Mentoring is an intellectual pillar of ethnobiology

Ethnobiology relies on community partnerships and relationships between elders or other knowledge keepers and students. Our Society of Ethnobiology, like all academic organizations, has its own issues with discrimination and abuses of power. But more than other academic disciplines, contemporary ethnobiology is practiced with and strengthened by close, respectful working relationships. As such, we offer our thoughts on the lessons ethnobiology brings to mentorship and accountability while outlining some of the specific steps we are taking as an academic and practicing community.Published versio

Combining Downhole and Sediment Logging to Understand Spatial Variability in Grain-Size, Facies, and Reservoir Quality of a Large-Scale Mississippi River Point Bar, False River, Louisiana

Although the general processes by which meandering river point bars are constructed have been known for some time, there is a lack of clarity regarding why small-scale heterogeneities develop. This is especially true in the largest meandering river systems, which are equivalent to some of the most important hydrocarbon reservoirs in the world. In this study, we evaluate the stratigraphic architecture of the 80 km2 False River Point Bar System on the Lower Mississippi River and use the knowledge gained to better comprehend point bar construction at different phases. Previous studies of small to medium-scale systems have been unable to predict the degree of lateral heterogeneity of larger systems— where data on a scale of 1 m to approximately 300 m is needed. Guided by a high resolution DEM, this study combines grain-size analysis, sediment coring, and electrical logging (gamma ray, hydraulic profiling, and electrical conductivity) at 19 sites (12 sites with sediment coring). Results show not only large-scale differences in lithology and permeability between these areas but also show differences on a finer scale within these locations. This is especially true at the Bueche property where an abandonment facies is observed. At the Woody property, where data was collected from closely spaced sites (approximately 30 m apart), data shows a rapid deterioration in permeability towards the youngest parts of the bar. The Roberts property channel fill location, which once connected the present oxbow lake to the Mississippi River, shows even more pronounced changes over 10’s of meters and generally poor reservoir characteristics. The False River system— and presumably other major river point bar deposits— show coherent differences across their width with a fining and reduction of reservoir quality going downstream and a sharp decrease immediately before the final abandonment of the channel

Where were you last night?: alibi believability and corroborating evidence : a new direction in psychology and law

This thesis discusses the definition of alibi, including the nature of evidence needed to support an alibi, and introduces a proposed taxonomy of alibi strength based on perceived believability. The taxonomy is composed of 12 entries represented by a factorial combination of four levels of person evidence and three levels of physical supporting evidence. Participants (N = 252) evaluated three alibis, with physical evidence as within-subjects variable and person evidence as a between-subjects variable. Participants rated the alibis according to believability and the likelihood that the alibi provider was the culprit. They also rated the alibi providers on various trait descriptions. Alibis with stronger levels of physical or person corroboration were rated as more believable than alibis with no physical or person corroboration. Physical evidence moderated the effect of person evidence: As strength of physical evidence increased, the effect of person evidence diminished. Likelihood judgments and relevant trait ratings showed a similar pattern to believability judgments. Interestingly, trait ratings on irrelevant dimensions were also affected by alibi strength. Evaluators generally make distinctions among alibis along the lines of the proposed taxonomy, indicating high promise for the use of the taxonomy in future alibi research

Lies, damned lies, and alibis: how do evaluators process alibis?

Research regarding the evaluation of alibis has been sparse to date. The current experiments were designed to assess how people evaluate and process alibi statements. It was hypothesized that people approach alibis with skepticism and that alibis elicit different processing from evaluators than do everyday memory statements. Experiment 1 used a cognitive busyness paradigm to assess the starting point from which alibi evaluators begin. Results indicated the cognitive busyness manipulation did not affect participants\u27 ratings of believability of either the weak or strong alibi. The superficial evaluation hypothesis was advanced as a potential explanation for the ineffectiveness of the busyness manipulation---that participants who were cognitively busy were interrupted in their processing of the central facts of the case but were nonetheless able to use simple, peripheral cues to arrive at similar evaluations as non-cognitively-busy participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the timing and type of alibi schema to examine whether alibis are processed differently from a normal narrative story. All participants viewed the same narrative account; some participants knew prior to viewing that the account was an alibi whereas others discovered after viewing that the account was an alibi. In addition, some participants were told the guilt or innocence status of the alibi provider. Results indicated that when participants did not know the ultimate status of the alibi provider and knew that they were viewing an alibi prior to watching the alibi video, their recall was biased toward details occurring during the time period most relevant to the alibi. Knowledge that the account was an alibi affected participants\u27 encoding, but not retrieval, of the alibi story. There was no clear support for the hypothesis that alibi evaluators approach alibis with skepticism, but there was support for the hypothesis that people encode alibi information differently than they encode an everyday narrative account

