Morphological characteristics of urban water bodies: mechanisms of change and implications for ecosystem function.

The size, shape, and connectivity of water bodies (lakes, ponds, and wetlands) can have important effects on ecological communities and ecosystem processes, but how these characteristics are influenced by land use and land cover change over broad spatial scales is not known. Intensive alteration of water bodies during urban development, including construction, burial, drainage, and reshaping, may select for certain morphometric characteristics and influence the types of water bodies present in cities. We used a database of over one million water bodies in 100 cities across the conterminous United States to compare the size distributions, connectivity (as intersection with surface flow lines), and shape (as measured by shoreline development factor) of water bodies in different land cover classes. Water bodies in all urban land covers were dominated by lakes and ponds, while reservoirs and wetlands comprised only a small fraction of the sample. In urban land covers, as compared to surrounding undeveloped land, water body size distributions converged on moderate sizes, shapes toward less tortuous shorelines, and the number and area of water bodies that intersected surface flow lines (i.e., streams and rivers) decreased. Potential mechanisms responsible for changing the characteristics of urban water bodies include: preferential removal, physical reshaping or addition of water bodies, and selection of locations for development. The relative contributions of each mechanism likely change as cities grow. The larger size and reduced surface connectivity of urban water bodies may affect the role of internal dynamics and sensitivity to catchment processes. More broadly, these results illustrate the complex nature of urban watersheds and highlight the need to develop a conceptual framework for urban water bodies.

The East Asian Collection at Duke University: Dynamics of Change.

Traces the history of Duke's East Asian Studies program and associated library collections from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Describes the strengths of the Japanese, Chinese and Korean collections, materials in special collections and cooperation with the University of North Carolina.

Crafting analytical tools to study institutional change

Most powerful analytical tools used in the social sciences are well suited for studying static situations. Static and mechanistic analysis, however, is not adequate to understand the changing world in which we live. In order to adequately address the most pressing social and environmental challenges looming ahead, we need to develop analytical tools for analyzing dynamic situations -particularly institutional change. In this paper, we develop an analytical tool to study institutional change, more specifically, the evolution of rules and norms. We believe that in order for such an analytical tool to be useful to develop a general theory of institutional change, it needs to enable the analyst to concisely record the processes of change in multiple specific settings so that lessons from such settings can eventually be integrated into a more general predictive theory of change. Copyright © The JOIE Foundation 2010.

Diasporic Agents and Trans-Asian Flows in the Making of Asian Modernity: The Case of Thailand

How do our everyday actions shape and transform the world economy? This volume of original essays argues that current scholarship in international political economy (IPE) is too highly focused on powerful states and large international institutions. The contributors examine specific forms of â everyday' actions to demonstrate how small-scale actors and their decisions can shape the global economy. They analyse a range of seemingly ordinary or subordinate actors, including peasants, working classes and trade unions, lower-middle and middle classes, female migrant labourers and Eastern diasporas, and examine how they have agency in transforming their political and economic environments. This book offers a novel way of thinking about everyday forms of change across a range of topical issues including globalisation, international finance, trade, taxation, consumerism, labour rights and regimes. It will appeal to students and scholars of politics, international relations, political economy and sociology.

Visual Disobedience: The Geopolitics of Experimental Art in Central America, 1990-Present

This dissertation centers on the relationship between art and politics in postwar Central America as materialized in the specific issues of racial and gendered violence that derive from the region's geopolitical location and history. It argues that the decade of the 1990s marks a moment of change in the region's cultural infrastructure, both institutionally and conceptually, in which artists seek a new visual language of experimental art practices to articulate and conceptualize a critical understanding of place, experience and knowledge. It posits that visual and conceptual manifestations of violence in Central American performance, conceptual art and installation extend beyond a critique of the state, and beyond the scope of political parties in perpetuating violent circumstances in these countries. It argues that instead artists use experimental practices in art to locate manifestations of racial violence in an historical system of domination and as a legacy of colonialism still witnessed, lived, and learned by multiple subjectivities in the region. In this postwar period artists move beyond the cold-war rhetoric of the previous decades and instead root the current social and political injustices in what Aníbal Quijano calls the `coloniality of power.' Through an engagement of decolonial methodologies, this dissertation challenges the label "political art" in Central America and offers what I call "visual disobedience" as a response to the coloniality of seeing. I posit that visual colonization is yet another aspect of the coloniality of power and indispensable to projects of decolonization. It offers an analysis of various works to show how visual disobedience responds specifically to racial and gender violence and the equally violent colonization of visuality in Mesoamerica. Such geopolitical critiques through art unmask themes specific to life and identity in contemporary Central America, from indigenous genocide, femicide, transnational gangs, to mass imprisonments and a new wave of social cleansing. I propose that Central American artists--beyond an anti-colonial stance--are engaging in visual disobedience so as to construct decolonial epistemologies in art, through art, and as art as decolonial gestures for healing.

Reconstruction of gross avian genome structure, organization and evolution suggests that the chicken lineage most closely resembles the dinosaur avian ancestor.

