Review of Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice

This review shows how all journeys are not futile; how human frailty makes us holy, in a certain sense. This review shows the great depth of the sovereignty of the Good. And how Professor Lane shows us that while all feet are clay; some realise so and go beyond their own frailties to tap into that which can only be experienced. Professor Lane should not be called Lane because academic styles demand us to do so. He actually professes what he writes. If only one read the book then one will know what literature is. Literature is a journey. And not gobbledygook and blah. Wake up. COVID 19 and EBOLA are here. In my practise as a mental healthcare person, I am yet to hear a person call on Freud or Lacan or Marx, for that matter before going into wonderland. So take it or leave it; this is a great book. I have tried doing justice to Professor Lane's scholarship

Gun owners, ethics, and the problem of evil: A response to the Las Vegas shooting

This article examines the ways in which American gun owners deploy a particular ethical system in their responses to instances of mass gun violence. I argue that anthropology is uniquely situated to provide a better understanding of how this ethical system is produced, thereby allowing us to move beyond the falsely dichotomous terms of the gun control debate. Recently returned from a period of fieldwork with a gun rights activist community in San Diego, California, I use ethnographic data to show that owning a firearm brings with it an ethical system that makes the prospect of giving up guns in the aftermath of a mass shooting even less attractive to my informants. Furthermore, this article focuses on what has been called “the problem of evil” by demonstrating how my informants order the world into “good guys” and “bad guys.” This opposition becomes personified into a more general notion of good versus evil, thereby placing particular people in the category of the human and others in the category of the inhuman, or monstrous

Narrating Environmental Citizenship. Norwegian picturebooks and comics in the Anthropocene

In my project, I examine how aspects of “environmental citizenship” are discussed in Norwegian picturebooks and comics. The term “environmental citizenship” encompasses several concepts that originate from political sciences and discuss what it can mean to be a responsible, or “good”, citizen with regard to the environment. The concepts are characterised by various understandings of what citizenship means and which role the environment and its intrinsic value play. Common for the concepts is an argument for the need to change something in our behaviour towards the world we live in. An econarratological perspective: I examine seven multimodal texts in my dissertation, four picturebooks and three comics, published between 1974 and 2019. My theoretical approach is based on econarratology, a direction in literary studies that combines an ecocritical perspective with particular attention to narratological questions, or the texts’ narrative structures. How is the texts’ multimodal “storyworld” presented and which role does the environment play in it? How are aspects of environmental citizenship discussed through verbal text and pictures? And how do the texts address readers to convey perspectives on the environment? These are some of the questions I discuss in the analytical chapters of my dissertation. Main findings: It shows itself that multimodal texts for young readers present various understandings of what it means to be an environmentally aware citizen. The texts foreground different aspects as important when it comes to our relationship with the environment and how we can live more environmentally friendly. The variety in the narratives underlines that a more nuanced examination of picturebooks and comics is both fruitful and necessary in order to take the complexity of children’s literature seriously when it comes to environmental questions.publishedVersio

Protecting the Last Tree: Environmental Education in the United States, 1990-2012

Having already been hired as an environmental organizer, I reflect on how my childhood experiences impacted me. I embark upon this vocational journey with youthful optimism, a good dose of realism, and just a touch of cynicism. An environmental organizer is someone who works mobilizing individuals around targeted environmental issues. They create policy changes that are environmentally positive… generally for little pay. What has motivated me, and scores of others, to willingly take on this seemingly impossible task? For me: was it the summer vacations to Yellowstone and The Rocky Mountains with my brothers and parents? Maybe it was being able to explore in “The Woods” behind my elementary school as a child? These questions have been central in my life this semester, as I am involved in two environmental education programs: the K-12 education component of Energy Service Corps (ESC) and the Leadership in Environmental Education Partnership (LEEP). My work within these organizations, which I will elaborate on in greater detail, compels me to contemplate the impact these programs have on children

Reflections on teaching: dwelling in a third space

What does it mean to teach well? What does it mean to be a good teacher? These are questions that have been asked for hundreds if not thousands of years; yet, an unequivocal answer has not been reached. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s (1962/1996) concept of a paradigm, it is easy to see that the field of curriculum is anything but paradigmatic. Competing philosophical, psychological, and sociological schools of thought, for example, all support differing ideas of what “good teaching” looks like, and teacher education programs often reflect this diversity of thought. The situation does not end at the borders of campuses, either. Not only must teachers aspire to live up to their own ever-evolving ideas of what it means to be a good teacher, but they must also grapple with often differing conceptions of what good teaching means to their coworkers, their school’s administration, their students, their students’ parents, and others. This dissertation is a meditation on my experiences of teaching and being taught—it is about being caught between conflicting and sometimes incommensurable ideas about what it means to teach well and how teachers can find a space to work productively and sanely in the tensions that abound. It has both personal and communal aspects and fluctuates between the subjective and social. On the one hand, it is a way to work through curricular issues I have faced as well as a way to help me think about issues I encounter in daily life. On the other hand, it is a way to share some of my experiences and insights with those in the field of education and to engage with them in a conversation about teaching. While this dissertation focuses on a recursive analysis of my teaching-learning experiences over three decades, it also attempts more. It endeavors to place those experiences within a larger social and cultural frame. In this manner, I hope a deeper understanding of what each reader—teacher educator or practitioner in the field—believes constitutes good teaching may emerge

