Environmental Resource Management in Borderlands: Evolution from Competing Interests to Common Aversions

Great enthusiasm is attached to the emergence of cross-border regions (CBRs) as a new institutional arrangement for dealing with local cross-border environmental resource management and other issues that remain too distant from national capitals and/or too expensive to be addressed in the traditional topocraticmanner requiring instead local adhocratic methods. This study briefly discusses the perceived value of CBRs and necessary and sufficient conditions for the successful and sustainable development of such places. Then, assuming that necessary conditions can be met, the study investigates an intriguing hypothesis concerning the catalyzing of sustainable consensus for cross-border resource management based on a game theoretical approach that employs the use of dilemma of common aversion rather than the more traditional dilemma of competing common interests. Using this lens to investigate a series of events on the Pacific northwestern Canadian-American border in a part of the Fraser Lowland, we look for evidence of the emergence of an active and sustainable CBR to address local trans-border resource management issues. Although our micro-level scale fails to conclusively demonstrate such evidence, it does demonstrate the value of using this approach and suggests a number of avenues for further research

Using Predictive Analysis for Meals on Wheels

We are living in the age of data. With the vast multitude of information flowing around us, we have an urgency to keep it, analyze it, and pull what we can from it. For our project, we are helping Meals on Wheels of Northwest Indiana do just that with the information they have. In our project, we will be helping the Meals on Wheels team sift through their data to find the characteristics of their clients, especially those that have signed up to pay for their food, so that they may better market to those individuals. We will be doing this be using Python scripts to clean the data, explore that data with manual review, and then create visualizations and statistics using Bokeh graphing tool, Excel, and other various tools

HIV Tat Protein Activates Endothelial Cells through NFκB and MAP Kinase Pathways.

HIV infection has been shown to predispose patients to accelerated development of heart disease. One mechanism for this pathology may involve endothelial activation either by HIV itself or by its secreted proteins, gp120 (a viral envelope protein) and tat (a protein that upregulates transcription of viral genes). We have studied the effects of gp120 and tat on signaling and production of inflammatory cytokines by Human Pulmonary Artery Endothelial Cells (HPAEC). HPAEC were stimulated at varying time points with combinations of gp120, tat, and monokines (IL-1β and TNFα). Cell lysate fractions were analyzed for MAP Kinase activity and NFκB activation, and culture supernatants were assayed for inflammatory cytokines (IL-6 and IL-8). The production of IL-6 and IL-8 was significantly enhanced by tat but not by gp120. Both gp120 and tat, however, induced significant morphological changes in HPAEC. The only synergy noted was between high levels of tat and TNFα acting on the production of IL-6. When HPAEC were stimulated with IL-1β and TNFα, peak phosphorylation of p38 MAP Kinase was found at 45 minutes, while NFκB was maximally activated at two hours. Both the ERK1,2 and p38 cascades of MAP Kinase were activated by tat, and an increase in NFκB phosphorylation and translocation were noted. We conclude that the HIV tat protein could be involved in inflammatory changes in endothelium leading to the accelerated development of heart disease in HIV patients

Morphologic and stratigraphic evolution of the Antarctic Peninsula, Pacific margin

Rebesco et al. (1998) proposed a general depositional model that relates sediment drift evolution on the Antarctic Peninsula Pacific-margin continental rise to glacial processes on the continental shelf. In their model, terrigenous sediment was directly delivered to the rise and contributed to the construction of large sediment drifts when grounded ice extended to the shelf edge. In this scenario, large volumes of fluidized sediment by-passed the margin at the mouth of ice streams (i.e., fast flowing ice), whereas prograding slopes were constructed on those portions of the shelf margin between major ice streams. This model relies heavily on the modern geomorphology of the margin. In contrast, an evaluation of the subsurface stratigraphy suggested that there may have been significant lateral shifts of ice-stream locations and associated trough-mouth-fan depositional systems through time (Bart and Anderson, 1995). New seismic data was acquired along the strike of the Antarctic Peninsula shelf during the 2002 season aboard the NBP R/VIB. Detailed mapping and regional correlations confirm that slope progradation between the modern troughs was indeed associated with large ice streams. Moreover, the new mapping results presented here illustrate that the last several glacial cycles did not produce significant slope progradation anywhere along the margin. This signifies a major change in the stratal-stacking pattern on the outer continental shelf. Correlation with age control at ODP Leg 178 shelf sites 1097 and 1103 indicates that the shift from progradation to aggradation occurred at ~5 Ma (Pliocene)

Rescuing Complementarity With Little Drama

The AMPS paradox challenges black hole complementarity by apparently constructing a way for an observer to bring information from the outside of the black hole into its interior if there is no drama at its horizon, making manifest a violation of monogamy of entanglement. We propose a new resolution to the paradox: this violation cannot be explicitly checked by an infalling observer in the finite proper time they have to live after crossing the horizon. Our resolution depends on a weak relaxation of the no-drama condition (we call it "little drama") which is the "complementarity dual" of scrambling of information on the stretched horizon. When translated to the description of the black hole interior, this implies that the fine-grained quantum information of infalling matter is rapidly diffused across the entire interior while classical observables and coarse-grained geometry remain unaffected. Under the assumption that information has diffused throughout the interior, we consider the difficulty of the information-theoretic task that an observer must perform after crossing the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole in order to verify a violation of monogamy of entanglement. We find that the time required to complete a necessary subroutine of this task, namely the decoding of Bell pairs from the interior and the late radiation, takes longer than the maximum amount of time that an observer can spend inside the black hole before hitting the singularity. Therefore, an infalling observer cannot observe monogamy violation before encountering the singularity.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures - v2: added references, small tweaks - v3: corrected typos to reflect final published versio

Eye movements can cause item-specific visual recognition advantages

Prior research suggests that spontaneous saccades localized towards blank regions of space during memory storage and recall improve memory for items at the saccade locations. In the present study, we examined whether a recognition advantage can be observed when a single, exogenously directed saccade occurs during memory maintenance. We manipulated whether participants made a saccade to an item’s previous location or maintained fixation, as well as whether tested items reappeared in their original location or not. The results of three experiments showed that visual recognition was better after a saccade to the location of a probed object than after no saccade or after a saccade to the location of a non-probed object, so long as saccades went to the to-be-tested location more often than chance. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that eye movements can elicit an item-specific recognition advantage in visual working memory

Some virtually special hyperbolic 3-manifold groups

Let M be a complete hyperbolic 3-manifold of finite volume that admits a decomposition into right-angled ideal polyhedra. We show that M has a deformation retraction that is a virtually special square complex, in the sense of Haglund and Wise and deduce that such manifolds are virtually fibered. We generalise a theorem of Haglund and Wise to the relatively hyperbolic setting and deduce that the fundamental group of M is LERF and that the geometrically finite subgroups of the fundamental group are virtual retracts. Examples of 3-manifolds admitting such a decomposition include augmented link complements. We classify the low-complexity augmented links and describe an infinite family with complements not commensurable to any 3-dimensional reflection orbifold.Comment: 51 pages, 13 figures. Referee's comments incorporated. To appear in Commentarii Mathematici Helvetic