Making the Sustainable Development Goals Really Sustainable: Human Rights Strategies to Improve Land Tenure Rights and Wages for the Poor

The Millennium Development Goals created incentives for donors and governments to favor quick impact over addressing complex social systems. As a result, the MDG period saw little sustained effort to open up access to those productive assets, and that presents a challenge for the SDGs. This paper argues (1) that this failing of the MDGs weakened their impact; (2) that the SDGs significantly improve on this record by including goals and targets that focus on these productive assets, in both land and labor; (3) that human rights approaches have driven important efforts in some societies to improve land and labor rights; and (4) that human rights organizations and human rights methods are shaping the SDGs and their monitoring and implementation. Examining national experiences with land reform, women’s property and inheritance rights, and improved labor rights and opportunities, the paper shows that these measures have important, long-term impacts on poverty and that they are driven by effective advocacy and long-term government commitments to human rights principles. Sustainable success will also require that poor people have access to the productive assets — land, credit, work at living wages and training, and energy — that give them opportunities to prosper. Human rights approaches tend to call for attention to the causes and multiple dimensions of poverty and to the linkages between poverty and civil and political freedoms, both in principle and in practice. The paper’s final section examines human rights advocates’ expanded involvement in shaping and monitoring the SDGs

Making the Sustainable Development Goals Really Sustainable: Human Rights Strategies to Improve Land Tenure Rights and Wages for the Poor

The Millennium Development Goals created incentives for donors and governments to favor quick impact over addressing complex social systems. As a result, the MDG period saw little sustained effort to open up access to those productive assets, and that presents a challenge for the SDGs. This paper argues (1) that this failing of the MDGs weakened their impact; (2) that the SDGs significantly improve on this record by including goals and targets that focus on these productive assets, in both land and labor; (3) that human rights approaches have driven important efforts in some societies to improve land and labor rights; and (4) that human rights organizations and human rights methods are shaping the SDGs and their monitoring and implementation. Examining national experiences with land reform, women’s property and inheritance rights, and improved labor rights and opportunities, the paper shows that these measures have important, long-term impacts on poverty and that they are driven by effective advocacy and long-term government commitments to human rights principles. Sustainable success will also require that poor people have access to the productive assets — land, credit, work at living wages and training, and energy — that give them opportunities to prosper. Human rights approaches tend to call for attention to the causes and multiple dimensions of poverty and to the linkages between poverty and civil and political freedoms, both in principle and in practice. The paper’s final section examines human rights advocates’ expanded involvement in shaping and monitoring the SDGs

A structured management approach to implementation of health promotion interventions in Head Start.

Improving the health and health literacy of low-income families is a national public health priority in the United States. The federal Head Start program provides a national infrastructure for implementation of health promotion interventions for young children and their families. The Health Care Institute (HCI) at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, developed a structured approach to health promotion training for Head Start grantees using business management principles. This article describes the HCI approach and provides examples of implemented programs and selected outcomes, including knowledge and behavior changes among Head Start staff and families. This prevention-focused training platform has reached 60,000 Head Start families in the United States since its inception in 2001. HCI has demonstrated consistent outcomes in diverse settings and cultures, suggesting both scalability and sustainability

A generalized theory of semiflexible polymers

DNA bending on length scales shorter than a persistence length plays an integral role in the translation of genetic information from DNA to cellular function. Quantitative experimental studies of these biological systems have led to a renewed interest in the polymer mechanics relevant for describing the conformational free energy of DNA bending induced by protein-DNA complexes. Recent experimental results from DNA cyclization studies have cast doubt on the applicability of the canonical semiflexible polymer theory, the wormlike chain (WLC) model, to DNA bending on biological length scales. This paper develops a theory of the chain statistics of a class of generalized semiflexible polymer models. Our focus is on the theoretical development of these models and the calculation of experimental observables. To illustrate our methods, we focus on a specific toy model of DNA bending. We show that the WLC model generically describes the long-length-scale chain statistics of semiflexible polymers, as predicted by the Renormalization Group. In particular, we show that either the WLC or our new model adequate describes force-extension, solution scattering, and long-contour-length cyclization experiments, regardless of the details of DNA bend elasticity. In contrast, experiments sensitive to short-length-scale chain behavior can in principle reveal dramatic departures from the linear elastic behavior assumed in the WLC model. We demonstrate this explicitly by showing that our toy model can reproduce the anomalously large short-contour-length cyclization J factors observed by Cloutier and Widom. Finally, we discuss the applicability of these models to DNA chain statistics in the context of future experiments

Research Mentoring and Scientist Identity: Insights from Undergraduates and their Mentors

