Green to Gray: Political Ecology of Paving Over Green Spaces in Moscow, Russia

Moscow, Russia is the largest city in Europe with over 12.6 million residents. The remarkable fact is that it is also a biologically diverse ecosystem with a few dozen specially protected natural areas, including 15 large forest parks and a variety of smaller nature-places. The recent landscaping “improvements” conducted by the Moscow government since 2010 greatly increased negative impacts on the green infrastructure, e.g., a lot more paving, systematic grass mowing, widespread planting of exotic plant species, increased residential and commercial construction, more noise, etc. While quantification of the impacts of the above on the biota is not easy, we offer some insights into the changes over the last 10 years with respect to birds, insects, and plants within a few green spaces inside the city beltway. We then proceed to analyze these changes from the political ecology perspectives by looking at what Moscow residents feel and how they interact with the now more controlled nature and how nonhuman actors interact with the residents. Paradoxically, some developments may have actually increased contact opportunities for the residents with certain elements of nature, while at the same time forcing the wilder natural elements to retreat away from the city and give way to lawns and other controlled substrates

A Memento of Complexity: The Rhetorics of Memory, Ambience, and Emergence

Drawing from complexity theory, this dissertation develops a schema of rhetorical memory that exhibits extended characteristics. Scholars traditionally conceptualize memory, the fourth canon in classical rhetoric, as place (loci) or image (phantasm). However, memory rhetoric resists the traditional loci-phantasm framework and instead emerges from enmeshments of interiority, collectivity, and technology. Emergence considers the dynamics of fundamental parts that generate complex systems and offers a methodological lens to theorizing memory. The resulting construct informs everyday life, which includes interfacing with pervasive computing or sensing familiarity. Further, congruently with a neurological turn that contradicts simplification, this dissertation resituates rhetorical memory as generative to imagination or perception

Digital demise : preservation of Facebook legacies post mortem

Personal Information Management includes the practice of creating, maintaining, retrieving, and sharing information. In this report, I will evaluate personal information management in the context of the social media service Facebook to illustrate the importance of managing our digital identities. Most research on our growing dependence on digital institutions to preserve our digital assets focuses on how an individual can manage their digital assets to prevent fraud, create filing systems, and secure a legacy. This body of literature can help an individual curate, archive, and secure their information in life, but little research explores managing and preserving digital assets after an individual passes away. In this report, I will explore the role of Facebook in Personal Information Management, managing digital legacies post mortem, and the impact of our Facebook assets on death and grieving. More than a quarter of the world's population uses Facebook to make connections, stay in touch with friends and relatives, and to create timelines of their digital histories (Facebook, 2017) User content on Facebook includes photos, the written word, and videos, and builds on a user's individual human experience. It has changed the way we interact both online and offline. Social media and changes in technology contribute to what some claim is a seismic shift in our culture and has significantly increased the content we produce and maintain. As information management processes shift from physical to digital, demanding different tools, it may be difficult for individuals and their loved ones to navigate new requirements to protect and access their information in life and post mortem. The ubiquitous presence of smartphones and connected devices makes people feel connected wherever they go. It enables us to create and publish content anytime, and anywhere, often faster than traditional journalists. To consider the question of how we might think about our digital legacies post mortem looking at Facebook in particular, this report first considers challenges to such legacies, potential solutions offered by Facebook, and the importance of addressing these challenges and questions. The report concludes with a look at how a Facebook user's enduring presence online affects the grief process. The entwining of our online and offline experiences highlights the importance of thinking about our post mortem digital assets and the artifacts we leave behind after death. This report will address these issues and offer solutions and challenges to securing our post mortem digital legacies on Facebook.Informatio

The institutional and archival social ecologies of a state mental hospital’s records, 1870 to present

In this dissertation, I construct the social ecologies of records from a state mental institution in order to explicate the impact and value of the records to different groups and individuals over time, with a focus on the social implications of the organizational records becoming archival objects. I engage with the repercussions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 on the access of health information, and posit what are the social complexities underlying potentially sensitive institutional records in general. My research site is a still-active facility that arose out of the Reconstruction South, and exclusively served the state’s African American population until it was desegregated after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Through the theoretical frameworks of social constructionism, and specifically Actor-Network Theory, I examine the discursive work that mental hospital records perform in order to mediate relationships between people. The design of the research is rooted in sociological and archival activist research so that I can focus purposefully on the power inequalities and silent participants within record ecologies. I collected data for my study from archival registers and minutes from several distinct eras in the hospital’s history and from interviews with people who currently have or had substantive connections to the creation, management, or use of the archival collection, including former and current facility personnel. In order to construct themes from the data, I use grounded theory with an emphasis on situational analysis and critical discourse analysis. By employing multiple means of analysis, I form a longitudinal picture of the human and non-human participants involved in record-creation and record-keeping work at the hospital. I also develop several major themes, including accountability, classification, the development of psychiatry, and power, which point to the overarching institutional use of records to help bureaucratic bodies control various populations and maintain hierarchies. In illustrating how the records support and perpetuate hegemonic structures, I advocate for a pluralization of the stakeholders who have the right to be included in the discussions about if and how the historical records are to be preserved and accessed.  Informatio

