Legacies of the past and promises of the future: Challenges for the research library in the 21st century

Highlights from Philip Kent's talk, titled Challenges for the Research Library in the 21st Century at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre @ UBC on September 20th, 2013

Ethical refections on the COVID‑19 pandemic in the global seafood industry: navigating diverse scales and contexts of marine values and identities

The global crisis instantiated by the COVID-19 pandemic opens a unique governance window to transform the sustainability, resilience, and ethics of the global seafood industry. Simultaneously crippling public health, civil liberties, and national economies, the global pandemic has exposed the diverse values and identities of actors upon which global food systems pivot, as well as their interconnectivity with other economic sectors and spheres of human activity. In the wake of COVID-19, ethics offers a timely conceptual reframing and methodological approach to navigate these diverse values and identities and to reconcile their ensuing policy trade-offs and conflicts. Values and identities denote complex concepts and realities, characterized by plurality, fluidity and dynamics, ambiguity, and implicitness, which often hamper responsive policy-setting and effective governance. Rather than adopt a static characterization of specific value or identity types, I introduce a novel hierarchical conceptualization of values and identities made salient by scale and context. I illustrate how salient values and identities emerge at multiple scales through three seafood COVID-19 contextual examples in India, Canada, and New Zealand, where diverse seafood actors interact within local, domestic (regional/national), and global seafood value chains, respectively. These examples highlight the differential values and identities, and hence differential vulnerabilities, resilience, and impacts on seafood actors with the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitate differentiated policy interventions if they are to be responsive to those affected. An ethical governance framework that integrates diverse marine values and identities, buttressed by concrete deliberation and decision-support protocols and tools, can transform the modus operandi of global seafood systems toward both sustainable and ethical development.publishedVersio

The investigation on the impact of financial crisis on Bursa Malaysia using minimal spanning tree

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in financial network. The financial network helps to visualize the complex relationship between stocks traded in the market. This paper investigates the stock market network in Bursa Malaysia during the 2008 global financial crisis. The financial network is based on the top hundred companies listed on Bursa Malaysia. Minimal spanning tree (MST) is employed to construct the financial network and uses cross-correlation as an input. The impact of the global financial crisis on the companies is evaluated using centrality measurements such as degree, betweenness, closeness and eigenvector centrality . The results indicate that there are some changes on the linkages between securities after the financial crisis, that can have some significant effect in investment decision making

Towards Post-Pandemic Sustainable and Ethical Food Systems

The current global COVID-19 pandemic has led to a deep and multidimensional crisis across all sectors of society. As countries contemplate their mobility and social-distancing policy restrictions, we have a unique opportunity to re-imagine the deliberative frameworks and value priorities in our food systems. Pre-pandemic food systems at global, national, regional and local scales already needed revision to chart a common vision for sustainable and ethical food futures. Re-orientation is also needed by the relevant sciences, traditionally siloed in their disciplines and without adequate attention paid to how the food system problem is variously framed by diverse stakeholders according to their values. From the transdisciplinary perspective of food ethics, we argue that a post-pandemic scheme focused on bottom-up, regional, cross-sectoral and non-partisan deliberation may provide the re-orientation and benchmarks needed for not only more sustainable, but also more ethical food futures.publishedVersio

How Can I Help You?Eligibility Worker: Navigating Patients Through the Social Services Maze

Introduction: Vermont has programs to assist low income individuals in obtaining basic needs such as health insurance, food security, fuel assistance, housing and transportation. However, these services are often underutilized by eligible individuals. Major barriers to enrollment include lack of knowledge about available programs and their income cutoffs, cumbersome application processes, literacy barriers, and lack of transportation to application sites. In other states, efforts to reduce these barriers have included shortened application forms, removal of asset tests, mail-in applications, media outreach, and eligibility workers placed in outreach agencies. Many studies suggest that the presence of an eligibility worker at a community health center can help overcome some social service enrollment barriers.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1012/thumbnail.jp

The genetic architecture of the human cerebral cortex

The cerebral cortex underlies our complex cognitive capabilities, yet little is known about the specific genetic loci that influence human cortical structure. To identify genetic variants that affect cortical structure, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of brain magnetic resonance imaging data from 51,665 individuals. We analyzed the surface area and average thickness of the whole cortex and 34 regions with known functional specializations. We identified 199 significant loci and found significant enrichment for loci influencing total surface area within regulatory elements that are active during prenatal cortical development, supporting the radial unit hypothesis. Loci that affect regional surface area cluster near genes in Wnt signaling pathways, which influence progenitor expansion and areal identity. Variation in cortical structure is genetically correlated with cognitive function, Parkinson's disease, insomnia, depression, neuroticism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Opening up access to worldwide access to BC historical documents

This session took place on October 26, 2011 in the Lillooet Room of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the University of British Columbia. This presentation can be found at 15:06 – 27:30 in the recording.Library, UBCUnreviewedOthe