Egyptian stelae from Malta

In 1829, four Egyptian stelae of Twelfth and Eighteenth Dynasty date were found, surprisingly, on Malta. Based on their far-flung findspot, some have suggested that the stelae were locally made by Egyptian colonists who had settled on the island during the second millennium BC. This contribution argues that the stelae offer no basis for such historical reconstructions. Style, content and petrology demonstrate that all four stelae were made in Egypt and that they originally stood in the necropolis of Abydos in Upper Egypt. Microfossils show that these stelae are made of Egyptian limestones, which are of a different geological age to limestones available on Malta. The examination of polished thin sections of samples from the stelae using scanning electron microscopy suggests that the limestones employed were quarried from four geological formations of different ages in the Nile Valley.peer-reviewe

Stafford Triangle

This year, the Portland metro area recognizes the 40th anniversary of Senate Bill 100’s signing into law by the late Governor Tom McCall. This landmark legislation paved the way for Oregon’s renowned land use planning system and pioneering urban growth boundaries. Since the implementation of the state’s first urban growth boundary (UGB) in the 1970s, the UGB has become a model for anti-urban sprawl efforts nationwide and has helped to preserve vast areas of agricultural and forest lands statewide. Since its inception, however, the UGB has excited controversy, especially in the state’s most populous area: Portland metro. This year, as many celebrate the birth of the UGB and its many successes, a largely rural community south of Portland and its surrounding municipalities continue to be embroiled in a decades-long conflict over the potential expansion of the boundary and the prospect of urbanization

Increasing Technology Engagement in the Mass Customized Secondary Classroom

The increase in student-centered and self-directed classroom practices and curriculum delivery methods such as proficiency based education (PBE) and mass customized learning (MCL) coupled with 1:1 technology environments requires the student be productive without direct teacher oversight. Using productivity software, this research project examines student digital engagement in a high school classroom employing student-centered MCL and PBE practices in an attempt to answer the following research questions: “Can the use of self-monitoring productivity applications increase positive technology outcomes while decreasing negative technology outcomes?” and “Do student perceptions of their engagement fit their behavior?” This qualitative study uses three phases of survey to collect data concerning productivity as reported by the productivity application and students’ beliefs concerning how the percentage reflects their actual computer use

Investigation Into The Relationship Between Hurricane Storm Parameters and Damage

“Economic damage, such as damage to property and infra-structure, from hurricane surges depends on two factors 1) the depth of coastal inundation and 2) the area covered by the surge” (Irish et. al 2007). Typically, damage estimates are developed after hurricanes have dissipated. To have the ability to predict hurricane damage in advance based upon various physical parameters would be a technical advance that could aid vulnerable coastal communities with hurricane planning. This thesis advances this goal forward by relating “Total Normalized Damage” to “Surge Scale” along with other key parameters. In this thesis Total Normalized Damages are compared to Surge Scale in three statistically significant ways: Un-separated Comparison, Separated Comparison and Separated Comparison without “micro-canes”. An attempt at the surge damage function has been presented in this thesis as a cornerstone of the research work contained herein. This thesis also examines the effect of different damage components and their uncertainties on Total Normalized Damage. Such damage estimates include wind damage, surge damage, and inland flooding, which were separated into individual damage categories

Rights As Footprints: A New Metaphor For Contemporary Human Rights Practice

As the discourse of human rights becomes ever more widespread, the analysis of contemporary human rights practice must contend with its pluralistic and contradictory features. In this Article, we introduce the metaphor of rights as footprints. We suggest that this metaphor captures the expressive and constitutive role of rights, and provides a critical tool with which to understand the accomplishments of the human rights field. In doing so, we document a right-to-health campaign in Accra, Ghana, which sought to end the human rights infringements that arose from the financing of health care through user fees. These infringements occurred when public hospitals forcibly detained patients, after their discharge, until they had paid their medical expenses. This occurrence, spectacular in its assault on liberty, is increasingly and banally practiced in the cash-strapped hospitals of developing countries, in and elsewhere. Our Article focuses on the role of story-telling and collective memory that galvanized further rights-protecting political action, during the initial moment of community-mobilization and in the intervening seven years. Importantly, we record this effect in both a local community in and in an international community of human rights practitioners. Our metaphor of footprints challenges the alternate understanding of rights as constituting formal legal precedent, international covenants, community anecdotes or institutional blueprints. It describes the ways in which collective memories of political mobilization, repeated and retold through shared yet shifting frames, generate multiple pathways towards a realization of human rights. We suggest that the forward-looking progression of human rights advocacy can be intimately related to the experience of looking back, and that the metaphor of footprints can reinforce the role of collective memory in a dynamic, community-focused and community-reinforced transnational human rights practice

Cognitive and brain structural effects of long-term high-effort endurance exercise in older adults: are there measurable benefits?

Age-related decline in cognitive performance and brain structure can be offset by increased exercise. Little is known, however, about the cognitive and brain structural consequences of long-term high-effort endurance exercise. In a cross-sectional design, we recruited older adults who had been engaging in high-effort endurance exercise over at least twenty years, and compared their cognitive performance and brain structure with a non-sedentary control group similar in age, sex, education, IQ, depression levels, and other lifestyle factors. We hypothesized that long-term high-effort endurance exercise would protect against the age-related decline in memory, attention, and brain structure. Our findings, in contrast to previous studies, indicated that those participating in long-term high-effort endurance exercise, when compared without confounds to non-sedentary control volunteers, showed no differences on measures of speed of processing, executive function, incidental memory, episodic memory, working memory, or visual search. On measures of prospective memory, long-term exercisers performance suggested a self-imposed increase in effort, which did not impact on ability to complete the PM task. In complex attention tasks, they displayed a differential strategy to controls. Structurally, long-term exercisers only displayed higher diffuse axial diffusivity, an index of axonal integrity, than controls, but this did not correlate with any cognitive differences

Rights As Footprints: A New Metaphor For Contemporary Human Rights Practice

As the discourse of human rights becomes ever more widespread, the analysis of contemporary human rights practice must contend with its pluralistic and contradictory features. In this Article, we introduce the metaphor of rights as footprints. We suggest that this metaphor captures the expressive and constitutive role of rights, and provides a critical tool with which to understand the accomplishments of the human rights field. In doing so, we document a right-to-health campaign in Accra, Ghana, which sought to end the human rights infringements that arose from the financing of health care through user fees. These infringements occurred when public hospitals forcibly detained patients, after their discharge, until they had paid their medical expenses. This occurrence, spectacular in its assault on liberty, is increasingly and banally practiced in the cash-strapped hospitals of developing countries, in and elsewhere. Our Article focuses on the role of story-telling and collective memory that galvanized further rights-protecting political action, during the initial moment of community-mobilization and in the intervening seven years. Importantly, we record this effect in both a local community in and in an international community of human rights practitioners. Our metaphor of footprints challenges the alternate understanding of rights as constituting formal legal precedent, international covenants, community anecdotes or institutional blueprints. It describes the ways in which collective memories of political mobilization, repeated and retold through shared yet shifting frames, generate multiple pathways towards a realization of human rights. We suggest that the forward-looking progression of human rights advocacy can be intimately related to the experience of looking back, and that the metaphor of footprints can reinforce the role of collective memory in a dynamic, community-focused and community-reinforced transnational human rights practice