Insights into the social ecological system of the Golden Stream Corridor Preserve in Belize through the assessment of direct use values and benefits

The designation of state and private protected areas around the world has been increasing over the past years. Belize is not an exception to this reality. To date more than 103 protected areas have been recognized into the National Protected Areas System of Belize (NPAS). Private protected areas (PPA) did not become part of Belize’s NPAS until 2015. But long before its legislation, private protected areas have been contributing to conservation and development in Belize. The Golden Stream Corridor Preserve (GSCP) is one of Belize’s exemplary PPA which advocates for conservation through the promotion of sustainable livelihood development and community empowerment. Using the co-evolution model by Pretzsch et al. (2014) as a conceptual framework, direct use values and benefits of the GSCP are assessed to gain insight into its social ecological system. A single case (embedded) case study design was used to execute this assessment at three buffering communities: Medina Bank, Golden Stream and Indian Creek. A total of 60 households, representing 10% of household leaders in each community were interviewed using a semi structured questionnaire. Community leaders were also interviewed to discover customary rules relating to resource use and the history of each community. The direct use value assessment revealed that the GSCP only contributes to values associated with tourism and employment. These values were disproportionately distributed across buffering communities; with Indian Creek perceiving all values associated with tourism, and Golden Stream from employment. Medina Bank saw no direct use values from the GSCP. Community forests and lands were found to be the exclusive source of direct use values associated with the utilization of forest products. Sustainable livelihood development opportunities and community empowerment were the most reported benefits arising from the management of the GSCP. The adoption and contribution of livelihood strategies were however met with positive and negative criticism by community members. Results from this evaluation epitomizes the importance of SES thinking in protected areas. Customary rules of resource use have contributed positively to the integrity of the GSCP. The impending threat of land use change and population growth at buffering communities calls for the creation of enabling environments for the adoption of sustainable livelihood through community participation, consultation, monitoring and evaluation.:CHAPTER ONE 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Research question and justification 2 CHAPTER TWO 2. Theoretical and conceptual framework 4 2.2 Ecosystem service approach in protected areas 7 2.3 Emergence of private protected areas: global status, definition, benefits and downsides 11 2.4 Social ecological co-evolution: a conceptual Framework 13 CHAPTER THREE 3.1 National Context: protected areas in Belize 17 3.2 Local context: The Golden Stream Corridor Preserve 19 3.3 Case study approach 23 3.4 Data collection 25 3.5 Data analysis 29 3.6 Ethical considerations 32 CHAPTER FOUR 4. Embedded case studies . 34 4.1 Case study 1: Medina Bank Village 46 4.2 Case study 2: Golden Stream Village 48 4.3 Case study 3: Indian Creek Village 62 CHAPTER FIVE 5. Consolidating and comparing the embedded cases CHAPTER SIX 6. Implications of findings for management 92 CHAPTER SEVEN 7. Conclusions, limitations and outlook 102 Limitation 103 Outlook 104 REFERENCES 108 ANNEXS 11

HAUNTING SECRETS: THE PHANTOM OF SHAME LEGACIES THAT KEEP ON GIVING

This paper reviews the connections between unspoken transgenerational trauma, shame, and the concepts of hauntology and transgenerational phantom and looks at ways writing can reveal the traces of shame-as-affect. Some transgenerational trauma narratives do not distinguish between trauma-as-event and shame-as-affect/emotion, which can lead to a conflation of the two. This paper proposes that hauntology (the encroachment of an "other) and the transgenerational phantom (the metaphysical manifestation of others' shameful secrets), as conceptual scaffolds, are relevant to deciphering and depicting shame-as-affect distinct to the traumatic event via an understanding of the way speech and writing can bear the traces of shame-as-affect. To demonstrate, this paper provides a close reading of Arundhati Roy's The god of small things and highlights how cryptographic writing—the fissures and distortions in language—can inform the representation of shame in trauma narratives

Points of comparison : what indicating gestures tell us about the origins of signs in San Juan Quiahije Chatino sign language

New languages emerge under rare conditions, when deaf children who cannot access the vocal-auditory language(s) used around them invent visual-manual communication systems of their own. Such homesign or family sign systems have simple structures but nevertheless show the hallmarks of language, including a stable lexicon of signs composed of meaningful, recombinable elements. Prior research has found that many of these elements are invented by signers, though some are adapted from the gestural input received from hearing interlocutors. The current project returns to this claim, examining the influence of gestures on the structure of two emerging family sign languages used in a rural, indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico. It focuses on foundational, visually accessible ‘indicating gestures’ such as pointing that direct the addressees attention to a region in physical space. Three linked studies were performed to investigate whether indicating gestures have internal structure that is accessible to deaf signers, and whether such structure is incorporated into their emerging languages. In the first, the spontaneous, speech-linked indicating gestures of hearing people were examined for internal structure. They were found to comprise three recombinable elements that, through systematic modulations in form, convey information about the direction and distance of targets. A second study looked for a relationship between the form of indicating gestures and the features of the speech that accompanies them. No such relationship was found, suggesting that the meaningful modulation of the gesture features occurs independently from speech. The final study compared the forms and meanings of two deaf signers’ indicating gestures with those of the hearing participants. Signers were found to use the direction and elbow height features, but not the handshape features, from the conventional indicating system. These findings reveal that indicating gestures, often described as holistic, non-composite signals, in fact exhibit an internal structure that can be incorporated into an emerging signed language. Interestingly, they also reveal that not all features of gestures—even ones that exhibit clear patterning—will be adopted by signers, perhaps because gesture features must be both systematically patterned and visually iconic for signers to interpret them as meaningful.Linguistic

