10,967 research outputs found
Fostering Critical Thinking about Climate Change: Applying Community Psychology to an Environmental Education Project with Youth
This article argues for the participation of community psychology in issues of global climate change. The knowledge accumulated and experience gained in the discipline of community psychology have great relevance to many topics related to the environment. Practitioners of community psychology could therefore make significant contributions to climate change mitigation. To illustrate this assertion, we describe an education project conducted with youth engaged in a community-based environmental organization. This initiative was motivated by the idea that engaged and critically aware youth often become change agents for social movements. Towards this purpose, rather than using mass marketing strategies to motivate small behavior changes, this project focused intensively on a few youth with the vision that these youth would also influence those around them to rethink their environmental habits. This project was influenced by five community psychology concepts: stakeholder participation, ecological and systems thinking, social justice, praxis, and empirical grounding. In this article we discuss the influence of these concepts on the projectâs outcomes, as measured through an evaluative study conducted to assess the impacts of the project on the participating youth in terms of their thinking and action. The contributions of community psychology were found to have greatly impacted the quality of the project and the outcomes experienced by the youth
The relationship between solar flares and solar sector boundaries
A superposed epoch analysis of 1964-1970 solar flares shows a marked increase in flare occurrence within a day of (-+) solar sector boundaries, as well as a local minimum in flare occurrence near (+-) sector boundaries. This perference for (-+) boundaries is more noticeable for Northern Hemisphere flares, where these polarities match the Hale polarity law, but is not reversed in the south. Plage regions do not show such a perference
Towards an agri-environment index for biodiversity conservation payment schemes
The aim of the paper is to give suggestions about how an agri-environment index can be designed by taking into account specific ecological and economical factors that reflect benefits and costs of biodiversity conservation. Main findings are that the general structure of an agri-environment index is recommended to be a benefits-to-cost ratio, whereby the conservation benefits are accounted for by the following factors which evaluate i) certain criteria that value the ecological quality of a site and point out its significance for biodiversity conservation (Conservation Significance Factor), ii) a criterion that reflects the connectivity of the site which is an important factor for species migration (Connectivity Factor) and iii) criteria that estimate the potential biodiversity outcomes induced by specific management actions (Conservation Management Factor). The Cost Factor reflects the amount of money that the landholder demands as compensation payment for his conservation services. The paper points out that an agri-environment index is a promising approach to encourage and compensate farmers for biodiversity-friendly management actions. Thereby, an improvement of the effectiveness and efficiency of European conservation payment schemes is a decisive contribution to biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes.agri-environmental policy, biodiversity benefits index, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, environmental benefits index, rural development
Sand Transport Studies in Monterey Bay, California: Annual Report, Part 5, 1973
(PDF contains 71 pages
"Virus hunting" using radial distance weighted discrimination
Motivated by the challenge of using DNA-seq data to identify viruses in human
blood samples, we propose a novel classification algorithm called "Radial
Distance Weighted Discrimination" (or Radial DWD). This classifier is designed
for binary classification, assuming one class is surrounded by the other class
in very diverse radial directions, which is seen to be typical for our virus
detection data. This separation of the 2 classes in multiple radial directions
naturally motivates the development of Radial DWD. While classical machine
learning methods such as the Support Vector Machine and linear Distance
Weighted Discrimination can sometimes give reasonable answers for a given data
set, their generalizability is severely compromised because of the linear
separating boundary. Radial DWD addresses this challenge by using a more
appropriate (in this particular case) spherical separating boundary.
Simulations show that for appropriate radial contexts, this gives much better
generalizability than linear methods, and also much better than conventional
kernel based (nonlinear) Support Vector Machines, because the latter methods
essentially use much of the information in the data for determining the shape
of the separating boundary. The effectiveness of Radial DWD is demonstrated for
real virus detection.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS869 in the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
- âŠ