Sky Burials: Ecological Necessity or Religious Custom?

This paper investigates the death ritual of sky burials in Tibetan Buddhism and the reason this ritual is practiced. There are contrasting justifications of the practice that span from religious significance to practical rationales. I argue sky burials are performed out of religious custom and that they are not practiced due to the environmental barriers present in the Tibetan plateau, as some scholars believe. This paper explains how Tibetan Buddhists perceive death, the various elements of the sky burial ritual and how it is performed, and lastly the varied interpretations of justifications for the ritual

Global Management Effectiveness Study: Integrated Social and Ecological Report for Non-node and Node Sites

The purpose of this study is to provide a critical assessment of the implementation, impact, and performance of Marine Managed Area (MMA) projects to serve as a basis for improved planning and implementation of new MMA projects worldwide. The specific objectives of the study are (1) to determine the socioeconomic, governance and ecological effects of MMAs; (2) to determine the critical factors influencing MMA effects, as well as the impact of the timing of those factors on the effects of the MMA; and (3) to provide tools for predicting MMA effects based on ecological, socioeconomic and governance variable

Predicting RAD-seq marker numbers across the eukaryotic tree of life

© The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Genome Biology and Evolution 7 (2015): 3207-3225, doi:10.1093/gbe/evv210.High-throughput sequencing of reduced representation libraries obtained through digestion with restriction enzymes—generically known as restriction site associated DNA sequencing (RAD-seq)—is a common strategy to generate genome-wide genotypic and sequence data from eukaryotes. A critical design element of any RAD-seq study is knowledge of the approximate number of genetic markers that can be obtained for a taxon using different restriction enzymes, as this number determines the scope of a project, and ultimately defines its success. This number can only be directly determined if a reference genome sequence is available, or it can be estimated if the genome size and restriction recognition sequence probabilities are known. However, both scenarios are uncommon for nonmodel species. Here, we performed systematic in silico surveys of recognition sequences, for diverse and commonly used type II restriction enzymes across the eukaryotic tree of life. Our observations reveal that recognition sequence frequencies for a given restriction enzyme are strikingly variable among broad eukaryotic taxonomic groups, being largely determined by phylogenetic relatedness. We demonstrate that genome sizes can be predicted from cleavage frequency data obtained with restriction enzymes targeting “neutral” elements. Models based on genomic compositions are also effective tools to accurately calculate probabilities of recognition sequences across taxa, and can be applied to species for which reduced representation data are available (including transcriptomes and neutral RAD-seq data sets). The analytical pipeline developed in this study, PredRAD (https://github.com/phrh/PredRAD), and the resulting databases constitute valuable resources that will help guide the design of any study using RAD-seq or related methods.This research was supported by the Office of Ocean Exploration and Research of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NA09OAR4320129 to T.S.); the Division of Ocean Sciences of the National Science Foundation (OCE-1131620 to T.S.); the Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NNX09AB76G to T.S.); and the Academic Programs Office (Ocean Ventures Fund to S.H.), the Ocean Exploration Institute (Fellowship support to T.M.S.), and the Ocean Life Institute of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (internal grant to T.M.S. and S.H.)

A comparative study of Mackay-Marg, Durham-Langham and Tonomat tonometry

A comparative study of Mackay-Marg, Durham-Langham and Tonomat tonometr

Methods for Managing Human–Deer Conflicts in Urban, Suburban, and Exurban Areas

This monograph identifies challenges and benefits associated with many human–deer conflict mitigation actions as well as methods to monitor the response of deer populations to management actions. Deer exploit urban, suburban, and exurban areas where human populations provide anthropogenic attractants, either intentionally or inadvertently, which often leads to human–deer conflicts. Mitigating actions have varying degrees of efficacy and may not be effective or accepted in every situation. Wildlife and municipal managers must work together to seek methods to reduce attractants, mitigate conflicts, and perpetuate the conservation of wildlife species that adds to the appreciation of nature in our lives.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/hwi_monographs/1001/thumbnail.jp

Photoinduced transient stark spectroscopy in organic semiconductors: a method for charge mobility determination in the picosecond regime.

Published versio

Leading learning: Theorising principals' support for teacher PD in Ontario

This paper describes and theorizes principals' support for teacher professional development ('PD') during a time of strong provincial pressure for an increased focus upon literacy, numeracy, and improvements in standardized test scores in elementary schools in Ontario, Canada. The paper draws upon semi-structured interviews with 12 principals in one school district to reveal tensions between principals' support for professional development associated with these provincial emphases, and advocacy for professional development relevant to the specific needs of their school sites. To explore these competing priorities, the paper draws upon Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the social world as comprising identifiable and contested social 'fields', each containing individuals and groups with particular and competing socially-inscribed dispositions, or 'habitus'. At the same time, the paper uses principals' responses to validate and extend normative understandings of 'leadership habitus'. While provincial pressures are revealed as having a significant impact upon principals' habitus, an argument is made that the capacity to take local context into account needs to be foregrounded more strongly in current normative conceptions of leadership habitus

SoundCloud and Bandcamp as alternative music platforms

We examine two ‘producer-oriented’ audio distribution platforms, SoundCloud and Bandcamp, that have been important repositories for the hopes of musicians, commentators and audiences that digital technologies and cultural platforms might promote democratisation of the cultural industries, and we compare their achievements and limitations in this respect. We show that the emancipatory elements enshrined in SoundCloud’s ‘bottom-up’ abundance are compromised by two elements that underpin the platform: the problematic ‘culture of connectivity’ of the social media systems to which it must remain integrally linked, and the systems of intellectual property that the firm has been increasingly compelled to enforce. By contrast, it seems that Bandcamp has been relatively stable in financial terms while being at odds with some key aspects of ‘platformization’, and we explore the possibility that some of the platform’s apparent success may derive from how its key features makes it attractive to indie musicians and fans drawn to an independent ethos. Nevertheless, we argue, even while in some respects Bandcamp acts more effectively as an ‘alternative’ than does SoundCloud, the former is also congruent economically and discursively with how platforms capitalise on the activity of self-managing, self-auditing, specialist, worker-users