Background Mentored research apprenticeships are a common feature of academic outreach programs that aim to promote diversity in science fields. The current study tests for links between three forms of mentoring (instrumental, socioemotional, and negative) and the degree to which undergraduates psychologically identify with science. Participants were 66 undergraduate-mentor dyads who worked together in a research apprenticeship. The undergraduate sample was predominantly composed of women, first-generation college students, and members of ethnic groups that are historically underrepresented in science. Results Findings illustrated that undergraduates who reported receiving more instrumental and socioemotional mentoring were higher in scientist identity. Further, mentors who reported engaging in higher levels of negative mentoring had undergraduates with lower scientist identity. Qualitative data from undergraduates’ mentors provided deeper insight into their motivation to become mentors and how they reason about conflict in their mentoring relationships. Conclusions Discussion highlights theoretical implications and details several methodological recommendations

Tuateawa: A study in soundscape ecology

Ramp Gallery 7-11 Dec 2020 A multimedia work by Kent Macpherson Rhys Jones & Paul Nelson The Tuateawa project seeks to inform Ecological Understanding using Analyses of Soundscapes. Sound recordings are made in specific locations near Tuateawa in the Coromandel peninsula. This area is being monitored for the eradication of pests such as possums, stoats and rats. The work looks at how the soundscapes change over time. In particular, How is bird life affected by the presence of introduced noxious pests? How does human activity influence natural behaviours. The project is a form of documentary capturing detailed sound recordings every season for three or more years. The sound data is analysed for any noticeable shifts in frequency and loudness, then output as various visual abstractions, the first of which is an audio visual work for LCD screens and speakers at Ramp Gallery 7-11 December 2020. The intended audience is intermediate age children to get them thinking about how these soundscapes might be understood and focused on through a less ‘scientific’ mediu

Synthesis and characterisation of an N-heterocyclic carbene with spatially-defined steric impact

The synthesis and co-ordination chemistry of a new ‘bulky yet flexible’ N-heterocyclic carbene (“IPaul”) is reported. This carbene has spatially-defined steric impact; steric maps show that two quadrants are very bulky while the other two are quite open. The electronic properties of this carbene are very similar to those of other 1,3-diarylimidazol-2-ylidenes. Copper, silver, iridium, and nickel complexes of the new ligand have been prepared. In solution, the ligand adopts two different conformations, while X-ray crystallographic analyses of the transition metal complexes suggest that the syn-conformer is preferred in the solid state due to intermolecular interactions. The copper complex of this new ligand has been shown to be highly-active in the hydrosilylation of carbonyl compounds, when compared to the analogous IPr, IMes, IPr* and IPr*OMe complexes

Marine tardigrades from South Carolina, USA

Until now, there have been only three studies of marine tardigrades from South Carolina, USA. The Fall 2015 invertebrate zoology class from Warren Wilson College collected four sediment samples from Huntington Beach State Park: shallow beach sand, deep beach sand, shallow salt marsh sediment, and deep salt marsh sediment. No tardigrades were found in the salt marsh, but two species were found in the beach samples. Batillipes pennaki Marcus, 1946 was found in shallow and deep beach sand, and three specimens of a potentially new species of Stygarctus Schulz, 1951 were found in the deep beach sand at groundwater level. Subsequent collections to find more specimens of Stygarctus have been unsuccessful so far, but a third species record, Orzeliscus belopus du Bois-Reymond Marcus, 1952, sensu lato was verified. Three eutardigrade species were also found in the beach sand, but we presume these were “accidentals” from terrestrial environments. A summary of known marine tardigrades from SC is presented

Comparative growth and static allometry in the genus Chlorocebus

Characterizing variation in growth across populations is critical to understanding multiple aspects of development in primates, including within-taxon developmental plasticity and the evolution of life history patterns. Growth in wild primates has often been reported and directly compared across larger taxonomic groups and within social groups, but comparisons are rarely investigated across widely dispersed populations of a single taxon. With the Vervet Phenome-Genome Project and the International Vervet Research Consortium, we trapped 936 vervet monkeys of all ages representing three populations (Kenyan pygerythrus, South African pygerythrus, and sabaeus from St. Kitts & Nevis). We gathered 10 different body measurements from each including mass, body breadth and length, segmental limb lengths, and chest circumference. To gain a better understanding of how ontogenetic patterns vary in these populations, we calculated bivariate allometry coefficients, derived using PCA on log-transformed and z-standardized trait values, and compared them to isometric vector coefficients. Within all population samples, around weaning age most traits showed a negative allometric relationship to body length. As each population ages, however, distinct patterns emerge, showing population differences in onset and intensity of growth among traits. In concordance with other analyses on growth in these populations, our results suggest that there exist relative differences in patterns of growth between Chlorocebus populations, further suggesting selection for unique developmental pathways in each