BACKGROUND: The availability of multiple avian genome sequence assemblies greatly improves our ability to define overall genome organization and reconstruct evolutionary changes. In birds, this has previously been impeded by a near intractable karyotype and relied almost exclusively on comparative molecular cytogenetics of only the largest chromosomes. Here, novel whole genome sequence information from 21 avian genome sequences (most newly assembled) made available on an interactive browser (Evolution Highway) was analyzed. RESULTS: Focusing on the six best-assembled genomes allowed us to assemble a putative karyotype of the dinosaur ancestor for each chromosome. Reconstructing evolutionary events that led to each species' genome organization, we determined that the fastest rate of change occurred in the zebra finch and budgerigar, consistent with rapid speciation events in the Passeriformes and Psittaciformes. Intra- and interchromosomal changes were explained most parsimoniously by a series of inversions and translocations respectively, with breakpoint reuse being commonplace. Analyzing chicken and zebra finch, we found little evidence to support the hypothesis of an association of evolutionary breakpoint regions with recombination hotspots but some evidence to support the hypothesis that microchromosomes largely represent conserved blocks of synteny in the majority of the 21 species analyzed. All but one species showed the expected number of microchromosomal rearrangements predicted by the haploid chromosome count. Ostrich, however, appeared to retain an overall karyotype structure of 2n=80 despite undergoing a large number (26) of hitherto un-described interchromosomal changes. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that mechanisms exist to preserve a static overall avian karyotype/genomic structure, including the microchromosomes, with widespread interchromosomal change occurring rarely (e.g., in ostrich and budgerigar lineages). Of the species analyzed, the chicken lineage appeared to have undergone the fewest changes compared to the dinosaur ancestor.

Peace and war: trajectories of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms before, during, and after military deployment in Afghanistan.

In the study reported here, we examined posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in 746 Danish soldiers measured on five occasions before, during, and after deployment to Afghanistan. Using latent class growth analysis, we identified six trajectories of change in PTSD symptoms. Two resilient trajectories had low levels across all five times, and a new-onset trajectory started low and showed a marked increase of PTSD symptoms. Three temporary-benefit trajectories, not previously described in the literature, showed decreases in PTSD symptoms during (or immediately after) deployment, followed by increases after return from deployment. Predeployment emotional problems and predeployment traumas, especially childhood adversities, were predictors for inclusion in the nonresilient trajectories, whereas deployment-related stress was not. These findings challenge standard views of PTSD in two ways. First, they show that factors other than immediately preceding stressors are critical for PTSD development, with childhood adversities being central. Second, they demonstrate that the development of PTSD symptoms shows heterogeneity, which indicates the need for multiple measurements to understand PTSD and identify people in need of treatment.

Application of the Intervention Mapping protocol to develop Keys, a family child care home intervention to prevent early childhood obesity.

BACKGROUND: Many families rely on child care outside the home, making these settings important influences on child development. Nearly 1.5 million children in the U.S. spend time in family child care homes (FCCHs), where providers care for children in their own residences. There is some evidence that children in FCCHs are heavier than those cared for in centers. However, few interventions have targeted FCCHs for obesity prevention. This paper will describe the application of the Intervention Mapping (IM) framework to the development of a childhood obesity prevention intervention for FCCHs METHODS: Following the IM protocol, six steps were completed in the planning and development of an intervention targeting FCCHs: needs assessment, formulation of change objectives matrices, selection of theory-based methods and strategies, creation of intervention components and materials, adoption and implementation planning, and evaluation planning RESULTS: Application of the IM process resulted in the creation of the Keys to Healthy Family Child Care Homes program (Keys), which includes three modules: Healthy You, Healthy Home, and Healthy Business. Delivery of each module includes a workshop, educational binder and tool-kit resources, and four coaching contacts. Social Cognitive Theory and Self-Determination Theory helped guide development of change objective matrices, selection of behavior change strategies, and identification of outcome measures. The Keys program is currently being evaluated through a cluster-randomized controlled trial CONCLUSIONS: The IM process, while time-consuming, enabled rigorous and systematic development of intervention components that are directly tied to behavior change theory and may increase the potential for behavior change within the FCCHs.

Differential developmental trajectories of magnetic susceptibility in human brain gray and white matter over the lifespan

As indicated by several recent studies, magnetic susceptibility of the brain is influenced mainly by myelin in the white matter and by iron deposits in the deep nuclei. Myelination and iron deposition in the brain evolve both spatially and temporally. This evolution reflects an important characteristic of normal brain development and ageing. In this study, we assessed the changes of regional susceptibility in the human brain in vivo by examining the developmental and ageing process from 1 to 83 years of age. The evolution of magnetic susceptibility over this lifespan was found to display differential trajectories between the gray and the white matter. In both cortical and subcortical white matter, an initial decrease followed by a subsequent increase in magnetic susceptibility was observed, which could be fitted by a Poisson curve. In the gray matter, including the cortical gray matter and the iron-rich deep nuclei, magnetic susceptibility displayed a monotonic increase that can be described by an exponential growth. The rate of change varied according to functional and anatomical regions of the brain. For the brain nuclei, the age-related changes of susceptibility were in good agreement with the findings from R2* measurement. Our results suggest that magnetic susceptibility may provide valuable information regarding the spatial and temporal patterns of brain myelination and iron deposition during brain maturation and ageing. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.