International Approaches to Climate Change and Cultural Heritage

Anthropogenic climate change is increasingly threatening cultural heritage; cultural resource managers, communities, and archaeologists are confronting this reality. Yet the phenomenon is happening over such a wide range of physical and sociocultural contexts that it is a problem that is too big for any one organization or discipline to tackle. Therefore the sharing of best practices and examples between the communities dealing with this problem is essential. This article presents examples from communities, cultural resource managers, and archaeologists who are engaging with climate change based threats to cultural heritage. Our presentation of these international activities follows the US National Park Service (NPS) four-pillar approach to climate change threats to cultural heritage, which is that there are four primary components to climate change response: science, mitigation, adaptation, and communication. We discuss this approach and then present a number of cases in which communities or institutions are attempting to manage cultural heritage threatened by climate change through these four pillars. This article restricts itself to examples that are taking place outside of the USA and concludes with some general recommendations for both archaeologists and funding entities

Characterisation of the semi-volatile component of Dissolved Organic Matter by Thermal Desorption – Proton Transfer Reaction – Mass Spectrometry

Proton Transfer Reaction – Mass Spectrometry (PTR-MS) is a sensitive, soft ionisation method suitable for qualitative and quantitative analysis of volatile and semi-volatile organic vapours. PTR-MS is used for various environmental applications including monitoring of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from natural and anthropogenic sources, chemical composition measurements of aerosols, etc. Here we apply thermal desorption PTR-MS for the frst time to characterise the chemical composition of dissolved organic matter (DOM). We developed a clean, low-pressure evaporation/sublimation system to remove water from samples and coupled it to a custom-made thermal desorption unit to introduce the samples to the PTR-MS. Using this system, we analysed waters from intact and degraded peat swamp forest of Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, and an oil palm plantation and natural forest in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. We detected more than 200 organic ions from these samples and principal component analysis allowed clear separation of the diferent sample origins based on the composition of organic compounds. The method is sensitive, reproducible, and provides a new and comparatively cheap tool for a rapid characterisation of water and soil DOM

Administrators' Beliefs About the Role of the Public: the Case of American Federal Executives

Faced with the steady growth of technological operations in government, to what extent and in what way can citizen participation in administra tion be preserved? A century ago the distinction between citizen and official was slight, passage from one status to the other was easy. Now inexpert participation in whole blocks of administration has become im possible, the distinction between official and citizen is more definite and permanent, a bureaucracy has emerged out of the conditions of modern government.... The reconciliation of democratic institutions and a pro fessionalized bureaucracy ... is one of the major perplexities of the future. 1Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68317/2/10.1177_106591297803100404.pd

Robust inference of genetic architecture in mapping studies.

The genetic architecture of a trait usually refers to the number and magnitude of loci that explain phenotypic variation. A description of genetic architecture can help us to understand how genetic variation is maintained, how traits have evolved and how phenotypes might respond to selection. However, linkage mapping and association studies can suffer from problems of bias, especially when conducted in natural populations where the opportunity to perform studies with very large sample sizes can be limited. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Li and colleagues perform an association study of brain traits in ninespine sticklebacks Pungitius pungitius. They use a sophisticated approach that models all of the genotyped markers simultaneously; conventional approaches fit each marker individually. Although the single-marker and multi-marker approaches find similar regions of the genome that explain phenotypic variation, the overall conclusions about trait architecture are somewhat different, depending on the approach used. Single-marker methods identify regions that explain quite large proportions of genetic variation, whereas the multi-marker approach suggests the traits are far more polygenic. Simulations suggest the multi-marker approach is robust. This study highlights how molecular quantitative genetics in wild populations can be used to address hypothesis-driven questions, without making unrealistic assumptions about effect sizes of individual quantitative trait loci

Troglitazone stimulates beta-arrestin-dependent cardiomyocyte contractility via the angiotensin II type 1A receptor.

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPAR gamma) agonists are commonly used to treat cardiovascular diseases, and are reported to have several effects on cardiovascular function that may be due to PPAR gamma-independent signaling events. Select angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) interact with and modulate PPAR gamma activity, thus we hypothesized that a PPAR gamma agonist may exert physiologic effects via the angiotensin II type 1(A) receptor (AT1(A)R). In AT1(A)R-overexpressing HEK 293 cells, both angiotensin II (Ang II) and the PPAR gamma agonist troglitazone (Trog) enhanced AT1(A)R internalization and recruitment of endogenous beta-arrestin 1/2 (beta arr1/2) to the AT1(A)R. A fluorescence assay to measure diacylglycerol (DAG) accumulation showed that although Ang II induced AT1(A)R-G(q) protein-mediated DAG accumulation, Trog had no impact on DAG generation. Trog-mediated recruitment of beta arr1/2 was selective to AT1(A)R as the response was prevented by an ARB- and Trog-mediated beta arr1/2 recruitment to beta1-adrenergic receptor (beta 1AR) was not observed. In isolated mouse cardiomyocytes, Trog increased both % and rate of cell shortening to a similar extent as Ang II, effects which were blocked with an ARB. Additionally, these effects were found to be beta arr2-dependent, as cardiomyocytes isolated from beta arr2-KO mice showed blunted contractile responses to Trog. These findings show for the first time that the PPAR gamma agonist Trog acts at the AT1(A)R to simultaneously block G(q) protein activation and induce the recruitment of beta arr1/2, which leads to an increase in cardiomyocyte contractility

Política nos Estados Unidos: tendências nas últimas quatro décadas

Neste artigo é discutido o desenvolvimento da política americana tendo em vista as transformações ocorridas ao longo das últimas décadas. Procurará contrastar amplamente a política americana como se apresentava em 1953 com a dos dias atuais. As transformações a serem abordadas referem-se às que afetam a composição, participação e alinhamento do grande público em uma sociedade de massa; às que tratam da natureza das instituições políticas e governamentais americanas e as elites; às que influenciam a natureza dos problemas enfrentados pelo governo americano e a perspectiva de tratá-los com eficiência.This article discusses developments in american politics, focusing on changes that have occurred over the course of the last few decades. It will broadly contrast what American politics looked like in 1953 with how it looks today. The changes I shall focus on are those affecting the composition, participation and political alignment of the mass public; those dealing with the nature of U. S. political and governing institutions and elites; and, those, influencing the nature of the problems with which the U. S. government is faced and the prospects of effectively dealing with them