"Ecologies of Empire: From Qing Cosmopolitanism to Modern Nationalism"

According to modern ecological theory, ecosystems are fragile combinations of diverse elements, and their resilience—or ability to recover after external shocks—varies as the system develops. Under conditions of low resilience, the system can collapse unpredictably and shift into a new state. Biodiversity in ecosystems, however, helps to maintain resilience. These basic natural principles also help to illuminate the social processes of empires. Like ecosystems, empires expand, grow, and collapse unpredictably when they lose the ability to respond to external shocks. Just as biodiversity increases resilience, imperial formations prosper when they are more cosmopolitan, incorporating diverse cultural elements that foster institutional innovation, and they suffer collapse when they limit participation by outside challengers. The author develops this analogy between ecosystems and imperial formations through a discussion of the Ming and Qing empires, concluding with reflections on the Maoist production system and the current resilience of China today. Keywords: ecology, empires, environmental history, famine, Ming, Qing, China, Mao, resilience, sustainability, diversit

The Changing Scope of the United States\u27 Trust Duties to American Indian Tribes: Navajo Nation v. United States

The mineral wealth beneath Native American lands has been an enduring source of controversy with respect to treaty relations between Indian Tribes and the United States government and the contours of the United States\u27 trust duties to the Tribes. Whereas in past years the process by which minerals like coal have been converted to capital amounted to blatant exploitation of America\u27s indigenous populations, Indian governments have acquired more control over the extraction of their minerals throughout the twentieth century. That this control remains severely limited both by federal regulations and the United States government\u27s complicity with powerful representatives of the mineral industry is exemplified by the Navajo Nation\u27s longstanding struggle to obtain a market rate for its coal resources. This Note examines the Navajo Nation\u27s claim that the United States breached its trust duties of care, candor, and loyalty by intervening to the Navajo\u27s detriment in the negotiation of a mining lease between the Navajo and Peabody Coal, the world\u27s largest private sector coal company. This litigation has stretched on for decades, but today the case is set to be heard, for the second time, by the United States Supreme Court. This Note seeks to examine the previous iterations of Navajo Nation v. United States in the context of the Federal-Tribal trust doctrine and in light of recent trends in the Supreme Court\u27s dispositions of cases implicating federal Indian law. Ultimately, it concludes that the Supreme Court\u27s current approach to the trust doctrine is inconsistent with controlling precedent and inimical to tribal sovereignty and self-determination

Why does the production of some learners not grammaticalize?

In this paper we follow two beginning learners of English, Andrea and Santo, over a period of 2 years as they develop means to structure the declarative utterances they produce in various production tasks, and then we look at the following problem: In the early stages of acquisition, both learners develop a common learner variety; during these stages, we see a picture of two learner varieties developing similar regularities determined by the minimal requirements of the tasks we examine. Andrea subsequently develops further morphosyntactic means to achieve greater cohesion in his discourse. But Santo does not. Although we can identify contexts where the grammaticalization of Andrea's production allows him to go beyond the initial constraints of his variety, it is much more difficult to ascertain why Santo, faced with the same constraints in the same contexts, does not follow this path. Some lines of investigation into this problem are then suggested

The basic variety (or: Couldn't natural languages be much simpler?)

In this article, we discuss the implications of the fact that adult second language learners (outside the classroom) universally develop a well-structured, efficient and simple form of language–the Basic Variety (BV). Three questions are asked as to (1) the structural properties of the BV, (2) the status of these properties and (3) why some structural properties of ‘fully fledged’ languages are more complex. First, we characterize the BV in four respects: its lexical repertoire, the principles according to which utterances are structured, and temporality and spatiality expressed. The organizational principles proposed are small in number, and interact. We analyse this interaction, describing how the BV is put to use in various complex verbal tasks, in order to establish both what its communicative potentialities are, and also those discourse contexts where the constraints come into conflict and where the variety breaks down. This latter phenomenon provides a partial answer to the third question,concerning the relative complexity of ‘fully fledged’ languages–they have devices to deal with such cases. As for the second question, it is argued firstly that the empirically established continuity of the adult acquisition process precludes any assignment of the BV to a mode of linguistic expression (e.g., ‘protolanguage’) distinct from that of ‘fully fledged’ languages and, moreover, that the organizational constraints of the BV belong to the core attributes of the human language capacity, whereas a number of complexifications not attested in the BV are less central properties of this capacity. Finally, it is shown that the notion of feature strength, as used in recent versions of Generative Grammar, allows a straightforward characterization of the BV as a special case of an I-language, in the sense of this theory. Under this perspective, the acquisition of an Ilanguage beyond the BV can essentially be described as a change in feature strength

