Towards integrated island management: lessons from Lau, Malaita, for the implementation of a national approach to resource management in Solomon Islands: final report

Solomon Islands has recently developed substantial policy aiming to support inshore fisheries management, conservation, climate change adaptation and ecosystem approaches to resource management. A large body of experience in community based approaches to management has developed but “upscaling” and particularly the implementation of nation-wide approaches has received little attention so far. With the emerging challenges posed by climate change and the need for ecosystem wide and integrated approaches attracting serious donor attention, a national debate on the most effective approaches to implementation is urgently needed. This report discusses potential implementation of “a cost-effective and integrated approach to resource management that is consistent with national policy and needs” based on a review of current policy and institutional structures and examination of a recent case study from Lau, Malaita using stakeholder, transaction and financial cost analyses

Religious Liberty, Discriminatory Intent, and the Conservative Constitution

The Supreme Court shocked the world at the end of its 2021–22 term by issuing landmark decisions ending constitutional protection for abortion rights, expanding gun rights, and weakening what remained of the wall between church and state. One thread uniting these cases that captured the public’s attention is the rhetoric common of originalism—a backwards-looking theory of constitutional interpretation focused on founding-era meaning and intent. This Article identifies the discriminatory intent doctrine as another powerful tool the Court is using to protect the social norms and hierarchies of a bygone era, and to build a conservative Constitution. Discriminatory intent rose to prominence during the Burger and Rehnquist Courts through the development of rules requiring intent, rigidly defining intent, and limiting the evidence relevant to prove intent. Application of these rules in equal protection claims often shielded legal structures from reproach that disadvantage women and people of color. By contrast, today’s Court is revisiting and radically reinterpreting these rules in ways that favor conservative religious adherents in First Amendment claims. In Free Exercise Clause cases brought by conservative Christians challenging seemingly religiously neutral and generally applicable laws, the Court has credited allegations of discriminatory intent on thin evidentiary records. Additionally, the Court has crafted a new strict rule designed to prevent even the possibility that discriminatory intent could creep into future decision-making—even when no evidence of actual bias presently exists. Meanwhile, the Court in Establishment Clause claims has abandoned longstanding intent rules prohibiting favoritism or hostility towards religion; instead, the sole relevant question is now whether founding-era practices support the government’s religious involvement. These emerging and conflicting roles for discriminatory intent in the Religion Clauses leave religious minorities and non-believers with diminished constitutional protection, while insulating the Christian right from perceived victimization by progressive forces who have sought to stem a global pandemic, promote reproductive rights, and prevent discrimination against LGBTQ individuals

Afterpulsing studies of low noise InGaAs/InP single-photon negative feedback avalanche diodes

We characterize the temporal evolution of the afterpulse probability in a free-running negative feedback avalanche diode (NFAD) over an extended range, from $\sim$300 ns to $\sim$1 ms. This is possible thanks to an extremely low dark count rate on the order of 1 cps at 10% efficiency, achieved by operating the NFAD at a temperatures as low as 143 K. Experimental results in a large range of operating temperatures (223-143 K) are compared with a legacy afterpulsing model based on multiple trap families at discrete energy levels, which is found to be lacking in physical completeness. Subsequently, we expand on a recent proposal which considers a continuous spectrum of traps by introducing well defined edges to the spectrum, which are experimentally observed.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Rural Resentment and LGBTQ Equality

In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges settled a decades-long national debate over the legality of same-sex marriage. Since Obergefell, however, local and state legislatures in conservative and mostly rural states have proposed and passed hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills. Obergefell may have ended the legal debate over same-sex marriage, but it did not resolve the cultural divide. Many rural Americans, especially in predominately white communities, feel that they are under attack. Judicial opinions and legislation protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination are serious threats to rural dwellers because they conflict with several core tenets of rural identity: community solidarity, self-reliance, and compliance with religiously informed gender and sexual norms. This conflict is amplified by the relative invisibility of gay and transgender people who live in rural areas, and the predominantly urban media representations of gay and transgender people. In several respects, the conflict is merely perceived and is not real. It is at these junctures of perceived conflict that we can draw important lessons for bridging the cultural divide, thereby protecting LGBTQ people across geographic spaces. This Article examines the sources and modern manifestations of rural LGBTQ resentment to provide foundational insights for the ongoing fight to protect all vulnerable minorities. Pro-LGBTQ legislation and judicial opinions symbolize a changing America in which white rural inhabitants see their identities disappeqaring, devalued, and disrespected. The left, popularly represented in rural America as a group of urban elites, characterizes anti-LGBTQ views a bigoted, and many people in small towns feel victimized by this criticism. Drawing on a robust body of social science research, this Article suggests that these feelings of victimization lead to resentment when outside forces, like federal judges and state and big-city legislators, tell rural Americans how to act, think, and feel. Rural Americans resent undeserving minorities who have gained rights and recognition, in contrasts to the identities of, and at the perceived expense of, white, straight, working-class prestige. They resent that liberal, largely urban outsiders are telling them that they must change who they are to accomodate people they perceive as unlike them. Opposing LGBTQ rights is thus one mechanism to protect and assert rural identity. It is important to unearth and pay attention to white rural anti-LGBTQ resentment in the post-Obergefell era because it is part of a larger force animating conservation politics across the United States