Relocating childbirth: the politics of birth place and Aboriginal midwifery in Manitoba, Canada

The place of birth for First Nations is a contested issue in Canada today. For the past 30 years, the practice of removing women from communities to birth in urban centre hospitals, called maternal evacuation, has been a part of the dialogue between First Nation organisations, the Canadian state, policy makers, and Academics. Concurrent to the practice of evacuation, there is a movement to repatriate birth to First Nations through Aboriginal midwifery. This multi-sited ethnography is based on 15 months of fieldwork in Manitoba, Canada and follows the practice of evacuation and the establishment of an Aboriginal midwifery practice in one northern First Nation community. The ethnography reveals that both evacuation and returning birth is a complex, multi-layered negotiation of risk between various actors. From women and their families, doctors and nurses, midwives and other health professionals: the management of risk is at the forefront of this discussion. This study takes into account how risk is imagined, created and targeted in the practice of maternity care for First Nations in Manitoba. The concept of risk and risk management takes on multiple forms as the practice of evacuation moves from the community to the urban centre, from federal land to provincial land, from the hospital to the board room. Through participation observation in the places of birth and interviews with the range of actors involved in maternity care for First Nations, this ethnography reveals the messiness of the concept of risk, and identifies where these actors collude and conflict on the topic of evacuation and repatriation. The study also traces how the state has co-opted the language of risk on all sides of this debate and how the bodies of the First Nations mother and midwife becomes sites in which these contestations over risk, responsibility, knowledge and safety occur

The cry among us: responding to adolescent female cutting in the evangelical Christian church

The phenomenon of cutting is extremely complex, as is the care of those who engage in it. This work provides exhaustive knowledge of the kinds of clinical interpretations of cutting that exist and interventions offered to curb this maladaptive behavior. It empowers volunteer youth workers to feel more confident in responding to young women who are cutting. It also encourages those who work in evangelical Christian contexts to draw carefully, cautiously, and judiciously, from the resources of their faith tradition as their contribution to the care of young women who cut

Revoicing in Undergraduate Physics Education: A Case Study

When an instructor repeats or revoices the words or ideas that a student has just said, what is the instructor\u27s goal? What results can this tactic bring? In order to lay the groundwork for a broader investigation of these questions, video recordings were viewed of one-on-one interviews of students populating a discussion-based modern physics-like course taken by non-physics science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors at a medium-sized public university. This work focuses on a one particular interview which reveals several functions of this revoicing technique. For the interview in question, revoicing instances were identified and put into three inflection type categories: declarative, interrogative, and ambiguous. The types of student responses to each instance were then identified and categorized by the level of student engagement they represented. Student engagement level was then compared for the various inflection types of the revoicing instances. It was found that interrogative revoicing had a higher likelihood of resulting in a response with a high level of student engagement, whereas declarative revoicing resulted more often in a response with a low level of student engagement. In the future, additional interviews from the data set can be analyzed to determine if this same pattern of engagement level holds for other students

Superconducting gamma-detectors for non-destructive analysis in nuclear safeguards

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Nuclear Science and Engineering, June 2010."June 2010." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-42).Ultra-high energy resolution superconducting gamma ray detectors operated at temperatures of 0. 1 K can improve the accuracy of non-destructive analysis of nuclear materials. These detectors offer an order of magnitude improvement in resolution over conventional high-purity germanium detectors. The increase in resolution improves the peak-to-background ratio, and reduces errors from line overlap, therefore allowing the identification of weak gamma rays on top of a high Compton background. The higher resolution also improves the accuracy of isotope ratio measurements in fissile material. In order to understand the spectral background and improve the detector sensitivity, GEANT4 Monte Carlo simulations are used to model the low energy response of these superconducting detectors. The models are used to identify the spectral contributions from Compton scattering and from the detector shielding to assess the feasibility of identifying fissile material in spent nuclear fuel. The detector simulations are compared for accuracy to experimental data. We discuss the superconducting detector model, possible improvements in spectrometer configuration, and their use in nuclear safeguards by the IAEA.by Andrea Elizabeth Robles Olson.S.B

Foundations of Cooperation in Young Children

Observations and experiments show that human adults preferentially share resources with close relations, with people who have shared with them (reciprocity), and with people who have shared with others (indirect reciprocity). These tendencies are consistent with evolutionary theory but could also reflect the shaping effects of experience or instruction in complex, cooperative and competitive societies. Here we report evidence for these three tendencies in 3.5 year old children, despite their limited experience with complex cooperative networks. Three pillars of mature cooperative behavior therefore appear to have roots extending deep into human development.Psycholog