Touring Pacific Cultures Kalissa Alexeyeff, John Taylor
Intersections : Gender, History & the Asian Context,
01/2016
43
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"Tourism is vital to the economies of most Pacific nations and as such is an important site for the meaningful production of shared and disputed cultural values and practices. This is especially the ...case when tourism intersects with other important arenas for cultural production, both directly and indirectly. Touring Pacific Cultures captures the central importance of tourism to the visual, material and performed cultures of the Pacific region. In this volume, we propose to explore new directions in understanding how culture is defined, produced, experienced and sustained through tourism-related practices across that region. We ask, how is cultural value, ownership, performance and commodification negotiated and experienced in actual lived practice as it moves with people across the Pacific? ‘This collection is a welcome addition to tourism studies, or perhaps we should say post- or para-tourism. The essays bring out many facets and experiences too quickly bundled under a single label and focused exclusively on “destinations” visited by “outsiders”. Tourism, we see here, actively involves many different populations, societies, and economies, a range of local/global/regional engagements that can be both destructive and creative. Western outsiders aren’t the only ones on the move. Unequal power, (neo)colonial exploitation and capitalist commodification are very much part of the picture. But so are desire, adventure, pleasure, cultural reinvention and economic development. The effect, overall, is an attitude of alert, critical ambivalence with respect to a proliferating historical phenomenon. A bumpy and rewarding ride.’ — James Clifford, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz"
Natural disasters pose serious threats to large urban areas, therefore understanding and predicting human movements is critical for evaluating a population's vulnerability and resilience and ...developing plans for disaster evacuation, response and relief. However, only limited research has been conducted into the effect of natural disasters on human mobility. This study examines how natural disasters influence human mobility patterns in urban populations using individuals' movement data collected from Twitter. We selected fifteen destructive cases across five types of natural disaster and analyzed the human movement data before, during, and after each event, comparing the perturbed and steady state movement data. The results suggest that the power-law can describe human mobility in most cases and that human mobility patterns observed in steady states are often correlated with those in perturbed states, highlighting their inherent resilience. However, the quantitative analysis shows that this resilience has its limits and can fail in more powerful natural disasters. The findings from this study will deepen our understanding of the interaction between urban dwellers and civil infrastructure, improve our ability to predict human movement patterns during natural disasters, and facilitate contingency planning by policymakers.
Although the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) is a popular measure, a review of the literature reveals 3 significant gaps: (a) There is some debate as to whether a 1- or a 2-factor model best ...describes the relationships among the PSS-10 items, (b) little information is available on the performance of the items on the scale, and (c) it is unclear whether PSS-10 scores are subject to gender bias. These gaps were addressed in this study using a sample of 1,236 adults from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States II. Based on self-identification, participants were 56.31% female, 77% White, 17.31% Black and/or African American, and the average age was 54.48 years (SD = 11.69). Findings from an ordinal confirmatory factor analysis suggested the relationships among the items are best described by an oblique 2-factor model. Item analysis using the graded response model provided no evidence of item misfit and indicated both subscales have a wide estimation range. Although t tests revealed a significant difference between the means of males and females on the Perceived Helplessness Subscale (t = 4.001, df = 1234, p < .001), measurement invariance tests suggest that PSS-10 scores may not be substantially affected by gender bias. Overall, the findings suggest that inferences made using PSS-10 scores are valid. However, this study calls into question inferences where the multidimensionality of the PSS-10 is ignored.
Human mobility is influenced by environmental change and natural disasters. Researchers have used trip distance distribution, radius of gyration of movements, and individuals' visited locations to ...understand and capture human mobility patterns and trajectories. However, our knowledge of human movements during natural disasters is limited owing to both a lack of empirical data and the low precision of available data. Here, we studied human mobility using high-resolution movement data from individuals in New York City during and for several days after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. We found the human movements followed truncated power-law distributions during and after Hurricane Sandy, although the β value was noticeably larger during the first 24 hours after the storm struck. Also, we examined two parameters: the center of mass and the radius of gyration of each individual's movements. We found that their values during perturbation states and steady states are highly correlated, suggesting human mobility data obtained in steady states can possibly predict the perturbation state. Our results demonstrate that human movement trajectories experienced significant perturbations during hurricanes, but also exhibited high resilience. We expect the study will stimulate future research on the perturbation and inherent resilience of human mobility under the influence of hurricanes. For example, mobility patterns in coastal urban areas could be examined as hurricanes approach, gain or dissipate in strength, and as the path of the storm changes. Understanding nuances of human mobility under the influence of such disasters will enable more effective evacuation, emergency response planning and development of strategies and policies to reduce fatality, injury, and economic loss.
This paper summarizes a strategy for supplying ecosystem services in urban areas through a participatory planning process targeting multifunctional green infrastructure. We draw from the literature ...on landscape multifunctionality, which has primarily been applied to agricultural settings, and propose opportunities to develop urban green infrastructure that could contribute to the sustainable social and ecological health of the city. Thinking in terms of system resilience, strategies might focus on the potential for green infrastructure to allow for adaptation and even transformation in the face of future challenges such as climate change, food insecurity, and limited resources. Because planning for multiple functions can be difficult when many diverse stakeholders are involved, we explored decision support tools that could be applied to green infrastructure planning in the early stages, to engage the public and encourage action toward implementing a preferred solution. Several specific ecosystem services that could be relevant for evaluating current and future urban green spaces include: plant biodiversity, food production, microclimate control, soil infiltration, carbon sequestration, visual quality, recreation, and social capital. Integrating such ecosystem services into small-scale greening projects could allow for creativity and local empowerment that would inspire broader transformation of green infrastructure at the city level. Those cities committing to such an approach by supporting greening projects are likely to benefit in the long run through the value of ecosystem services for urban residents and the broader public.
