Signs: Savanah to Key West

Signs: Savanah to Key West documents my 800-mile, 13-day bicycle ride in 2018-2019. It starts fifty miles outside of Savanah, Georgia, and follows the Atlantic coastline to Key West, Florida. The trip culminates in Niceville to visit my grandpa, a military veteran and engineer born in 1924. I’ve ridden across the country twice. In 2017, I bicycled the Trans America Bicycle Trail from Astoria, Oregon to Yorktown, Virigina. In 2018, I bicycled a northern route, from to Anacortes, Washington to Bar Harbor, Maine. Between those cross-country rides, I followed the Mississippi and other rivers from Muscatine, Iowa to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I bicycled the Route 66 Bicycle trail from Chicago to Los Angeles. I’ve participated in organized rides such as RAGBRAI, GOBA, and Tour de Nebraska. On such journeys, I plan logistics, journal, log data, and write. My bicycle journeys became the books Great River Legs, What a Bicycle Can Carry, A Bicycle’s Echo, Velocipede, and Safety Measures. Often, the books focus on assignments I give myself. On my first cross-country adventure, I sought to find something abandoned to the road each day. These treasures tell the story of the journey. For Signs, I photographed signs while I pedaled. The signs focus and structure the story’s narrative.https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1129/thumbnail.jp

Spatial Updating in the Lateral Intraparietal Cortex

Recent experiments in neurophysiology have begun to examine the active nature of our perceptual experience. One area of research focuses on the impact of eye movements on visual perception. With each eye movement, a new image is presented to the brain, yet our perception is that the world remains stable. This phenomenon, termed spatial constancy, depends on a convergence of information about our eye movements with sensory information from the visual system. Neurons in the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) contribute to the construction of an internal representation of space that is updated or "remapped" with each eye movement. Although the basic phenomenon of remapping has been described, many questions remain unanswered. Here we describe two experiments designed to gain a greater understanding of spatial updating in the primate brain. First, we hypothesized that spatial updating would be equally robust throughout the visual field. We tested this by monitoring the activity of neurons in LIP while varying the direction over which a stimulus trace must be updated. We found that individual neurons remap stimulus traces in multiple directions, though the strength of the remapped response is variable. Across the population of LIP neurons, remapping is effectively independent of saccade direction. These findings indicate that the activity of LIP neurons can contribute to the maintenance of spatial constancy throughout the visual field. Second, to begin to understand the circuitry underlying remapping, we studied a special case: when a stimulus must be updated from one visual hemifield to the other. We hypothesized that the forebrain commissures provide the primary route for this across-hemifield remapping. We tested this by comparing the signal related to within- and across-hemifield remapping. We predicted that in split-brain monkeys, across-hemifield remapping would be abolished while within-hemifield remapping would remain robust. Surprisingly, we found that in split-brain monkeys, LIP neurons can remap stimulus traces across hemifields, though this signal is weaker than that associated with within-hemifield remapping. This finding implies that while the forebrain commissures are likely to be the primary route for the interhemispheric transfer of visual information, they are not the only route available. This indicates that a distributed network of brain regions supports spatial updating

Freedom on the Net 2014 - Tightening the Net: Governments Expand Online Controls (Summary)

Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fourth consecutive year, with a growing number of countries introducing online censorship and monitoring practices that are simultaneously more aggressive and more sophisticated in their targeting of individual users. This booklet is a summary of findings for the 2014 edition of "Freedom on the Net.

Freedom on the Net 2015: Privatizing Censorship, Eroding Privacy (Summary)

Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth consecutive year, with more governments censoring information of public interest and placing greater demands on the private sector to take down offending content.This booklet is a summary of findings for the 2015 edition of "Freedom on the Net.

