Tamales & Bollos--Patrimonio De La Humanidad/World Heritage: Challenges Faced by Restoration Efforts in Panama City\u27s San Felipe Historic District

On a street comer in Panama City\u27s historic San Felipe neighborhood (and World Heritage Site) in December 2007, a vendor was selling tamales and bollos (traditional corn meal wraps). Few foods could be more typically Panamanian than these that were being sold in Panama City\u27s oldest neighborhood. The vendor cries bollospatrimonio de la humanidad or bollos-- patrimony of humanity. This vendor represents the dichotomy evident in San Felipe today. For the past 50 years, San Felipe has been a popular neighborhood with a majority low income residents, active street life, and cultural and social diversity. Moreover, the Presidential Palace, the Ministry of Government and Justice, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also made San Felipe one important node of political activity of the Nation. A two-decade-long movement to protect the architectural heritage of the neighborhood culminated in 1997 with designation of San Felipe as a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, as specified by the 1972 World Heritage Convention. Historic preservation legislation, the UNESCO declaration, and new legislation promoting restoration through economical and fiscal incentives has jumpstarted a dramatic process of restoration. The result has been increasing restoration activity with much more on the horizon. At the same time, the majority of the former residents (both renters and squatters) have been displaced by wealthier new owners. 2 Today, the price per square meter of restored residences in the historic district is among the highest in Panama City.3 The danger is that the historic neighborhood of San Felipe in the near future may contain many newly restored buildings occupied by high income (and foreign) residents. Many of these new residents will only spend a fraction of the year in Panama. Chic boutique restaurants will continue to multiply, and the deli will replace the Chinese-owned comer grocery. As a result, the typical Panamanian street life and culture may become increasingly absent, and social diversity may become a distant memory

Climate Change and Security: The Case of Florida

The low-lying subtropical Florida Peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the sea, is highly vulnerable to the manifestations of climate change. Rising sea levels are already responsable for significant coastal erosion that threatens infrastructure, real estate, and Florida’s subtropical habitats. The State lies in the path of hurricanes whose winds and storm surges pose great threats to life and property. Rising temperatures are likely to impact the most vulnerable sectors of the population, adversely impact agriculture, and threaten the health of Florida’s coral reef ecosystems. Some local governments are beginning to address the threats. However, the State of Florida irresponsibly continues to take a “business-as-usual” path

Globalization and the Pan-American high­way: Concerns for the Panama-Colombia border region of Darién-Chocó and its peoples

eng: The Darien - Chocó Region is a privileged but abandoned region - privileged because it enjoys rich biological and cultural diversities. As one of the most species-rich regions on earth, the region truly deserves its natural world heritage classification.' It is a biological, political, and economic crossroads that connects North and South America and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The region suffers, however, from a number of unfortunate realities. It is isolated from centers of power in Colombia and Panama, and government services and transportation infrastruc- ture are clearly deficient. Active colonization and deforestation fronts eat at the tropical forest ecosystem on both sides of the bor- der along existing roads. The region's communities display high levels of poverty and unsatisfied basic human needs. The area is rife with conflicts over land, power, and geopolitics. The Colombian portion of the region has been the scene of extreme political violence for more than twenty years that has caused a grave humanitarian crisis for indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations.I. INTRODUCTION ....................................... 550II. CHARACTERIZATION OF THE PANAMA-COLOMBIA BORDER REGION ..................................... 552III. HISTORY OF THE PAN-AMERICAN HIGHWAY AND THE ROAD CONSTRUCTION ................................. 572IV. CONCERNS ABOUT THE PAN-AMERICAN HIGHWAY ...... 592V. RECOMMENDATIONS .................................. 608VI. CONCLUSIONS ........................................ 61

Stylization of Pitch with Syllable-Based Linear Segments

Fundamental frequency contours for speech, as obtained by common pitch tracking algorithms, contain a great deal of fine detail that is unlikely to hold much perceptual significance for listeners. In our experiments, a radically reduced pitch contour consisting of a single linear segment for each syllable was found to judged as equally natural as the original pitch track by listeners, based on high-quality analysis-synthesis. We describe the algorithms both for segmenting speech into syllables based on fitting Gaussians to the energy envelope, and for approximating the pitch contour by independent linear segments for each syllable. We report our web-based test in which 40 listeners compared the stylized pitch contour resyntheses to equivalent resyntheses based on the original pitch track, and also to pitch tracks stylized by the existing Momel algorithm. Listeners preferred the original pitch contour to the linear approximation in only 60% of cases, where 50% would indicate random guessing. By contrast, the original was preferred over Momel in 74% of cases