Open-street CCTV in Australia: the politics of resistance and expansion

This paper summarizes the first systematic attempt to document and assess the extent of open-street CCTV systems in Australia. In addition to providing empirical data, this paper argues that it is tempting for Australian scholars, and those elsewhere, to view the UK ‘surveillance revolution’ as the harbinger of inevitable global trends sweeping across jurisdictions. However analysis of the Australian data suggests that the deployment of CCTV in other national contexts may follow substantially divergent patterns. While the Australian CCTV experience follows many trends exhibited in other nations, it is nevertheless significant that the diffusion of CCTV in Australia has been more restrained than in the UK. We suggest that the divergence between the UK and Australian experiences resides in contrasting political structures and the consequent variation in the strength of debate and resistance at the local level

Temporal Changes in the Fishes of Waller Creek and Invasion of the Variable Platyfish

This poster was presented at the second Waller Creek Symposium held on the University of Texas campus at the Recreational Sports Center on May 7, 2018.Waller Creek is an entirely urban creek flowing 11km through Austin, Travis County, Texas into Ladybird Lake. We gather the historic fish data, all held in our own Fishes of Texas Project database (Hendrickson and Cohen, 2018), for the creek and attempt to describe temporal change in the fauna of the creek. Minimal samples exist from the 1940’s and ’50s, but its fish fauna is rigorously sampled in the 1970’s when Edwards (1976) first formally surveyed the creek. It was uncollected in the 1980s. The Hendrickson lab, working with the public, local schools and universities, began sampling the creek in the 1990’s and continues to do so. These two sources (Edwards and Hendrickson Lab) are the main generators of data and we compared pre- and post-1980s data largely generated by these two sources. The fish fauna remains dominated by the same seven species Edwards collected in the 1970s (Gambusia affinis, Campostoma anomalum, Astyanax mexicanus, Lepomis megalotis, Lepomis cyanellus, Cyprinella lutrensis, and Herichthys cyanoguttatus), with the exception of an invasive species (Xiphophorus variatus), first detected in 2004, that is now the dominant species in the creek. Two of these seven species are firmly established non-natives (Astyanax mexicanus and Herichthys cyanoguttatus). Most of the less common native species collected in the 1970’s are no longer present (Ameiurus melas, Dionda flavipinnis, Fundulus zebrinus, Lepomis humilis, Lepomis macrochirus) or rare (Cyprinella venusta, Micropterus salmoides, Pimephales promelas) based on the data.Integrative BiologyWaller Creek Working Grou

The Cost of Subway Delays: A Counterfactual Welfare Analysis of Boston’s T

Boston’s subway system, the T, is an important artery for transportation in and around the city. However, it is the oldest subway system in the United States, and, as a result, is in dire need of upgrades. This paper employs a welfare analysis to calculate the economic cost of the T’s lack of reliability, while also comparing the T’s reliability rate to other transit systems around the world. With a counterfactual estimate of a 95 percent reliability rate versus the pre-pandemic 88.47 percent reliability rate, the difference in welfare is found to be between $54 million and$163 million annually. Thus, long overdue improvements to the T would have a significant impact on the overall welfare of the Boston metropolitan area, and serve as a great economic benefit to all stakeholders

