Evaluation of environmental impact upon human health with decimas framework

The article is dedicated to the problem of decision making in complex systems. Application of a novel interdisciplinary approach, which widely use intelligent agents is offered. The principal ideas of the novel approach are embodied into the DeciMaS framework, that offers a logical set of stages oriented to creation of decision support systems for complex problem management. The components of the DeciMaS framework and the way in which they are organized are introduced. Design and implementation of the system are discussed. The article demonstrates how the initial information is transformed into knowledge. Impact assessment upon human health evaluation is the case study, which is resolved by DeciMas framework. It includes creation of the meta-ontology. In addition, a multi-agent architecture for a decision support system is introduced. The sequence of the steps for the DeciMaS framework design with Prometheus Development Kit and its implementation with JACK Development Environment are presented as well. Finally, data and experiment results of data modeling, simulation, impact assessment, and decision generation are discussed

Decision-Making in Complex Dynamic and Evolutive Systems: The Need for a New Paradigm

For contemporary psychology, decision-making represents behaviours, which are very different from automatic responses. They are developed by implementing integrative cognitive functions adapted to the finalities sought and the situation to treat. Through the diversity of epistemological choices for instance, research in previous decades focused on the individual choices expressed by situations or contexts with a stable structure. The new problems of life in today’s society lead to making decisions on societal problems (climate, energy, etc.), which bring into play systems and no longer variables. This chapter has four aspects. After having characterised the decision-making process as a cognitive behaviour (1), having recalled the best known traditional models (those of Economics and Psychology) (2), this chapter deals with the properties of complex systems (globality, interactivity, dynamism, and scalability), which render decision-making difficult (3), and concludes with the necessity of a change of paradigm by pointing to paths to follow (4)

Assessing the impact of climate change upon migration in Burkina Faso: an agent-based modelling approach

The notion of environmental migration, and the associated desire to predict the likely scale of the phenomenon in the future, has frequented academic debate since the 1980s. Despite this, current estimates of the numbers of people likely to be displaced by environmental change by 2050 range from 150 million to 1 billion. By developing an agent-based model this research attempts to provide a rigorous means of quantifying the influence of future changes in climate (using rainfall as a proxy) upon migration trends within the context of Burkina Faso. Located in dryland West Africa, the population and economy of Burkina Faso are highly dependent upon rain-fed agriculture, placing them in a position of considerable vulnerability to future changes in rainfall. The conceptual basis behind the Agent Migration Adaptation to Rainfall Change (AMARC) model presented by this thesis is developed using contributions from the fields of climate adaptation and social psychology to focus upon three Theory of Planned Behaviour components of the migration decision: behavioural attitude; subjective norm; and perceived behavioural control. Rules of behaviour defined within the model are developed and parameterised using information gained from both retrospective migration data analysis and the responses of interviewees in focus groups conducted across Burkina Faso. Following a process of stringent model validation and testing the AMARC model is used to investigate the role of changes in rainfall variability upon past and future modelled migration. Although a relatively clear hierarchical impact of (from highest to lowest modelled migration) average, dry and wet rainfall conditions upon total modelled migration is identified, the individual flows of migrants that make up the total show unique and varied relationships with changes in rainfall. Furthermore, modelled internal and international migration flows show both similarities and differences when compared with relationships identified between rainfall and migration within existing literature

Rodrigo\u27s Corrido: Race, Postcolonial Theory, and U.S. Civil Rights

Richard Delgado enlists his alter ego, Rodrigo, to analyze Latino legal history and civil rights. Encountering the Professor after testifying at a hearing on an immigration bill, Rodrigo excitedly tells his old friend and mentor about a new body of writing he has come across. Postcolonial theory, which deals with issues such as cultural survival, resistance, and collaboration, can help move American civil rights scholarship beyond its current impasse. Over dinner, Rodrigo demonstrates how insights from these writers can enrich U.S. civil rights theory and practice. He also posits a new theory of Latinos\u27 sociolegal construction, based on a triple taboo, that can enable Latino people and litigators to understand and change their condition. Rodrigo shows how dominant society has invested Latinos with a complex stereotype consisting of filth, hypersexuality, and jabber so that Anglos will unconsciously devalue the group and their rights. To progress, therefore, Latino people must understand and contest this social construction, much as their forebears have done through corridos, actos, cantares, and other forms of insurrectionary folk literature and actions

Los Tres Grandes - Herman Gallegos, Ernesto Galarza, Julian Samora: Rooted in Community, Guided by Friendship, Cultivating Leadership.