Transformations in the Belize sugar industry: from Colonial plantations to a vital tourist industry

This research explored the evolution of the sugar industry in Belize, including examining its influence on the country's economy and its cultural and historical heritage. As part of this exploration, it situated the information in the context of a heritage tourist application. There has been a dearth of historical lineage establishing how sugar evolved from being a `non-native' crop to becoming a major source of income in Belize. This study has added to this lineage by connecting the transference of plants with parallel changes in migration and labor patterns, including those of British colonists, expatriate Confederates, East Indians and Belizeans. It also assessed relative group influences with the industries' transformation through the use of archival sources, GPS and ArcGIS mapping applications and technological advancements. Results identified the locations of some important sugar mills and their associated communities, their histories and the role of various groups, which set the stage for sugar's influence in the modern economy including heritage and industrial tourism in Belize. It shows how the use of technological advances play a vital role in ecotourism through the endorsement of the history of sugar in the country's past and present culture. One major product is an overview of the growth, development and economic impact of sugar in Belize. A second product is the development of a strategy for improving heritage and industrial tourism of these historic sites. The final product is a database showing sugar-related heritage site locations and their histories along with maps as well as a downloadable application that is available for transfer to a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to access history, maps and directions for the culturally inclined visitor in Belize

Interpreting conflict mortuary behaviour: applying non-linear and traditional quantitative methods to conflict burials

The research in this dissertation concerns methods and theories involved in the analysis and interpretation of burials related to wars and other conflict situations. Its core is a conflict interment model that I developed to facilitate the identification of material differences in burials that will help in understanding burial circumstances (e.g., whether a death occurred in direct conflict on the battlefield, as a direct consequence of battlefield injuries or other trauma, or as an execution, or was unrelated to the conflict; and whether the subsequent burial was by a ‘friendly’, ‘neutral’ or ‘hostile group’). These is a great need for such a model, because exhumations tend to focus on the recovery of remains – while assuming the circumstances of death and burial – and therefore lack the structured methods and procedures that might provide additional information about what actually took place. I analyse nine datasets from seven different conflict episodes spanning the 15th century to the late 20th century. The reason for using data from different centuries, types of conflict, culture, and grave type (or level of a particular type of grave) is to test the applicability of the model to: a) known grave types, in order to discern any common elements to be found in friendly, neutral, or hostile interments; and b) unknown grave types, in order to tentatively identify those responsible for interment and the circumstances surrounding the burials. The model takes account of both normative (cross-cultural) and situational behaviours in the death and burial process, and includes variables dealing with body positioning, cause of death, presence or absence of mutilation, burial container, and ritual markers including clothing and grave goods. The ultimate goal is to develop an approach to burials in archaeology applicable in a wide variety of recent, historic and, possibly prehistoric contexts

Stigmergy-based Load Scheduling in a Demand Side Management Context

This work proposes an approach, based on a fundamental coordination mechanism from nature, namely stigmergy. The proposed meta-heuristic is utilized to distributively calculate global schedules for a population of customers provided with intelligent devices. These schedules maximize renewable energy sources utilization. Furthermore, this approach is adapted and utilized as a coordination mechanism of autonomous customers to modify their consumption behavior in a real-time optimization context

Ant-based sorting and ACO-based clustering approaches: A review

Data clustering is used in a number of fields including statistics, bioinformatics, machine learning exploratory data analysis, image segmentation, security, medical image analysis, web handling and mathematical programming.Its role is to group data into clusters with high similarity within clusters and with high dissimilarity between clusters.This paper reviews the problems that affect clustering performance for deterministic clustering and stochastic clustering approaches.In deterministic clustering, the problems are caused by sensitivity to the number of provided clusters.In stochastic clustering, problems are caused either by the absence of an optimal number of clusters or by the projection of data.The review is focused on ant-based sorting and ACO-based clustering which have problems of slow convergence, un-robust results and local optima solution.The results from this review can be used as a guide for researchers working in the area of data clustering as it shows the strengths and weaknesses of using both clustering approaches

Summer 2008 Research Symposium Abstract Book

Summer 2008 volume of abstracts for science research projects conducted by Trinity College students

The Clemson Ghost Tour: Disrupting Rhetorical Stagnation

How do we teach in sick places, physically and institutionally designed to exclude? Through activism? Through inquiry? Perhaps somewhere in-between? I argue that an understanding of rhetoric grounded in an early Greek understanding of space and place is of utmost importance to our students\u27 ability to live among others in a more civil, just, and equitable society, a society that extends beyond physical spaces and places and into virtual ones. This dissertation explores our relationality through an ecological-ethical design approach that views writing and teaching not only as acts of disruption, but also as a means of attending to our spaces and places, especially this messy, territorialized, networked, posthuman space