Applying Optimization and the Analytic Hierarchy Process to Enhance Agricultural Preservation Strategies in the State of Delaware

Using agricultural preservation priorities derived from an analytical hierarchy process by 23 conservation experts from 18 agencies in the state of Delaware, this research uses weighted benefit measures to evaluate the historical success of Delaware’s agricultural protection fund, which spent nearly $100 million in its first decade. This research demonstrates how these operation research techniques can be used in concert to address relevant conservation questions. Results suggest that the state’s sealed-bid-offer auction, which determines the yearly conservation selections, is superior to benefit-targeting approaches frequently employed by conservation organizations, but is inferior to the optimization technique of binary linear programming that could have provided additional benefits to the state, such as 12,000 additional acres worth an estimated$25 million.conservation optimization, farmland protection, analytic hierarchy process, binary linear programming, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

The Demise of Industrial Education for African Americans: | |Revisiting the Industrial Curriculum in Higher Education

The purpose of this study was to examine the causes that led African Americans to resist industrial education higher education, which ended industrial training programs in predominantly Black colleges and universities during the 1920s. Three key factors helped create this reform movement: 1) the death of Booker T. Washington; 2) the improved educational levels of African Americans; and 3) the rise in aspirations of African Americans to expand the benefits of higher education. The loss of the Civil War caused a reorientation of southern and economic conditions. Newly freed slaves had to be granted citizenship. Southern Whites were more concerned with rebuilding the South while holding onto the power. Several key characters emerged as leaders within the debate of African American education during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Armstrong, Washington, and Jones were among the many supporters of industrial education, while DuBois and Miller supported the argument of the liberal arts education for African Americans. Three research questions addressed the issues surrounding the ideology of African Americans\u27 education: (1) What role did hegemony and ideology play in African American education and how did they influence Booker T. Washington\u27s and W. E. B. Dubois\u27s position on how African Americans should be educated; (2) What was the Black ideology of African American education; and (3) What was the White ideology of African American education

"Integrating Optimization and Strategic Conservation to Achieve Higher Efficiencies in Land Protection"

Strategic land conservation seeks to select the highest quality lands given limited financial resources. Traditionally conservation officials implement strategic conservation by creating prioritization maps that attempt to identify the lands of highest ecological value or public value from a resource perspective. This paper describes the history of using optimization in strategic conservation and demonstrates how the combination of these approaches can significantly strengthen conservation efforts by making these programs more efficient with public monies.Mathematical Programming, Conservation Optimization, Cost Effectiveness Analysis, Strategic Conservation

Interspecific visual signalling in animals and plants: a functional classification

Organisms frequently gain advantages when they engage in signalling with individuals of other species. Here we provide a functionally structured framework of the great variety of interspecific visual signals seen in nature, then describe the different signalling mechanisms that have evolved in response to each of these functional requirements. We propose that interspecific visual signalling can be divided into six major functional categories: antipredator, food acquisition, antiparasite, host acquisition, reproductive, and agonistic signalling, with each function enabled by several distinct mechanisms. We support our classification by reviewing the ecological and behavioural drivers of interspecific signalling in animals and plants, principally focussing on comparative studies that address large-scale patterns of diversity. Collating diverse examples of interspecific signalling into an organised set of functional and mechanistic categories places anachronistic behavioural and morphological labels in fresh context, clarifies terminology, and redirects research effort towards understanding environmental influences driving interspecific signalling in nature

Visual bordering: how refugee-serving organizations represent refugees on Instagram

Theories of symbolic bordering highlight how xenophobic media coverage and humanitarian messaging create boundaries between migrants and receiving communities partly based on deservingness. Contrasting with studies of mainly text-based representations of refugees, we examine refugee-serving organizations’ visual communications work on Instagram. Using a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, we collected 191 posts made in early 2021 by five UK-based organizations. Then, we applied quantitative content and qualitative semiotic analysis to these posts, complemented by two semi-structured interviews with communications staff members. We show how visual choices invoke divisions between posts’ refugee subjects and their intended audiences, while rendering some refugees legible and particularly worthy of protection or empathy. These choices include using stereotypical elements, obscuring identifiable people, and explicitly attributing quotations to refugees. We also identify “takeover” posts where refugees had controlled organizations’ social media accounts. Our study contributes understanding of how symbolic bordering occurs visually online and has implications for humanitarian communications practice

INFORMATION VALUE IN WEED MANAGEMENT

Use of the economic threshold to improve the efficiency of preemergent-herbicide treatment decisions is limited by a lack of weed information. An economic model for assessing the expected value of weed information needed to implement a threshold decision rule is developed. Empirical results suggest that early season weed information can have value in cabbage weed management in Massachusetts.Crop Production/Industries,

Cascading Activation Revisited: How Audiences Contribute to News Agendas Using Social Media

Social media have become conduits through which audiences can challenge elites in media and politics. Recent updates to cascading activation, originally developed to explain how frames flowing from powerful figures gain public dominance, give greater theoretical scope for audiences to exert influence. Yet empirical understanding of how and in what circumstances this happens with respect to agenda-setting - another core media effect - is not well-developed, especially given the affordances of digital technologies. We address this gap by connecting theorization on cascades to developments in intermedia agenda-setting. Specifically, we analyze the dynamics surrounding the perceived reluctance by ARD-aktuell, the newsroom of Germany's public broadcasting consortium, to use its prime-time broadcast "Tagesschau" to report the arrest of a refugee accused of murdering a German woman in December 2016. By presenting finely grained timelines linking content analysis of 5,409 Facebook comments with Tagesschau editorial responses and parallel media coverage of this event, we contribute further conditions under which audience-informed cascades may occur: notably, when publicly funded news organizations are involved, and the issue at stake invokes both domestic and international aspects which sustain disagreement

As we like it: did the UK's 2016 EU referendum reveal the "will of the people?"

Rhetoric surrounding the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on continued European Union (EU) membership frequently has invoked the “will of the people.” Addressing the House of Commons in March 2019, then–Prime Minster Theresa May stated that “my sense of responsibility and duty has meant that I have kept working to ensure that we deliver on the result and the will of the people” (March 27, 2019).1 May’s successor, Boris Johnson, appealed to the same notion when suggesting in the Daily Telegraph (September 15, 2019) that opposition parties were “united in wanting to cancel the referendum result…and overturn the will of the people.” On the other side of the debate, Caroline Lucas (currently the sole Member of Parliament for the UK’s Green Party) stated that “[e]very recent opinion poll shows that the will of the people has changed since [the referendum]” (December 4, 2018)