State of Watershed Payments: An Emerging Marketplace

A global research effort conducted by Ecosystem Marketplace identified a total of approximately 288 payments for watershed services (PWS) and water quality trading (WQT) programs in varying stages of activity over the past 30 years. In 2008, the baseline year, about 127 programs were actively receiving payments or transacting credits. The total transaction value from all programs actively engaged in 2008 is estimated at US$9.3 billion. Over the entire time span of recorded activity, total transaction value is estimated at slightly more than US$50 billion, impacting some 3.24 billion hectares

Designing an Instrument to Assess School-Based Peer-to-Peer Heroin and Opioid Prevention Program Outcomes

This study examines the issue of adolescent heroin and opioid use in New Hampshire and reviews interventions that positively change adolescent knowledge and perception of use. Prior studies indicate that peer-to-peer storytelling formats have a positive impact on adolescent knowledge and perception of substance use. We identified the Communities for Alcohol and Drug-free Youth’s (CADY) Alex’s Story, a school-based peer-to-peer storytelling prevention program addressing adolescent heroin and opioid use. To assist CADY in analyzing the programmatic impact of “Alex’s Story” on students, we designed a survey instrument to assess students’ understanding about substance use and addiction, and perception of harm associated with heroin and opioid use. We propose CADY use the designed instrument as a pre- and post-survey to measure students’ beliefs and perception of harm. It is hypothesized that by doing so, students who view Alex’s Story will have 1) an increased understanding about substance use and addiction, and 2) an increase in perception of harm related to heroin and opioid use when compared to students who do not view Alex’s Story. The implementation process for the survey instrument will be discussed

Homies in the New Latino Diaspora

“Homies” are a series of over two hundred 1¾ inch figurines created by a California artist, with the images also available on clothing, in comics, in videogames, on stickers and on the internet. The artist claims that his creations represent the whole range of people one finds in “the barrio.” As the images circulate, however, different audiences interpret them differently - some decrying their glorification of gangsters, for instance, with others lauding the portrayal of less commonly represented social types. This paper traces the uptake of Homies images in one suburban American town, a town with no previous history of Mexican settlement that has become home to thousands of Mexican immigrants over the past 15 years. In this location, Homies images are taken up in various identity projects as Anglos use them to make sense of the rapidly growing immigrant community and as Mexican youth use them to identify themselves. The role that Homies play in social identification cannot be understood by examining discrete events of media “reception,” however. Analysts must also take into account ongoing local struggles over identity through which the mass mediated images come to have meaning and in which these images sometimes play central roles. The recontextualization of these mass mediated images among different groups in town sometimes results in the homogenization of identities - with the signs used to construe Mexican youth in unflattering ways drawn from nationally circulating stereotypes - while at other times the images are taken up in less familiar identity projects

Learning to Analyze and Critically Evaluate Ideas, Arguments, and Points of View

By encouraging our students to adopt a critical framework, we prepare them not only to engage in scholarly conversation and debate in our disciplines, but also to be engaged citizens in a democratic society

Helping Immigrants Identify as University-Bound Students : Unexpected Difficulties in Teaching the Hidden Curriculum

Globalization has brought rapid migration to many regions previously unfamiliar with immigration. In these changing landscapes long-time residents must make sense of their new neighbors, and immigrants must adjust to hosts’ ideas about them and develop their own accounts of a new social context. How immigrants are viewed and how they view themselves have important implications for their future prospects-especially in schools, where students are measured against normative models of success. Yet as members of cultural and linguistic minority groups, and often as people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, immigrant students may not be aware of these models that are typically part of the implicit or hidden curriculum. Realizing this, secondary school educators in one American town tried to help immigrant students adopt a normative model of identity, the «university-bound student,» by teaching them explicitly how such a person should behave. Their well-intentioned efforts at teaching the hidden curriculum did not work, however. Immigrant students recognized and valued the identity, but neither they nor their teachers believed that the students could adopt it themselves. Using ethnographic data and discourse analyses of curricular materials and classroom interaction, we describe how this program failed to work. We argue that this occurred in part because the intervention was based upon a conception of culture and identity as static and homogenous. We show how a more complex account of culture and identity –as circulatory, multiple, and heterogeneously evaluated– explains this failure and suggests how such an intervention could be more successful