Los Tres Grandes, Ernesto Galarza, Herman Gallegos, and Julian Samora, fused intellectual constructs and grassroots strategies to reverse the societal dynamics they understood had marginalized Mexican Americans at both governmental and social levels. In 1968, the three scholar/activists launched the Southwest Council of La Raza (SWCLR), which four years later became the National Council of La Raza. My dissertation explores the relationship of these three men, a nexus of history and personality that launched what became the largest civil rights organization for Latinos in the United States. At a time when foundations earmarked minority support primarily for African Americans, Los Tres brought philanthropic attention (through the Ford Foundation) to Mexican American concerns. This was a groundbreaking achievement. Their relationship honored their cultural teachings as they engaged the elite world of philanthropy. They established a paradigm for Mexican Americans within the dominant culture without compromising their culture and ethnic capital. The three leaders created an organization that focused on the development of leaders and on empowering communities to overcome political and economic marginalization. How Galarza, Gallegos, and Samora used scholarship as a pivotal ingredient of social and political change has been all but lost to history. I investigate the particular strengths each man brought to this dynamic political action. The story of their productive relationship is one that needs to be brought to light for a new generation to explore and celebrate. Their story demonstrates the importance of leadership development, which is an overarching theme of this study. To tell their story, this dissertation mines the archives of the three men and uses information from the oral histories of key associates. This primary data is useful in understanding how Los Tres supported one another and created a context within which to work. They created unnamed theoretical models that echoed how they lived and how they worked. Honoring the validity of their own standpoint, their own stories, their own culture, they set the table for future scholarship that employs these groundbreaking ideas

Book Reviews

The Use and Abuse of History: Recent Developments in Feminist Theory Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Mary Poovey) (Reviewed by Rita Felski, Murdoch University, Western Australia) Am I that Name? : Feminism and the Category of \u27\u27Women\u27\u27 in History (Denise Riley) (Reviewed by Rita Felski, Murdoch University, Western Australia)Feminist Literary History (Janet Todd) (Reviewed by Rita Felski, Murdoch University, Western Australia)Sor JuanaSor Juana or, The Traps of Faith (Octavio Paz) (Reviewed by Electa Arenal, College of Staten Island, C.U.N.Y.)A Sor Juana Anthology (Alan S. Trueblood) (Reviewed by Electa Arenal, College of Staten Island, C.U.N.Y.)Sor Juana\u27s Dream (Luis Harss) (Reviewed by Electa Arenal, College of Staten Island, C.U.N.Y.)Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers(Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman) (Reviewed by Jennifer Summit, The John Hopkins University)Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents(Leah S. Marcus) (Reviewed by James R. Siemon, Boston University)Ben Jonson\u27s Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperalism il1 the Comedies(Robert N. Watson) (Reviewed by Richard S. Ide, University of Southern California)One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton(James Grantham Turner) (Reviewed by Marilyn L. Williamson, Wayne State University)Virtue of Necessity: English Women\u27s Writings, 1649-1688(Elaine Jobby) (Reviewed by Christopher Hill, Sibford Ferris, Oxon.)Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy(Kristina Straub) (Reviewed by Julia Epstein, Haverford College)Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment(G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter) (Reviewed by Hero A. Chalmers, Brasenose College, Oxford)Blake and Spenser(Robert F. Gleckner) (Reviewed by Andrew Elfenbein, Yale University)Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism(Herbert F. Tucker) (Reviewed by John Jay Baker, The University of Tulsa)The Historicity of Romantic Discourse(Clifford Siskin) (Reviewed by Daniel P. Watkins, Duquesne University)Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women\u27s Poetry in America(Alicia Suskin Ostriker) (Reviewed by Amy Kaminsky, University of Minnesota)No Man\u27s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century(Sandra M. Gilbert) (Reviewed by Anne Hermann, University of Michigan)Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory(Barbara Hernstein Smith) (Reviewed by Linda Howe, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ.)History and Value: The Clarendon Lectures and Northcliffe Lectures(Frank Kermode) (Reviewed by Linda Howe, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ.)Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces(Catharine R. Stimpson) (Reviewed by Catherine Belsey, University of Wales College of Cardiff

