Encountering El Tigre : jaguars, knowledge, and discourse in the Western world, 1492-1945

The jaguar is one of the most charismatic species found in the Western Hemisphere, and its presence has long resonated with human communities. Throughout history these large spotted cats have evoked a myriad of responses, from reverence and respect, to fear and disdain. Situated within ongoing re-examinations of the place of animals in public discourse, this dissertation examines representations of jaguars from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, exploring the ways in which knowledge about this species was constituted in the Western world within the evolution of scientific thought and natural history. Locating the jaguar at the intersections of nature, science, and culture, this dissertation is concerned with the ways this elusive species’ animality was constructed and represented. Records produced by Europeans in the New World demonstrate the dynamic ways in which humans imagined the jaguar’s physical form, interpreted their actions, characterized their feline-ness, and ultimately, attempted to locate these cats within their own notions of natural order. Loaded within these accounts from the outset are notions of value, which are as fluid as the positions these cats occupied in ecological, biological, and imaginary landscapes of the New World. This dissertation examines accounts from prominent explorers, scholars, scientists, authors, and artists, all of whom sought to represent jaguar lives. Drawing from accounts of explorations, guides produced by naturalists, scientific reports, and the letters and journals of those who traveled through the shared margins, these chapters locate the jaguar at the center of its own natural history. These jaguars are a connective thread moving through the span of post-contact natural history, and they keep notable company: from Cortés to Balboa; Alexander von Humboldt to Charles Darwin; and Theodore Roosevelt to Aldo Leopold. All of these men published tales of the jaguar that circulated widely through Western Europe and the United States, playing a significant role in the production of jaguar knowledge. In so doing, the jaguar’s tale become one that operates across scales of time and space, simultaneously immediate and localized within these encounters and yet timeless and global, embedded within global circulations of information and power.Geography and the Environmen

Capacity building for transnationalisation of higher education

Purpose – Transnationalism and transnational concept are extensively researched in many social science areas; however, transnational management and transnational marketing is relatively a less explored research domain. Also, knowledge management for transnational education (TNE) marketing is not well-researched. Capacity building is an established research-stream, with a key focus on socio-economic and ecological development; however, prior research on capacity building from the context of TNE’s knowledge management and marketing is scarce. The purpose of this study is to analyse TNE marketing mix, to understand the influence of transnational stakeholders’ causal scope(s) on knowledge management in TNE to uphold their transnatioalisation processes through capacity building in TNEs’ marketing management. Design/methodology/approach – An inductive constructivist method is followed. Findings – Organisational learning from the context of transnational market and socio-economic competitive factors, based on analysing the transnational stakeholders’ causal scope(s) is imperative for proactive knowledge management capacity in TNE marketing. Following the analysis of transnational stakeholders’ causal scope(s) to learn about the cause and consequence of the transnational stakeholders’ relationships and interactions, an initial conceptual framework of knowledge management for TNE marketing is proposed. Practical insights from different TNE markets are developed in support of this novel knowledge management capacity building framework of TNE, and its generalisation perspectives and future research areas are discussed. Practical implications – These insights will be useful for TNE administrators to better align their knowledge management perspectives and propositions with their transnational stakeholders to underpin TNE marketing. Academics will be able to use these insights as a basis for future research. Originality/value – This study proposes a novel conceptual stakeholder-centred capacity building framework for TNE’s knowledge management to uphold TNE marketing and supports the framework, based on practical insights from three different transnational markets

Jurassic World Remake: Bringing Ancient Fossils Back to Life via Zero-Shot Long Image-to-Image Translation

With a strong understanding of the target domain from natural language, we produce promising results in translating across large domain gaps and bringing skeletons back to life. In this work, we use text-guided latent diffusion models for zero-shot image-to-image translation (I2I) across large domain gaps (longI2I), where large amounts of new visual features and new geometry need to be generated to enter the target domain. Being able to perform translations across large domain gaps has a wide variety of real-world applications in criminology, astrology, environmental conservation, and paleontology. In this work, we introduce a new task Skull2Animal for translating between skulls and living animals. On this task, we find that unguided Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are not capable of translating across large domain gaps. Instead of these traditional I2I methods, we explore the use of guided diffusion and image editing models and provide a new benchmark model, Revive-2I, capable of performing zero-shot I2I via text-prompting latent diffusion models. We find that guidance is necessary for longI2I because, to bridge the large domain gap, prior knowledge about the target domain is needed. In addition, we find that prompting provides the best and most scalable information about the target domain as classifier-guided diffusion models require retraining for specific use cases and lack stronger constraints on the target domain because of the wide variety of images they are trained on.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures, ACM Multimedia 202

