Development of the Innate Immune Response in NestlingTree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor)

The innate immune system provides an immediate, short term, first line of defense from pathogens; its appearance early in development in vertebrates is evidence of its critical importance. Even so, few studies have investigated the development of the immune response as juveniles transition into adults. Ultimately, the ability to respond to pathogens confers fitness benefits in terms of health, survival, and reproductive success, and it follows that functions such as rapid growth cannot be fully met simultaneously since energy is a limiting resource. As a result, defense mechanisms are compromised at an early age due to energy allocation to rapid growth; therefore, immunity should increase as individuals mature. I studied the development of innate immunity in nestling Tree Swallows using microbicidal assays which were conducted in vitro to assess the ability of the immune system to kill E. coli via lysis. This research may provide insight into patterns of disease susceptibility, which in turn influence evolutionary fitness and population dynamics

Dairi Storytelling and Stories in the Batak Reader of Herman Neubronner Van Der Tuuk

In this article I first discuss how texts of Dairi stories collected in the nineteenth century by Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk relate to storytelling, and question whether the development of written versions of stories necessarily endangers the practice of storytelling. Then I investigate how written versions of Dairi stories in Van der Tuuk\u27s Batak Reader relate to each other and to the printed text, based on texts in manuscripts collected by Van der Tuuk. In conclusion I discuss the possible aim of Van der Tuuk\u27s Batak Reader, focussing on the Dairi section, which has not been dealt with in earlier publications

Fluctuating fortunes of a collective entreprise: The case of the Agroforestry Tree Seeds Association of Lantapan (ATSAL) in the Philippines

"The Agroforestry Tree Seeds Association of Lantapan (ATSAL) in Bukidnon province, southern Philippines was organized in 1998, facilitated by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). Farmers were trained on germplasm collection, processing and marketing of agroforestry tree seeds and seedlings. ATSAL has been marketing various tree seeds and seedlings with apparent success, and has provided training on seed collection and nursery management to farmers, government technicians, and workers from non-government organizations (NGOs). This paper reports on the initial results of an on-going study to assess the effectiveness of ATSAL's marketing strategy, including group dynamics, and the issues and challenges the group faces. It was found that during the first two years, ATSAL's market share of greatly demanded timber tree species increased significantly, thus helping to disseminate widely these important species among farmers. ICRAF's technical back-up was an advantage, increasing the Association's market credibility. Subsequently, ATSAL extended its market to the central Philippines, but failed to meet the demand for seeds due to organizational limitations. Market competition exists, where a nonmember was able to take a larger market share than was the group. Nonetheless, ATSAL has established its name as a viable community-based seed and seedling producer, maintaining a stronghold in local and regional markets. Collective action is important for smallholders to break in, and gain market access, but is unlikely to sustain without effective leadership and some facilitation (in some cases even ongoing), thus requiring expenditures on repairs and maintenance through continuous technical and leadership training for the collective, and technical back-up and facilitation by an intermediary. Finally, facilitating smallholder collective action is essentially an arduous task, requiring the supporting agency to hold a firm grasp of market realities, to invest in the maintenance of collective action, to provide continuous technical back-up, and to ascertain the conditions that make collective action succeed." authors' abstractCollective action, Niche marketing, Agroforestry seeds, Community-based entreprise,

Principles for Fairness and Efficiency in Enhancing Environmental Services in Asia: Payments, Compensation, or Co-Investment?

The term payments for environmental services (PES) has rapidly gained popularity, with its focus on market-based mechanisms for enhancing environmental services (ES). Current use of the term, however, covers a broad spectrum of interactions between ES suppliers and beneficiaries. A broader class of mechanisms pursues ES enhancement through compensation or rewards. Such mechanisms can be analyzed on the basis of how they meet four conditions: realistic, conditional, voluntary, and pro-poor. Based on our action research in Asia in the Rewarding Upland Poor for Environmental Services (RUPES) program since 2002, we examine three paradigms: commoditized ES (CES), compensation for opportunities skipped (COS), and co-investment in (environmental) stewardship (CIS). Among the RUPES action research sites, there are several examples of CIS with a focus on assets (natural + human + social capital) that can be expected to provide future flows of ES. CES, equivalent to a strict definition of PES, may represent an abstraction rather than a current reality. COS is a challenge when the legality of opportunities to reduce ES is contested. The primary difference between CES, COS, and CIS is the way in which conditionality is achieved, with additional variation in the scale (individual, household, or community) at which the voluntary principle takes shape. CIS approaches have the greatest opportunity to be pro-poor, as both CES and COS presuppose property rights that the rural poor often do not have. CIS requires and reinforces trust building after initial conflicts over the consequences of resource use on ES have been clarified and a realistic joint appraisal is obtained. CIS will often be part of a multiscale approach to the regeneration and survival of natural capital, alongside respect and appreciation for the guardians and stewards of landscapes