Cosmopolitan designs and twentieth-century literary culture: "Colección los presentes" and the emergence of the professional writer

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Kansas, Spanish and Portuguese, 1997.Literary cosmopolitanism, an esthetic mode whose proponents defined themselves oppositionally to regional, provincial, and revolutionary narratives, achieved a prominent position in Mexican letters at midcentury. One of the institutions most responsible for the new literary mode was a series of texts known as the "Los Presentes" collection. Beginning in the latter months of 1954, Juan Jose Arreola directed the publication of Carlos Fuentes's first collection of short stories, Los dias enmascarados; Elena Poniatowska's first novel, Lilus Kikus; and Tomas Segovia's first novel, Primavera muda. In addition to these three titles, Arreola published his own drama, La hora de todos, and the first installment of Alfonso Reyes's extensive autobiographical project, Parentalia. This study examines the role of Los Presentes in the struggle to establish cosmopolitanism as the dominant literary style of the period. The first chapter traces the general outlines of the cultural-literary field in Mexico at midcentury and provides an institutional history of Los Presentes. Chapter 2 begins with a close reading of the first three books published by Arreola and finishes with an examination of the subversive positions they take with respect to traditional formulations of the notion of mestizaje. In the third chapter, an analysis of Arreola's own drama and Reyes's autobiography illuminate the complex web of alliances and compromises that undergirded the editorial strategy of the series. Chapter 4 places the first Los Presentes texts into a broader context through an examination of two other novels written in 1954, Magdalena Mondragon's Tenemos sed and Ramon Rubin's La bruma lo vuelve azul. The fourth chapter concludes with a reading of critical reviews and essays by Los Presentes writers concerning other novels and the esthetic positions of the era

Profile of a Plant: The Olive in Early Medieval Italy, 400-900 CE.

For more than half a millennium the Roman Empire gave a schematic and legible form to the Mediterranean landscape, everywhere engineered to feed its massive army and urban centers. To those ends, the polity coopted the olive tree and drove the creation of intensive, large-scale oleicultural projects around the sea’s basin, which were connected to the capital by the Mediterranean’s buoyant shipping. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, the structures underpinning ancient forms of olive production and consumption decayed and disappeared. This dissertation examines the olive’s ecological and cultural transformations in the wake of Rome’s fall. Specifically, it focuses on early medieval Italy, a contested territory in this period, where Lombard kings, dukes, popes, abbots of powerful monasteries, Byzantine emperors, and Frankish lords competed for hegemony. As such, the olive-human relationship was expressed not in a single, uniform manner, but rather in a mosaic of local expressions, highly dependent upon immediate environmental and cultural forces. The essay illuminates some of the ways that early medieval Italian communities engaged their environmental inheritance, how they recast the stolid olive to fit local contingencies. The first chapter looks at northwest Tuscany, at the city of Lucca, where documentary and archaeological evidence enable a clear portrait of urban olive consumption. Central Italy and the Sabine hills frame the second chapter, which explores how the city of Rome’s contraction influenced olive growth in its hinterland. In chapter three, I explore the cultural afterlife of the olive, by focusing upon how the bishop’s of Rome reimagined the primary use of olive oil, as a lighting fuel rather than food. Finally, changes in the use of imaginary olives in Christian miracle stories and at cult sites constitutes the subject of the last chapter. By partnering with the olive, this dissertation shifts the focus away from the traditional, institutionally-centered story of “decline” in Dark Age Italy, onto the dynamic, lived interactions that gave form to the Middle Ages.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108992/1/grahambj_1.pd

The use of local knowledge for the defence and sustainable management of mangrove ecosystems : the case of Ecuador

