A Spatial Analysis Of Assault Patterns In Entertainment Areas Throughout the Waikato using Geographic Information Systems

Alcohol related violence has long been a matter of social concern. Recent studies investigating the association between assaults and alcohol have found that there are certain places and locations including bars, which are more commonly associated with assaults than other places. Using different spatial analysis techniques accommodated within a Geographic Information System (GIS) including point and choropleth density, Euclidean based distance measures, clustering analysis and geographically weighted regression, this study examines the association between bars and assaults in the Waikato region. It also seeks to explain the assault patterns around bars by various theories, namely the “Social Disorganisation Theory”, “Routine Activity Theory” and the “Crime Potential Theory”. The study determined that for the two year period (2008-2009) in the Waikato Police district there was clear evidence of higher assault levels being associated with areas of higher bar densities. In Hamilton’s CBD there was a particularly strong relationship between assaults and bars where around 25% of all assaults took place within 10 metres of a bar and approximately half of all assaults took place within 50 metres of a bar. Over the study period, one meshblock in Hamilton’s CBD recorded approximately 45 assaults per square kilometre per week. Elsewhere in the Waikato, the study showed a reasonably strong relationship between assaults and bars at the coastal resorts of Whitianga, Raglan and Coromandel township. In these townships, there was a discernable, but lesser relationship to that of the Hamilton CBD, with around 15-25% of assaults taking place within 10 metres of a bar. The assault density in the centre of these coastal townships, as well as other townships throughout the Waikato was generally lower, recording 3-4 assaults per square kilometre per week. Suburban areas in Hamilton City showed similar assault densities to that recorded in the centre of townships throughout the Waikato. The study findings were found to be generally consistent with the Routine Activity and Crime Potential theories by conclusively demonstrating that place, in this instance, bars, and their location, influences the distribution of assaults. The study examined population characteristics only in respect of population density and its proxy, road density, but these variables were not found to be particularly accurate in predicting the distribution of assaults

Affection and Mercy: Kinship, State, and the Management of Marriage in Jordan.

This dissertation uses a series of institutional initiatives around marriage to understand how Jordanian kinship systems are changing, bringing with them new relationships to property, labor, and political authority. The dissertation is structured around the three major prestations of Jordanian marriage exchanges: the house, the bridewealth, and the wedding. I focus on institutions that help young people fulfill these prerequisites to marriage without having to rely on their families for assistance, like Jordan’s Housing Corporation, its government-run Sharia Courts, and an Islamic charity called the Chastity Society. By basing myself in a rural, patrilocal family compound, I was able to contrast these institutional initiatives with the marital practices of people who rely heavily on their extended kin ties to facilitate their marriages. Drawing on archival evidence, participant observation, and oral history, I show how even the well-financed and self-consciously modern institutional initiatives that I studied have been repeatedly forced to accede to the prerogatives of extended kin groups. Whether through the implementation of squatter settlement standardization programs, official form marriage contracts, or Islamic mass weddings, the institutions I studied have repeatedly struggled with legitimizing the extended kin group’s authority over the property, labor, and sexual relations of its members. This dissertation also analyzes how these institutional initiatives attempt to partition the social world to create new forms of order and discipline—as well as novel escape hatches. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship exploring how various domains of modern social life like religion, the family, the state, and the market are constituted through practice and how social actors experience such domains phenomenologically. This study demonstrates the persistent and indispensible role that kinship plays in the functioning of modern institutions. It also highlights an emerging Islamic ideal of companionate marriage that challenges the primacy of the extended kin group, which I term (following a popular Quranic verse) “affection and mercy.”PhDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116635/1/gfhugh_1.pd

Staying Tuned

Ethnographers today find themselves experimenting with new approaches to digital ethnography amid pandemic-related restrictions on research. Yet such developments only accelerate a broader trend toward the dissolution of the traditional ethnographic ‘field’ due to new com-munications technologies and the emergence of a globalized ‘knowledge economy’. Through six contributions from around the world, this forum explores how the emergence of a more diffuse, interconnected ethno-graphic field is impacting fieldwork’s status as a rite of passage, creating new affective entanglements and shifting power relationships between researchers and participants. Despite the potential for influence and surveillance that new technologies cede to already powerful institutions, the discussions underline how ethnographic interlocutors are auteurs in their own right—and that ethnographers are also often bit characters in other people’s stories

