Assessing the Character of Place to Guide Geotourism in Montana: A Case Study of Whitefish and White Sulphur Springs, Montana

Assessing the Character of Place to Guide Geotourism in Montana: A Case Study of Whitefish and White Sulphur Springs, Montana Evan Tipton, M.S in Resource Conservation Purpose This study aims to identify the key attributes that local residents and visitors believe comprise as well as threaten the ‘character of their place.’ In 2007, the Montana Tourism Advisory Council, a governor-appointed advisory group, adopted the Montana Tourism and Recreation Charter, based on the niche approach to tourism called geotourism. The guiding principle of this charter, the one by which all activities should be measured, is to ensure that geotourism is sustaining or enhancing the character of a place, including its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents. Similarly, a goal in Governor Bullock’s Main Street Montana Project addresses the need to “Protect Montana’s quality of life for this and future generations.” The unknown variable in both the geotourism charter and Main Street Montana Project is the definition of “character of place,” which is likely highly linked to quality of life. Setting the Stage / ‘So What?’ Defining and understanding not only the constructs that together clarify what is meant by character of place, but also the threats to this character, will establish a replicable framework offering practical insights to help inform tourism marketers, community leaders, and policy-makers on not just what this ‘character of place’ is, but how it is constructed and what is needed to protect it. Methodological Approach This is an exploratory study that requires a qualitative research approach in order to discover what makes up ‘character of place’ and the threats to it, from the perspective of local residents and visitors. Photos and videos (much like methods of conversational journal-keeping long used in ethnographic studies of local communities) will be taken by the respondents to capture the imagery, scenery, stories and conversations which they feel best conveys the spirit and the character of the place they call home, as well as the threats to it. Within the visual representations, semi-structured interviews will be conducted to understand the link between the visuals and the meanings that they hold for the respondents. A representative sample of 15 residents and 15 visitors in each community (60 total respondents) will be asked to participate in the study using nonprobability purposive sampling. The resident subjects will be selected from a list of residents that community members recommend using chain referral methodology. The researchers will make efforts to ensure the resident sample is representative of the local populations based on occupation, gender, and length of residency. The visitor sample will be chosen by intercepts at various events in the community, along the main streets, or recommended by people within the community (chamber/CVB or accommodation owners). Leveraging videography in this methodological approach is innovative for several reasons. First, the use of videography in tourism related studies is almost non-existent. While photo-elicitation is a well-documented approach, this research field has not seen the inclusion of video to understand the concept of place attachment or community character. Second, a video allows the image to be constantly developing in front of one’s eyes. Having a continuously developing image might produce more prompts that elicit more in-depth conversation about how study participants perceive a place. Third, considering the multidimensional nature of ‘character’, video adds a dimensionality that a static images dos not. Lastly, video will allow for sound, which has proven to be important in people’s experience of place. Anticipated Outcomes A ‘within’ community comparison of resident and visitor depictions and definition of ‘character of place’ for both communities. A resident comparison of ‘character of place’ between the two communities. A nonresident comparison of ‘character of place’ between the two communities. The three comparisons above will be provided in a report on the key traits that comprise and threaten the local character of Whitefish and White Sulphur Springs based on resident perceptions compared to visitor perceptions. The report will include a rich-media presentation on the local ‘character of place’ for these two communities. A replicable framework for assessing and understanding the common goods and the uncommon spirit that geotourism should seek to sustain and enhance in Montana’s local communities will be produced. A short film will be created to highlight the “character of place” story using the videos, photos, and interview data obtained from residents and visitors. The Montana Office of Tourism’s film department has offered the assistance in creating and editing the short film

Assessing Character of Place to Guide Geotourism - A Case Study of Two Montana Communities

In 2007 the governor’s Montana Tourism Advisory Council adopted the Montana Tourism and Recreation Charter. Its guiding principle of geotourism pledges to sustain and enhance the character of the places that the people of Montana call home. How can the state’s efforts to keep this pledge be assessed when “character of place” has never been defined in detail? To keep this pledge, and chart the future of geotourism in the state, it was important to clarify what is meant by character of place and identify the full range of present and potential problems that threaten the integrity of a character. Only by assessing character of place can we understand whether and how geotourism sustains the local environment and its aesthetic appeal, enhances the local community and its culture, and enriches the local heritage and well-being of its people