COCRYSTALLIZATION TO IMPROVE THE DISSOLUTION AND PHARMACOKINETICS OF A POORLY SOLUBLE DRUG

Improving the dissolution and pharmacokinetics of the poorly soluble active pharmaceutical ingredient, AMG 517, through cocrystallization was investigated. Correlations between the in vitro powder and intrinsic dissolution in fasted simulated intestinal fluid and the in vivo rat pharmacokinetics of 16 cocrystals were examined. A detailed exploration of the behaviors of corresponding carboxylic acid and amide cocrystal pairs utilizing single crystal structure analysis to elucidate results is also performed. All cocrystals exhibit increased intrinsic and powder dissolution rates as well as area under the concentration-time curve and maximum plasma concentration in rat pharmacokinetic investigations compared to the free base. Linear regression analysis leads to a moderate in vitro/in vivo correlation. The incorporation of an amide rather than the more common carboxylic acid cocrystal former affords unique properties in one case. In silico tools describing the crystal faces, attachment energy and crystal morphology, are constructive in relating the crystals physical properties

Racialization in Payday Mugging Narratives

As Mexican immigrants move to areas of the United States that have not been home to Latinos, both longstanding residents and newcomers must make sense of their new neighbors. In one East Coast suburb relevant models of identity are sometimes communicated through “payday mugging” stories about African American criminals mugging undocumented Mexican victims. These narratives racialize African Americans and Mexicans in different ways. As payday mugging stories move across narrators from different communities, the racialized characterizations shift

Interviews as Interactional Data

Interviews are designed to gather propositional information communicated through reference and predication. Some lament the fact that interviews always include interactional positioning that presupposes and sometimes creates social identities and power relationships. Interactional aspects of interview events threaten to corrupt the propositional information communicated, and it appears that these aspects need to be controlled. Interviews do often yield useful propositional information, and interviewers must guard against the sometimes-corrupting influence of interactional factors. But we argue that the interactional aspects of interview events can also be valuable data. Interview subjects sometimes position themselves in ways that reveal something about the habitual positioning that characterizes them or their groups. We illustrate the potential value of this interactional information by describing “payday mugging” stories told by interviewees in one New Latino Diaspora town

Migration Narratives

Migration Narratives presents an ethnographic study of an American town that recently became home to thousands of Mexican migrants, with the Mexican population rising from 125 in 1990 to slightly under 10,000 in 2016. Through interviews with residents, the book focuses on key educational, religious, and civic institutions that shape and are shaped by the realities of Mexican immigrants. Focusing on African American, Mexican, Irish and Italian communities, the authors describe how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers’ pathways and draw links between the town’s earlier cycles of migration. The town represents similar communities across the USA and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. The purpose of the book is to document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience and to suggest ways in which policy-makers, researchers, educators and communities can respond intelligently to politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world. This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Boston College

Building Resilient Oregon Coastal Communities: Reimagining Critical Facilities through Latinx Sense of Place

This paper examines equitability of critical facilities within resilience planning efforts and how it relates to accessibility and utilization for Latinx community members along the Oregon coast in relation to natural hazards including the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with emergency management personnel and Latinx coastal community members in Newport City and Clatsop County regarding their perceptions of critical facility values and locations, in order to create an inclusive sense of place. The interviews and focus groups were analyzed and used to identify necessary changes within resilience planning efforts that will improve resilience levels for Latinx community members along the Oregon coast. This research finds that current resilience planning focus and efforts regarding critical facilities are not meeting the needs of Oregon Latinx coastal community members, creating inequitable access and utilization in times of need. This paper identifies Latinx determined critical facilities and their associated values resulting in various suggested improvements for equitable accessibility and utilization. This research is meant to expose systemic issues in resilience planning efforts regarding critical facilities, not to catalog cultural differences. A critical facility according to FEMA, provides services and functions essential to a community, especially during and after a disaster (FEMA, n.d.)