Shrimp aquaculture is one of the fastest growing economic activities in the tropical coastal zone. In Ecuador, the shrimp farming industry has grown exponentially since its introduction in 1969 and is now the main producing country of cultured shrimp in Latin America. But its rapid and uncontrolled expansion has led to a 57% reduction of mangrove forest in the country, and has had considerable impacts on the poor afro- Ecuadorian coastal communities decreasing the area available to them for obtaining their livelihoods. In turn this has generated a breakdown in the traditional resource allocation and management strategies, further adding to the social exclusion of already marginalised groups who are mainly Afro-Ecuadorians. This thesis explores the complexities of social, political and economic changes that have arisen in mangrove communities since the introduction of shrimp farming in the Mangrove Ecological Reserve (REMACAM). Located in the north of the Esmeraldas Province this is the last pristine mangrove ecosystem in Ecuador, harbouring some 6,000 traditional inhabitants. The research focuses on how the affected populations have responded to these changes, and how they have engaged with national neo-liberal reforms in order to be able to defend and manage the ecosystem. Research focuses on the dichotomous way in which mangroves are perceived in Ecuador today. Outsider perceptions see mangroves as mosquito ridden wastelands. This representation has made possible the development and expansion of the shrimp farming industry at the expense of the mangrove ecosystem. On the other hand, insider perspectives see mangroves as a multiple use ecosystem and a livelihoods provider. These understandings have been successfully used by the mangrove defence movement (CCONDEM) to create a strong movement against the shrimp farming industry. Using an insider perspective the mangrove defence movement has engaged with the country's neoliberal reforms, created national and international alliances and has also created a new political space of resistance. This space includes challenging, and changing national legislation, and proposing new legislation and management strategies to defend the mangroves and the traditional communities whose livelihoods depend on the ecosystemEThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceSchool of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University : ESRCGBUnited Kingdo

Nicolas Bohier (1469 – 1539) and the ius commune: a study in sixteenth–century French legal practice

European legal history, as a field of scientific enquiry, is a relatively young discipline that can trace its roots back to the German jurist Savigny, whose work on the jurists of the medieval ius commune is commonly seen as the first of its kind. As one of the foremost German scholars of the nineteenth century and a fierce opponent of German codification, Savigny laid the foundation for generations of subsequent historians, not only in terms of the scope, but also in terms of the method of enquiry. Thus, in the generations after Savigny, European legal history tended to be approached in terms of general narratives charting the development of the European legal order through successive historical epochs. Within these narratives, jurists played a prominent role. Thus, the creation of the legal order of Europe was based upon a translatio studii from the Roman jurists via the medieval ius commune to civil codes of the nineteenth century. By grouping jurists into “schools” or “movements”, modern commentators, so it was argued, were able to assess the impact of these on the narrative of European legal history. Although, since the end of the Second World War, this narrative has become more nuanced, the jurists remain central to it. This has had a number of consequences. The main consequence of this focus on jurists (mostly academic figures teaching at universities) has been the marginalisation of legal practice and legal practitioners in the narrative of European legal history. And yet, as recent research on the rise of central courts in Europe has shown, legal practice clearly had an impact on the development of the European legal order. In light of these insights, this thesis seeks to contribute to the narrative of European legal history by focusing not on the works of academic jurists, but on the activities of legal practitioners. This statement requires delimitation. Rather than focusing on a number of legal practitioners over a long period of time, this thesis will focus on a single legal practitioner who flourished during a specific period in European history using the principles of a microhistory. The individual in question is the French lawyer Nicolas Bohier (1469-1539). The reasons for this specific focus are twofold. First, a focus on a specific individual and his works allows for greater scrutiny in depth, thus providing a counterbalance to (and also a means of testing and verifying) the broad sweep accounts found in most works on European legal history. In second place, Nicolas Bohier and his oeuvre cry out for a critical analysis and, until now, remain largely unstudied. As a practising lawyer and eventually president of the regional court of Bordeaux, Bohier was at the coalface of French legal practice in the sixteenth century. As a prolific writer and editor, Bohier left a rich corpus of work consisting of records of decisions of the court in Bordeaux, legal opinions as well as customs of the region. Furthermore, sixteenth-century France is a particularly exciting topic of investigation. This period not only saw the rise and solidification of Royal authority, but also saw the beginning of the homologation of customary law in France. On an intellectual level, the sixteenth century saw the rise of “legal humanism”, a particularly controversial intellectual movement in the context of European legal history as shown by recent research. This then brings us to the central point of this thesis. If, during the sixteenth century, the medieval ius commune was being replaced by “national” legal orders across Europe, as the general surveys of European legal history state, the works of a legal practitioner would show it much more clearly than the works of academic jurists. This thesis will therefore examine Bohier’s use of the term ius commune across his works to assess not only his understanding of the term, but also to assess how this concept operated in relation to other “sources of law”, for example statute and custom. Although the results of a microhistory study should not be generalised too far, it will permit us to interrogate the general narratives of European legal history of the early modern period