Characterizing Changes In Participation And Diversification In Virginia\u27s Small-Scale Commercial Fishing Industry

Small-scale fisheries represent a diverse and dynamic portion of the global commercial fishing population and serve as a source of food security, income, and livelihood for many individuals and contribute to the development of local community and regional identities. Virginia’s small-scale commercial fisheries offer similar benefits, accounting for a significant portion of the state’s total annual landings and employing thousands of individuals. Despite the value of these fisheries, the number of commercial licenses has declined over the past few decades. Declines are attributed to various factors but indicate potential shifts in participation and resource dependence that may be consequential. Similar to other occupations dependent on natural resources, small-scale fishermen are vulnerable to shocks but can employ diversification strategies within and outside of the fishing sector to increase resilience. This dissertation serves to contribute to a knowledge gap on the extent of diversification and changes in participation and diversification patterns over time in Virginia’s small-scale commercial fisheries. In Chapters I and II, state licensing and permitting data, as well as commercial landings data, are used to investigate participation and diversification in wild fisheries and marine-related businesses through structural change, multiple correspondence analyses, and the development of diversification models. In Chapter III, a survey instrument is used to determine the willingness of fishermen to diversify into an emerging species fishery. Chapter IV uses ethnographic interviews to further investigate the role of diversification as a livelihood strategy. The findings of this dissertation indicate that diversification within and outside of Virginia’s small-scale commercial fishing industry can serve as an important adaptive strategy. Fishermen who were more diversified had higher and less variable annual incomes than fishermen who were less diversified. Likewise, more diversified individuals tended to remain in the commercial fishing industry for longer. There is evidence of instability in participation and diversification in some wild fisheries and marine-related businesses, however, that reflects the volatility of the commercial fishing industry. Further investigation of the individual diversification behavior indicates a suite of influential factors such as participation in a limited entry fishery or marine-related business, annual income, and socio-demographic variables. These drivers of diversification behavior are useful to managers in predicting responses to adverse events or estimating participation in the future. The findings from Chapter III indicate that ex-vessel price plays an important role in the decision to diversify into an emerging fishery. This dissertation indicates that fishermen are heterogenous in their response to economic, environmental, and social changes and these differences can ultimately influence levels of participation and diversification. Understanding individual decision-making behavior and livelihood strategies of small-scale commercial fishermen is integral in addressing the socio-economic impacts of environmental and management changes. Furthermore, it is important for fishery managers to understand how management and policy decisions influence livelihood strategies, resource dependence, and vulnerability as these constraints threaten the long-term sustainability and resiliency of commercial fishermen, the commercial fishing industry, and coastal communities dependent on commercial fishing

The Long and Winding Road to Achievement: Peer Mentoring as a tool for Transition into Higher Education and its impact on Retention and Social and Academic Integration.

This study explores first year undergraduate degree students and undergraduate degree course leader’s opinions, feelings and thoughts about the peer mentoring programme run on a collection of degrees known as the undergraduate framework (UF). The findings are extracted from a number of semi-structured interviews with course leaders and 48 questionnaires from the first year students. The methodology used was an interpretivist inductive qualitative case study, which allowed for the participant’s opinions, feelings and thoughts to be acknowledged. The study aims to identify how the peer mentoring programme can aid the transition into higher education, integration into higher education and retention at the university. Throughout the thesis it identifies the gap in research on peer mentoring and the lack of a universal definition of mentoring and peer mentoring. Furthermore, it discusses the complexity of the term integration, the transition into higher education becomes more apparent through the research data and whether the peer mentoring programme aids the immense and complex gap of transitioning.The study analyses the participants interesting responses about the peer mentoring programme and identifies where the programme may benefit from development.In particular, the key findings focus upon the three main concepts of the study; transition, retention and integration. The study’s findings identify barriers to retaining students and social and academic integration as well as exploring if one type of integration takes priority over the other. The findings also highlight what the participants know about the aims of the programme, how mentors and mentees are matched, how mentees communicate with their mentors and how the university gathers feedback about the programme. It is argued that the responses from participants establish the value that mentees and course leaders attach to different types of integration. Finally, it identifies the potential improvements that,if made, might benefit the peer mentoring programme that is the focus of this study

Form Follows Function: Adapting the Strength Model to Facilitate Implementation and Sustainability

Case management is a common social service intervention that has been applied across a range of disciplines, populations, and types of organizations. Despite its widespread use, the activities constituting case management are often poorly specified (Lukersmith, Millington, & Salvador-Carulla, 2016). The Strengths Model is an important exception—not only does it offer a structured approach to service delivery, but it provides enough flexibility to facilitate implementation and support sustainability. The goal of this chapter is to help practitioners think creatively about implementation, so they can meet the needs of their organization while remaining true to the core components of the Strengths Model. In the first part of this chapter, we discuss the delicate balance between implementing a model to fidelity and mak- ing adaptations to address organizational barriers and constraints, highlighting some of the prior modifications made to the Strengths Model to ease implementation. In the second part of the chapter, we describe one agency’s approach to implementa- tion, the structural adaptations staff made to the Strengths Model, and the benefits and challenges associated with their approach

Identification and Characterization of the IMC Protein Family in Toxoplasma gondii