The conditions for functional mechanisms of compensation and reward for environmental services

Mechanisms of compensation and reward for environmental services (CRES) are becoming increasingly contemplated as means for managing human–environment interactions. Most of the functional mechanisms in the tropics have been developed within the last 15 years; many developing countries still have had little experience with functional mechanisms. We consider the conditions that foster the origin and implementation of functional mechanisms. Deductive and inductive approaches are combined. Eight hypotheses are derived from theories of institution and policy change. Five case studies, from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, are then reviewed according to a common framework. The results suggest the following to be important conditions for functional CRES mechanisms: (1) localized scarcity for particular environmental services, (2) influence from international environmental agreements and international organizations, (3) government policies and public attitudes favoring a mixture of regulatory and marketbased instruments, and (4) security of individual and group property rights

Modeling Semantic Plausibility by Injecting World Knowledge

Distributional data tells us that a man can swallow candy, but not that a man can swallow a paintball, since this is never attested. However both are physically plausible events. This paper introduces the task of semantic plausibility: recognizing plausible but possibly novel events. We present a new crowdsourced dataset of semantic plausibility judgments of single events such as "man swallow paintball". Simple models based on distributional representations perform poorly on this task, despite doing well on selection preference, but injecting manually elicited knowledge about entity properties provides a substantial performance boost. Our error analysis shows that our new dataset is a great testbed for semantic plausibility models: more sophisticated knowledge representation and propagation could address many of the remaining errors.Comment: camera-ready draft (with link to data), Published at NAACL 2018 as a conference paper (oral

Studies of Birds and Mammals in the Baird and Schwatka Mountains, Alaska

In 1963 a joint University of Alaska-Smithsonian Institution crew worked at five locations in the Baird and Schwatka mountains in northwestern Alaska, conducting an ecological reconnaissance and faunal and floral inventory. Standard methods of observation and collection were used. Camps in the Kobuk drainage were located in the Redstone River valley and at Walker Lake, both on the margin of the taiga. The Noatak valley was represented by one camp each in the lower, middle, and upper reaches of the river, all in tundra. A summary of pre-1963 ornithological work in the region is presented. Significant records of distribution and/or breeding were obtained for the following birds: Podiceps grisegena, Anas platyrhynchos, Aythya valisineria, Histrionicus histrionicus, Melanitta perspicillata, Mergus merganser, Aphrizia virgata, Bartramia longicauda, Actitis macularia, Tringa flavipes, Phalaropus fuficarius, Lobipes lobatus, Larus hyperboreus,Xema sabini, Sayornis saya, Nuttalornis borealis, Eremophilia alpestris, Tachycineta thalassina, Riparia riparia, Petrochelidon pyrrhonota, Phylloscopus borealis, Dendroica petechia, Leucosticte tephrocotis, Zonotrichia atricapilla, Calcarius pictus; and the mammal, Spermophilus undulatus. Good series of Cletihrionomys rutilius (350) and Microtus miurus (147) have been deposited in the University of Alaska Museum. Severe doubt has been raised regarding the validity of the standard three-night trap grid for population estimation under wet conditions in arctic areas

Aspects of number in the Papuan outliers of East Nusantara

Handout from a paper presented at the International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, Bali, July 2-6, 2012.The East Nusantara region is home to two distinct groups of Papuan languages spoken far from the New Guinea mainland and surrounded by genetically unrelated Austronesian languages. While some have proposed a genetic relationship between the North Halmaheran (NH) languages and the Alor-Pantar (AP) languages (Capell 1944, Cowan 1957), most of the apparent similarities between these groups can be seen to be general typological features of the area (cf. Holton 2012). In this paper I compare the treatment of number in NH and AP languages. Examples are drawn primarily from my own field work with Tobelo (NH) and Western Pantar (AP), though related languages are cited where those two languages do not well-represent their respective families. Some aspects of number are indeed treated similarly in the two groups. For example, both NH and AP languages make extensive use of numeral classifiers, though the number of semantic categories delineated by these classifiers is much more restricted in AP languages. However, the two families carve up semantic space quite differently. WP bina (from a verb meaning ‘detached’) is used to classify fish, animals, and other non-human living things; while in Tobelo fish are counted with ngai and non-fish animals are counted with gahumu, a generic numeral classifier for three-dimensional objects (living and non-living). Other aspects of number are quite different in the two families. In AP languages number can be indicated on nouns with a plural word following the noun. The plural word designates a multitude, more than a few, rather than a non-singular referent. In WP plural words may co-occur with a co-referential pronoun indexing the number of the referent aname marung ging gateranang dia wang pidding gallang person people 3PL:AGT all go exist sebar look_for ‘all the people spread out to look for them’ In contrast, in NH languages nominal plural is not indicated except via pronominal indexing on the verb