A Perfect Storm: Environmental Justice and Air Quality Impacts of Offshore Oil and Gas Development in the Arctic Outer Continental Shelf

The Arctic Outer Continental Shelf is the next great legal battleground over oil and gas resources, environmental protection, and environmental justice.  The Arctic is home to an array of sensitive ecological resources and a large Native Alaskan population that relies heavily on the natural environment for food and supplies.  The Arctic Ocean also holds a vast amount of untapped oil and gas resources that had previously been largely inaccessible because of harsh climatic conditions and withdrawals of large swaths of the Shelf by Congress and multiple presidents.  However, climate change is melting Arctic sea ice and opening up previously inaccessible areas.  In addition, President Trump is pushing to expand oil and gas development everywhere, including the Arctic.  If President Trump’s plans prevail against the many legal challenges seeking to protect the Arctic, Native Alaskans will face a multitude of threats to their health, safety, and way of life.Scholars, journalists, and environmental groups have already illuminated the threats of oil spills and climate change.  This Comment focuses on a less discussed impact of offshore oil and gas development: air pollution and its effects on Native Alaskans.  Onshore oil and gas development has already been polluting the air of Alaskan communities, causing increases in respiratory illnesses and other health problems, and leading to climate change, which is disrupting the natural environment upon which Native Alaskans depend for food and supplies.  A new era of offshore development would amplify these problems and create new and unique challenges that disproportionately burden Native Alaskan communities.This Comment makes two novel contributions.  First, it illuminates the erratic history and disjointed nature of air quality regulation on the Outer Continental Shelf.  Second, this Comment highlights how the federal government’s current regulatory structure for offshore air emissions uniquely fails Native Alaskans who are seeking to protect their health and way of life.  In addition, this Comment makes some recommendations for statutory and regulatory changes to better address the environmental justice impacts of air pollution from offshore oil and gas development in the Arctic

Feedback within 24 hours

It is widely accepted that feedback to students’ work works best when it is received quickly, while they still remember clearly what they were trying to do in their efforts

Same Race and Cross Race Matching

Cross-race matching is an issue with which many mentoring programs struggle. This technical assistance packet provides practical tips on how to tailor matching, training, and support processes to increase the chances that cross-race matches survive

Deploying rural community wireless mesh networks

Inadequate Internet access is widening the digital divide between town and countryside, degrading both social communication and business advancements in rural areas. Wireless mesh networking can provide an excellent framework for delivering broadband services to such areas. With this in mind, Lancaster University deployed a WMN in the rural village of Wray over a three-year period, providing the community with Internet service that exceeds many urban offerings. The project gave researchers a real-world testbed for exploring the technical and social issues entailed in deploying WMNs in the heart of a small community

African American and European American Therapists’ Experiences of Addressing Race in Cross-Racial Psychotherapy Dyads

Using Consensual Qualitative Research, 12 licensed psychologists’ overall experiences addressing race in psychotherapy were investigated, as were their experiences addressing race in a specific cross-racial therapy dyad. Results indicated that only African American psychologists reported routinely addressing race with clients of color or when race was part of a client’s presenting concern. European American psychologists indicated that they would address race if clients raised the topic, and some reported that they did not normally address race with racially different clients. When discussing a specific cross-racial dyad, African American therapists more often than European American therapists addressed race because they perceived client discomfort. Only European American therapists reported feeling uncomfortable addressing race, but therapists of both races perceived that such discussions had positive effects

Critically Assessing the Invalidity of Race Realism and Finding Solutions to Educate Society on Racial Theory

With race being a hard concept to grasp, many competing theories have arisen to explain what race is and how to categorise someone by race. The dominant explanation for race in early history has been characterised by race realism. Colloquially, race realism is the theory that scientific evidence proves race to be objectively definable by trends in geography, appearance, and most prominently, genetics. Previous research from Stanford geneticist Noah Rosenberg (2005) that looked to support this topic has relied on small sample sizes and data that had otherwise been misconducted. When Sarah Tishkoff (2009) of the University of Pennsylvania conducted the same experiments more thoroughly and with larger sample sizes, evidence contradictory to earlier experiments arose and invalidated the findings supposedly supporting race realism. Considering this, we used data from an extensive public survey to assess society’s underlying beliefs and attitudes towards race while looking to confirm that race realism had been invalidated at a social level. In alignment with the newer findings, the data we collected suggests that people of younger generations have been less and less exposed to the ideas of race realism, and all have come to the conclusion on their own that it is arbitrary to objectively define someone by race. The study showed that while these generations still socially group themselves into races as a result of ancestral and geographic history, there is no genetic property that ties them to their personal sense of identity. Thus, the study concludes by providing ways to further educate the population and avoid the pitfalls of race realism, as certain social groups in the media still back the obsolete ideas of race realism to this day

A New Look at the Old Race Language: Rethinking Race and Exclusion in Social Policy

This essay is an examination of the use of the notion “race current in American social science literature and public discourse. It argues that the current assumptions of “race are mistaken and lead to misunderstanding and misdirected social policy. A rethinking of the notions of “race requires making a paradigmatic shift of the old categories of “race and “race relations to a new language that rejects “race as a descriptive and an analytical category. It examines the processes through which “racist social policies are enacted against Asian immigrants in contemporary Southern California

iCapture: Facilitating Spontaneous User-Interaction with Pervasive Displays using Smart Devices

Abstract. The eCampus project at Lancaster University is an inter-disciplinary project aiming to deploy a wide range of situated displays across the University campus in order to create a large per-vasive communications infrastructure. At present, we are conducting a series of parallel research activities in order to investigate how the pervasive communications infrastructure can support the daily needs of staff, students and visitors to the University. This paper introduces one of our current research investigations into how one is able to mediate spontaneous interaction with the pervasive display infrastructure through camera equipped mobile phones (i.e. smart devices).