reindeer herding. We analyze a shift in benefit-sharing arrangements between oil companies and Indigenous Nenets reindeer herders in Nenets Autonomous Okrug (NAO), Russia, as an evolution of the herders’ rights, defined as the intertwined co-production of legal processes, ideologies, and power relations. Semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis demonstrate that in NAO, benefit-sharing shifted from paternalism (dependent on herders’ negotiation skills) to company-centered social responsibility (formalized compensation rules). This shift was enabled by the adoption of a formal methodology for calculating income lost due to extractive projects and facilitated by the regional government’s efforts to develop reindeer-herding. While laws per se did not change, herders’ ability to access compensation and markets increased. This paper shows that even when ideologies of indigeneity are not influential, the use of existing laws and convergence of the government’s and Indigenous groups’ economic interests may shift legal processes and power relations toward greater rights for Indigenous groups.
Modeling multiple ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, commodity production, and tradeoffs at landscape scales
Date: 2009-02-01
Creator: Erik Nelson, Guillermo Mendoza, James Regetz, Stephen Polasky, Heather, Tallis, D. Richard Cameron, Kai M.A. Chan, Gretchen C. Daily, Joshua Goldstein
Access: Open access
- Nature provides a wide range of benefits to people. There is increasing consensus about the importance of incorporating these "ecosystem services" into resource management decisions, but quantifying the levels and values of these services has proven difficult. We use a spatially explicit modeling tool, Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), to predict changes in ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, and commodity production levels. We apply InVEST to stakeholder-defined scenarios of land-use/land-cover change in the Willamette Basin, Oregon. We found that scenarios that received high scores for a variety of ecosystem services also had high scores for biodiversity, suggesting there is little tradeoff between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. Scenarios involving more development had higher commodity production values, but lower levels of biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. However, including payments for carbon sequestration alleviates this tradeoff. Quantifying ecosystem services in a spatially explicit manner, and analyzing tradeoffs between them, can help to make natural resource decisions more effective, efficient, and defensible. © The Ecological Society of America.
Narrative painting and visual gossip at the early-twentieth-century royal academy
Date: 2009-06-01
Creator: Pamela Fletcher
Access: Open access
- Narrative paintings of modern life were immensely popular at the Royal Academy from the 1850s well into the early twentieth century. Perfectly suited to the Academy's culture of conversation, the pictures invited viewers to respond to the scenes as if they were real life situations, and gossip about the depicted characters as if they were real people. While such responses were routinely derided by critics as evidence of the public's lack of aesthetic sophistication, they offer tantalizing glimpses of the pictures' social lives. This article argues that taking gossip seriously as a mode of engagement with art both amplifies our understanding of the meanings, functions, and pleasures of narrative painting, and suggests specific connections between exhibition culture and the meanings of pictures. Using the richly documented reception of the 'problem pictures' of the 1910s and 1920s as the primary evidence, this article establishes a taxonomy of gossipy modes of engagement with narrative painting, and argues that gossiping about pictures allowed for the performance of individual identity, the creation of social and artistic groups, and connected public and private understandings of the world.