North American Economic Integration and Globalization

Morley Gunderson presents an overview of issues related to North American economic integration and globalization. He provides a particularly balanced perspective, a rarity in this area of highly charged, ideology-driven and emotional debate. He first notes that economic integration has both a deepening and widening dimension and enumerates the various aspects of these two dimensions in the context of North American integration, noting that in practice the different dimensions complement one another in a self-reinforcing fashion. He also points out that deeper and wider economic integration can foster internal consolidation since this integration is generally regarded as a precondition for external competitiveness. Gunderson pays particular attention to the issue of policy integration. He argues that the emerging competitive pressures on the North from low-cost, less regulated jurisdictions in the South is the most important consequence of trade liberalization and globalization, although there is still insufficient evidence of harmonization leading to the lowest common denominator. The policy-making process is now subject to the forces of competition that apply to business and labour. He argues that the laws and regulations that will be under the most pressure will be those that are the most inefficient, that is those that protect interest group rents and impose costs without commensurate benefits. Gunderson notes that integration represents a threat to distributional or equity-oriented policies that do not have positive feedback effects on efficiency even when the population considers such policies highly desirable. Raising taxes to finance these policies may not be the solution if mobile factors of production consequently flee to lower-tax jurisdictions. He documents the wide range of policy responses to the potential policy vacuum created by globalization and integration, including the NAFTA labour side agreement, the inclusion of social clauses in trade agreements, corporate codes of conduct, social labelling, and consumer boycotts, transnational efforts amongst unions, social groups and NGOs and union-to-union cooperation. But he finds that effectiveness of these responses to date is moot. Gunderson raises the issue of whether the more circumscribed role of governments and greater role of market forces will in fact benefit the most disadvantaged. He notes that so far this has not been the case, although whether this negative trend will continue is an open question. He concludes by cautioning that the long-run sustainability of integration depends on the equitable sharing of the efficiency gains arising from this process.Canada, North America, NAFTA, Integration, Border Effects, Policy Integration, Competitiveness

Investigation into strath terrace production in the Mud Hills, California

Rainbow Basin and Owl Canyon comprise deeply dissected uplands in the Mud Hills region near Barstow, California in the western portion of the Basin and Range geologic province. These erosional landscapes are formed in sediment deposited in a Miocene-time extensional basin. The basin was then filled with sediment before being inverted due to tectonic uplift beginning roughly 10 Ma. Sometime after 250 to 300 ka strath terraces were produced and preserved in the two drainage basins in Rainbow Basin, but not in the single drainage basin of Owl Canyon. The reason behind this difference is the main problem to be addressed by this study. This difference is ultimately explained by a contrast in critical stream power between the drainage basins stemming from a difference in the amount of sediment denuded from the hillslopes of the different catchments. Severe winter Pacific storms occurring between 11 and 14 ka may have led to the production and preservation of erosional strath terraces in Rainbow Basin while causing the aggradation of the channel in Owl Canyon. These severe winter storms tend to cause more denudation in larger drainages. Because the catchment of Owl Canyon is roughly three times the size of either of the catchments in Rainbow Basin, it is not unreasonable that this phenomenon would have raised critical steam power relative to stream power in Owl Canyon to a degree that it would cause aggradation in Owl Canyon while allowing strath production and sedimentation in Rainbow Basin

Tripping With Stephen Gaskin: An Exploration of a Hippy Adult Educator

For the last 40 years, Stephen Gaskin has been an adult educator on the fringe, working with tens of thousands of adults in the counterculture movement in pursuit of social change regarding marijuana legalization, women’s rights, environmental justice issues and beyond. Gaskin has written 11 books about his experiences teaching and learning with adults outside the mainstream, yet, he is virtually unknown in the field of adult education. He lists his religion as hippy; he is a member of the Counterculture Hall of Fame (inducted 2004), a convicted felon, a United States Marine, a Korean War combat veteran, and a convenor. From 1967 to 1970, Gaskin led weekly rap sessions in which thousands of hippys, up to 3,000 by some accounts, would talk openly about sex, love, drugs, religion, and politics, all with a goal of emancipatory learning for social justice. These informal adult education classes signified the beginning of Gaskin’s four decade-long struggle against social injustice and The Man. The primary focus of this dissertation is to examine Gaskin’s life and mission by analyzing his theories and methodologies in relation to adult education and adult learning in order to show that he is an unrecognized adult educator who has contributed demonstrably, and uniquely, to the field of adult education. Gaskin’s writing is situated in a contextual paradigm framed by several existing areas of adult education, including spirituality, ecological consciousness, praxis, and emancipatory learning