Gene duplication is a prevalent phenomenon across the tree of life. The processes that lead to the retention of duplicated genes are not well understood. Functional genomics approaches in model ...organisms, such as yeast, provide useful tools to test the mechanisms underlying retention with functional redundancy and divergence of duplicated genes, including fates associated with neofunctionalization, subfunctionalization, back-up compensation, and dosage amplification. Duplicated genes may also be retained as a consequence of structural and functional entanglement. Advances in human gene editing have enabled the interrogation of duplicated genes in the human genome, providing new tools to evaluate the relative contributions of each of these factors to duplicate gene retention and the evolution of genome structure.
Gene duplication events are major factors in shaping eukaryotic genomes.Systematic analysis of complex genetic interactions of duplicated genes revealed that their functional redundancy is evolutionary stable and can coevolve with acquisition of functional specialization due to structural and functional entanglement factors.Structural constraints that lead to maintenance of functionally overlapping duplicated genes include protein–protein interactions that maintain heteromers between sister duplicates.
AbstractTo meet energy-reduction goals, cities are challenged with assessing building energy performance and prioritizing efficiency upgrades across existing buildings. Although current top-down ...building energy benchmarking approaches are useful for identifying overall efficient and poor performers across a portfolio of buildings at a city scale, they are limited in their ability to provide actionable insights regarding efficiency opportunities. Concurrently, advances in smart metering data analytics combined with new data streams available via smart metering infrastructure present the opportunity to incorporate previously undetectable temporal fluctuations into top-down building benchmarking analyses. This paper leveraged smart meter electricity data to develop daily building energy benchmarks segmented by strategic periods to quantify their variation from conventional, annual energy benchmarking strategies and investigate how such metrics can lead to near real-time energy management. The periods considered include occupied periods during the school year, unoccupied periods during the school year, occupied periods during the summer, unoccupied periods during the summer, and peak summer demand periods. Results showed that temporally segmented building energy benchmarks are distinct from a building’s overall benchmark. This demonstrates that a building’s overall benchmark masks periods in which a building is over- or underperforming during the day, week, or month; thus, temporally segmented energy benchmarks can provide a more specific and accurate measure for building efficiency. We discussed how these findings establish the foundation for digital twin–enabled urban energy management platforms by enabling identification of building retrofit strategies and near-real-time efficiency in the context of the performance of an entire building portfolio. Temporally segmented energy benchmarking measures generated from smart meter data streams are a critical step for integrating smart meter analytics with building energy benchmarking techniques, and for conducting smarter energy management across a large geographic scale of buildings.
In the United States, interest in urban agriculture has grown dramatically. While community gardens have sprouted across the landscape, home food gardens—arguably an ever-present, more durable form ...of urban agriculture—have been overlooked, understudied, and unsupported by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and academics. In part a response to the invisibility of home gardens, this paper is a manifesto for their study in the Global North. It seeks to develop a multi-scalar and multidisciplinary research framework that acknowledges the garden’s social and ecological or material dimensions. Given the lack of existing research, we draw on the more extensive literature on home gardens in the South and community gardens in the North to develop a set of hypotheses about the social-ecological effects of urban home food gardens in the North. These gardens, we hypothesize, contribute to food security, community development, cultural reproduction, and resilience at multiple scales; conserve agrobiodiversity; and support urban biodiversity. They may also have negative ecological effects, such as stormwater nutrient loading. Because of the entanglement of the social and the ecological or material in the garden, we review three theoretical perspectives—social ecological systems theory, actor-network theory, and assemblage theory—that have been or could be applied to the multi-scalar and multidisciplinary study of the garden. We also review sampling and analytic methods for conducting home garden research. The paper concludes with a discussion of opportunities to extend the research agenda beyond descriptive analysis, the primary focus of garden research to date.
While the photochemistry of duplex DNA has been extensively studied, the photochemistry of nonduplex DNA structures is largely unexplored. Because the structure and stereochemistry of DNA ...photoproducts depend on the secondary structure and conformation of the DNA precursor, they can serve as intrinsic probes of DNA structure. This review focuses on the structures and stereoisomers of pyrimidine dimer photoproducts arising from adjacent and nonadjacent pyrimidines in A, B and denatured DNA, bulge loops, G‐quadruplexes and reverse Hoogsteen hairpins and methods for their detection.
While irradiation of duplex DNA produces adjacent cis,syn cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPDs), irradiation of other structures can produce other isomers, such as the nonadjacent trans,anti CPD formed in G‐quadruplexes. This review investigates the various types of adjacent and nonadjacent dipyrimidine photoproducts and methods for their detection that could be used to identify the presence of various types of unusual structures in DNA.
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