Supporting the Micmac Farms Through Ethnographic Communication Research

“Living in New York City, I experienced being at the top of the food chain, and living in Presque Isle Maine, we are at the bottom of the food chain. The food we get is the bottom of the barrel, low quality, and expensive.” This was a story told to me by a tribal administrator, which represented a problem of food security. The Micmac started a farm in order to address community health issues of high obesity and diabetes. In the summer of 2011, I worked three months on the farm supporting community needs and goals of the farm. My research stems from Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI), which developed from a 20 million USD NSF grant. A key feature of SSI focuses on addressing community problems by engaging with stakeholders and community members, which involves being problem driven and produce knowledge with and for the communities the research serves. After meeting with the tribal council, they agreed to collaborate and expressed needs of additional labor, as well as coordinating community outreach. I also studied the interactions of groups and individuals to see where communication studies could support the growth of their farm. One chapter utilized risk communication. In this chapter I argue that power structures within administration threaten the tribes attempt to gain greater economic and food security. This analysis revealed two key risks that threaten this business, economic constraints and not planning and operating correctly. These risks created mistakes in daily operations that cause inefficiencies in production, which contributes to the farm by identifying threats to the business. During this analysis, I realized that my data consists largely of economic behaviors. No issues of tribal sovereignty, health, or past food traditions became dominate themes. I employed a genealogical analysis as influenced by Michel Foucault to understand the underlying discourses that operate in and through the Micmac Farms. In this chapter I explore why do economic behaviors dominate the data? I created a history of farming discourse by analyzing documents to see where key events in history influenced changes with farming practices. I then traced these moments to see how they arise on the Micmac Farms. The grants the farm utilize center on economics because they derive from the farming discourse and a rich history of business. This also becomes an output for the Micmac because they must be careful to find culturally appropriate funding sources that promote indigenous culture and knowledge instead of negating them. I incorporated these findings into a technical report for the community. I outlined a plan to improve management on the farm, as drawn out through my analysis on risk. It involves reorganizing task allocation to resolve inefficiencies in farm production. This addresses a community need of developing a successful business, and I outlined another plan to encourage community interaction around the farm. This involves educating youth about food systems, working with elders to learn past food traditions, and utilizing high school youth to begin a Community Supported Agriculture program

From the St. Croix to the Skutik: Expanding Our Understanding of History, Research Engagement, and Places

Situated in Maine rivers, I engage sites of memory present in places related to natural resources and research engagement. To address this, first I articulate an archeological analysis of Colonial American and early Maine history to describe land-based practices that shaped river ecology and interactions with Wabanaki people. This historical tension arises as the success of the timber industry required dams to transport lumber, blocking paths for migrating fish and restricting Wabanaki sustenance practices. Similarly, the process of resource extraction has continued in other forms placing Wabanaki people and First Nations more broadly, as the subjects of research through studying their languages and learning their stories without providing reciprocity to these communities. Next, I build from environmental communication, participatory critical rhetoric, and indigenous methods to describe how researchers can create more ethical pathways for collaborative processes through orienting to history from Wabanaki perspectives and shaping research methods to accommodate the community’s vision for progress. I provide examples of what this looks like through a partnership with the Passamaquoddy Environmental Department where research goals, methods, and analysis were guided through community feedback. This ultimately created a process where communities can retain control of their knowledge, which has implications for alleviating historical tensions that have not favored participation or reciprocity with the Wabanaki. I finish with two theoretical chapters that recognize how Wabanaki knowledge has been restricted on the St. Croix. By reintegrating the knowledge of Wabanaki thinkers and fishers back to the river, I draw out how values related to balance guide interactions, such as fishing practices, on the river and how this supports stronger ecological systems and fishing identities for Wabanaki and non-Wabanaki communities. Through this discussion, I extend an idea into a final reflective chapter to understand how key places in Maine support diverse ecologies that organize people, practices, and communities in unique ways

Wabanaki Experiences and Perspectives on “Our Shared Ocean”: Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission Special Report Sea Run

The Maine Indian State Tribal Commission (MITSC) recently published a special report titled, Sea Run, documenting the impact of Colonial and Maine policies and activities on the quality and quantity of tribal fisheries spanning the time from first contact between Europeans and the Wabanaki Nations to today

University Entry Score: Is it a Consideration for Spatial Performance in Architecture Design Students?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight into the relationship between students’ spatial ability and their university entrance score (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank [ATAR]). The ATAR provides entry into university studies but does not necessary provide a good measure of students’ spatial skills. Spatial abilities are fundamental to success in many design courses. This paper aims to show whether the ATAR is a good predictor of spatial skills and considers the implications of this. Design/methodology/approach – Students entering university design courses in architecture were tested three times during their rst year using a three-dimensional (3D) Ability Test (3DAT), an online psychometric test of 3D spatial ability. The students’ results in 3DAT were then compared to students’ ATAR scores using a Pearson’s correlation test were also conducted to assess the relationship between ATAR and spatial performance. Findings – There was no correlation between ATAR and spatial performance. Therefore, there was no relationship between Participants were required to select their ATAR from ranges, i.e. 71-80, 81-90 and 91-100, which meant their exact ATAR was not recorded. This meant that the participants were clustered, making it dif cult to establish a linear relationship that was a true re ection of the population. Practical implications – Initiatives to support students entering design courses may be necessary to compensate for the range of spatial skills students possess when entering university because of their school experiences. Social implications – Individuals who have strong spatial skills are able to perform spatial problems faster and more ef ciently than those with weak spatial skills. High spatial performance has been shown relate to performance in areas such as mathematics science technology and design. Originality/value – This paper ful ls the need to better understand the diversity of spatial abilities students have on entering design courses