Life and times of Lord Byron

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University, 1929. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

A study of vision screening for kindergarteners

A study of vision screening for kindergartener

Directed Proper Connection of Graphs

An edge-colored directed graph is called properly connected if, between every pair of vertices, there is a properly colored directed path. We study some conditions on directed graphs which guarantee the existence of a coloring that is properly connected. We also study conditions on a colored directed graph which guarantee that the coloring is properly connected

Laser writing of individual atomic defects in a crystal with near-unity yield

Atomic defects in wide band gap materials show great promise for development of a new generation of quantum information technologies, but have been hampered by the inability to produce and engineer the defects in a controlled way. The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color center in diamond is one of the foremost candidates, with single defects allowing optical addressing of electron spin and nuclear spin degrees of freedom with potential for applications in advanced sensing and computing. Here we demonstrate a method for the deterministic writing of individual NV centers at selected locations with high positioning accuracy using laser processing with online fluorescence feedback. This method provides a new tool for the fabrication of engineered materials and devices for quantum technologies and offers insight into the diffusion dynamics of point defects in solids.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

Long-term trends in diatom diversity and palaeoproductivity: a 16 000-year multidecadal record from Lake Baikal, southern Siberia

Biological diversity is inextricably linked to community stability and ecosystem functioning, but our understanding of these relationships in freshwater ecosystems is largely based on short-term observational, experimental, and modelling approaches. Using a multidecadal diatom record for the past ca. 16 000 years from Lake Baikal, we investigate how diversity and palaeoproductivity have responded to climate change during periods of both rapid climate fluctuation and relative climate stability. We show dynamic changes in diatom communities during the past 16 000 years, with decadal shifts in species dominance punctuating millennial-scale seasonal trends. We describe for the first time in Lake Baikal a gradual shift from spring to autumnal diatom communities that started during the Younger Dryas and peaked during the Late Holocene, which likely represents orbitally driven ecosystem responses to long-term changes in seasonality. Using a multivariate classification tree, we show that trends in planktonic and tychoplanktonic diatoms broadly reflect both long-term climatic changes associated with the demise of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets and abrupt climatic changes associated with, for example, the Younger Dryas stadial. Indeed, diatom communities are most different before and after the boundary between the Early and Middle Holocene periods of ca. 8.2 cal kyr BP, associated with the presence and demise of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets respectively. Diatom richness and diversity, estimated using Hill's species numbers, are also shown to be very responsive to periods characterized by abrupt climate change, and using knowledge of diatom autecologies in Lake Baikal, diversity trends are interpreted in terms of resource availability. Using diatom biovolume accumulation rates (BVARs; µm3 cm−2 yr−1), we show that spring diatom crops dominate palaeoproductivity for nearly all of our record, apart from a short period during the Late Holocene, when autumnal productivity dominated between 1.8–1.4 cal kyr BP. Palaeoproductivity was especially unstable during the Younger Dryas, reaching peak rates of 18.3 × 103 µm3 cm−2 yr−1 at ca. 12.3 cal kyr BP. Generalized additive models (GAMs), which explore productivity–diversity relationships (PDRs) during pre-defined climate periods, reveal complex relationships. The strongest statistical evidence for GAMs were found during the Younger Dryas, the Early Holocene, and the Late Holocene, i.e. periods of rapid climate change. We account for these differences in terms of climate-mediated resource availability, and the ability of endemic diatom species in Lake Baikal to adapt to extreme forms of living in this unique ecosystem. Our analyses offer insight into how productivity–diversity relationships may develop in the future under a warming climate