06-05 Can Climate Change Save Lives? A comment on “Economy-wide estimates of the implications of climate change: Human health”

In a recent article in this journal, Francesco Bosello, Roberto Roson, and Richard Tol make the surprising prediction that the first stages of global warming will, on balance, save a large number of lives. Bosello et al. fail to substantiate this remarkable estimate, and they make multiple mistaken or misleading assumptions. They rely on research that identifies a simple empirical relationship between temperature and mortality, but ignores the countervailing effect of human adaptation to gradual changes in average temperature. While focusing on small changes in average temperatures, they ignore the important health impacts of extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, floods, and hurricanes. They extrapolate this pattern far beyond the level that is apparently supported by their principal sources, and introduce an arbitrary assumption that may bias the result toward finding benefits from warming.

06-06 “European Chemical Policy and the United States: The Impacts of REACH”

The European Union is moving toward adoption of its new Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) policy, an innovative system of chemicals regulation that will provide crucial information on the safety profile of chemicals used in industry. Chemicals produced elsewhere, such as in the United States, and exported to Europe will have to meet the same standards as chemicals produced within the European Union. What is at stake for the U.S. is substantial: we estimate that chemical exports to Europe that are subject to REACH amount to about $14 billion per year, and are directly and indirectly responsible for 54,000 jobs. Revenues and employment of this magnitude dwarf the costs of compliance with REACH, which will amount to no more than$14 million per year. Even if, as the U.S. chemicals industry has argued, REACH is a needless mistake, it will be far more profitable to pay the modest compliance costs than to lose access to the enormous European market.

CRED: A New Model of Climate and Development

This paper describes a new model, Climate and Regional Economics of Development (CRED), which is designed to analyze the economics of climate and development choices. Its principal innovations are the treatment of global equity, calculation of the optimum interregional flows of resources, and use of McKinsey marginal abatement cost curves to project the cost of mitigation. The model shows more equitable scenarios have better climate outcomes; the challenge of climate policy is to persuade high-income countries to accept the need for both international equity and climate protection.climate economics, development, global equity, abatement costs, integrated assessment models

Light travels across time

This paper explores my relationship to light, time, and material through the lens of fiction in it’s varying forms, couched in personal narrative, which, although technically non-fiction, could just as easily be categorized as a construction, since writing is a process of choosing the information you find pertinent to your task, and excluding the rest. Consequently, the abstract of this paper may also be the most accurate part, which is not to say the truestStudio Ar

Auditory-motor adaptation is reduced in adults who stutter but not in children who stutter

Previous studies have shown that adults who stutter produce smaller corrective motor responses to compensate for unexpected auditory perturbations in comparison to adults who do not stutter, suggesting that stuttering may be associated with deficits in integration of auditory feedback for online speech monitoring. In this study, we examined whether stuttering is also associated with deficiencies in integrating and using discrepancies between expect ed and received auditory feedback to adaptively update motor programs for accurate speech production. Using a sensorimotor adaptation paradigm, we measured adaptive speech responses to auditory formant frequency perturbations in adults and children who stutter and their matched nonstuttering controls. We found that the magnitude of the speech adaptive response for children who stutter did not differ from that of fluent children. However, the adaptation magnitude of adults who stutter in response to formant perturbation was significantly smaller than the adaptation magnitude of adults who do not stutter. Together these results indicate that stuttering is associated with deficits in integrating discrepancies between predicted and received auditory feedback to calibrate the speech production system in adults but not children. This auditory-motor integration deficit thus appears to be a compensatory effect that develops over years of stuttering

No se necesita pasaporte: aprender con innovación social por medio de la colaboración online