Optimizing the representation of orientation preference maps in visual cortex

The colorful representation of orientation preference maps in primary visual cortex has become iconic. However, the standard representation is misleading because it uses a color mapping to indicate orientations based on the HSV (hue, saturation, value) color space, for which important perceptual features such as brightness, and not just hue, vary among orientations. This means that some orientations stand out more than others, conveying a distorted visual impression. This is particularly problematic for visualizing subtle biases caused by slight overrepresentation of some orientations due to, for example, stripe rearing. We show that displaying orientation maps with a color mapping based on a slightly modified version of the HCL (hue, chroma, lightness) color space, so that primarily only hue varies between orientations, leads to a more balanced visual impression. This makes it easier to perceive the true structure of this seminal example of functional brain architecture

The proliferation of men: markets, property, and seizure in Jordan

Spurred on by massive influxes of Palestinian refugees in previous decades, the 1970s and 1980s were marked by acute struggles over land and housing in Jordan. This article places those struggles within the context of a historical look at property in Jordan spanning from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to more recent waves of refugees from Syria and Iraq. Drawing on recent research in the social studies of finance and feminist substantivist critiques of “the economy,” I argue for more attention to the role of violence and war in the formation of markets and property regimes. Moving between a World Bank squatter settlement standardization program and interviews with contemporary planners, speculators, homeowners, and construction workers, I argue that the sublimation of violent contestation over property has required subtle but important transformations in gender norms that privilege new strategies of accumulation. Yet many of my interlocutors insist that this novel ‘proliferation of wealth’ remains subordinate to the role of large agnatic kin groups in the communal defense of land ('the proliferation of men'). Ongoing struggles between financiers, agnatic kin groups, and the Jordanian state illustrate the ways in which seizure is key to the work of market formation. [infrastructure, squatter settlements, settler colonialism, violence, kinship, masculinity

Navigating the thermal landscape: thermo-spatial ecology of wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta) in the north

Thermal ecology studies of ectotherms, like turtles, have typically focused on a species' thermal preferences and tolerances, or on thermoregulation site selections; only recently have landscape-scale thermal ecology studies been performed. I examined the spatial and nesting ecology of wood turtles in Sudbury District of Ontario, Canada, in a thermal context. I also measured the thermal impacts of natural resource extraction on wood turtle habitat. Wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta) cover a wide variety of terrestrial and aquatic habitats during their annual cycle, making them ideal for thermo-spatial studies. I tracked movements and thermal use of 15 radio-tagged adult turtles during the active season, comparing their selections to temperature monitoring stations spread in an array across the study area, to determine if the turtles are navigating a thermal landscape. Temperature had minimal influence on home range-scale movements, but possibly influenced movements at a smaller spatial scale. I compared the thermal landscape (using thermal imagery), soil moisture, and grain size distribution of 3 nesting beaches to determine the strongest predictor of nest-searching behaviour. Temperature range appeared to be an important cue, but females were apparently using a suite of cues to select their nest sites. I mapped the thermal landscapes of six sites: two relatively undisturbed wood turtle habitat sites, two recently-harvested forestry sites, and two active gravel pits, to find the effects of resource harvesting on wood turtle habitat. The undisturbed sites were cooler and less variable than the disturbed sites, and provided higher-quality thermal habitat. My results support the findings of previous studies: that temperature is a stronger driver of turtle behaviour at the micro-habitat scale than the home range scale, and that soil temperature co-varies with soil structural variables at the micro-habitat scale. The data from the habitat mapping provide useful information for conservation efforts when mitigating or rehabilitating wood turtle habitat.Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Biolog

