BCS 100 administrative course material

This document contains acknowledgments and UArctic Evaluation criteria from Aug 25 2010 for the BCS 100 course

BCS 100 course Syllabus 2011

This document contains the 2011 BCS 100 course syllabus

BCS 100 Reading List 2011

This is the Reading List for the UArctic BCS 100 course

BCS 100 Module 5: Contemporary Economic Activity

Economic forces play a significant role in today’s northern economies and have shaped northern lives from a time when subsistence activities predominated. Today, globalization is bringing much focus to the vast renewable and non-renewable resources in the North including wildlife, fisheries and oceans, and mineral, oil and gas development. This module examines how economic activity is changing as a result of climate change, and how the contemporary economy is juxtaposed with the traditional subsistence economy. In both cases, social wellbeing is dependent upon renewable and non-renewable resources, and is governed by policy that defines how these resources are used

Bridging The Gap Between Higher Education And The Workforce: A Coach Approach To Teaching

Abstract There is debate in the business community around whether new entrants to the labour market are as proficient in essential skills such as communications, collaboration, and critical thinking as were their forbears. At the same time, the demand for executive coaching has increased substantially under both strong and weak economic conditions. Corporations are now using coaching to enhance essential skills within the workplace, which gives rise to questions about college graduates' skills and the positive impact coaching skills could have if embedded within academia. We explore the benefits of using a coach approach in the classroom whereby the instructor engages, enlightens, and empowers students to better prepare graduates for life-long learning and the labour market. The model requires the instructor to embrace authenticity, insight, and innovation by taking a coach approach to teaching with the intent to enhance learning outcomes

Optimising the spatial planning of prescribed burns to achieve multiple objectives in a fire-dependent ecosystem

1. There is potential for negative consequences for the ecological integrity of fire-dependent ecosystems as a result of inappropriate fire regimes. This can occur when asset (property) protection is prioritised over conservation objectives in burn programs

Tourism economics research: A review and assessment

This paper aims to provide the most up-to-date survey of tourism economics research and to summarise the key trends in its recent development. Particular attention is paid to the research progress made over the last decade in respect of approaches, methodological innovations, emerging topics, research gaps, and directions for future research. Remarkable but unbalanced developments have been observed across different sub-research areas in tourism economics. While neoclassical economics has contributed the most to the development of tourism economics, alternative schools of thought in economics have also emerged in advancing our understanding of tourism from different perspectives. As tourism studies are multi- and inter-disciplinary, integrating economics with other social science disciplines will further contribute to knowledge creation in tourism studies

Opportunities to Increase Wildfire Risk Mitigation Through Cattle Grazing in Western Canada

The fire season of 2023 was record-breaking in Canada given the number, severity, and intensity of wildfires. Factors contributing to the number of fires are likely to get worse in the future because of the interaction and complexity of many factors such as climate change and the legacy of decades of successful wildfire suppression. Further complicating wildfire management is the ever-continuing expansion of the wildland-urban interface and subsequent increases in values at risk. Fire management solutions including prevention and suppression will require novel approaches given rising costs and logistical complications. This paper examines the payment concept for ecosystem services whereby ranchers are paid to graze cattle in targeted high-priority areas in the wildland-urban interface. Grazing can be ecologically appropriate and has long been used in fire-prone ecosystems in Europe. With some key considerations, implementing PES (Payments for Ecosystem Services) could reduce fire risk, support agricultural producers, and enhance societal protection

Using Catastrophe Theory to Model the Economic Effects of Wildfire Behavior

Wildfire managers are obligated to meet ecosystem management objectives such as cost minimization and efficiency (Williams et al. 1993). This, however, is difficult because each objective is dependent upon wildfire controllability and wildfire behavior. Currently, there is no functional form that defines the relationship between wildfire behavior and controllability and therefore, there is no physical basis for efficient economic analysis. In the first section I generate a fire data set and test it as a cusp catastrophe. Results suggest that catastrophe theory may be an effective tool to model wildfire controllability as measured by the modeled change in fireline intensity, windspeed, initial fuel moisture and fuel loading. The resulting production function relationship presents three management possibilities. The model may be used to; identify environmental factors that systematically predict wildfire controllability and the range over which sudden changes in fire behavior occur; to quantify uncertainty of fire behavior in terms of environmental factors, and; to define a manageable environmental variable that can be used to determine marginal costs and benefits of wildfire management activities. The second section enhances the C+NVC theory by including the physical effects of wildfire behavior and environmental conditions as developed in the first section. To facilitate development of the model I use two factors of production, suppression, which is variable throughout all time periods, and presuppression, which is fixed in the short run and variable in all other instances. I show that the annual C+NVC curve is the economic envelope to the seasonal C+NVC curves. Next, I characterize net value change as a monotonically increasing function of fireline intensity. Because the fire model relates physical effects to fireline intensity, the C+NVC model is enhanced in three ways; the introduction of environmental variables will enable fire managers to assess fire management programs for severe and average expected fire behavior and identify conditions that lead to management uncertainty; fire behavior is defined in terms of intensity and controllability, therefore, the cusp model generates different estimates of suppression efficiency depending upon environmental conditions and expected fire behavior, and; the NVC manifold provides a method by which to evaluate the marginal effectiveness of presuppression