Blue Chip Quest: a Geographical Analysis of Collegiate Football Recruiting, 1972-1981

This study is concerned with the analysis of production, migration patterns, and the decision-making process of the college-bound High School All-American football players. The objectives were to analyze player origins and migrations to see if and under what conditions trends and patterns emerge.Higher Educatio

Modelling the contribution of SO2 and NOx emissions from international shipping to sulphur and oxidised nitrogen deposition in the United Kingdom

A statistical Lagrangian atmospheric transport model was used to generate annual maps of deposition of sulphur and nitrogen for the United Kingdom at a 5 x 5 km2 resolution for the year 2005 and to assess the contribution attributed to emissions of SO2 and NOx from international shipping. A future emissions scenario for the year 2020 was used to investigate changes in the relative contribution of shipping emissions. The results show that, if shipping emissions are assumed to increase at a rate of 2.5% per year, their relative contribution to total sulphur and oxidised nitrogen deposition are expected to increase from 15% and 12% respectively to 37% and 28% between 2005 and 2020. Enforcement of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) agreement to reduce the sulphur content in marine fuel to 0.5% was estimated to result in a 30% reduction in total sulphur deposition to the UK for the year 2020 compared to a business as usual scenario, with the result that the relative contribution from shipping to sulphur deposition in the UK would be reduced to 9% of the tota

Exploiting Machine Learning to Subvert Your Spam Filter

Using statistical machine learning for making security decisions introduces new vulnerabilities in large scale systems. This paper shows how an adversary can exploit statistical machine learning, as used in the SpamBayes spam filter, to render it useless—even if the adversary’s access is limited to only 1 % of the training messages. We further demonstrate a new class of focused attacks that successfully prevent victims from receiving specific email messages. Finally, we introduce two new types of defenses against these attacks.

Developing a discipline-based measure of visualisation

This paper reports on current studies in a large research project concerned with assessing and improving visualisation specific to engineering and science disciplines. These studies primarily focus on establishing a reliable measure of visualisation to identify poor performers so that training and learning tasks can be developed. The visualisation measure called the 3D Ability Test (3DAT) complies with psychometric test construction standards and consists of subtests and test items within each. The 3DAT is a computer-based instrument that measures choice accuracy and response time. The methodology used to investigate subtest properties is presented and results of statistical procedures are reported. Factors of visualisation are examined and the benefits of using a range of subtests are outlined. A case is made for a purpose-designed subtest (dot coordinate) to be seen as a particularly good measure of the visualisation skills considered necessary for science-related disciplines. We outline preliminary studies conducted with unskilled participants (no prior learning) and skilled participants (prior learning) under laboratory conditions. Included is research done with first year university students in design-based disciplines such as mechanical and chemical engineering. Results revealed significant differences between engineering groups when compared to other groups and consistent evidence of gender bias favouring males. The success of collaboration between unusual partners (applied psychology and design) is discussed and argued is the relevance of visualisation to science disciplines where conceptual development is important. Central to the overall project is funding provided by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC)

Empowerment for Continuous Agent-Environment Systems

This paper develops generalizations of empowerment to continuous states. Empowerment is a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity motivated by hypotheses about the efficiency of the sensorimotor loop in biological organisms, but also from considerations stemming from curiosity-driven learning. Empowemerment measures, for agent-environment systems with stochastic transitions, how much influence an agent has on its environment, but only that influence that can be sensed by the agent sensors. It is an information-theoretic generalization of joint controllability (influence on environment) and observability (measurement by sensors) of the environment by the agent, both controllability and observability being usually defined in control theory as the dimensionality of the control/observation spaces. Earlier work has shown that empowerment has various interesting and relevant properties, e.g., it allows us to identify salient states using only the dynamics, and it can act as intrinsic reward without requiring an external reward. However, in this previous work empowerment was limited to the case of small-scale and discrete domains and furthermore state transition probabilities were assumed to be known. The goal of this paper is to extend empowerment to the significantly more important and relevant case of continuous vector-valued state spaces and initially unknown state transition probabilities. The continuous state space is addressed by Monte-Carlo approximation; the unknown transitions are addressed by model learning and prediction for which we apply Gaussian processes regression with iterated forecasting. In a number of well-known continuous control tasks we examine the dynamics induced by empowerment and include an application to exploration and online model learning