The Charles C. Wise Library : a retrospective

The Charles C. Wise Library: A Retrospective presents the fascinating story of the “tremendous setting for learning” and contains beautiful photographs documenting the library’s growth from 1931 to 2006

Towards integrated island management: lessons from Lau, Malaita, for the implementation of a national approach to resource management in Solomon Islands

Solomon Islands has recently developed substantial policy aiming to support inshore fisheries management, conservation, climate change adaptation and ecosystem approaches to resource management. A large body of experience in community based approaches to management has developed but ôupscalingö and particularly the implementation of nation-wide approaches has received little attention so far. With the emerging challenges posed by climate change and the need for ecosystem wide and integrated approaches attracting serious donor attention, a national debate on the most effective approaches to implementation is urgently needed. This report discusses potential implementation of ôa cost-effective and integrated approach to resource management that is consistent with national policy and needsö based on a review of current policy and institutional structures and examination of a recent case study from Lau, Malaita using stakeholder, transaction and financial cost analyses.Resource management, Policies, Fishery management, Conservation, Environment management, ISEW, Pacific, Solomon Is., Malaita I.,

Export entrepreneurial-oriented behaviour and export performance

Predicting export performance remains an important issue at the heart of export research and management. This is because of the primary role of exporting to ensuring the profitability, growth and survival of firms. Given these and other benefits that firms stand to gain (and the challenges that firms face) for their active engagement in exporting, scholars have exerted efforts into explaining the causes of export success. Export marketing strategy, firm characteristics, capabilities and firms’ orientations towards export markets are some the variables studied. Firms’ entrepreneurial orientation towards export markets has been one important variable that has captured the attention of researchers. This study is an attempt to introduce an export context-specific entrepreneurial-oriented behaviour (or export EOB) to the study of antecedents of export performance. A theoretical model involving the relationship between export EOB (and its dimensions) and export performance is, therefore, developed and empirically tested using data from 212 exporting organisations. Findings suggest that firms’ overall level of export EOB is a major driver of export success. The study further establishes that a high level of market-oriented behaviour in exporting organisations can help firms to derive stronger benefits from their entrepreneurial activities. At the specific level of the export EOB components, results suggest that development of novel product innovations, high export risk-taking, and strong proactive and competitively aggressive behaviours can help exporting organisations to improve their performance. However, product innovation intensity and autonomy are negatively related to export performance, suggesting that high levels of these two behaviours might lead to poor export performance. Nevertheless, further analysis shows that the negative association between product innovation intensity and export performance becomes positive when moderated by product innovation novelty. In addition, the study shows that autonomy has indirect positive association with export performance through interaction with proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness. In other words, autonomy facilitates the effectiveness of proactive and competitive aggressive behaviours. Further analyses of moderating effect relationships reveal mixed results. Specifically, the study finds that export market orientation positively moderates the link between production innovation intensity and export performance. In addition, export customer dynamism positively moderates the association of product innovation novelty and risk-taking with export performance. On the contrary, export customer dynamism negatively moderates the link between product innovation intensity and export performance. Theoretical, export managerial and policy implications of these findings are discussed and useful areas for future research are proposed

Atanasoski, N. and Vora, K. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, London and Durham: Duke University Press. 2019. 240pp 99.95(cloth)99.95 (cloth) 25.95 (pbk) $25.95 (ebk). ISBN 978‐1‐4780‐0386‐1

No abstract available