Measurement of the nuclear modification factor for muons from charm and bottom hadrons in Pb+Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Heavy-flavour hadron production provides information about the transport properties and microscopic structure of the quark-gluon plasma created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A measurement of the muons from semileptonic decays of charm and bottom hadrons produced in Pb+Pb and pp collisions at a nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. The Pb+Pb data were collected in 2015 and 2018 with sampled integrated luminosities of 208 mu b(-1) and 38 mu b(-1), respectively, and pp data with a sampled integrated luminosity of 1.17 pb(-1) were collected in 2017. Muons from heavy-flavour semileptonic decays are separated from the light-flavour hadronic background using the momentum imbalance between the inner detector and muon spectrometer measurements, and muons originating from charm and bottom decays are further separated via the muon track's transverse impact parameter. Differential yields in Pb+Pb collisions and differential cross sections in pp collisions for such muons are measured as a function of muon transverse momentum from 4 GeV to 30 GeV in the absolute pseudorapidity interval vertical bar eta vertical bar < 2. Nuclear modification factors for charm and bottom muons are presented as a function of muon transverse momentum in intervals of Pb+Pb collision centrality. The bottom muon results are the most precise measurement of b quark nuclear modification at low transverse momentum where reconstruction of B hadrons is challenging. The measured nuclear modification factors quantify a significant suppression of the yields of muons from decays of charm and bottom hadrons, with stronger effects for muons from charm hadron decays

A search for an unexpected asymmetry in the production of e+μ− and e−μ+ pairs in proton-proton collisions recorded by the ATLAS detector at root s = 13 TeV

This search, a type not previously performed at ATLAS, uses a comparison of the production cross sections for e(+)mu(-) and e(-)mu(+) pairs to constrain physics processes beyond the Standard Model. It uses 139 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data recorded at root s = 13 TeV at the LHC. Targeting sources of new physics which prefer final states containing e(+)mu(-) and e(-)mu(+), the search contains two broad signal regions which are used to provide model-independent constraints on the ratio of cross sections at the 2% level. The search also has two special selections targeting supersymmetric models and leptoquark signatures. Observations using one of these selections are able to exclude, at 95% confidence level, singly produced smuons with masses up to 640 GeV in a model in which the only other light sparticle is a neutralino when the R-parity-violating coupling lambda(23)(1)' is close to unity. Observations using the other selection exclude scalar leptoquarks with masses below 1880 GeV when g(1R)(eu) = g(1R)(mu c) = 1, at 95% confidence level. The limit on the coupling reduces to g(1R)(eu) = g(1R)(mu c) = 0.46 for a mass of 1420 GeV

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Measurements of photo-nuclear jet production in Pb plus Pb collisions with ATLAS

Ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study the parton distributions in the colliding nuclei via the measurement of photo-nuclear jet production. An analysis of jet production in ultra-peripheral Pb+Pb collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV performed using data collected with the ATLAS detector in 2015 is described. The data set corresponds to a total Pb+Pb integrated luminosity of 0.38 nb−1. The ultra-peripheral collisions are selected using a combination of forward neutron and rapidity gap requirements. The cross-sections, not unfolded for detector response, are compared to results from Pythia Monte Carlo simulations re-weighted to match a photon spectrum obtained from the STARlight model. Qualitative agreement between data and these simulations is observed over a broad kinematic range suggesting that using these collisions to measure nuclear parton distributions is experimentally realisable

Measurements of photo-nuclear jet production in Pb + Pb collisions with ATLAS

Ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study the parton distributions in the colliding nuclei via the measurement of photo-nuclear jet production. An analysis of jet production in ultra-peripheral Pb+Pb collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV performed using data collected with the ATLAS detector in 2015 is described. The data set corresponds to a total Pb+Pb integrated luminosity of 0.38 nb⁻¹. The ultra-peripheral collisions are selected using a combination of forward neutron and rapidity gap requirements. The cross-sections, not unfolded for detector response, are compared to results from Pythia Monte Carlo simulations re-weighted to match a photon spectrum obtained from the STARlight model. Qualitative agreement between data and these simulations is observed over a broad kinematic range suggesting that using these collisions to measure nuclear parton distributions is experimentally realisable

Differential cross-section measurements of the production of four charged leptons in association with two jets using the ATLAS detector

Differential cross-sections are measured for the production of four charged leptons in association with two jets. These measurements are sensitive to final states in which the jets are produced via the strong interaction as well as to the purely-electroweak vector boson scattering process. The analysis is performed using proton-proton collision data collected by ATLAS at √s = 13 TeV and with an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1. The data are corrected for the effects of detector inefficiency and resolution and are compared to state-of-the-art Monte Carlo event generator predictions. The differential cross-sections are used to search for anomalous weak-boson self-interactions that are induced by dimension-six and dimension-eight operators in Standard Model effective field theory

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