Regulation and Identity of Florigen: Flowering Locus T Moves Center Stage

The transition from vegetative to reproductive growth is controlled by day length in many plant species. Day length is perceived in leaves and induces a systemic signal, called florigen, that moves through the phloem to the shoot apex. At the shoot apical meristem (SAM), florigen causes changes in gene expression that reprogram the SAM to form flowers instead of leaves. Analysis of flowering of Arabidopsis thaliana placed the CONSTANS/FLOWERING LOCUS T (CO/FT) module at the core of a pathway that promotes flowering in response to changes in day length. We describe progress in defining the molecular mechanisms that activate this module in response to changing day length and the increasing evidence that FT protein is a major component of florigen. Finally, we discuss conservation of FT function in other species and how variation in its regulation could generate different flowering behaviors

Measuring implicit European and Mediterranean landscape identity. A tool proposal

This study presents a tool - the Landscape Identity Implicit Association Test (LI-IAT) - devoted to measure the implicit identification with European and Mediterranean landscapes. To this aim, a series of prototypical landscapes was selected as stimulus, following an accurate multi-step procedure. Participants (N = 174), recruited in two Italian cities, performed two LI-IATs devoted to assess their identification with European vs. Not-European and Mediterranean vs. Not-Mediterranean prototypical landscapes. Psychometric properties and criterion validity of these measures were investigated. Two self-report measures, assessing, respectively, European and Mediterranean place identity and pleasantness of the target landscapes, were also administered. Results showed: (1) an adequate level of internal consistency for both LI-IATs; (2) a higher identification with European and Mediterranean landscapes than, respectively, with Not-European and Not-Mediterranean ones; and (3) a significant positive relationship between the European and Mediterranean LI-IATs and the corresponding place identity scores, also when pleasantness of landscapes was controlled for. Overall, these findings provide a first evidence supporting the reliability and criterion validity of the European and Mediterranean LI-IAT

Happy Medium Magazine

Undergraduate student Trevor Fornara, as a participant in the Summer Scholars and Artists Program, created the first print edition of Happy Medium Magazine under the guidance of faculty advisor Heather Dorn. Happy Medium Magazine is a student-run nonpartisan politics magazine published by Happy Medium, a subsidiary organization of the Student Association at Binghamton University. The project entailed planning, content curating, editing, designing, and distributing the publication’s first print edition. Seven articles were selected to be featured in the edition, and a unique design was created for each page to match the article\u27s theme. Through a collaboration with the Binghamton University Center for Civic Engagement, a detachable voter registration form was included on the back inside cover of the magazine with instructions for students registering on and off campus. One thousand copies of the thirty-two-page edition were printed with funds from the Summer Scholars and Artists Program stipend.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2023/1028/thumbnail.jp

Camera Traps Reveal Two Novel Predators of Black-throated Sparrow (Amphispiza bilineata) Nests but Limited Support for the Nest Concealment Hypothesis

[Abstract and full-text available with all rights reserved on May 2043, with co-author permissions.

Calling Binghamton our home: a housing market on the rise, leaving many behind

For every 100 extremely low-income households in Broome County, New York, there are 17 affordable housing units. This deficit in low-income housing in the City of Binghamton and greater Broome County has been persistent for over 20 years. Despite this, hundreds of units of luxury student housing are constructed each year that are too expensive for low-income households. The question I aim to answer is whether or not the Binghamton low-income housing market is overpriced for its value? I hypothesize that the answer is yes and that the university has dramatically affected the market. Through a series of interviews, I will investigate the Binghamton low-income housing market, specifically how Binghamton University has affected its recent growth. These interviews will be conducted with community leaders, landlords, tenants, and local politicians. I plan to compare the quality of housing units as described by tenants to their listed prices to establish a concept of worth. The impact caused by Binghamton University may be largely due to the plans to expand the university’s student body to twenty thousand. Binghamton is far past the maximum supply level for student housing, although hundreds of new units are built every year. Meanwhile, there is a severe shortage of low-income housing. Contractors know that they can make more money off competing in the over-saturated student housing market rather than the growing low-income housing market. The city has been slow to enact policy to encourage contractors to build affordable housing as these housing projects and the university’s growth bring money to the area.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2021/1103/thumbnail.jp