Algorithms, haplotypes and phylogenetic networks

Preface. Before I started my PhD in computational biology in 2005, I had never even heard of this term. Now, almost four years later, I think I have some idea of what is meant by it. One of the goals of my PhD was to explore different topics within computational biology and to see where the biggest opportunities for discrete/combinatorial mathematicians could be found. Roughly speaking, the first two years of my PhD I focussed mainly on problems related to haplotyping and genome rearrangements and the last two years on phylogenetic networks. I must say I really enjoyed learning so much about both mathematics and biology. It was especially amazing to learn how exact, theoretical mathematics can be used to solve complex, practical problems from biology. The topics I studied clearly show how extremely useful mathematics can be for biology. But I also learned that there are many more interesting topics in computational biology than the ones that I could study so far. The number of opportunities for discrete mathematicians is absolutely immense. I did not include my studies on genome rearrangements in this thesis, because my most interesting results [Hur07a; Hur07b] are not directly related to biology. This work is nevertheless interesting to mathematicians and I recommend them to read it. I can certainly conclude that also in this field there is a vast number of opportunities for mathematicians and that the topic genome rearrangements provides numerous beautiful mathematical problems. I could never have written this thesis without a great amount of help from many different people. I want to thank my supervisors Leen Stougie and Judith Keijsper for guiding me, for helping me, for correcting my mistakes, for supplying ideas and for the enjoyable time I had while working with them. I also want to thank the Dutch BSIK/BRICKS project for funding my research and Gerhard Woeginger for giving me the opportunity to work in his group and being my second promotor. I want to thank Jens Stoye and Julia Zakotnik for the work we did together and for the great time I had in Bielefeld. I want to thank Ferry Hagen and Teun Boekhout for helping me to make my work relevant for "real" biology. I also want to thank John Tromp, Rudi Cilibrasi, Cor Hurkens and all others I worked with during my PhD. I want to thank Erik de Vink and Mike Steel for reading and commenting my thesis. I want to thank my colleagues from the Combinatorial Optimisation group at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven for the pleasant working conditions and the fun things we did besides work. I especially want to thank Matthias Mnich, not only a great colleague but also a good friend, for all his ideas, his humour and our good and fruitful cooperation. I also want to thank Steven Kelk. I must say that I was very lucky to work with Steven during my PhD. He introduced me to problems, had an enormous amount of ideas, found the critical mistakes in my proofs and made my PhD a success both in terms of results and in terms of enjoying work. Finally, I want to thank Conno Hendriksen and Bas Heideveld for assisting me during my PhD defence and I want to thank them and all my other friends and family for helping me with everything in my life but research

The Tragedy of Punishment: An Insight into Why Doing Something Good Feels Bad

My motivation for writing on what I have come to call “the tragedy of punishment” is the seemingly paradoxical state of affairs associated with punishment. The first state of affairs is the general understanding that punishment is not just a necessary practice but also a morally good one that serves not only to give criminals their just deserts but also generally benefit society and those in it. The second state of affairs is the realization that, despite the understanding that punishment is painted as a moral good, when thinking about all the harm caused by punishment one cannot help but feel badly about it. The problem arises with the obvious conclusion that these two state of affairs seem at the very least problematically counterintuitive. How can it be that doing a moral good ends up leaving us feeling bad? In fact, many cases in which a morally good action is committed are cause for celebration but not so for punishment. What then makes punishment different from the other cases in which the result is supposed to be a good? It is an answer to this question that motivates the rest of the paper

Letter from [Theodore P. Lukens ?] to John Muir, [ca. 1907].

[T. P. Lukens]Sunday 14thMy Dear Mr MuirI am sure you how much I regret to know that Helen has had a set back. I had not know it before, and my wife and sister joins me in the hope that she may spedily recover.I beleive I know just the place for you to take her. My friend and one of your great admirers, Theodore S. Van Dyke has a Ranch home on the Mojava Desert at Dagget just East of Barsts, he has beautiful Alfalfa fields, lots of milk, eggs &c and I beleive would take you in in some way. Mr Van Dyke is an artist, and a writer, only this, he is a great hunter, and beleives in it, but he is not a pot hunter.04004 The surroundings are grand from the Desert point of view, wonderfully collored mountains, he owns about all of the Mojava River at this point and is useing it to good advantage.I will write him by this mail and say you will write himI am very sure you can make satisfactory arrangementsI have desolved partnership with Mr Gant, and am doeing business on my own account with my office at home0400