Performance in an ASL Boundary Perception Task Using Naturalistic Stimuli

This study compares the performance of two groups on an American Sign Language (ASL) perception task. Twenty-two L1 signers of ASL and twelve sign-naive English speakers watched a filmed lecture in ASL and pressed a response pad to identify "natural breaks" in the signing. Responses from each subject group were analyzed into agreement clusters--time slices of up to 2 seconds in which a substantial percentage of participants identified a boundary. Comparison of the response patterns of signers and non-signers revealed a one-way implication between signer agreement clusters and non-signer agreement clusters. That is, where signers agreed about the location of a boundary, non-signers did as well, but it was not the case that non-signer agreement about a boundary was a predictor that signers would identify the same boundary

Radioactive Tritium in the Environment Surrounding the Department of Energy’s Historic Nuclear Bomb Manufacturing Plant, Mound Facility, Miamisburg, Ohio

This research was completed money allocated during Round 5 of the Citizens’ Monitoring and Technical Assessment Fund (MTA Fund). Clark University was named conservator of these works. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at [email protected]://commons.clarku.edu/mesh/1000/thumbnail.jp

InternalBlue - Bluetooth Binary Patching and Experimentation Framework

Bluetooth is one of the most established technologies for short range digital wireless data transmission. With the advent of wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT), Bluetooth has again gained importance, which makes security research and protocol optimizations imperative. Surprisingly, there is a lack of openly available tools and experimental platforms to scrutinize Bluetooth. In particular, system aspects and close to hardware protocol layers are mostly uncovered. We reverse engineer multiple Broadcom Bluetooth chipsets that are widespread in off-the-shelf devices. Thus, we offer deep insights into the internal architecture of a popular commercial family of Bluetooth controllers used in smartphones, wearables, and IoT platforms. Reverse engineered functions can then be altered with our InternalBlue Python framework---outperforming evaluation kits, which are limited to documented and vendor-defined functions. The modified Bluetooth stack remains fully functional and high-performance. Hence, it provides a portable low-cost research platform. InternalBlue is a versatile framework and we demonstrate its abilities by implementing tests and demos for known Bluetooth vulnerabilities. Moreover, we discover a novel critical security issue affecting a large selection of Broadcom chipsets that allows executing code within the attacked Bluetooth firmware. We further show how to use our framework to fix bugs in chipsets out of vendor support and how to add new security features to Bluetooth firmware

Inside a Swiss Army Knife: An Assessment of AmeriCorps

This study reviews the goals and achievements of AmeriCorps, the national service program championed by President Clinton and approved by Congress in 1993. We identify five AmeriCorps goals: satisfying unmet social needs, developing corps members, enhancing the civic ethic, reinvigorating lethargic bureaucracies, and bridging race and class. The evidence of AmeriCorps\u27 effectiveness is not definitive. Self-reports from recipient programs, selective cost-benefit analyses, and some survey evidence indicate some positive results. More fine-grained survey and field research raise questions about AmeriCorps\u27 overall effects. Much more research is needed before policy makers and citizens can determine AmeriCorps\u27 productivity

Fractional Hardy-Sobolev type inequalities for half spaces and John domains

As our main result we prove a variant of the fractional Hardy-Sobolev-Maz'ya inequality for half spaces. This result contains a complete answer to a recent open question by Musina and Nazarov. In the proof we apply a new version of the fractional Hardy-Sobolev inequality that we establish also for more general unbounded John domains than half spaces

Gaerttner LINAC Laboratory report on international nuclear data measurements

The Gaerttner LINAC Laboratory has made neutron transmission and capture measurements up to several hundred eV on samples of Zr, Nb, Mo, Sm, Nd, Ho, Er, Tm, Hf, and W. A new neutron time-of-flight target has been built and installed and a new {sup 6}Li glass transmission detector is under construction. The electron linear accelerator is being refurbished with new klystrons, a new RF transport system and the reinstallation of the ninth accelerating section. These improvements are intended to provide a more powerful and monoenergetic electron beam

Exploring the application of a conceptual framework in a social MALL app

Little by little, Mobile Assisted Language Learning (or, simply, MALL) is taking force in the field of education, as it supports language blended learning and language learning ubiquity. The study presented here belongs in the Social Ontology-based Cognitively Augmented Language Learning Mobile Environment (SO-CALL-ME) research project, whose final aim is to design and create English as a Foreign Language (EFL) mobile applications (henceforth, apps) that apply a solid pedagogy to teaching technical and language skills. Thus, these apps provide a very flexible form of learning that is also practical, interactive, adaptive, dynamic and deeply rooted in daily sociocultural situations and contexts. In particular, our study has aimed at designing and implementing an app to help its users create and perform successful business presentations. Thus, the potential users of our app are both professionals and students in general, since business presentations are a compulsory and essential activity in most professional environments nowadays. Using our app will allow them to learn these skills ubiquitously and autonomously, since it contains selfevaluating (automatically corrected) exercises