Correlation of performance between Eyespan, Wayne Saccadic Fixator, Accuvision, and Reaction Plus

This study investigated the relationship between performance on the Eyespan 2064, Wayne Saccadic Fixator and Accuvision 1000. Additionally, this study investigated whether a correlation exists between measures of reaction and response times as measured by the Reaction Plus, and eye hand coordination as measured with these three devices. In Phase I, forty four subjects were assigned a random order of testing for the Eyespan, Wayne and Accuvision. Phase II consisted of testing all forty four subjects on the Reaction Plus. Statistical analysis did not show a significant relationship for performance on the Accuvision versus the Eyespan or Wayne. However, a significant correlation did exist between reaction time and performance on all three instruments. Response time showed a correlation with the Eyespan and Accuvision, but not with the Wayne. These results indicate that although there is some relationship between eye-hand reaction and/or response speeds with all three of these instruments, performance cannot reliably be compared between these eyehand devices

The Difference in Physical Health Between High-Income and Low-Income Populations in Tennessee

Good overall physical health can be a protective factor against cognitive decline in aging. A good diet, routine exercise, and mindfulness to personal mental health are three main aspects that help determine one’s overall well-being. Socioeconomic status may play a factor in the ability to have access to resources for all three aspects of overall health previously stated. This data is important because it may impact how future researchers go about finding ways to help underprivileged communities. This study aimed to report significant factors that contribute to physical health in relation to cognitive aging from studying six different counties throughout the state of Tennessee. We obtained this data from mySidewalk which is a platform that helps organize and share data to the general public. This study consisted of residents of the highest and lowest average income counties. The low-income counties consisted of Jackson County, Clay County, and Hancock County while the high-income counties consisted of Williamson County, Davidson County, and Wilson County. We measured three variables in this study which consisted of seniors one-mile urban or ten-miles rural with low access to healthy food in ages 65 and older, poor mental health, and no leisure-time physical activity among adults. We hypothesized people with poor physical health in relation to aging tend to face issues with cognitive functioning and found that our hypothesis was supported. Poor mental health was the only variable that did not show significant difference between the high- and low-income counties. Our analysis revealed that lower income populations may lack in fields including but limited not limited to transportation, lack of stores in the area, and lack of adequate time to go grocery shopping. This contributes to why there is a disparity in cognitive decline in relation to aging between high- and low-income populations in Tennessee

Advanced timeline systems

The Mission Planning Division of the Mission Operations Laboratory at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is responsible for scheduling experiment activities for space missions controlled at MSFC. In order to draw statistically relevant conclusions, all experiments must be scheduled at least once and may have repeated performances during the mission. An experiment consists of a series of steps which, when performed, provide results pertinent to the experiment's functional objective. Since these experiments require a set of resources such as crew and power, the task of creating a timeline of experiment activities for the mission is one of resource constrained scheduling. For each experiment, a computer model with detailed information of the steps involved in running the experiment, including crew requirements, processing times, and resource requirements is created. These models are then loaded into the Experiment Scheduling Program (ESP) which attempts to create a schedule which satisfies all resource constraints. ESP uses a depth-first search technique to place each experiment into a time interval, and a scoring function to evaluate the schedule. The mission planners generate several schedules and choose one with a high value of the scoring function to send through the approval process. The process of approving a mission timeline can take several months. Each timeline must meet the requirements of the scientists, the crew, and various engineering departments as well as enforce all resource restrictions. No single objective is considered in creating a timeline. The experiment scheduling problem is: given a set of experiments, place each experiment along the mission timeline so that all resource requirements and temporal constraints are met and the timeline is acceptable to all who must approve it. Much work has been done on multicriteria decision making (MCDM). When there are two criteria, schedules which perform well with respect to one criterion will often perform poorly with respect to the other. One schedule dominates another if it performs strictly better on one criterion, and no worse on the other. Clearly, dominated schedules are undesireable. A nondominated schedule can be generated by some sort of optimization problem. Generally there are two approaches: the first is a hierarchical approach while the second requires optimizing a weighting or scoring function

China Marches West: Character List

Character list of Chinese terms in book China Marches West