Fostering Critical Thinking about Climate Change: Applying Community Psychology to an Environmental Education Project with Youth

This article argues for the participation of community psychology in issues of global climate change. The knowledge accumulated and experience gained in the discipline of community psychology have great relevance to many topics related to the environment. Practitioners of community psychology could therefore make significant contributions to climate change mitigation. To illustrate this assertion, we describe an education project conducted with youth engaged in a community-based environmental organization. This initiative was motivated by the idea that engaged and critically aware youth often become change agents for social movements. Towards this purpose, rather than using mass marketing strategies to motivate small behavior changes, this project focused intensively on a few youth with the vision that these youth would also influence those around them to rethink their environmental habits. This project was influenced by five community psychology concepts: stakeholder participation, ecological and systems thinking, social justice, praxis, and empirical grounding. In this article we discuss the influence of these concepts on the project’s outcomes, as measured through an evaluative study conducted to assess the impacts of the project on the participating youth in terms of their thinking and action. The contributions of community psychology were found to have greatly impacted the quality of the project and the outcomes experienced by the youth

The relationship between solar flares and solar sector boundaries

A superposed epoch analysis of 1964-1970 solar flares shows a marked increase in flare occurrence within a day of (-+) solar sector boundaries, as well as a local minimum in flare occurrence near (+-) sector boundaries. This perference for (-+) boundaries is more noticeable for Northern Hemisphere flares, where these polarities match the Hale polarity law, but is not reversed in the south. Plage regions do not show such a perference

Towards an agri-environment index for biodiversity conservation payment schemes

The aim of the paper is to give suggestions about how an agri-environment index can be designed by taking into account specific ecological and economical factors that reflect benefits and costs of biodiversity conservation. Main findings are that the general structure of an agri-environment index is recommended to be a benefits-to-cost ratio, whereby the conservation benefits are accounted for by the following factors which evaluate i) certain criteria that value the ecological quality of a site and point out its significance for biodiversity conservation (Conservation Significance Factor), ii) a criterion that reflects the connectivity of the site which is an important factor for species migration (Connectivity Factor) and iii) criteria that estimate the potential biodiversity outcomes induced by specific management actions (Conservation Management Factor). The Cost Factor reflects the amount of money that the landholder demands as compensation payment for his conservation services. The paper points out that an agri-environment index is a promising approach to encourage and compensate farmers for biodiversity-friendly management actions. Thereby, an improvement of the effectiveness and efficiency of European conservation payment schemes is a decisive contribution to biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes.agri-environmental policy, biodiversity benefits index, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, environmental benefits index, rural development

Sand Transport Studies in Monterey Bay, California: Annual Report, Part 5, 1973

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"Virus hunting" using radial distance weighted discrimination

Motivated by the challenge of using DNA-seq data to identify viruses in human blood samples, we propose a novel classification algorithm called "Radial Distance Weighted Discrimination" (or Radial DWD). This classifier is designed for binary classification, assuming one class is surrounded by the other class in very diverse radial directions, which is seen to be typical for our virus detection data. This separation of the 2 classes in multiple radial directions naturally motivates the development of Radial DWD. While classical machine learning methods such as the Support Vector Machine and linear Distance Weighted Discrimination can sometimes give reasonable answers for a given data set, their generalizability is severely compromised because of the linear separating boundary. Radial DWD addresses this challenge by using a more appropriate (in this particular case) spherical separating boundary. Simulations show that for appropriate radial contexts, this gives much better generalizability than linear methods, and also much better than conventional kernel based (nonlinear) Support Vector Machines, because the latter methods essentially use much of the information in the data for determining the shape of the separating boundary. The effectiveness of Radial DWD is demonstrated for real virus detection.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS869 in the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Humour at the Model United Nations: The role of laughter in constituting geopolitical assemblages

Model United Nations (MUN) is a simulation in which students take on the roles of ambassadors to the United Nations, engaging in debate on 'real' issues from the perspective of their assumed national identities. This paper, based on a year of ethnography and interviews of a college-level MUN team, examines the role of humour in producing particular geopolitical imaginations among those participating and also in producing the MUN assemblage itself. Key here is the circulation of affects among participants' bodies, producing an orientation among them that facilitates debate and consensus-building. This finding is seen as a corrective to past work on geopolitics and humour, which has tended to emphasise irony and satire, as well as mass-mediated humor. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC