AMERICA'S FORGOTTEN PEOPLE AND PLACES: ENDING THE LEGACY OF POVERTY IN THE RURAL SOUTH

This study focuses on the longstanding impoverishment of the rural South and three of its subregions-Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and the Black Belt. The poor quality of life in rural Appalachia and along the Mississippi Delta has been publically acknowledged by programs and commissions for improving conditions. However, the more comprehensive Black Belt subregion that links parts of Southern Appalachia and the Southern Delta has not received such regional policy attention. While the South as a whole is more rural and impoverished than other U.S. regions, this is largely due to the poor conditions in the Black Belt. In addition to region and rurality, a third feature of the pattern is race. It is in the Black Belt that the South's poor socioeconomic conditions are most concentrated. Policy and program attention are needed for regional solutions that take rurality and race into account along with demographic and other subregional characteristics.Appalachia, Black Belt, Mississippi Delta, policy, poverty, quality of life, rural, South, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Strata: Deserts Past, Present and Future

This book documents a collaborative, environmental art project on Puritjarra, a rock shelter in the Cleland Hills in western central Australia. The project incorporates the perspectives of scholars of archaeology, ecology, environmental history and the history of science as well as those of contemporary artists drawing upon the heritage of Indigenous peoples and settlers. It explores diverse ways of representing and understanding a place where desert oaks may well have been a continuous feature of the landscape for the last 100,000 years, while plant and animal species introduced more recently have caused significant change within the span of a single human lifetime. Recurring themes include water, food, shelter and spiritual renewal. The aim of the project: “co-understanding… valuing the different ways each of us sees a single place that is significant, but differently so, for each perspective.

Combustion of a coal char particle in a stream of dry gas.

The burning rate, surface temperature, drag, and extinction conditions of a single char particle moving in a gas are computed numerically. The effects of the size and velocity of the particle and of the temperature and composition of the gas are examined in the framework of a simple model that includes O2 and CO2 heterogeneous reactions and, in some cases, a diffusion-controlled CO oxidation flame in the gas around the particle. In agreement with known results, the burning rate is found to increase with the velocity of the particle when the Reynolds number of the gas flow ceases to be small. The temperature of the particle increases with the temperature and oxygen mass fraction of the gas and is little affected by the size and velocity of the particle, except in the vicinity of extinction. The drag coefficient is a decreasing function of the particle size and velocity in the range of Reynolds numbers that has been analyzed. The presence of CO2 in the gas may have an important effect on the gasification of small particles

Deciphering User-Generated Content in Transitional Societies: A Syria Coverage Case Study

Social media and user-generated content (UGC) — photos and videos taken by members of the public — played an important role in coverage of the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, but, this was chiefly supplementary to traditional newsgathering for covering those revolutions. However in Syria with the tight control on foreign media denying access for foreign journalists, especially in the early months of the uprising, news organizations had to rely almost exclusively on this UGC via social media and their own UGC intake platforms. Much of the UGC used by news outlets is fielded by Syrian activists both inside Syria and based overseas who are in contact with Syrian demonstrators and planners. The objective of this study is to look at how two prominent Arab-language news organisations, BBC Arabic and Al Jazeera Arabic (AJA), have used social media and UGC — photos, videos and comments — to provide coverage of the uprising in Syria

The Coastie Initiative

Coastline change is an ever-increasing area of interest with a multitude of research opportunities. The Coastie Initiative was developed with Parks Canada to crowdsource the collection of regular imagery of coastal morphology, building a large dataset for tracking shoreline change. Citizens can partake in this growing program by submitting a ‘Coastie’ through the web-based platform. At every site, a phone cradle, designed to standardize images, is accompanied by an informational panel and a QR code. Visitors can use the QR code to quickly access the submission wizard. After submission, the image is saved and awaits classification by researchers. The intended development of the project includes an achievement system to promote user retention, an automated classification system to eliminate manual labelling, and an ocean literacy stream as an effort to educate and inform the public. The initiative was launched during the fall of 2021 with 5 locations. The Coastie program is a collaboration that has developed from the global CoastSnap Community Beach Monitoring movement that began in Australia in 2017. Using the early prototype dataset, coastal change can be quantified from repeat geo-rectified images. These capture deposition/erosion of the beach and dune topography in response to ambient environmental conditions or higher energy storm events. This dataset will serve as a baseline to monitor how coastal systems respond to climate change, including sea level rise, change in storm activity, and reduction in sea ice coverage. The Coastie Initiative allows citizen scientists to influence coastline exploration participating alongside motivated researchers