Research planning in the face of change:the human role in reindeer/caribou systems

Reindeer/caribou (Rangifer tarandus) constitute a biological resource of vital importance to the physical and cultural survival of Arctic residents since time immemorial. Recent and possible future economic, social and ecological changes raise concern for sustainability of these resources and the well-being of those who depend on them. In February 1999 eighty scientists, reindeer/caribou users and resource managers gathered in Rovaniemi, Finland, for an interdisciplinary workshop to develop a circumpolar research plan that addressed the sustainability of humanreindeer/caribou systems. Small working groups addressed six themes: hunting systems, herding systems, rengeland/habitat protection, minimizing industrial impacts, maintaining the strength of indigenous cultures, and responding to global change. The resulting Research Plan cells for interdisciplinary comparative studies, advancement of tools for assessing cumulative effects, implementation of regional and a circumpolar monitoring and assessment programmes, and cultural studies on the transmission of knowledge. Cross-cutting directives for future research include:• improving humans’ability to anticipate and respond to change;• understanding better the dynamics of human-reindeer/caribou systems;• developing research methods that are both more instructive and less intrusive;• facilitating open communication among groups with interests in reindeer/caribou resources;• organizing researchers into a strong, coordinated network;• re-framing the conventional research paradigm to be more inclusive of differing cultural perspectives.Three follow-up initiatives are proposed: 1) development of a web-based resource on the human role in reindeer/caribou systems (www.rangifer.net); establishment of a Profile of Herds database to support comparative research; and 3) convening of working groups to address specific problems identified by workshop participants

Resolving Mismatches in U.S. Ocean Governance

Problems in ocean resource management derive from governance, not science. Ocean zoning would replace mismatched and fragmented approaches with integrated regulatory domains

Detection of Affective States From Text and Speech for Real-Time Human–Computer Interaction

Objective: The goal of this work is to develop and test an automated system methodology that can detect emotion from text and speech features. Background: Affective human-computer interaction will be critical for the success of new systems that will be prevalent in the 21st century. Such systems will need to properly deduce human emotional state before they can determine how to best interact with people. Method: Corpora and machine learning classification models are used to train and test a methodology for emotion detection. The methodology uses a stepwise approach to detect sentiment in sentences by first filtering out neutral sentences, then distinguishing among positive, negative, and five emotion classes. Results: Results of the classification between emotion and neutral sentences achieved recall accuracies as high as 77% in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) corpus and 61% in the Louisiana State University medical drama (LSU-MD) corpus for emotion samples. Once neutral sentences were filtered out, the methodology achieved accuracy scores for detecting negative sentences as high as 92.3%. Conclusion: Results of the feature analysis indicate that speech spectral features are better than speech prosodic features for emotion detection. Accumulated sentiment composition text features appear to be very important as well. This work contributes to the study of human communication by providing a better understanding of how language factors help to best convey human emotion and how to best automate this process. Application: Results of this study can be used to develop better automated assistive systems that interpret human language and respond to emotions through 3-D computer graphics. Copyright © 2012, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society

Security spheres: a phenomenology of maritime spatial practices

This article explores maritime protection zones (MPZ), which are being created in the territorial waters of a number of European states. Through the work of Gaston Bachelard and Peter Sloterdijk, the article analyses maritime zonation as a paradigmatic global security mechanism. It examines how maritime spatial planning seeks to reconfigure sea-space into multi-dimensional spheres of predictability and rationality. These processes, it proposes, seek to routinize the use of sea-space and reconcile tensions between the governance of land and sea, and between fixed infrastructure and mobile capital flows. The political and economic redistribution at stake in the construction of a global network of vast maritime zones, which act as hubs of wealth creation and environmental management, creates further tensions where commercial and military security imaginaries meet local and ecological interests. The article traces the ontology of multi-dimensional zonation and concludes that space which emerges from a pluralist and less anthropocentric understanding of the maritime would provide more effective security