Conservation and crime convergence? Situating the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference

The 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) Conference was the fourth and biggest meeting on IWT convened at the initiative of the UK Government. Using a collaborative event ethnography, we examine the Conference as a site where key actors defined the problem of IWT as one of serious crime that needs to be addressed as such. We ask (a) how was IWT framed as serious crime, (b) how was this framing mobilized to promote particular policy responses, and (c) how did the framing and suggested responses reflect the privileging of elite voices? Answering these questions demonstrates the expanding ways in which thinking related to crime and policing are an increasingly forceful dynamic shaping conservation-related policy at the global level. We argue that the conservation-crime convergence on display at the 2018 London IWT Conference is characteristic of a conservation policy landscape that increasingly promotes and privileges responses to IWT that are based on legal and judicial reform, criminal investigations, intelligence gathering, and law enforcement technologies. Marginalized are those voices that seek to address the underlying drivers of IWT by promoting solutions rooted in sustainable livelihoods in source countries and global demand reduction. We suggest that political ecology of conservation and environmental crime would benefit from greater engagement with critical criminology, a discipline that critically interrogates the uneven power dynamics that shape ideas of crime, criminality, how they are politicized, and how they frame policy decisions. This would add further conceptual rigor to political ecological work that deconstructs conservation and environmental crime

Mental Health and Addiction Services Loan Repayment Assistance

The State of Indiana recognizes the importance of strengthening and retaining the behavioral health workforce in order to 1) tackle the opioid epidemic and 2) expand the workforce to areas in greatest need of mental health care. Financial incentives focused on workforce recruitment and/or retention are frequently used as a strategy to increase workforce capacity, reduce turnover, and reduce burnout. Student loan repayment assistance programs are one such strategy. These programs generally offer professionals relief from the administrative and economic stress of repaying student debt in exchange for practicing in underserved areas or with underserved populations for a specified time period. In 2014, the Indiana Family and Social Services Division of Mental Health and Addiction (DMHA) implemented a Mental Health and Addiction Services Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP) targeting behavioral health professionals. The Bowen Center for Health Workforce Research and Policy (Bowen Center) was contracted by DMHA to perform an evaluation of the LRAP. The primary objectives of the evaluation were to 1) identify successful outcomes associated with the program and 2) determine areas in need of improvement. The following report describes the evaluation methods, discusses results, identifies successes, and offers recommendations for future program improvemen

The ecology, genetics and conservation of a translocated population of Cnemidophorus Vanzoi (Teiidae) on Praslin Island, St. Lucia

Includes bibliographical references.This study investigates the colonisation of Praslin Island by C. vanzoi, three years after the translocation event. An examination of habitat use, lizard abundance, distribution and population genetics was conducted and population comparisons investigated changes in morphometrics or lizard condition since translocation. These investigations were cunducted during the wet season and the dry season. This information will help determine the value of translocation as a tool for the conservation of this species

Composing Violence: Student Talk, University Discourse, and the Politics of Witnessing.

This study examines undergraduates’ discourses on their writing about violence. In the last twenty years, composition scholarship has often turned to examples of student writing about violence in order to critique or justify personal writing assignments, while writing about violence in other genres is under-examined. This study demonstrates that students are writing about violence in courses across the university and in a variety of genres. In adopting an ethnographic approach, this study illuminates students’ behind-the-scenes writing practices and offers a more expansive view of how discourses of violence shape and are shaped by students’ academic writing practices than has been available to scholars and instructors up to this point. Thematic and discourse analysis of interviews with students, as well as analysis of the students’ essays, reveal that students’ discursive engagements with violence are partial, contingent, and contextual. When writing about violence, students must negotiate competing, context-specific, and disciplinary understandings of violence. Furthermore, students’ experiences appear to mediate—and are mediated by—the process of writing about violence. At times, this complexity, struggle, and experiential engagement is not visible in the essays themselves, but is revealed in students’ talk about their writing. These findings suggest that writing about violence can be an opportunity for students to reconsider their understandings of violence, reshape their experiences, and confront their positions within histories violence. At the same time, the partiality of students’ discursive engagements with violence can also essentialize victims of violence, divorce violence from the structures that produce it, and reproduce boundaries between students and the violence they write about. These findings point to the political and ethical importance of acknowledging that higher education is a crucial, but often ignored, site for the production of—and engagement with—discourses of violence. This dissertation calls for pedagogies that take seriously the experiences, ethical insights and theoretical savvy that many students already bring to their writing about violence. Such pedagogies must also work to make explicit the disciplines, theories, and ideologies that help shape the discursive field of violence in a given essay, course, or university, ultimately helping students locate themselves within histories of violence.Ph.D.English & EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89834/1/hdickins_1.pd