L’échange parcellaire : une nouvelle étape dans l’aménagement foncier de l’Ouest français

Depuis les années 1960, la superficie des exploitations agricoles du Grand-Ouest n’a cessé d’augmenter. Dans la course à l’agrandissement, les conflits d’usages pour le foncier ont contraint les exploitants à reprendre des terres éloignées de leur siège d’exploitation. L’organisation parcellaire qui en résulte rend la gestion des fermes de plus en plus complexe. Alors que les remembrements (nommés Aménagements Fonciers Agricoles et Forestiers depuis 2005) ont longtemps été mobilisés pour réorganiser le parcellaire, ils se font de plus en plus rares et semblent laisser la place à une nouvelle forme d’intervention : l’échange parcellaire. Cette démarche repose sur la participation volontaire des exploitants et ne s’appuie plus sur la maîtrise d’ouvrage du conseil départemental, mais sur l’animation des Chambres d’agriculture. À partir d’une observation participante dans plusieurs opérations en cours ainsi qu’une dizaine d’entretiens menés auprès d’exploitants, cet article présente cette dynamique et questionne l’implication nouvelle des acteurs, ses effets sur la restructuration parcellaire et sur les rapports sociaux entre exploitants. La relative souplesse de cet outil, qui contraste avec le cadre autoritaire du remembrement, semble conditionner le profil des participants et générer des rapports de force entre ces derniers nous conduisant à interroger l’efficacité d’une telle démarche.Since the 1960s, the size of farms in Western France has been gradually increasing. Conflicts regarding land use have forced farmers to acquire more remote parcels of land, thus fragmenting their estates and complicating their day-to-day activities. However, land consolidation (known in France as aménagement foncier agricole et forestier since 2005) is being used less and less today. Instead, a new type of intervention is increasingly being implemented: plot exchanges. This approach is based on the voluntary participation of farmers. Until recently, such exchanges were coordinated by the conseils departementaux (the equivalent of county councils in France), but they are now the responsibility of local chambres d’agriculture (chambers of agriculture). Based both on participant observations of plot-exchange meetings and a dozen or so interviews with farmers who have taken part in them, this article aims to describe this new trend and characterize the consequences of the involvement of new actors. To this end, we shall examine both the social relations between actors during these meetings and their results in terms of plot reorganization. Unlike the strict framework of land consolidation, the flexibility afforded by plot exchanges seems to have the effect of predetermining participant profiles and fostering certain power relationships between farmers, thus calling into question the effectiveness of this approach

Reliability and Concurrent Validity of Select C3 Logix Test Components

We sought to investigate the one-week and within-session reliability of the instrumented balance error scoring system test and the concurrent validity/one-week reliability of two neurocognitive assessments available through C3 Logix. (n = 37) Participants completed two balance error scoring system tests separated by the Trails A, Trails B, and Symbol Digit Modality test available through C3 Logix, and with paper and pencil. We found that the instrumented balance error scoring system test demonstrated strong one-week reliability and that neuropsychological tests available through C3 Logix show acceptable concurrent validity with standard (comparable) paper and pencil measures

Experimental removal of dominant plants alters the diversity of a network of flower-visiting insects

Plants form the base of complex communities on terrestrial ecosystems, and are the basic resource for insect herbivores and their associated natural enemies. Most plants contain flowers, and important interactions occur in these organs. Many insects are flower visitors and are known to be affected by habitat loss, fragmentation, and changes in landscape structure, but few studies have experimentally tested how habitat loss alters the structure of flower-visiting insect communities.In this study we focused on thrips (Insecta: Thysanoptera) as a model system. Previous studies in Reunion have revealed that flowers of the following exotic plants species host highly diverse communities of flower-visiting thrips : Solanum mauritianum, Lantana camara, Ipomea indica. Here, we tested the hypothesis that elimination of S. mauritianum flowers (as an important habitat for adult thrips) will trigger changes in thrips communities in the other two plants.We established replicated communities involving the three plants, and in a paired design, S. mauritanicum flowers were eliminated or not. The effect of this treatment on thrips was assessed during one month, by estimating their abundance, richness (i.e. the number of species) and diversity (shanon and simpson indexes). A community of eleven native and exotic thrips species was found. The treatment did not have any effect on insect abundance or diversity, but it had an effect on richness: elimination of S. mauritianum flowers had a negative effect on the richness of the number of species found on L. camara, but not on I. indica. At the landscape level, we observed that both the proportion of sugarcane and habitat fragmentation correlated with thrips richness. These correlations, however, were only observed when S. mauritianum flowers were eliminated, and not in our controls. Although our study was performed on exotic plant species, we provide evidence that at a fine spatial scale, the loss of a plant species that hosts a large diversity of flower-visiting insects can have consequences that cascade to the community of insects inhabiting other plants. Future studies are needed to unveil whether similar effects occur in communities of non-exotic plants, and to explore the consequences of habitat loss at a larger scale