In midst the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, there is an inherent need to consider the effects on education in poorer regions of the globe. Students from Western countries and more privileged backgrounds have managed to continue learning albeit Universities having closed in the most difficult moments of the Pandemic. Students from disadvantaged regions and poorer backgrounds however, very often remained isolated when their institution shut down during the pandemic. In this paper the authors discuss a socially innovative initiative that enables building a community of international learning based on a popular methodology named COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning). The methodology relies on the use of openly available online platforms that allow students and lecturers to be connected digitally, thus making learning resources available to students no matter their location. It allows for an intense peer-to-peer learning environment and promotes the virtual teamwork on real cases and assignmentsEn medio de la actual pandemia de COVID19, hay una necesidad inherente de considerar los efectos en la educación en las regiones más pobres del mundo. Los estudiantes de los países occidentales y de entornos más privilegiados han conseguido seguir aprendiendo, aunque las Universidades hayan cerrado debido a la pandemia. Sin embargo, los estudiantes de regiones desfavorecidas se quedaron, a menudo, aislados cuando su institución cerró durante la pandemia. En este artículo, las autoras discuten una iniciativa socialmente innovadora que permite construir una comunidad de aprendizaje internacional basada en una metodología popular llamada COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning). Basada en el uso de plataformas online de libre acceso que permiten conectar digitalmente a estudiantes y profesores, poniendo así los recursos de aprendizaje a disposición de los estudiantes sin importar su ubicación. Permite un entorno de aprendizaje entre pares y promueve el trabajo en equipo virtual sobre casos y tareas reale

Schools in vulnerable contexts: Galapagos Islands’ principals and accountability

Rural and remote areas present challenges in the organization of schools, especially when implementing new practices. In this study, we examine the leadership challenges faced by principals in the Galapagos Islands, under the Ministry of Education in Ecuador. The purpose of this case is to examine the work of principals leading schools in this unique context observing the expectations and demands for principals under a newly implemented accountability system. Significant in this study is the examination of leadership in highly vulnerable contexts, including the remote islands of Galapagos, and leadership values respective to the success of schools and communities

Jubileo 2000

Series 8: Altadena, Southern California / Jubilee (2000-2012): Spanish Files, Notebook 10https://digitalcommons.fuller.edu/kinsler-tee/1058/thumbnail.jp

Sarah Piatt and the politics of mourning

The American poet Sarah Piatt (1836-1919) addresses crucial dilemmas of modem identity, in particular the traumatic effects of war, the complexities of racial relationships and the unsettling dynamics of urban life. Although a respected poet in her day, Piatt's work disappeared after her death from the canon of American literature, and it is only in the last five years that scholars have begun to realise the importance of her poetry and to assess its depth and scope. This thesis contributes to the process of assessing the significance of Piatt's work, and contextualises her in relation to a number of other nineteenth-century American writers, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Chestnut and Frederick Douglass. I focus on the rift between Piatt's Southern plantation childhood and her married life in the industrial North, and upon how the Civil War created irreconcilable conflicts and divided loyalties in her life, which are played out in her writing. I emphasise the Civil War as a moment of personal and cultural trauma, which inaugurates what I term Piatfs 'politics of mourning'. I explore her politics of mourning in relation to psychoanalytic theory. While Freud sought to rid mourning of its ambivalence and interminability, and to displace these onto melancholia, Piatt's writing blurs the boundary between them. Instead of dispensing with mourning too quickly, too easily, Piatt recognises that one cannot avoid being haunted by the past and by the dead. She engages in a dialogue with the past and explores how the desire of the dead continues to be played out by the living. In contrast to Northern writers like Phelps, Stowe and Whitman, who seek to heal the nation by appealing to the idea of sacrifice, and the pastoral, in order to console the bereaved and envisage a redeemed body politic, Piatt turns away from consolation. Instead, she takes mourning in a direction that leads towards an exploration of the uncanny, the ghost-like and the hallucinatory. She explores the stifling effects of mourning in the South, and the way in which the North buried the unpleasant realities of the war, in the process of memorialising it. Piatt remained deeply emotionally invested in the South, yet she was also very critical of the Confederate Cause, and in her work she repeatedly interrogates her own investment in an idealised version of the antebellum South. I examine the ways in which Piatt scrutinises Southern discourses of race and slavery. I focus in particular on how she seeks to articulate a language of mourning for the South while also repeatedly exposing, and destabilising Southern fictions of mastery