Tidal Title and the Boundaries of the Bay: The Case of the Submerged High Water Mark

There is no particular policy reason why the same line should be used for both the upland boundary of the jus publicum and the seaward boundary of parcels bounded by the sea. In interpreting the language used in grants of private interests, the ostensible object of the inquiry is to ascertain the parties (particularly the grantor\u27s) intent. Subject only to limitations on the grantor\u27s estate or power to convey, it is that intention which controls the extent of his transfer. On the other hand, in setting the upland boundaries of lands subject to the jus publicum, the courts are essentially making a policy determination, i.e., which lands are subject to what mode of use-allocation, a question of law in which private intentions play no role. Nonetheless, for reasons which seem largely historical, the rule of construction for grants extending to the sea has been held to result in the same boundary line as the line which, by law, defines the upland limits of the jus publicum. In the case of both, the line is the high water line. This article explores judicial resolutions in New York to the question: Where is the high water line

An ecological method for the sampling of nonverbal signalling behaviours of young children with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD)

- Background: Profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) are a complex range of disabilities that affect the general health and wellbeing of the individual and their capacity to interact and learn. - Method: We developed a new methodology to capture the nonsymbolic signalling behaviours of children with PMLD within the context of a face-to-face interaction with a caregiver to provide analysis at a micro-level of descriptive detail incorporating the use of the ELAN digital video software. - Conclusion: The signalling behaviours of participants in a natural, everyday interaction can be better understood with the use of this innovation in methodology, which is predicated on the ecology of communication. Recognition of the developmental ability of the participants is an integral factor within that ecology. The method presented establishes an advanced account of the modalities through which a child affected by PMLD is able to communicate

Tidal Title and the Boundaries of the Bay: The Case of the Submerged High Water Mark

The unique character and special public importance of lands bordering the sea have been recognized since ancient times. In the nature of things, shore lands, together with the waters which cover them (permanently or periodically), have a number of valuable uses not shared generally with inland territories. Navigation, passage, fishery, and bathing are among the particular uses of the shore or adjacent sea for which the public has traditionally received greater or lesser legal protection. However, this list is neither exclusive nor closed. For example, the recent avalanche of accretions to our stock of ecological knowledge has heightened (if not created) a general awareness of the economic importance of tidal areas as a source of ocean nutrients and as a sink for ocean pollutant

Changes in a Chinese interior design firm due to the development and use of a blog-based reflective practitioner knowledge management system inspired by Chinese philosophy: An autoethnographic case study

Dao (Way) The Way that can be experienced is not true; The world that can be constructed is not true. The Way manifests all that happens and may happen; The world represents all that exists and may exist. To experience without intention is to sense the world: To experience with intention is to anticipate the world. These two experiences are indistinguishable; Their construction differs but their effect is the same. Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way\u27. Which is ever greater and more subtle than/he world. Lao-Tzu, TaoDeChing, tr. Peter A. Merel This thesis is a reflective practitioner autoethnographic account of the way in which a Chinese interior design firm, through inspiration from Chinese philosophy (as exemplied in the beginning quotes), developed and used a reflective practitioner knowledge management system, called kBlogCentral, based around web-based blogs. The objective of setting up kBlogCentral was to build a simple, low cost knowledge management system for managing knowledge regarding various projects among the staff. All members of the firm are encouraged to perform reflective practitioner research and publish their knowledge as part of virtual teams regarding their professional practice. This reflective practitioner study depicts the rationale, process, and implications of building the system especially regarding inspiration from traditional and contemporary Chinese philosophy as this is seen as a culturally appropriate philosophical underpinning. The research outcome, present d throughout the thesis, is a rich description and reflections of employing action reflective practitioner research and a Web technology on the Internet, called Blog to manage knowledge in the interior design company in the light of Chine e thinking. Blog technology is mainly manifested in interactive websites that allow for rich Web based interaction and communication. The research question is: How did the process of developing an using a Blog-based reflective practitioner knowledge management system, through inspiration from Chinese philosophy, change the professional practice of member of a Chinese interior design firm? As part of answering this question, I report on my attempts to inspire change in the purpose, behaviour and underlying culture of a Chinese design firm aspiring to transform its management and practice. The major arena for this transformation is the KBlogCentral knowledge management system. The Dao (way) to such transformation is the member of the firm employing heuristic elf-reflective action research to \u27find it future\u27, with and through its people. In this process I have reported on innovative and, to my mind, valuable discoveries in knowledge elicitation and methods of integrating the views f my colleagues. This doctoral thesis, reporting on my finding of these discoveries, is my contribution to knowledge within the academic information systems, design, and management fields. The research reveals that knowledge, as a social product of human interactions, does not exist outside an agent - human beings. Thus the main role of knowledge management is to support social human interactions instead of just employing information technology to manipulate data, information and explicit knowledge as advocated by the functionalist approach. Knowledge management practices in China are found to be highly influenced by the contemporary interpretations of strands of traditional Chine e philosophy. The existence of a linguistic divide, resulting from some obsolete or misinterpreted doctrines of traditional Chinese philosophy, impedes the processes of creating and sharing knowledge in China. This thesis is a b ginning endeavour to critically examine these obsolete and distorted doctrines as a contribution towards a modem form of Chinese philosophy revitalizing Chinese to meet the challenges of a growing knowledge economy. Thus an undercurrent of heuristic hope runs through this thesis in that, within technology originating from and dominated by the West, this thesis reveals how knowledge management practice in China can be inspired by Chinese philosophy