NASA Earth Resources Survey Symposium. Volume 3: Summary reports

This document contains the proceedings and summaries of the earth resources survey symposium, sponsored by the NASA Headquarters Office of Applications and held in Houston, Texas, June 9 to 12, 1975. Topics include the use of remote sensing techniques in agriculture, in geology, for environmental monitoring, for land use planning, and for management of water resources and coastal zones. Details are provided about services available to various users. Significant applications, conclusions, and future needs are also discussed

Options for a new integrated natural resources monitoring framework for Wales. Phase 1 project report

Healthy natural resources underpin significant economic sectors in Wales including agriculture, fisheries, tourism and forestry, they also make a significant contribution across Cabinet policies including the health and well-being agenda. In order to develop policies that build social, economic and environmental resilience and to evaluate policy implementation, a robust natural resources monitoring framework is required. Current monitoring activities are of varying quality, not sufficiently aligned to the new legislative and policy landscape, disjointed and when considered as a whole, potentially not as cost-effective as they could be. This project was tasked with identifying options and developing recommendations for an integrated natural resources monitoring framework for Wales reflecting the ambitions and integrating principles of the Environment Act and Well Being of Future Generations Act. The monitoring community, the Welsh Government and Natural Resources Wales Core Evidence Group, the project team, stakeholders and partners, have agreed on a set of recommendations

Natural Places & Digital Spaces: Challenges and Opportunities for Instagram in Biodiversity Conservation

Science communication through social media is an area of research that has gained much international interest. Yet there lacks robust information of environmental education on Instagram specifically, as well as its relationship to the fields of conservation biology and conservation management, which is where this research is most meaningful. This paper explores the proliferation of the social media platform, Instagram, into the field of conservation science by examining the opportunities and challenges in three case studies. Chapter 1 investigates how Instagram has influenced protected areas and protected area management. Primary data is offered to demonstrate the influence that parks have over its visitors along with an outline of the current and future state of its use by parks. Chapter 2 uses empirical and observational data to analyze the perspectives of 18 Science Communicators on the emergence of scientific engagement on Instagram. Concentrating on its impacts for wildlife biology and conservation, guidelines for ethical and effective science communication are offered. Chapter 3 assesses the usability and reception of Instagram as a tool for environmental education based on experimentation, analysis and survey results. The dichotomy between humans and nature caused by technology (Kesebir and Kesebir, 2017) is challenged in this case study, through disseminating engaging environmental information on Instagram. The 2018 IPCC special report revealed that the next 11 years are most crucial in maintaining global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees (IPCC, 2018) which requires implementing drastic changes to all levels of society. To address this need, this research will identify new opportunities and challenges for conservation biology from bringing environmental awareness and education to Instagram

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters\u27 walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the purposes of art and often display their sculptures in ways that are self-reflexive of speciesism and express criticisms of anthropocentrism. Through an intersectional feminist lens and alongside critical insights from (and debates within) postcolonialism, deconstruction, and affect theory, I analyze the art pieces created by Sarina Brewer, Angela Singer, Polly Morgan, Scott Bibus, and Robert Marbury. In doing so, I explore the ethical ambiguities of using postmortem animal bodies in an art movement that is informed by animal rights, and also discuss the complexity of animal-human relationships in the face of human conceptualized impressions of life and death. Brushing up against the history of public autopsies and other forms of body preservation, I look to the ways in which bodies are made ‘taxidermic’ through violence, trauma, objectification, commodification, bio-engineered artificiality, extinction, and the discriminatory practices that represented certain (animal and human) bodies as ‘unruly.’ Tackling the frames that produce ‘taxidermic’ bodies (as exposable and exploitable skins), I challenge the anthropocentrism foundational to human thought and highlight the ways that humans produce and perpetuate hollowed out crypts of meaning as it applies to animality. Essentially, this project attempts to undermine anthropocentric worldviews that construct humans as separate and unique from what is understood and described as the ‘nonhuman,’ and, also, invites readers to confront and acknowledge how vulnerability and mortality are shared among humans (animals) and other nonhuman beings