A Housing Market on the Rise, Leaving Many Behind: Voices of Binghamton on the Housing Crisis

The city of Binghamton is in the depths of a housing crisis that has been growing for decades. According to the Stakeholders of Broome County, a housing advocacy coalition, there are only 17 affordable housing units available for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. This deficit in low-income housing in the city of Binghamton and greater Broome County has been persistent for over 20 years. Despite this, hundreds of luxury housing units have been constructed in recent years that are marketed toward Binghamton University students and are too expensive for low-income households to afford. How does the presence of Binghamton University impact the local housing market, specifically the low-income housing market? Additionally, what policy solutions could be implemented to help alleviate the Binghamton housing crisis? I investigated the Binghamton low-income housing market through a series of interviews with tenants, landlords, non-profit and community leaders, public officials and university administrators. I specifically looked at Binghamton University’s effect on the housing landscape in the City of Binghamton. The impact caused by Binghamton University is partially due to the University’s 20 by 2020 plan announced in 2014, in which they planned to expand the school’s undergraduate and graduate enrollment from around 16,000 to 20,000 by 2020. The University fell 2,000 students shy of this expansion goal, however the planned expansion may have been a large factor in the construction of several student housing projects since the 2014 proposal. The City of Binghamton’s supply of student housing far surpasses the actual demand, although new student housing projects are proposed every year. Meanwhile, there is a severe shortage of low-income housing. Developers know that they can make more money in the over-saturated student housing market rather than the growing low-income housing market. Although policies have been written and proposed, the city and county have failed to enact sufficient policy to encourage developers to build affordable housing, as student housing projects and the university’s growth bring money to the downtown area, outpricing the local residents

Taxonomy of Minority Governments

A minority government in its most basic form is a government in which the party holding the most parliamentary seats still has fewer than half the seats in parliament and therefore cannot pass legislation or advance policy without support from unaffiliated parties. Because seats in minority parliaments are more evenly distributed amongst multiple parties, opposition parties have greater opportunity to block legislation. A minority government must therefore negotiate with external parties and adjust its policies to garner the majority of votes required to advance its initiatives. This paper serves as a taxonomy of minority governments in recent history and proceeds in three parts. First, it provides a working definition of minority governments, explains the different types of minority governments, and identifies how minority governments relate to coalition governments. Second, the paper explores the ways minority governments form, including the various ways they take power and the types of electoral systems likely to produce them. Finally, the paper examines the relationship between minority governments and constitutional design, primarily focusing on the role of first past the post and proportional representation electoral systems and semi-presidential executive systems. Ultimately, this taxonomy asserts that a democratic instability is neither a cause nor an effect of the formation of minority governments: minority governments are not a sign of democratic failure and do not threaten a country’s democratic performance

Semantic technologies for open interaction systems

Open interaction systems play a crucial role in agreement technologies because they are software devised for enabling autonomous agents (software or human) to interact, negotiate, collaborate, and coordinate their activities in order to establish agreements and manage their execution. Following the approach proposed by the recent literature on agent environments those open distributed systems can be efficiently and effectively modeled as a set of correlated physical and institutional spaces of interaction where objects and agents are situated. In our view in distributed open systems, spaces are fundamental for modeling the fact that events, actions, and social concepts (like norms and institutional objects) should be perceivable only by the agents situated in the spaces where they happen or where they are situated. Institutional spaces are also crucial for their active functional role of keeping track of the state of the interaction, and for monitoring and enforcing norms. Given that in an open distributed and dynamic system it is fundamental to be able to create and destroy spaces of interaction at run-time, in this paper we propose to create them using Artificial Institutions (AIs) specified at design time. This dynamic creation is a complex task that deserves to be studied in all details. For doing that, in this paper, we will first define the various components of AIs and spaces using Semantic Web Technologies, then we will describe the mechanisms for using AIs specification for realizing spaces of interaction. We will exemplify this process by formalizing the components of the auction Artificial Institution and of the spaces created for running concrete auction