Female Pleasure and Theories of Desire in Narrative Structure: Evolution, Futurity, and Species Survival in the Post-Human and Science Fiction Imaginary

This dissertation explores the complex relationship between an expanded narratological theory of narrative desire, inseparable in its relation to evolution and biological reproduction, and the future survival of humanity imagined across the narrative structures of three 21st-century works of dystopian science fiction. By examining the genre\u27s potential to address species survival specifically through female forms of desire identified as narrative recurrence, prolonged duration, and emotional resolution, this study concurrently develops a metatextual methodology that cultivates the overlooked liminal space of quiescence. This analytical framework emphasizes narrative structure over theme-based analysis to unlock the radical imagination present in the texts by highlighting the challenges of narrativizing a post-human future in Battlestar Galactica, Mass Effect 3, and Octavia Butler\u27s Parable of the Trickster. The reimagined television series Battlestar Galactica self-consciously poses questions regarding its own structural design. A moment of quiescence, positioned after the end and before the beginning of a narrative cycle in the epilogue, exists as a phase of unlimited potentiality beyond the activity of the diegetic text. In Mass Effect 3, the third installment of the massively successful video game franchise, the protests of dissatisfied gamers resulted in the creation of new ending options, revealing how quiescence can also be understood as the space surrounding the text as paratextual elements, existing adjacent to but separate from the main text, that directly influence interpretation and meaning. Finally, the archival materials of the unfinished book Parable of the Trickster, held at the Huntington Library and written by acclaimed science fiction author Octavia Butler, offers insights into quiescence as a location that exists akin to this pre-textual space. The archives reveal Butler’s struggle with severe writer’s block as a testament to the challenges and foreboding nature of envisioning humanity\u27s future as it pertains to evolution and species survival. By incorporating female sexuality into narrative desire, I propose that reviving this theory may offer value in contemporary structural analysis of plots, especially since the concept of quiescence allows us to explore aspects beyond the confines of the diegetic text in a world where narrative is becoming ever more interactive, multi-modal, intertextual, and transmedial. Science fiction during this era of convergence is also seeing a rapid transformation. As humanity increasingly faces existential threats such as artificial intelligence, pandemics, climate change, and nuclear apocalypse, innovative strategies and skills for survival must be developed that transcend our anthropocentric limitations. Although human reproduction is traditionally based on biological foundations that involve erotic desire, the reality of human survival - and reproduction - is rapidly evolving. The development of non-erotic desires such as scientific literacy, global cooperation, and ethical reasoning will become increasingly essential for species survival and, as this occurs, alterations to our human biology may fundamentally reshape our narrative constructs and forms of narrative desire. Ultimately, these texts reveal attempts at post-human forms of relationality within a genre of possibilities that self-consciously struggles to answer what form human survival may take in the future

Run-time Variability with Roles

Adaptability is an intrinsic property of software systems that require adaptation to cope with dynamically changing environments. Achieving adaptability is challenging. Variability is a key solution as it enables a software system to change its behavior which corresponds to a specific need. The abstraction of variability is to manage variants, which are dynamic parts to be composed to the base system. Run-time variability realizes these variant compositions dynamically at run time to enable adaptation. Adaptation, relying on variants specified at build time, is called anticipated adaptation, which allows the system behavior to change with respect to a set of predefined execution environments. This implies the inability to solve practical problems in which the execution environment is not completely fixed and often unknown until run time. Enabling unanticipated adaptation, which allows variants to be dynamically added at run time, alleviates this inability, but it holds several implications yielding system instability such as inconsistency and run-time failures. Adaptation should be performed only when a system reaches a consistent state to avoid inconsistency. Inconsistency is an effect of adaptation happening when the system changes the state and behavior while a series of methods is still invoking. A software bug is another source of system instability. It often appears in a variant composition and is brought to the system during adaptation. The problem is even more critical for unanticipated adaptation as the system has no prior knowledge of the new variants. This dissertation aims to achieve anticipated and unanticipated adaptation. In achieving adaptation, the issues of inconsistency and software failures, which may happen as a consequence of run-time adaptation, are evidently addressed as well. Roles encapsulate dynamic behavior used to adapt players representing the base system, which is the rationale to select roles as the software system's variants. Based on the role concept, this dissertation presents three mechanisms to comprehensively address adaptation. First, a dynamic instance binding mechanism is proposed to loosely bind players and roles. Dynamic binding of roles enables anticipated and unanticipated adaptation. Second, an object-level tranquility mechanism is proposed to avoid inconsistency by allowing a player object to adapt only when its consistent state is reached. Last, a rollback recovery mechanism is proposed as a proactive mechanism to embrace and handle failures resulting from a defective composition of variants. A checkpoint of a system configuration is created before adaptation. If a specialized bug sensor detects a failure, the system rolls back to the most recent checkpoint. These mechanisms are integrated into a role-based runtime, called LyRT. LyRT was validated with three case studies to demonstrate the practical feasibility. This validation showed that LyRT is more advanced than the existing variability approaches with respect to adaptation due to its consistency control and failure handling. Besides, several benchmarks were set up to quantify the overhead of LyRT concerning the execution time of adaptation. The results revealed that the overhead introduced to achieve anticipated and unanticipated adaptation to be small enough for practical use in adaptive software systems. Thus, LyRT is suitable for adaptive software systems that frequently require the adaptation of large sets of objects

Reasoning and querying bounds on differences with layered preferences

Artificial intelligence largely relies on bounds on differences (BoDs) to model binary constraints regarding different dimensions, such as time, space, costs, and calories. Recently, some approaches have extended the BoDs framework in a fuzzy, \u201cnoncrisp\u201d direction, considering probabilities or preferences. While previous approaches have mainly aimed at providing an optimal solution to the set of constraints, we propose an innovative class of approaches in which constraint propagation algorithms aim at identifying the \u201cspace of solutions\u201d (i.e., the minimal network) with their preferences, and query answering mechanisms are provided to explore the space of solutions as required, for example, in decision support tasks. Aiming at generality, we propose a class of approaches parametrized over user\u2010defined scales of qualitative preferences (e.g., Low, Medium, High, and Very High), utilizing the resume and extension operations to combine preferences, and considering different formalisms to associate preferences with BoDs. We consider both \u201cgeneral\u201d preferences and a form of layered preferences that we call \u201cpyramid\u201d preferences. The properties of the class of approaches are also analyzed. In particular, we show that, when the resume and extension operations are defined such that they constitute a closed semiring, a more efficient constraint propagation algorithm can be used. Finally, we provide a preliminary implementation of the constraint propagation algorithms

Conception and experience of well-being in two Ghanaian samples: Implications for Positive Psychology

We conducted two studies to explore Ghanaian understandings of well-being through a situation sampling method in which participants described situations that increased and decreased their well-being. Participants in Study 1 were 80 community members (Mean Age = 41.962; SD=13.900; 40 women, 40 men) who responded in the context of interviews through the medium of local languages. Coding analyses revealed that these situation descriptions emphasized sustainability-oriented themes of materiality (tangible support, economic hardship) and peace of mind (presence or absence of worry or strife) with greater frequency than growth-oriented themes of psychologization (growth, meaning, achievement) and affect (happiness, sadness). Participants in Study 2 were 125 students (Mean Age = 21.592; SD=2.759; 68 women, 57 men) at three universities in Ghana who responded via questionnaire in the medium of English. In contrast to the community sample, coding analyses revealed that the students’ situations emphasized growth-oriented themes of affect and psychologization with greater frequency than sustainability-oriented themes of materiality and peace of mind. We interpret these results within a theoretical framework that emphasizes the cultural-psychological foundations of well-being, and we consider implications for hegemonic perspectives of positive psychology

