Interactive Radio: A New Platform for Calm Computing

Interactive radio is proposed as a platform for Weiser's calm computing vision. An evaluation of CereProc's MyMyRadio is presented as a case study to highlight the potential and challenges of an interactive radio approach: the difficulty of transitioning between passive and active modes of interaction, and the challenge of designing such services. The evaluation showed: 1) A higher workload for MyMyRadio for active tasks compared to default applications (e.g. Facebook app); 2) No significant difference in workload for passive tasks (e.g. listening to audio rendered RSS updates vs Browser app); 3) A higher workload when listening to music within MyMyRadio vs iTunes; and 4) A preference for RSS feed content compared to content from social media. We conclude by discussing the potential of interactive radio as a platform for pervasive eyes-free services

Historical Reconstruction Reveals Recovery in Hawaiian Coral Reefs

Coral reef ecosystems are declining worldwide, yet regional differences in the trajectories, timing and extent of degradation highlight the need for in-depth regional case studies to understand the factors that contribute to either ecosystem sustainability or decline. We reconstructed social-ecological interactions in Hawaiian coral reef environments over 700 years using detailed datasets on ecological conditions, proximate anthropogenic stressor regimes and social change. Here we report previously undetected recovery periods in Hawaiian coral reefs, including a historical recovery in the MHI (∼AD 1400–1820) and an ongoing recovery in the NWHI (∼AD 1950–2009+). These recovery periods appear to be attributed to a complex set of changes in underlying social systems, which served to release reefs from direct anthropogenic stressor regimes. Recovery at the ecosystem level is associated with reductions in stressors over long time periods (decades+) and large spatial scales (>103 km2). Our results challenge conventional assumptions and reported findings that human impacts to ecosystems are cumulative and lead only to long-term trajectories of environmental decline. In contrast, recovery periods reveal that human societies have interacted sustainably with coral reef environments over long time periods, and that degraded ecosystems may still retain the adaptive capacity and resilience to recover from human impacts

Measuring local depletion of terrestrial game vertebrates by central-place hunters in rural Amazonia

The degree to which terrestrial vertebrate populations are depleted in tropical forests occupied by human communities has been the subject of an intense polarising debate that has important conservation implications. Conservation ecologists and practitioners are divided over the extent to which community-based subsistence offtake is compatible with ecologically functional populations of tropical forest game species. To quantify depletion envelopes of forest vertebrates around human communities, we deployed a total of 383 camera trap stations and 78 quantitative interviews to survey the peri-community areas controlled by 60 semi-subsistence communities over a combined area of over 3.2 million hectares in the Médio Juruá and Uatumã regions of Central-Western Brazilian Amazonia. Our results largely conform with prior evidence that hunting large-bodied vertebrates reduces wildlife populations near settlements, such that they are only found at a distance to settlements where they are hunted less frequently. Camera trap data suggest that a select few harvest-sensitive species, including lowland tapir, are either repelled or depleted by human communities. Nocturnal and cathemeral species were detected relatively more frequently in disturbed areas close to communities, but individual species did not necessarily shift their activity patterns. Group biomass of all species was depressed in the wider neighbourhood of urban areas rather than communities. Interview data suggest that species traits, especially group size and body mass, mediate these relationships. Large-bodied, large-group-living species are detected farther from communities as reported by experienced informants. Long-established communities in our study regions have not “emptied” the surrounding forest. Low human population density and low hunting offtake due to abundant sources of alternative aquatic protein, suggest that these communities represent a best-case scenario for sustainable hunting of wildlife for food, thereby providing a conservative assessment of game depletion. Given this ‘best-case’ camera trap and interview-based evidence for hunting depletion, regions with higher human population densities, external trade in wildlife and limited access to alternative protein will likely exhibit more severe depletion

Persistent Place-Making in Prehistory: the Creation, Maintenance, and Transformation of an Epipalaeolithic Landscape

Most archaeological projects today integrate, at least to some degree, how past people engaged with their surroundings, including both how they strategized resource use, organized technological production, or scheduled movements within a physical environment, as well as how they constructed cosmologies around or created symbolic connections to places in the landscape. However, there are a multitude of ways in which archaeologists approach the creation, maintenance, and transformation of human-landscape interrelationships. This paper explores some of these approaches for reconstructing the Epipalaeolithic (ca. 23,000–11,500 years BP) landscape of Southwest Asia, using macro- and microscale geoarchaeological approaches to examine how everyday practices leave traces of human-landscape interactions in northern and eastern Jordan. The case studies presented here demonstrate that these Epipalaeolithic groups engaged in complex and far-reaching social landscapes. Examination of the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic (EP) highlights that the notion of “Neolithization” is somewhat misleading as many of the features we use to define this transition were already well-established patterns of behavior by the Neolithic. Instead, these features and practices were enacted within a hunter-gatherer world and worldview

Evidence confirms an anthropic origin of Amazonian Dark Earths

Archaeology of the America

Evidence confirms an anthropic origin of Amazonian Dark Earths.

Arising from: Silva et al. Nature Communications https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20184-2 (2021

Chloroplast DNA Microsatellites Reveal Contrasting Phylogeographic Structure in Mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla King, Meliaceae) from Amazonia and Central America

Big-leaf mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) is one of the most valuable and overharvested timber trees of tropical America. A description of the organization of genetic variation across its broad range would be useful for management of genetic diversity and for understanding its demographic history. Here we report on a phylogeographic analysis of mahogany based on six polymorphic cpDNA simple sequence repeat loci (cpSSRs) genotyped in 16 populations distributed across the Brazilian Amazon and Mesoamerica (N = 245 individuals). Of the 31 cpDNA haplotypes identified, 15 occurred in Amazonia and 16 in Mesoamerica with no single haplotype shared between the two regions. The populations from Central America showed moderate differentiation (FST = 0.36) while within population genetic diversity was generally high (mean Nei's HE = 0.639). In contrast, the Amazonian populations were strongly differentiated (FST = 0.95) and contained low haplotype diversity (mean HE = 0.176), with the exception of the highly diverse Marajoara population from the Eastern Amazon (HE = 0.925). SAMOVA identified a single Mesoamerican phylogroup and four Amazonian phylogroups, indicating stronger phylogeographic structure within Amazonia. The results demonstrate high levels of cpDNA variation and differentiation of regional S. macrophylla populations, and provide the first evidence of a major phylogeographic break between Mesoamerican and South American mahogany populations

The domestication of Amazonia before European conquest

During the twentieth century, Amazonia was widely regarded as relatively pristine nature, little impacted by human history. This view remains popular despite mounting evidence of substantial human influence over millennial scales across the region. Here, we review the evidence of an anthropogenic Amazonia in response to claims of sparse populations across broad portions of the region. Amazonia was a major centre of crop domestication, with at least 83 native species containing populations domesticated to some degree. Plant domestication occurs in domesticated landscapes, including highly modified Amazonian dark earths (ADEs) associated with large settled populations and that may cover greater than 0.1% of the region. Populations and food production expanded rapidly within land management systems in the mid-Holocene, and complex societies expanded in resource-rich areas creating domesticated landscapes with profound impacts on local and regional ecology. ADE food production projections support estimates of at least eight million people in 1492. By this time, highly diverse regional systems had developed across Amazonia where subsistence resources were created with plant and landscape domestication, including earthworks. This review argues that the Amazonian anthrome was no less socio-culturally diverse or populous than other tropical forested areas of the world prior to European conquest