Fishes of Texas Project: Data Visualization and Analysis Tools

Poster presentation presented at the 2020 Texas Chapter of the American Fisheries Society annual meeting in Waco, Texas on January 24, 2020.The Fishes of Texas Project (FoTX) (http://fishesoftexas.org) database currently has 124,452 specimen-vouchered occurrence records spanning > 150 years with over 400,000 new records (including non-vouchered sources such as literature, anecdotal, and photo-based) in the process of being imported. Continual data growth prompted creation of new tools to dynamically assess (as the data evolve) the state of data coverage across various dimensions to increase user understanding and accessibility to the data and improve overall utility of the project. We produced species sampling curves, temporal species accumulation graphs, and heat maps of collecting event density over time and space for each river sub-basin within Texas. A QGIS plugin was also created to better assess the suspect status of incoming records. Each type of visualization has basic documentation, easily accessible statistical summaries, flexible queries, and exploration tools to help reveal variations in sampling density over both temporal and spatial dimensions. We highlight here the San Bernard River as an example of a notably under-sampled sub-basin (as indicated by diverse forms of evidence). With addition of future records, these dynamic tools will continue to illustrate taxonomic and spatial sampling deficiencies that in turn will help guide conservation planning.Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service State Wildlife Grant Program, grant TX T-180-R-1, F17AF01129 (CFDA# 15.634)Integrative Biolog

Documentation Related to a 1991 Observation of Sturgeon in the Rio Grande – Río Bravo, USA (Texas) and Mexico (Coahuila)

This digital archive provides a compilation of previously unpublished information regarding a 1991 observation of a live sturgeon (Family Acipenseridae) in the Rio Grande-Río Bravo of the USA and Mexico. Though a few specimens collected in the 19th century support occurrence of sturgeon in this river basin, lack of credible, recent records has often led to this species not being recognized as part of the basin’s native fish fauna, and certainly not part of its modern fish community. The second and third authors of this document manage the Fishes of Texas Project (Hendrickson, Dean A., & Cohen, Adam E. (2015). Fishes of Texas Project Database (version 2.0). Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas at Austin. http://doi.org/10.17603/C3WC70) and knew of the unpublished 1991 observation of sturgeon reported here. They requested the content provided here from first author (Platania) who provided what follows below (verbatim as received in April 2018) and permission to archive it for public access.Integrative Biolog

Artificially Sweetened: An Analysis of the United States Sugar Program

By limiting imports of sugar into the United States, the United States Department of Agriculture maintains a price floor for domestic sugar producers that has traditionally been double the price of sugar on the international market. Operating at an annual cost of two billion dollars, the US sugar program has deleterious effects for both US consumers and foreign producers, many of which live in developing countries. By forcing developing countries out of the US market, the US sugar program costs countries in the third world millions of dollars each year in lost trade and development opportunities. Although agricultural trade liberalization is politically unpopular in the United States, there is still potential to reform this inefficient and unfair trade policy

Armenian Iranian identities in the institutional home visit : a case study

textIn recent years, many ethnic Armenians from Iran have come to the US as refugees, resettling in a diverse landscape that already includes large Armenian and Iranian diaspora communities. Soon after arrival, they also interface with US institutions in a home visit from a refugee resettlement case worker. In this thesis I adopt constructivist understandings of identity-in-interaction to examine the identity work that older Armenian Iranian immigrants do during these visits, reproduced here as life history interviews. I argue that Armenian Iranians use the home visit to discursively construct an Armenian Iranian identity that addresses the tension between institutional and community pressure to represent themselves as uniquely discriminated against in Iranian society while still identifying with an Iranian national identity. The more localized and temporary identities and interactional roles that speakers – including the researcher – adopt in the interviews also contribute to gender asymmetries in the interactions to the effect that men most often command the floor. Therefore, while the home visit format provides insight into the ways Armenian Iranians articulate an identity that is at least in part “Iranian” amidst normative pressures to do otherwise, it can also translate into an interaction that privileges men’s perspectives and allows them to largely determine its direction and content.Middle Eastern Studie

Monitoring the Impact of Health Care Reforms on Americans 50-64: Awareness and Coverage Expectations

This survey found widespread awareness among Americans ages 50 to 64 about the new health insurance Marketplace that had been created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Those with the most to gain from the ACA -- the uninsured and those with nongroup (individual) insurance -- expressed the greatest interest in using the Marketplace to learn about new coverage options. Most of those already insured expected to keep their same source of coverage in 2014, whereas the uninsured had mixed expectations. This paper is part of a series that looks at the experiences of 50- to 64-year-olds during the ACA's first open enrollment period