Thesis advisor: Marc-Jan GubbelsThe apicomplexan parasite Toxoplasma gondii divides rapidly and asexually through a unique process of internal daughter budding. The physical infrastructure for this process is the cytoskeleton, which is composed of subpellicular microtubules, flattened vesicles (alveoli), and a meshwork of intermediate filament-like proteins. This meshwork is composed of a family of 14 inner membrane complex (IMC) proteins that were identified based on the presence of a repeat sequence shared across the Alveolata, the alveolin-repeat. All 14 proteins were cloned as YFP fusions to study their subcellular localization and antibodies were generated against several representative IMC proteins. Each IMC displays unique spatio-temporal dynamics throughout development, but four physically distinct localizations were identified: eight IMCs localize to the alveoli, four IMCs localize to a structure known as the basal complex, IMC11 localizes to the apical cap in mature parasites, and IMC15 localizes primarily to the centrosomes and early buds. IMC15 is of particular interest because its appearance before membrane occupation and recognition nexus 1 (MORN1) in the early bud suggests that it is the first cytoskeletal component to associate with the buds. A conditional knockdown of this protein using the destabilization domain (DD) reveals IMC15 has a strong affinity for the centrosomes that overcomes targeting of the DD fusion protein to the proteasome and the presence of IMC15 in the early bud may not be necessary for the division process. Conditional knockdowns using a tetracycline repressible promoter reveal that a minimal amount of IMC15 is sufficient for parasite survival. In order to further characterize IMC15, dominant negative constructs based on mutating putative palmitoylation sites or overexpression of deletion constructs are being pursued. Collectively, the IMC family is being incorporated into the temporal and spatial dynamics of cytoskeletal development through the creation of a comprehensive timeline of daughter bud assembly. These findings are contributing unprecedented detail to the cell division process.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Biology

Exploring Nursing Students\u27 Perceptions of Electronic Fetal Monitoring App

Within the healthcare realm, innovative technology has become an integral part of teaching in today’s nursing education, specifically computer-generated teaching applications. A new application that combines both nursing simulation and teaching methods regarding electronic fetal monitoring and fetal heart rhythms was developed at the University of Tennessee in fall 2014.This application was created in collaboration with both the College of Engineering and the College of Nursing. The Electronic Fetal Monitoring App displays instructor-created fetal heart rate (FHR) and maternal contraction patterns to simulate a monitor enabling live- feed interpretation in the classroom or simulation setting. It also has the potential to be saved and recreated for further simulated learning experiences. With current nursing education using processes such as application involvement and simulation in the clinical environment, the evolvement and merger of simulation and technology applications has the potential to exponentially benefit patient outcomes. Therefore, with the creation of a novel simulation application incorporated into the classroom setting, the purpose of this qualitative descriptive study is to explore nursing students’ learning experiences, attitudes, perceptions, and opinions regarding a fluid, dynamic, instructor-manipulated EFM application

Towards water literacy: an interdisciplinary analysis of standards for teaching and learning about humans and Water

Water is critical to sustain human existence. Water literacy involves understanding the interactions within and between natural and human dimensions of water systems to support informed decision-making, an important outcome for learners of all ages. It is therefore critical to foster water literacy in today’s global citizens, particularly through formal education. The purpose of this study, in tandem with a parallel study focusing on natural dimensions of water systems (Mostacedo-Marasovic et al., in press), is to examine water-related K-12 standards for teaching and learning about human dimensions of water systems to develop a comprehensive and transdisciplinary perspective on water education. Our overarching question is, “What do disciplinary standards specify as outcomes for students’ learning about water and humans?”. Our research questions are: i) “To what extent do these water-related standards address recognized domains of learning?” and ii) “What thematic outcomes for students’ learning are apparent across grades in these water-related standards?”. We use chi-square statistics and a conventional qualitative content analysis method complemented by processes from grounded theory to analyze water-related education standards (N = 341) from 12 education-oriented, governmental and non-governmental organizations based in the United States. Our results indicate that first, water-related standards emphasize the cognitive domain, including declarative and procedural knowledge. The affective domain and its social and emotional components are much less prevalent. Second, the water-related standards illustrate five categories which encompass human dimensions of water spanning K-12 grade bands, including human settlements; the nexus between water, food, and energy; public health; impacts of human activities on water quality and quantity; and water resources management. Overall, the study contributes to a more holistic and comprehensive perspective of water and human systems that can help inform teaching and learning to cultivate water literacy, including curriculum development and classroom pedagogy

Resource-constrained FPGA Design for Satellite Component Feature Extraction

The effective use of computer vision and machine learning for on-orbit applications has been hampered by limited computing capabilities, and therefore limited performance. While embedded systems utilizing ARM processors have been shown to meet acceptable but low performance standards, the recent availability of larger space-grade field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) show potential to exceed the performance of microcomputer systems. This work proposes use of neural network-based object detection algorithm that can be deployed on a comparably resource-constrained FPGA to automatically detect components of non-cooperative, satellites on orbit. Hardware-in-the-loop experiments were performed on the ORION Maneuver Kinematics Simulator at Florida Tech to compare the performance of the new model deployed on a small, resource-constrained FPGA to an equivalent algorithm on a microcomputer system. Results show the FPGA implementation increases the throughput and decreases latency while maintaining comparable accuracy. These findings suggest future missions should consider deploying computer vision algorithms on space-grade FPGAs.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables, Accepted at IEEE Aerospace Conference 202