Three-dimensional hydrodynamic models coupled with GIS-based neuro-fuzzy classification for assessing environmental vulnerability of marine cage aquaculture

There is considerable opportunity to develop new modelling techniques within a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) framework for the development of sustainable marine cage culture. However, the spatial data sets are often uncertain and incomplete, therefore new spatial models employing “soft computing” methods such as fuzzy logic may be more suitable. The aim of this study is to develop a model using Neuro-fuzzy techniques in a 3D GIS (Arc View 3.2) to predict coastal environmental vulnerability for Atlantic salmon cage aquaculture. A 3D hydrodynamic model (3DMOHID) coupled to a particle-tracking model is applied to study the circulation patterns, dispersion processes and residence time in Mulroy Bay, Co. Donegal Ireland, an Irish fjard (shallow fjordic system), an area of restricted exchange, geometrically complicated with important aquaculture activities. The hydrodynamic model was calibrated and validated by comparison with sea surface and water flow measurements. The model provided spatial and temporal information on circulation, renewal time, helping to determine the influence of winds on circulation patterns and in particular the assessment of the hydrographic conditions with a strong influence on the management of fish cage culture. The particle-tracking model was used to study the transport and flushing processes. Instantaneous massive releases of particles from key boxes are modelled to analyse the ocean-fjord exchange characteristics and, by emulating discharge from finfish cages, to show the behaviour of waste in terms of water circulation and water exchange. In this study the results from the hydrodynamic model have been incorporated into GIS to provide an easy-to-use graphical user interface for 2D (maps), 3D and temporal visualization (animations), for interrogation of results. v Data on the physical environment and aquaculture suitability were derived from a 3- dimensional hydrodynamic model and GIS for incorporation into the final model framework and included mean and maximum current velocities, current flow quiescence time, water column stratification, sediment granulometry, particulate waste dispersion distance, oxygen depletion, water depth, coastal protection zones, and slope. The Neuro-fuzzy classification model NEFCLASS–J, was used to develop learning algorithms to create the structure (rule base) and the parameters (fuzzy sets) of a fuzzy classifier from a set of classified training data. A total of 42 training sites were sampled using stratified random sampling from the GIS raster data layers, and the vulnerability categories for each were manually classified into four categories based on the opinions of experts with field experience and specific knowledge of the environmental problems investigated. The final products, GIS/based Neuro Fuzzy maps were achieved by combining modeled and real environmental parameters relevant to marine fin fish Aquaculture. Environmental vulnerability models, based on Neuro-fuzzy techniques, showed sensitivity to the membership shapes of the fuzzy sets, the nature of the weightings applied to the model rules, and validation techniques used during the learning and validation process. The accuracy of the final classifier selected was R=85.71%, (estimated error value of ±16.5% from Cross Validation, N=10) with a Kappa coefficient of agreement of 81%. Unclassified cells in the whole spatial domain (of 1623 GIS cells) ranged from 0% to 24.18 %. A statistical comparison between vulnerability scores and a significant product of aquaculture waste (nitrogen concentrations in sediment under the salmon cages) showed that the final model gave a good correlation between predicted environmental vi vulnerability and sediment nitrogen levels, highlighting a number of areas with variable sensitivity to aquaculture. Further evaluation and analysis of the quality of the classification was achieved and the applicability of separability indexes was also studied. The inter-class separability estimations were performed on two different training data sets to assess the difficulty of the class separation problem under investigation. The Neuro-fuzzy classifier for a supervised and hard classification of coastal environmental vulnerability has demonstrated an ability to derive an accurate and reliable classification into areas of different levels of environmental vulnerability using a minimal number of training sets. The output will be an environmental spatial model for application in coastal areas intended to facilitate policy decision and to allow input into wider ranging spatial modelling projects, such as coastal zone management systems and effective environmental management of fish cage aquaculture