Explicit Discourse Connectives / Implicit Discourse Relations

While explicit discourse connectives can signal coherence relations, a common assumption is that only their absence or ambiguity necessitates relation inference. Using a crowdsourced conjunction completion task to collect 40K+ judgments on 50 discourse adverbials, we find this common assumption to be false. Instead, naive subjects systematically infer an implicit connective alongside an explicit discourse adverbial. But sometimes different subsets of subjects may each endorse different connectives. The size of these subsets means that such differences cannot be written off as error. Rather, they demonstrate how the coherence associated with explicit adverbials relates to coherence inferred between the clauses themselves

The Luminosity Function of Lyman alpha Emitters at Redshift z=7.7

Lyman alpha (Lya) emission lines should be attenuated in a neutral intergalactic medium (IGM). Therefore the visibility of Lya emitters at high redshifts can serve as a valuable probe of reionization at about the 50% level. We present an imaging search for z=7.7 Lya emitting galaxies using an ultra-narrowband filter (filter width= 9A) on the NEWFIRM imager at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. We found four candidate Lya emitters in a survey volume of 1.4 x 10^4 Mpc^3, with a line flux brighter than 6x10^-18 erg/cm^2/s (5 sigma in 2" aperture). We also performed a detailed Monte-Carlo simulation incorporating the instrumental effects to estimate the expected number of Lya emitters in our survey, and found that we should expect to detect one Lya emitter, assuming a non-evolving Lya luminosity function (LF) between z=6.5 and z=7.7. Even if one of the present candidates is spectroscopically confirmed as a z~8 Lya emitter, it would indicate that there is no significant evolution of the Lya LF from z=3.1 to z~8. While firm conclusions would need both spectroscopic confirmations and larger surveys to boost the number counts of galaxies, we successfully demonstrate the feasibility of sensitive near-infrared (1.06 um) narrow-band searches using custom filters designed to avoid the OH emission lines that make up most of the sky background.Comment: Published in ApJ, 3 figure

An Assessment of Indiana's Maternity Care Workforce: 2022 Report

Health professionals who provide perinatal and labor and delivery (L&D) services are essential to ensuring access to care for pregnant women, a population that -typically requires specialized services. Understanding the availability of maternity care is essential to supporting maternal and infant health and improving risks associate with mortality. Most maternity care providers are generally comprised of physicians who specialize in obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) or family medicine. In addition to physicians, advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) who collaborate with physicians, such as certified nurse midwives (CNMs), nurse practitioners (NPs), and clinical nurse specialists (CNSs), may provide maternity care services. This assessment provides details of the physicians and APRNs who provide maternity care services in Indiana

2018 Psychologist Licensure Survey Data Report

Identifying supply and distribution of the psychologist workforce is crucial in understanding the capacity to meet mental health needs and improve overall population health of Indiana citizens. Psychology has evolved from a field focusing solely on scientific research into a clinical profession that combines research with mental health treatment. Today, psychologists are seen as a valuable part of the behavioral health workforce that offers therapeutic treatment for various mental health needs. Data presented in this report provide a snapshot of key demographic and practice characteristics for the psychologist workforce in Indiana. The 2018 Indiana Psychologist Licensure Survey Data Report presents key information derived from data collected from the psychologist re-licensure survey administered by the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency (IPLA) during the license renewal period. In 2018, 1,797 psychologists renewed their professional licenses. Of those who renewed their license, 966 (53.8%) psychologists reported actively practicing and had a valid Indiana license address and were included in this report. Based on the sample in this report, this workforce is experiencing a demographic shift. Around three-quarters (75.1%) of psychologists under the age of 45 are female, and female psychologists are shown to have greater racial and ethnic diversity. When examining workforce capacity, the greatest need for psychologists appears to be in rural, less populous counties. For instance, 21 of the 31 (67.7%) counties with no reported psychologist FTE are designated as rural. This limited access to psychologists is compounded by the fact that only around one-fifth of this workforce reported working more than 32 hours per week in patient care (21.8%). This report details important demographic and practice characteristics for the psychologist workforce and examines these data specifically for psychologists. The 2018 Psychologist Licensure Survey Data Report presents a snapshot of data on the psychologist profession to provide stakeholders with information needed to improve the quality and accessibility of psychologists for Indiana residents through policymaking, workforce development, and resource allocation