Modified nucleotides in eukaryotic ribosomal RNA

Eukaryotic ribosomal RNA contains a considerable number of modified nucleotides. The most common types of modification are 2'-0-methylation and pseudouridylation. This thesis describes studies on pseudouridine in eukaryotic rRNA and its possible relationship to 2'-0-methylation. A simple two-dimensional chromatographic system was developed for separating Up and Up from digests of 32P- labelled RNA. This system was used to quantitate up in HeLa rRNA,. The number of pseudouridines was found to be very close to the number of 2'-0-methyl groups. HeLa 28S RNA contains some 62 2'-0--methyl groups and 60 pseudouridines whilst 18S RNA. contains approximately 38 2'-0-methylations and 37 up residues. The up content of rRNA from mouse L-cells, Xenopus laevis, and Dicty ostelium discoidium was also quantitated. The number of pseudouridines and the number of 2'0-methyl groups was approximately equal in L-cell rRNA and in Xenopus 28S RNA, There was an appreciable excess of pseudouridine over 2'-0-methylation in Xenopus 1 8S RNA, The up content of Dictyostelium rRNA was markedly lower than in vertebrate rRNA's. Data on the number of 2'-0-methyl groups in this species are not accurate but it appears that methylation is also lower than in vertebrates. The pseudouridine content of HeLa 32S and 45S r pre RNA's was investigated. Considerable numbers of up residues were present in both precursors. 32 S RNA was found to contain slightly more pseudouridines than 28S RNA, The estimated number of up residues in 45S RNA (70) was less than the sum of the numbers found in 1 8S and 28S RNA,'s. Possible alternative explanations for this are discussed. Techniques for RNA fingerprinting and sequence analysis were used to investigate the presence of pseudouridine in oligonucleotides from HeLa 1 8S rRNA.. Pseudouridine occurs only at specific sites in the rRNA. sequences. A. large RNA fragment was prepared by digestion of HeLa 28S rRNA with T1 ribonuclease under mild conditions, followed by separation of the products on sucrose gradients. Base composition analysis showed that the fragment had a very high G + C content (ca, 80%). Electrophoretic separation on neutral polyacrylamide gels suggested that preparations contained several fragments of comparable, but not identical size, Denaturation of fragments on 6M urea gels suggested that these various fragments have at least part of their primary sequence in common. Both pancreatic RNase fingerprints and electrophoresis under denaturing conditions demonstrated that the large fragments contain internal nicks. The integrity of the large fragment must, therefore, be maintained after partial digestion by secondary structural interactions. Low reactivity of the fragment to sodium bisulphite suggested that a high proportion of G-C base pairs is present. Electron microscopy in 80% formamide showed that the fragment contains a high degree of secondary structure which is resistant to denaturation. The presence of modified nucleotides in the fragment was investigated. Measurement of 14 C-methyl radioactivity showed that few methyl groups are present. This was confirmed by fingerprinting analysis which showed only one or two 2'-0-methylated oligonucleotides. Pseudouridine was also found to be relatively less abundant in G-C rich fragments than in 28S rRNA, as a whole. Not more than three pseudouridines were present in the fragment, which is several hundred nucleotides long

Affecting Identity: Salem's Moravian Potters and the Technologies of Identity Making, 1793-1831.

This dissertation presents an archaeological and historical investigation of Moravian ceramic production in Salem, North Carolina, from 1793 until 1831. During the second half of the eighteenth century, Moravian craftsmen were known throughout the Backcountry of North Carolina for their quality work and reasonable prices. Salem’s congregation-owned pottery, for example, supplied the region with a variety of utilitarian and decorative wares. However, after the turmoil of the American Revolution, Moravian potters faced greater economic competition. This was also a period of social transformation in Salem. Older ideas about personal freedom, racial segregation, and industrialization were actively challenged within the community. To remain competitive, Salem’s second master potter, Rudolph Christ (1750-1833), embarked on an ambitious expansion of the pottery in 1793. Eventually, three kilns were built across the street from the original workshop. Historic records suggest that all three kilns were built to diversify the pottery’s traditional stock-in-trade which was dominated by coarse earthenware. New products included refined earthenware, stoneware, faience, and molded figural bottles. This study combines archaeological data from the excavation of two kilns located on Lot 38 (38FY395-38) with historical research to better understand how Moravian potters melded traditional and new ceramic production techniques and kiln designs to negotiate the complex and changing relationship between religion and economics during this period. I argue that, in so doing, members of Salem’s ceramic-producing community attempted, with varying degrees of success, to affect their identities and social status through their participation in the overlapping and mutually dependent social fields of ceramic production and religious practice. Participation within the field of ceramic production in Salem was often tied to religious commitment. Ultimately, success as a master potter required not only the mastery of ceramic-making techniques, but it also depended on the command of other social technologies including demonstrating pious behavior, submitting thorough inventories, embracing a moral economy model of management, and negotiating the politics of various governing boards. This case study in ceramic production demonstrates that economics and religion, the sacred and secular, technology and belief, should not be viewed as mutually exclusive aspects of social life in the archaeological examination of religious communities like the Moravians’ community of Salem, North Carolina.Doctor of Philosoph